I don't think there is peasant class in Singapore, most are
petite bourgeoisie dominated by small elite class.
It is necessary to determine class status.
Although bad people are in the minority, they nevertheless occupy
some of the crucial departments and are in authority. . . There
should be distinction between one’s class component and one’s own
performance, primarily the latter. To draw class lines is to ferret
out the bad elements.
It also important to distinguish between class background and one’s
own performance, with emphasis on the latter. The exclusive
component theory is incorrect. The question is whether you take the
stand of your original class or take a changed class stand, that
is, taking the side of workers and poor and lower-middle peasants.
Moreover, you are not supposed to engage in sectarianism, but must
unite with the majority, even including some of the landlords and
rich peasants, as well as their children. There are some counter
revolutionaries and saboteurs who should be transformed, and if
they wish to transform, we should have them, one and all. But if we
consider only the background, then even Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin would be unacceptable. For instance, Marx studied idealism
first and Materialism later before he developed Marxism. Both Hegel
and Fueurbach were his mentors in the field of philosophy.
In undertaking class determination in factories, our purpose is
mainly to find out those Kuomintang secretaries, generals,
reactionary officers, escaped landlords, and landlords, rich
peasants, counter-revolutionaries and bad elements. As in Pai-Yin
Factory, it was to check the bad people, not every body, and not
the technical staff who came from exploitative classes. Some of
them used to serve the exploitative class. If their present
performances are good, we should trust them, and even though it is
not too good, they must be transformed. Some of them have come from
exploitative classes, and so we must see how their performance
is.
In order to produce socialist theory, it behoves intellectuals to
study the existing phenomena of class struggle, to enhance the
results of their study theoretically, and to proselytize them, thus
changing the working class from a diffused into an organized class,
and from a self-developing in to a self-conscious class. The
workers, because they have to work and earn their living everyday
under exploitation and oppression, cannot produce Marxism by
themselves. Marx was not a worker himself, but he could perceive
the trend of development, and after studying analytically,
succeeded in changing bourgeois philosophy into proletarian
philosophy, and bourgeois political economy into proletarian
political economy, thereby educating the workers. In point of fact,
it is impossible for a worker to read so many books or to read such
bulky volumes, though the advanced ones could perhaps read more.
The phenomenon of class struggle has existed for millenniums and
even the bourgeoisie conceded that there was class struggle. It was
only Marx and Engels who made it into a theory and systemized it.
We must knock down the bourgeoisie. Socialism has succeeded
capitalism. I myself also learned from the landlord class by
studying Confucius’s book for six years and by attending bourgeois
schools for seven years, spending 13 years altogether. I was then
only 20-odd years of age, and was basically ignorant about Marx. It
was only after the October revolution that I heard of Marx and read
his books.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_58.htm
This distinction of at least two geographic areas
in each civilization is of major importance. The process of
expansion, which begins in the core area, also begins to slow up in
the core at a time when the peripheral area is still expanding. In
consequence, by the latter part of the Age of Expansion, the
peripheral areas of a civilization tend to become wealthier and
more powerful than the core area.
Another way of saying this is that the core passes from
the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict before the periphery
does. Eventually, in most civilizations the rate of expansion
begins to decline everywhere.
It is this
decline in the rate of expansion of a
civilization which marks its passage from the Age of Expansion to
the Age of Conflict.
This latter is the most complex, most interesting, and
most critical of all the periods of the life cycle of a
civilization. It is marked by four chief characteristics: (a) it is
a period of declining rate of
expansion; (b) it is a period
of growing tensions and class conflicts; (c)
it is a period
of increasingly frequent and increasingly violent imperialist
wars; and (d) it is a period
of growing irrationality, pessimism, superstitions, and
otherworldliness.
All these phenomena appear in the core area of a
civilization before they appear in more peripheral
portions of the society.
The decreasing rate of
expansion of the Age of Conflict gives rise to the other
characteristics of the age, in part at least. After
the long years of the Age of Expansion, people's minds and their
social organizations are adjusted to expansion, and it is a very
difficult thing to readjust these to a decreasing rate of
expansion.
Social classes and political units within the
civilization try to compensate for the slowing of expansion through
normal growth by the use of violence against other social classes
or against other political units. From this come
class struggles and imperialist
wars. The outcomes of these struggles within
the civilization are not of vital significance for the future of
the civilization itself. What
would be of such significance would be the reorganization of the
structure of the civilization so that the process of normal growth
would be resumed. Because such a
reorganization requires the removal of the causes of the
civilization's decline, the triumph
of one social class over another or of one political unit over
another, within the civilization, will not usually have any
major influence on the causes of the decline, and will not (except
by accident) result in such a reorganization of structure as will
give rise to a new period of expansion.
Indeed, the
class struggles and imperialist wars of the Age of Conflict will
probably serve to increase the speed of the civilization's decline
because they dissipate capital and divert wealth and energies from
productive to nonproductive
activities...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/01.html#1
It is a basic rule of social processes that
instruments tend to become institutionalized and that
institutionalization leads to decreased effectiveness in achieving
macro-goals.
When
this occurs, not only are macro-goals underachieved, but a
dichotomy of interests (and potential conflict) emerges between the
desires of the society for the fulfillment of macro-goals and the
desires of the organization and its parts to fulfill their
macro-goals.
This
phenomenon can be observed in any society in all its activities,
from churches where religion is replaced by clericalism, through
schools where the struggle for credits, curriculum, and
examinations become obstacles to real education, to the military
aspect where weapons, inter-service animosities, SOP, and thirst
for promotions become threats to defense and even to national
security.
This process of
the institutionalization of organizations is the chief cause of the
decreasing rate of expansion and of class and group conflicts as
Stage III of any civilization passes into Stage
IV.
Somewhat more remotely it is also the chief cause in the onset of
imperialist wars.
This third characteristic of an Age of General Crisis is but one
example, though a major one, of the general tendency of this Stage
to seek to increase its rate of expansion by the use of force and
of political action, as this rate ceases to be maintained at an
adequate level by organizational processes based on accepted
structural patterns...
A fine example of this whole process can be seen in the history of
the defeated powers of WWII.
Before
the war, Germany, Japan, and Italy refused to consider any
significant reforms of their political, financial, and economic
organizations, insisting that higher standards of living for their
citizens could be obtained only by increased resources, even if
those could be obtained only by force from their
neighbors.
The
efforts of these fascist states to obtain more resources by force
led to World War II. As
a result of the defeat of these aggressors in 1945, all three
countries suffered a sharp reduction in
resources: land,
population (counter-balanced, to some extent, by repatriation of
nationals), of monetary resources (such as foreign exchange
balances), and raw materials.
Yet in all three cases, as a result of the actions of the United
States, the fascist organizational structure which had made the war
was replaced by a different and more effective organizational
structure, in economics, in government, and in
finance.
In
each of the three countries, this new organization, after 1952,
achieved a spectacular increase in standards of living and did so
on a smaller resource base than had existed in
1938.
As
a result of the defeat, which was essentially a defeat of the
fascist organization itself, a new O with a reduced R achieved an
output of G which astonished the world and which gave the
inhabitants of all three countries a higher standard of living than
they had ever had in history. In
all three the rate of expansion is now slowing down, as the
post-1950 O becomes institutionalized...
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/General_Crises_in_Civilizations.htm
