THE MARXIAN THEORY OF SOCIALISM 23 both restricting and accommodating the 'rich peasant* (and even the ex-landlord), so that the waste in assets was kept to the minimum. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-60, despite the difficulties it faced, had this valid essential principle that by letting the communes accumulate capital to start 'back-yard' industries, it kept part of the savings of the Communes for rural industrial investment. In the Cultural Revolution there came a forced rural shift of social services and industry to the countryside (on shift of medical services see Mao Tsetung Unrehearsed, pp. 232--3). The urban population was reduced from 24.7% of the total in 1960 to 17.4% in 1970 (C.E. Ebanks and Chaoze Chang, Asia-Pacific Population Journal, 5 (3), p. 32). It thus seemed as if the Chinese were fulfilling Engels's admonition to take industry away from the great cities (Anti-Duhring, p. 441; cf. Mao Tsetung, Critique of Soviet Economics, p. 102). Clearly, one of the great strengths of the Chinese Communist Party has been its ability to maintain a proper balance between town and country and look after the interests of the peasantry, while trying to accumulate capital for industry. It is not, however, clear if this success (its last phase being the redistribution of commune land among peasants under the Production Responsibility System begun in 1978) can be as well sustained under the present surge of 'Commodity Socialism*. There is a third important contradiction, an external one for each socialist economy: contradictions with other socialist nations. But consideration of this will take us very far from our present study; and I do not also believe that socialism in USSR came to an end principally because of a 'revolt of nations'. The national conflicts seem to have been a consequence rather than a cause of the socialist break-down. The constant resolution of the internal contradictions of Socialism we have been discussing can probably occur only through a kind of Uninterrupted Revolution, a movement in waves, out of a process of trial-and-error on a historical scale. It is true that in a socialist society, since there is no class-exploitation, there should in theory be no class struggle. But in practice, with the enlargement of the bureaucratic apparatus and the 'privileged stratum', there still remains ground for a New Class, a potential neo-bourgeoisie, to arise. When such a situation occurs, the contradictions (a) between the proletariat and the State, (b) between mental and manual labour, and (c) between town and country, may all take up the character of separate or multi-faceted class-struggles. Even when the Soviet Communist Party went on saying that in the 'State of the Whole People' there could be no class struggle, the constant effort of the privileged strata to transform the USSR into a group of capitalist 'free-enterprise' countries was nothing short of a class-offensive against an ideologically disarmed and economically 'alienated' proletariat. The successfully contrived capitalist restorations have shown that it was not correct to insist that Socialism once established