Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this article:
Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.
What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.
That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
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From the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter, forebear of Young Spartacus, July 1971.
Neither People's Peace Nor People's War:
INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST!
Many radicals, disillusioned with the flag-waving patriotism of the clergy-liberal CP-SWP led antiwar movement, were drawn to the People's Peace Treaty as a positive way to show their solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution. But the People's Peace Treaty embodies precisely those politics which have prevented the Vietnamese Revolution from reaching a victorious conclusion. Twice the Viet Minh, predecessor of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), won complete military victory only to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory through a People's Peace Treaty-type settlement. The March 6 accords of 1946, signed by Ho Chi Minh, allowed French troops back into Indo-China. The 1954 Geneva accords, backed both by the Soviet Union and Communist China, gave back South Viet Nam, which the Viet Minh held, in exchange for elections which were of course never held.
People's Peace
The People's Peace Treaty asks that the Americans and Vietnamese recognize the "independence, peace and neutrality" of Laos and Cambodia, along the lines of the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Conventions. But the Geneva accords recognized, not the Cambodian and Laotian Communists and national liberation fighters, but their butchers, members of the royal families handpicked for their ruthlessness in dealing with real independence fighters and for their subservience to French imperialism.
The People's Peace Treaty calls for a "provisional coalition government to organize democratic elections. " Coalition governments by their very nature are unstable formations in which either the Communists throw everybody else out (DRV) or else are tossed out themselves, which is more likely. Those who would learn from history, instead of endlessly repeating mistakes, would do well to study the Laotian events from 1956 to 1958, which parallel almost exactly what the PPT projects for South Viet Nam after the withdrawal of U. S. troops. The Pathet Lao did quite well in the elections held after the Vientiane Agreements (1957), whereupon they were thrown out of government, and following various "democratic" maneuvers the U.S. resumed aid to the Royal Laotian army, which became the only foreign army in the world wholly supported by U. S. taxpayers. Coalition governments only serve to confuse, disarm and retard the class struggle, as recent examples, Allende in Chile and Bandaranaike in Ceylon, demonstrate.
People's War
People's War is merely the extension of the class-collaborationism and nationalism embodied in the People's Peace. Lin Piao describes People's War as: "To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities. " Thus, People's War is a war waged without the participation of the working class. People's War is also a strategy for the "rural areas of the world" (the under-developed countries), not the "cities of the world"(the industrial countries). Further, the1 revolution in the "rural areas of the world" is divided by Lin Piao into two distinct stages: the national-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution. The two stages must be kept distinct since the national-democratic revolution "embraces in its ranks not only the workers, peasants , and the urban petty bourgeoisie, but also the national bourgeoisie and other patriot¬ic and anti-imperialist democrats. "Obviously if the national-democratic revolution began to perform socialist tasks such as the expropriation of the national bourgeoisie, then the national bourgeoisie would soon depart from its ranks. People's War is a military strategy for a war of the national-democratic revolution (including the national bourgeoisie in its ranks), fought without the workers, in the countryside of underdeveloped countries. Nowhere do Mao, Lin Piao or Giap claim that People's War is a strategy for workers, for revolutionary work in the cities or in the industrial countries or during a socialist revolution. In fact, none of these "revolutionaries" or their co-thinkers have any strategy for a proletarian socialist revolution.
According to Lin Piao "the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the national-democratic revolution. " But if the socialist revolution, which means the destruction of the national bourgeoisie as a class were truly an inevitable sequel to the national-democrat revolution, then the national bourgeoisie will not join a movement which promises, if successful, their destruction. No matter how oppressive the national bourgeoisie may find colonial or neo-colonial subjugation, it knows that its survival is contingent on the continuance of that subjugation. Therefore, for national independence to be consolidated after anything resembling People's War, the national bourgeoisie must be smashed !
Even where People's War has been militarily successful, the democratic tasks still remain on the agenda and the socialist revolution is anything but inevitable. The price paid for "using the countryside to first encircle, then capture the cities" has been economic mismanagement and stagnation even within tt context of a planned economy and socialized production, and the complete absence of wor ers democracy (for which Maothought and six hour Castroite tirades are no substitute) and the isolation of the revolution in one country
Who are the "People"?
The fundamental flaw of the People's Peace Treaty is that it ignores the class reality of the struggle in Indochina. It states that the "American and Vietnamese people are not enemies. " Then why did the war happen? Th "People" is not the enemy precisely because in modern society, torn by class conflict, ir dividuals and groups act and react as classes. The undifferentiated "People" can be neithei enemies nor allies because they have no social reality. "Power to the People" is as meaningless a formulation as "Amen". Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Program is a trenchant critic of such formulations as "People's Party, "People's State" and "international brotherhood of Peoples" which confuse and hide the reality of the class struggle, which is a struggle between different classes of "People".
The Socialist Workers Party has built a consciously anti-class peace movement. By basing the peace movement on "the masses" (another euphemism for "the People") the SWP attempts to cover over its welcoming of bourgeois politicians into the movement. The SWP is consciously class-collaborationist and must be politically destroyed as an obstacle in the road of proletarian revolution, along with the CPUSA and the People's Peace Treaty.
Class War
Instead of People's Peace or People's War, Trotskyists advocate class war. Trotskyists believe that the urban working class must lead the peasants. What is required is a proletarian vanguard party with a program for international working-class revolution, not a Stalinist party with a peasant-based and nationally-limited program. The proletariat in "rural areas" as well as in industrial centers, following in the footsteps of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, must raise once again the banners of the October Revolution and the Fourth International of Trotsky!
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