Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"
“The strength of Marxism,” writes Leon Trotsky in The Third International After Lenin, “lies in its ability to foretell.”
Trotsky made the remark in a 1928 commentary on the Chinese revolution. In the same work he also made a number of predictions which, if he is measured by his own standard, place him considerably outside and opposed to the camp of those who deserve to be called Marxists.
Everyone knows, for instance, of the magnificent and heroic role of the Chinese peasant masses as the main force of the revolution, as the backbone of the Red Army and, under the proletarian leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a vital component part of socialist construction in China today.
What did Trotsky “foretell?”
“Numerically the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasantry,” he writes in the same work. “But ... the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian At present this is no longer a matter of theoretical forecast, but a fact verified completely in all its aspects.”
It is also a matter of fact that the Chinese revolution was characterized by a protracted period of dual power for nearly two decades. “Red political power,” sustained by the Red Army and organized by the CPC, was established in a number of liberated zones stretching over vast areas and incorporating scores of millions of people. The governments of the base areas rallied the masses and step-by-step carried out the democratic tasks of the revolution, including land reform and the struggle against the Japanese imperialists.
New Democracy
Mao Tsetung termed the character of the state power and economy in these areas as “new democracy,” or a proletarian-led “dictatorship of all revolutionary classes over the counterrevolutionaries and traitors.” Their existence was seen as the first stage of the Chinese revolution, which would be completed in the main when they were extended over the entire country. At that time the revolution would immediately and uninterruptedly pass over to its second stage of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Such a development was possible, Mao said, because of the moribund character of imperialism and the fact that the October revolution in 1917 had placed the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonial countries on the side of the proletarian socialist world revolution. “It is no longer a revolution of the old type,” Mao stated in 1940, “led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat ...” What Mao had done, in effect, was to creatively apply and further develop Lenin’s theory of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to the concrete conditions in China.
Again, what did Trotsky “foretell?”
The formula of the democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness ... the third Chinese revolution, despite the great backwardness of China, or more correctly, because of this great backwardness as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, not even such a six-month period as the October Revolution had (November 1917 to July 1918) but it will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in city and village.
Lashing out at “some metaphysics-mongers plus a few Trotskyites who, brandishing their pens like lances, are tilting in all directions and creating bedlam,” Mao said in a 1940 summary:
It is a utopian view rejected by true revolutionaries to say that the democratic revolution does not have a specific task and period of its own but can be merged and accomplished simultaneously with another task, i.e., the socialist task (which can only be carried out in another period), and this is what they call “accomplishing both at one stroke.”
History has proved Mao correct. But rather than face the bankruptcy of their mentor, the present-day Trotskyists are reduced to slandering the Chinese revolution and rewriting history in a manner worthy of the Kuomintang. The U.S. Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution, for instance, sums up the new democratic period that mobilized the Chinese masses to resist Japan and to future victories against Chiang Kai-shek in the following manner:
After the defeat of the second Chinese revolution, they withdrew from the cities and established an armed peasant base. For a span of over 20 years, they used this armed power to rule over the backward and scattered peasant masses. In this manner the uncontrolled, cynical, self-willed bureaucracy consolidated. They applied to the revolution the methods of deceit and ultimatism, in order, at every stage, to safeguard their interests, their power, their privileges. Each success rendered them more contemptuous and fearful of the masses, more convinced they could cheat the class struggle with impunity.
Contrary to the SWP, however, this was the most daring and dramatic period in Chinese history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, inspired by the leadership of Mao Tsetung and the CPC, “stood up” and turned over centuries of feudal domination. Tens of thousands flocked from the Kuomintang areas to the liberated zones, where the CPC had established, for the first time, an uncorrupted and democratic system of rule that, by all accounts, won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. By all accounts, that is, except three: those of the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, the Japanese fascists and the Trotskyists.
Given its evaluation of the CPC, how does the SWP think the proletarian dictatorship ever managed to come to be in China? Apart from being counter-revolutionary, the reasoning is nothing short of bizarre. By their logic, it could only have been done spontaneously by the peasants. without the leading role of the proletariat, in opposition to the CPC every step of the way and, most decisively, because of Soviet prestige and the U.S. invasion of Korea!
SWP hits “Mao & Co.”
“Throughout the revolution,” states the SWP resolution, “Mao & Co. continued to impose arbitrary restrictions and limits upon its course. The agrarian reform was carried out ‘in stages’ and was completed only when the assault of American imperialism stimulated the opposition of the landlords during and after Korea. The Chinese Stalinists were able to ride into power because the Chinese working class had been demoralized by the continuous defeats it suffered during and after the second Chinese revolution, and. by the deliberate policy of the CPC, which subordinated the cities, above all, the proletariat, to the military struggle in the countryside and thereby blocked the emergence of the workers as an independent political force. The CPC thus appeared in the eyes of the masses as the only organization with political cadres and knowledge, backed, moreover, by military force.”
The SWP has another interesting facet. It characterizes the periods of 1925-27 and 1936-47 as years of “Maoist crimes.” What happened between 1928 and 1935? Why does this period get off the hook? One reason could be that this was the time when Mao still did not have hegemony within the CPC, when its central committee was dominated by the “three ‘left’ lines,” most disastrously by the ultra-leftism of the Li Li-san line.
Li Li-san’s attack
Li Li-san attacked Mao for “right opportunism” because he made distinctions between his enemies, because he didn’t oppose the entire bourgeoisie all at once, because he built rural base areas rather than launching frontal attacks on the cities all at once, and because Mao refused to expropriate the millions of “rich” peasants and petit bourgeoisie and “force” them into the revolution. Trotsky would have agreed. “The drive on the rich peasants,” he stated in 1923, “will be the first and not the second step of the Chinese October.” The SWP would have sympathized with Li Li-san, too. “The armies and regime of Chiang,” states their resolution, “could have been knocked down like rotten pieces of wood had the CPC at any time summoned the masses in the cities to rise.”
What was the cumulative result of the “three ‘left’ lines” in China? Disaster. All except one of more than a dozen base areas were lost. The Red Army, which Mao’s influence had carefully built up. was reduced to a fragment of its former size and power. The situation was only reversed by Mao’s assumption of leadership and his political direction of the unprecedented epic of the Long March.
How could Trotsky be so mistaken that his views led both him and his followers into the camp of counter-reVolution? The essence of the matter is found in Trotsky’s liquidation of the national question.
“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses?” Lenin asked at the Comintern’s Second Congress. “The distinction between oppressed nations and oppressing nations. We emphasize this distinction – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy.
The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and backward countries,” he also noted, “but must not merge with it, and must unfailingly preserve the independence of the proletarian movement ...”
Trotsky’s view
Trotsky made the same distinction, all right, hut arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Tsarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However. The conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Tsarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”
Didn’t the Chinese national bourgeoisie at times conduct armed struggle against the imperialists? Yes, Trotsky notes, but then countered this by stating that the Russian capitalists, too, fought foreign imperialists. Trotsky forgets one “minor” point. The Russian capitalists fought in an inter-imperialist war to subjugate backward nations; the Chinese fought a war of national liberation.
Rejects alliance
Despite the experience of the Chinese revolution, the present-day Trotskyists continue to uphold their reactionary views. “Any perspective of collaborating with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected,” states the resolutions of the 1968 World Congress of the so-called Fourth International. “Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as ‘national democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ ‘anti-imperialist revolution,’ or ‘bloc of four classes,’ which have been irretrievably refuted ... must be rejected.”
This is the real reason why the SWP refused to support the political program of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and stood with Washington in their refusal to support the demand, “Sign the Treaty Now!”
As succinctly stated in Forward Along the Path Charted By Karl Marx, written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese revolution is precisely a two-stage revolution, passing through a “new-type bourgeois-democratic revolution,” comprising at that stage an alliance of “four revolutionary forces,” including the “national bourgeoisie.” It has conducted the “national democratic” revolution in the liberated zones, conducted a people’s war based on the principle of self- reliance and on its completion, will uninterruptedly pass over to the socialist revolution.
Hiding behind “leftism”
The SWP opposes all this as so much “counterrevolution,” but has tried to hide its real views on Vietnam from the masses of anti-imperialist activists behind “left” phrases. For the SWP to come out in the open with its views on the line summed up by Truong Thinh would only lead to a greater self-exposure of~the renegade character of the Trotskyist line.
“The Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution,” states the Albanian commentator Agim Popa, “is also the theory of the negation of the national movement in the development of the revolutionary, movement, the theory of the overestimation of the external factor and the negation of the internal factor as decisive in the revolution and, in the last analysis, a theory of the ‘export’ of revolution.” These concepts also apply to the Trotskyist line on China’s view of the united front and the cultural revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment