From The "Renegade Eye" Blog -Stratfor: Pakistan and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan

Stratfor: Pakistan and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan
By George Friedman
September 28, 2010

Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration. As all his books do, the book has riveted Washington. It reveals that intense debate occurred over what course to take, that the president sought alternative strategies and that compromises were reached. But while knowing the details of these things is interesting, what would have been shocking is if they hadn’t taken place.

It is interesting to reflect on the institutional inevitability of these disagreements. The military is involved in a war. It is institutionally and emotionally committed to victory in the theater of combat. It will demand all available resources for executing the war under way. For a soldier who has bled in that war, questioning the importance of the war is obscene. A war must be fought relentlessly and with all available means.

But while the military’s top generals and senior civilian leadership are responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the commander-in-chief directs them. Generals must think about how to win the war they are fighting. Presidents must think about whether the war is worth fighting. The president is responsible for America’s global posture. He must consider what an unlimited commitment to a particular conflict might mean in other regions of the world where forces would be unavailable.

A president must take a more dispassionate view than his generals. He must calculate not only whether victory is possible but also the value of the victory relative to the cost. Given the nature of the war in Afghanistan, U.S. President Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus — first the U.S. Central Command chief and now the top commander in Afghanistan — had to view it differently. This is unavoidable. This is natural. And only one of the two is ultimately in charge.

The Nature of Guerrilla Warfare

In thinking about Afghanistan, it is essential that we begin by thinking about the nature of guerrilla warfare against an occupying force. The guerrilla lives in the country. He isn’t going anywhere else, as he has nowhere to go. By contrast, the foreigner has a place to which he can return. This is the core weakness of the occupier and the strength of the guerrilla. The former can leave and in all likelihood, his nation will survive. The guerrilla can’t. And having alternatives undermines the foreigner’s will to fight regardless of the importance of the war to him.

The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what he is fighting for. The occupier’s patience is calculated against the cost of the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in this country, what is happening elsewhere?

Tactically, the guerrilla survives by being elusive. He disperses in small groups. He operates in hostile terrain. He denies the enemy intelligence on his location and capabilities. He forms political alliances with civilians who provide him supplies and intelligence on the occupation forces and misleads the occupiers about his own location. The guerrilla uses this intelligence network to decline combat on the enemy’s terms and to strike the enemy when he is least prepared. The guerrilla’s goal is not to seize and hold ground but to survive, evade and strike, imposing casualties on the occupier. Above all, the guerrilla must never form a center of gravity that, if struck, would lead to his defeat. He thus actively avoids anything that could be construed as a decisive contact.

The occupation force is normally a more conventional army. Its strength is superior firepower, resources and organization. If it knows where the guerrilla is and can strike before the guerrilla can disperse, the occupying force will defeat the guerrilla. The occupier’s problems are that his intelligence is normally inferior to that of the guerrillas; the guerrillas rarely mass in ways that permit decisive combat and normally can disperse faster than the occupier can pinpoint and deploy forces against them; and the guerrillas’ superior tactical capabilities allow them to impose a constant low rate of casualties on the occupier. Indeed, the massive amount of resources the occupier requires and the inflexibility of a military institution not solely committed to the particular theater of operations can actually work against the occupier by creating logistical vulnerabilities susceptible to guerrilla attacks and difficulty adapting at a rate sufficient to keep pace with the guerrilla. The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival. While the occupier is not winning decisively, even while suffering only some casualties, he is losing. While the guerrilla is not losing decisively, even if suffering significant casualties, he is winning. Since the guerrilla is not going anywhere, he can afford far higher casualties than the occupier, who ultimately has the alternative of withdrawal.

The asymmetry of this warfare favors the guerrilla. This is particularly true when the strategic value of the war to the occupier is ambiguous, where the occupier does not possess sufficient force and patience to systematically overwhelm the guerrillas, and where either political or military constraints prevent operations against sanctuaries. This is a truth as relevant to David’s insurgency against the Philistines as it is to the U.S. experience in Vietnam or the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.

There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that Americans can’t endure the long war has no empirical basis. What the United States has difficulty with — along with imperial and colonial powers before it — is a war in which the ability to impose one’s will on the enemy through force of arms is lacking and when it is not clear that the failure of previous years to win the war will be solved in the years ahead.

Far more relevant than casualties to whether Americans continue a war is the question of the conflict’s strategic importance, for which the president is ultimately responsible. This divides into several parts. This first is whether the United States has the ability with available force to achieve its political goals through prosecuting the war (since all war is fought for some political goal, from regime change to policy shift) and whether the force the United States is willing to dedicate suffices to achieve these goals. To address this question in Afghanistan, we have to focus on the political goal.

The Evolution of the U.S. Political Goal in Afghanistan

Washington’s primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the U.S. homeland from follow-on attacks to 9/11. But if Afghanistan were completely pacified, the threat of Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism would remain at issue because it is no longer just an issue of a single organization — al Qaeda — but a series of fragmented groups conducting operations in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, Somalia and elsewhere.

Today, al Qaeda is simply one manifestation of the threat of this transnational jihadist phenomenon. It is important to stop and consider al Qaeda — and the transnational jihadist phenomenon in general — in terms of guerrillas, and to think of the phenomenon as a guerrilla force in its own right operating by the very same rules on a global basis. Thus, where the Taliban apply guerrilla principles to Afghanistan, today’s transnational jihadist applies them to the Islamic world and beyond. The transnational jihadists are not leaving and are not giving up. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, they will decline combat against larger American forces and strike vulnerable targets when they can.

There are certainly more players and more complexity to the global phenomenon than in a localized insurgency. Many governments across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia have no interest in seeing these movements set up shop and stir up unrest in their territory. And al Qaeda’s devolution has seen frustrations as well as successes as it spreads. But the underlying principles of guerrilla warfare remain at issue. Whenever the Americans concentrate force in one area, al Qaeda disengages, disperses and regroups elsewhere and, perhaps more important, the ideology that underpins the phenomenon continues to exist. The threat will undoubtedly continue to evolve and face challenges, but in the end, it will continue to exist along the lines of the guerrilla acting against the United States.

There is another important way in which the global guerrilla analogy is apt. STRATFOR has long held that Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism does not represent a strategic, existential threat to the United States. While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people. They are dangerous and must be defended against, but transnational terrorism is and remains a tactical problem that for nearly a decade has been treated as if it were the pre-eminent strategic threat to the United States.

Nietzsche wrote that, “The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.” The stated U.S. goal in Afghanistan was the destruction of al Qaeda. While al Qaeda as it existed in 2001 has certainly been disrupted and degraded, al Qaeda’s evolution and migration means that disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan. The guerrilla does not rely on a single piece of real estate (in this case Afghanistan) but rather on his ability to move seamlessly across terrain to evade decisive combat in any specific location. Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism is not centered on Afghanistan and does not need Afghanistan, so no matter how successful that war might be, it would make little difference in the larger fight against transnational jihadism.

Thus far, the United States has chosen to carry on fighting the war in Afghanistan. As al Qaeda has fled Afghanistan, the overall political goal for the United States in the country has evolved to include the creation of a democratic and uncorrupt Afghanistan. It is not clear that anyone knows how to do this, particularly given that most Afghans consider the ruling government of President Hamid Karzai — with which the United States is allied — as the heart of the corruption problem, and beyond Kabul most Afghans do not regard their way of making political and social arrangements to be corrupt.

Simply withdrawing from Afghanistan carries its own strategic and political costs, however. The strategic problem is that simply terminating the war after nine years would destabilize the Islamic world. The United States has managed to block al Qaeda’s goal of triggering a series of uprisings against existing regimes and replacing them with jihadist regimes. It did this by displaying a willingness to intervene where necessary. Of course, the idea that U.S. intervention destabilized the region raises the question of what regional stability would look like had it not intervened. The danger of withdrawal is that the network of relationships the United States created and imposed at the regime level could unravel if it withdrew. America would be seen as having lost the war, the prestige of radical Islamists and thereby the foundation of the ideology that underpins their movement would surge, and this could destabilize regimes and undermine American interests.

The political problem is domestic. Obama’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent. This is not unprecedented, but it means he is politically weak. One of the charges against him, fair or not, is that he is inherently anti-war by background and so not fully committed to the war effort. Where a Republican would face charges of being a warmonger, which would make withdrawal easier, Obama faces charges of being too soft. Since a president must maintain political support to be effective, withdrawal becomes even harder. Therefore, strategic analysis aside, the president is not going to order a complete withdrawal of all combat forces any time soon — the national (and international) political alignment won’t support such a step. At the same time, remaining in Afghanistan is unlikely to achieve any goal and leaves potential rivals like China and Russia freer rein.

The American Solution

The American solution, one that we suspect is already under way, is the Pakistanization of the war. By this, we do not mean extending the war into Pakistan but rather extending Pakistan into Afghanistan. The Taliban phenomenon has extended into Pakistan in ways that seriously complicate Pakistani efforts to regain their bearing in Afghanistan. It has created a major security problem for Islamabad, which, coupled with the severe deterioration of the country’s economy and now the floods, has weakened the Pakistanis’ ability to manage Afghanistan. In other words, the moment that the Pakistanis have been waiting for — American agreement and support for the Pakistanization of the war — has come at a time when the Pakistanis are not in an ideal position to capitalize on it.

In the past, the United States has endeavored to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime in Pakistan separate. (The Taliban movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan are not one and the same.) Washington has not succeeded in this regard, with the Pakistanis continuing to hedge their bets and maintain a relationship across the border. Still, U.S. opposition has been the single greatest impediment to Pakistan’s consolidation of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and abandoning this opposition leaves important avenues open for Islamabad.

The Pakistani relationship to the Taliban, which was a liability for the United States in the past, now becomes an advantage for Washington because it creates a trusted channel for meaningful communication with the Taliban. Logic suggests this channel is quite active now.

The Vietnam War ended with the Paris peace talks. Those formal talks were not where the real bargaining took place but rather where the results were ultimately confirmed. If talks are under way, a similar venue for the formal manifestation of the talks is needed — and Islamabad is as good a place as any.

Pakistan is an American ally which the United States needs, both to balance growing Chinese influence in and partnership with Pakistan, and to contain India. Pakistan needs the United States for the same reason. Meanwhile, the Taliban want to run Afghanistan. The United States has no strong national interest in how Afghanistan is run so long as it does not support and espouse transnational jihadism. But it needs its withdrawal to take place in a manner that strengthens its influence rather than weakens it, and Pakistan can provide the cover for turning a retreat into a negotiated settlement.

Pakistan has every reason to play this role. It needs the United States over the long term to balance against India. It must have a stable or relatively stable Afghanistan to secure its western frontier. It needs an end to U.S. forays into Pakistan that are destabilizing the regime. And playing this role would enhance Pakistan’s status in the Islamic world, something the United States could benefit from, too. We suspect that all sides are moving toward this end.

The United States isn’t going to defeat the Taliban. The original goal of the war is irrelevant, and the current goal is rather difficult to take seriously. Even a victory, whatever that would look like, would make little difference in the fight against transnational jihad, but a defeat could harm U.S. interests. Therefore, the United States needs a withdrawal that is not a defeat. Such a strategic shift is not without profound political complexity and difficulties. But the disparity between — and increasingly, the incompatibility of — the struggle with transnational terrorism and the war effort geographically rooted in Afghanistan is only becoming more apparent — even to the American public.

RENEGADE EYE
Posted by Renegade Eye at 12:56 AM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Labels: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Stratfor
2 comments:
The Pagan Temple said...
The only way this situation is going to be solved satisfactorily is by putting the warlords in charge of the country.

Actually, I should be more concise than that. I should say that we should recognize the reality that the warlords are the natural leaders of the country, help shore them up, support them, guide them into the formation of a stable government, and then get out of their way.

Forget the idea of political and religious freedom, that's not happening, though we could encourage with some degree of success access to education and economic opportunity, which is really all that matters.

The death of the Taliban and the transnational jihad movement as applies to Afghanistan would then be heralded by the sickening sweet stench of tens of thousands of burning bodies. And that suits me fine.

30 September, 2010 05:45
Renegade Eye said...
When the socialist government was in power, it was Afghanistan's golden age. Your comment proves it.

30 September, 2010 22:45
Post a Comment

Newer Post

*From "An Unrepentant Communist" Blog- On The Workers Struggles In Europe

Click on headline to link to the blog entry mentioned in the title.

From The "HistoMat" Blog- Jack London on the historic failure of the capitalist class

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Jack London on the historic failure of the capitalist class

There are many counts of the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to which capital has never replied and can never reply.

The capitalist class has managed society, and its management has failed. And not only has it failed in its management, but it has failed deplorably, ignobly, horribly. The capitalist class had an opportunity such as was vouchsafed no previous ruling class in the history of the world. It broke away from the rule of the old feudal aristocracy and made modern society. It mastered matter, organized the machinery of life, and made possible a wonderful era for mankind, wherein no creature should cry aloud because it had not enough to eat, and wherein for every child there would be opportunity for education, for intellectual and spiritual uplift. Matter being mastered, and the machinery of life organized, all this was possible. Here was the chance, God-given, and the capitalist class failed. It was blind and greedy. It prattled sweet ideals and dear moralities, rubbed its eyes not once, nor ceased one whit in its greediness, and smashed down in a failure as tremendous only as was the opportunity it had ignored.

But all this is like so much cobwebs to the bourgeois mind. As it was blind in the past, it is blind now and cannot see nor understand. Well, then, let the indictment be stated more definitely, in terms sharp and unmistakable...The capitalist class has mismanaged, is to-day mismanaging. In New York City 50,000 children go hungry to school, and in New York City there are 1320 millionnaires. The point, however, is not that the mass of man kind is miserable because of the wealth the capitalist class has taken to itself. Far from it. The point really is that the mass of mankind is miserable, not for want of the wealth taken by the capitalist class, but for want of the wealth that was never created. This wealth was never created because the capitalist class managed too wastefully and irrationally. The capitalist class, blind and greedy, grasping madly, has not only not made the best of its management, but made the worst of it. It is a management prodigiously wasteful. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly.

With the natural resources of the world, the machinery already invented, a rational organization of production and distribution, and an equally rational elimination of waste, the able-bodied workers would not have to labor more than two or three hours per day to feed everybody, clothe everybody, house everybody, educate everybody, and give a fair measure of little luxuries to everybody. There would be no more material want and wretchedness, no more children toiling out their lives, no more men and women and babes living like beasts and dying like beasts. Not only would matter be mastered, but the machine would be mastered. In such a day incentive would be finer and nobler than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. No man, woman, or child would be impelled to action by an empty stomach. On the contrary, they would be impelled to action as a child in a spelling match is impelled to action, as boys and girls at games, as scientists formulating law, as inventors applying law, as artists and sculptors painting canvases and shaping clay, as poets and statesmen serving humanity by singing and by statecraft. The spiritual, intellectual, and artistic uplift consequent upon such a condition of society would be tremendous. All the human world would surge upward in a mighty wave.

This was the opportunity vouchsafed the capitalist class. Less blindness on its part, less greediness, and a rational management, were all that was necessary. A wonderful era was possible for the human race. But the capitalist class failed. It made a shambles of civilization. Nor can the capitalist class plead not guilty. It knew of the opportunity. Its wise men told it of the opportunity, its scholars and its scientists told it of the opportunity. All that they said is there to-day in the books, just so much damning evidence against it. It would not listen. It was too greedy. It rose up (as it rises up to-day), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared that profits were impossible without the toil of children and babes. It lulled its conscience to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities, and allowed the suffering and misery of mankind to continue and to increase. In short, the capitalist class failed to take advantage of the opportunity. But the opportunity is still here. The capitalist class has been tried and found wanting. Remains the working-class to see what it can do with the opportunity...
Jack London, 'Revolution', 1905
Labels: America, capital, crisis, socialism


posted by Snowball @ 6:48 PM

2 Comments:
At 9:54 PM, Rick said...
An impressive elaboration of the Marx and Engels in The manifesto of the communist party:

"And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."


At 3:41 PM, Snowball said...
Cheers Rick - yep, it sounded kind of familiar and so having the exact quote from the masters themselves is great.

Lawless Arrests, Detentions and Torture in Iraq - by Stephen Lendman

Lawless Arrests, Detentions and Torture in Iraq

Lawless Arrests, Detentions and Torture in Iraq - by Stephen Lendman

An earlier article discussed Iraq's dire conditions after seven years of occupation, and over a decade of sanctions, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/04/iraq-today-afflicted-by-violence.html

It presents a grim overall picture, besides Gideon Polya's September 13, 2010 estimated eight million "War on Terror" deaths, mostly in Iraq, what he calls "avoidable mortality and under-5 infant mortality" ones, accessed through the following link:

http://www.countercurrents.org/polya130910.htm

Conditions now include:

-- 4.5 million refugees;

-- 2.8 million internal ones (IDPs), one-third in squatter slums;

-- mass impoverishment and depravation;

-- rampant human rights abuses; and

-- settlements without basic services, such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, health care, and education.

Nir Rosen's September 13, 2010 ZNet article adds more, accessed through the following link:

http://www.zcommunications.org/what-america-left-behind-in-iraq-by-nir-rosen

"Welcome to the new Iraq," he says, "same as the old Iraq," including:

-- "automatic weapons pointed at your head out of military vehicles;"

-- mountains of garbage everywhere;

-- the stench of sewage; and

-- daily violence, chaos, terror, and toxic environment, the same conditions everywhere under direct or proxy US occupations. The definition below explains how Iraqis see their "liberation."

Merriam-Webster defines dystopia as "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." Other definitions include extreme deprivation, oppression, and terror. These conditions apply to Iraq, a living hell under occupation, not the sanitized Western image when anything at all is reported.

New Amnesty International (AI) Report on Iraq

AI's report explains more, titled "New Order, Same Abuses: Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq." It debunks Western mythology with the harsh reality of "unlawful detention(s), enforced disappearance(s) and torture or other ill-treatment of thousands of people since 2003 by the US-led Multinational Force (MNF) in Iraq and the Iraqi authorities."

Saddam's Iraq was paradise by comparison. Most Iraqis would agree, given their lack of freedom, mass impoverishment, and human misery with no hope for change under occupation. It's how America planned it.

Many detainees are held arbitrarily, "without charge or trial, for seven years" or longer. For some, it's despite Iraqi courts ordering them released for lack of evidence, and the 2008 Amnesty Law requiring it after six or 12 months, depending on the circumstances. Yet thousands remain lawlessly imprisoned, many held incommunicado, tortured or abused without access to counsel, and for some, no family visits. Many aren't told where their relatives are held.

Under US imposed rules, "An estimated 30,000 untried detainees are currently being held by the Iraqi authorities, although the exact number is not known as the authorities do not disclose such information." Most are in severely overcrowded facilities under poor conditions. As a result, untreated health problems are common.

America's January 1, 2009 implemented SOFA (status of forces agreement) instituted permanent occupation and much more, including releasing or transferring all detainees to Iraqi custody. However, nothing is said about US or Iraqi human rights obligations, what Washington doesn't now or ever cared about. Former US diplomat George Kennan explained it in his February 1948 "Memo PPS23," saying:

We must "dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming....we (cannot) afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction....We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of high-minded altruism....We should (avoid considering) unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. (The) less we are hampered by idealistic slogans (ideas and practices), the better."

The father of Soviet containment, Kennan was a dove. Hard-liners toughened his ideas, implementing them for over six decades, including in present day Iraq (and Afghanistan) where the vast majority of detainees are suspected of unproved terrorism or related offenses.

Iraq's Amnesty Law

Effective on February 27, 2008, its Article 1 says those detained can be pardoned and released by one of the Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council's established judicial committees. Article 2 lists exceptions, including:

-- prisoners sentenced to death;

-- those convicted of terrorism causing death or permanent disability;

-- anyone convicted of crimes against humanity; and

-- others sentenced for premeditated murder, kidnapping, rape, homosexual acts, adultery, incest, forging official documents, counterfeiting, smuggling artifacts, and offenses under the Iraqi Military Criminal Code.

"In practice, the Amnesty Law appears to have been widely ignored and to have had little effect or impact on prisoner numbers. Some detainees have been released, but thousands" remain imprisoned without charges or trials in violation of international laws, including Fourth Geneva, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

For example, ICCPR's Article 9 states:

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention....Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time" or released.

Principle 4 of the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment states:

"Any form of detention or imprisonment and all measures affecting the human rights of a person under any form of detention or imprisonment shall be ordered by, or be subject to the effective control of, a judicial or other authority."

Its Principle 11 says "A person shall not be kept in detention without being given an effective opportunity to be heard promptly by a judicial or other authority."

America and its puppet Iraqi regime systematically violate international law provisions, harming all Iraqis, those in detention most. In some cases, arrests weren't for suspected crimes, but to extort money from detainees and their families. America turns a blind eye, including complete disregard for human rights, civil liberties, and democratic freedoms. In today's Iraq, they don't exist, the occupation in place to assure it.

Yet "The policy of locking people up on mere suspicion (in some cases against regime critics) and denying them justice has contributed to, not alleviated" the sectarian divisions and insecurity. Worse is how they're treated, AI detailing:

"Rape or the threat of rape. Beating with cables and hosepipes. Prolonged suspension by the limbs. Electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body. Breaking of limbs. Removal of toenails with pliers. Asphyxiation using a plastic bag over the head. Piercing the body with drills. Being forced to sit on sharp objects such as broken bottles....just some of the torture methods used against men, women and children," inflicting enough pain to get anyone to confess to stop it.

One detainee told his interrogators he'd sign anything, even a blank sheet of paper to end it. He did and told AI he was innocent, yet under Iraqi "law," his confession is admissible as evidence. "The Iraqi criminal justice system relies heavily on (forced) confessions as evidence of guilt," many then convicted, including hundreds sentenced to death based on torture-extracted admissions, mostly from innocent victims.

Women are as mistreated as men, many reporting being repeatedly raped during interrogations and in detention. For others, men and women, torture results in death. Investigations aren't conducted or whitewashed, death certificates citing heart failure or other natural causes. "In all cases, those responsible for abuses have not been brought to justice. The failure to deal seriously and effectively with torture and other human rights violations....has created a culture of impunity."

At times, prison guards and other security officers were suspended, even arrested, then granted immediate amnesty and released. These practices began under George Bush. Obama continues them seamlessly and shamelessly, what major media accounts never report.

A Final Comment

In 2004, Americans and world audiences recall the horrors of torture, rape, sodomy, murder, and other abuses by US military personnel at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Today under occupation, every US and Iraqi-controlled detention facility is Abu Ghraib or worse, their tortures, extreme abuses and appalling conditions continue.

Thousands of civilians are thus victimized by imperial Washington's lawlessness. Human lives and welfare are thus sacrificed, a shocking indictment of America's true aim and employed means, abroad and at home. Obama is as culpable as Bush. Both are unindicted war criminals.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

Fragments Of Working Class Culture- On the Question Of Working Class War-Time Social-Patriotism

Markin comment:

Private First Class, United States Army, James O’Brien would have been sixty-seven, or perhaps, sixty-eight years old this fall. You do not see the point of bringing up this unknown private soldier’s name? Well, here is another clue. Jimmy O., who was a few years older than I, was the first kid from my growing-up working class neighborhood to see service in Vietnam. Still not enough? Then take a little trip down to Washington, D.C. and you will find his “fame” listed on that surreal and serenely beautiful black stone work dedicated to the fallen of that war. Yes, I thought that might get your attention. This is Jimmy O’s story, but is also my story around the edges, and come to think of it, yours too, if you want end these damn imperial military adventures that the American state insists on dragging its youth into, and in disproportionate numbers its working class and minority youth.

My first dozen years, or so, were spend in a public housing project, a place where the desperately poor of the day (that day and this one as well), or the otherwise displaced and forgotten of the go-go American economy of the 1950s were shunted off to. So you can say I knew Jimmy O’Briens all my life, really, although I did not physically meet him until we moved across town to my coming-of-age working class neighborhood, a neighborhood whose ethos was in no way superior to “the projects” except that the tiny ill-thought out and benighted houses were, for the most part, single dwellings on minuscule plots. And I really only knew the real Jimmy through my older brother which is to say not very well at all as I was, okay, just a wet-behind-the-ears kid. And Jimmy, well Jimmy was the king hellion of the neighborhood and dragged my brother, and the brothers of others, in tow. Jimmy’s name brought terror to some, consternation to others and the plague to the rest. So this ain’t going to be a story of moral uplift, heroic sacrifice for great principles, or larger than life battles against great odds, for sure.

See Jimmy, when he was around the old neighborhood, was the very large target, that is to say the number one target, of the “shawlies”. Shawlies? In our mainly Irish working class neighborhood, although I confess I only heard it used by more recent or older immigrants, it signified that circle, council if you will, unofficial of course, of mothers, young and old, who set the moral tone, at least the public moral tone of the place. In short, the gossips, old hags, and rumor-mongers (I am being polite here) who had their own devious grapevine, and more importantly, were a constant source of information about you to your own mother. Usually nothing good either.

And what conduct of Jimmy’s would bring him to the notice of that august body, other than the obvious one of corrupting the morals of the youth that I alluded to before? Hey, as you will see this guy was no Socrates. Jimmy, it seems, or it seems to me now, was spoon-fed on old-time gangster movies. No, not the George Raft-Jimmy Cagney-Edward G. Robinson vehicles of the 1930s in which the bad guy pepper-sprayed every one with his trusty machine gun. Everyone, everyone except dear old Ma (whom he would not touch a hair of the head of, and you better not either if you know what’s good for you). No, Jimmy was into being a proto-typical wild one a la Marlon Brando or the bad guys in James Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause. Without putting too fine a spin on it, some kind of existential anti-hero.

So who was this Jimmy? Not a bad looking guy with slicked-back black hair, long sideburns (even after they were fashion-faded), engineer boots, dungarees (before they were fashionista), tied together by a thick leather belt (which did service for other purposes as well), tee shirt in season (and out, with jacket, although not a leather one). Always smoking a cigarette (or getting ready too), always carrying himself with a little swagger and lot of attitude. Oh ya, he was a tenth grade high school drop-out (not really that unusual in those days in that neighborhood, including my own brother as well). And here is the draw, the final draw that drew slightly younger guys to him (and the older girls, as well) he always had wheels, great wheels, wheels to die for, and kept them up to the nth degree. Always cherry Chevy’s (as my brother put it). Employment: unknown (or, maybe, better, don’t want to know).

That last point is really the start of this story about how the ethos of the working poor operates right at that point where it meets the lumpen-proletariat (the dregs, the criminal element that feeds off the working poor first, and then, maybe seeks “greener” pastures elsewhere) and links up with the demands of the American military, almost automatically. Jimmy (and his associates, including my drop-out brother) was constantly the subject of local police attention. Every known bad–ass offense, real or made-up, wound up at his doorstep. Some of it rightly so, as it turns out. I might add that the irate shawlies had plenty to do with this police activity. And also had plenty to do with setting up Jimmy as the prime example of what not to emulate to us younger kids. Well, as anyone devoted to a life of crime, including me in my own very small and short-lived early teen criminal career, can testify to when you tempt the fates enough those damn sisters will come and get you. The long and short of it is that eventually Jimmy’s luck ran out. The year that his luck ran out was 1963, not a good year to have your luck run out if there ever is one.

Nowadays we talk, and rightly so, about an “economic draft” that forces many working class and minority youth to sign up for “voluntary” military service, even in such guaranteed ill-fated war time, because they are up against the wall in their personal lives and the military offers some security. I want to talk about this notion of an “economic draft” in a different sense, a class sense, a sense that I am familiar with from those 1960s times, although I know that the same thing probably still goes on today. Jimmy, moreover, was a prima facie case of what I am talking about. When Jimmy’s luck ran out he faced several serious counts of armed robbery, and other assorted minor crimes. When he went to court he thus faced many years (I don’t remember his total, my brother’s was nine, I think). The judge, in his infinite mercy, offered this deal- Cedar Junction (not the name then, but the state prison’s name now) or the Army. He, fatefully, opted for the Army (as did my brother, with less fateful results).

Here is the part that is important to understand though. Jimmy (and to a lesser extent, my brother), the minute that he opted for military service went from being “bum-of-the-month” in shawlie circles to a fine, if misunderstood and slightly errant, boy. Even the oldest hags and character assassins had twinkles in their eyes for old Jimmy then. Of course, his mother also came in for higher esteem for raising such a fine boy committed to serve his country (and his god, don’t forget that part). Once in uniform, an airborne ranger’s uniform, and more importantly, once Jimmy had orders for Vietnam, then an exotic if dangerous place and a name little understood in the neighborhood other than the United States was committed to its defense against the atheistic communists, his stock rose even further. I was not around the old neighborhood regularly when the news of his death was announced in 1965 but my parents told me later than his funeral was treated as something like a solemn state function. The shawlies, in any case, were out in force and heaped the flowers and Mass cards for the dead to the high heavens.

*********

Postscript:

As we all know, or have heard, later in that 1960s decade all hell broke loose over the seemingly endless and purposeless continuation of that damn war. In the old neighborhood, as was related to me my parents and others, there were the beginnings of rumblings against the war as more and more boys didn’t come back, or came back grievously wounded, or became part of the lost legions who ended up in the VA hospitals, the half-way houses and flophouses of this country. Yes, but hear me out on this, those rumblings, real enough, never transcended that social-patriotic belief that the sacrifices, the sacrifices of their sons (and daughters, indirectly) were right and held that belief through to the bitter end. And, moreover, those rumblings seldom got beyond person murmurs of despair, certainly never to the level of hitting the streets to express their opposition. And, most certainly, never to condone the opposition to the war by those in uniform while they were in uniform like one neighborhood boy, Private Markin.

And know this, ex-Private Markin cries out, and cry out to the high heavens in the name of Private First Class James O’Brien (and the legion of others from the old neighborhood)- Down With Obama’s Afghan And Iraq Wars!-Troops Out Now!-Join Me!

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"Women And Permanent Revolution In China"

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive for an online copy of a section of his classic work Permanent Revolution-What Does The Slogan Of Democratic Dictatorship Mean For The East?

Markin comment:

The following is a two part article from the Winter 1982-82 and Spring 1984 issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

******

Women and Permanent Revolution
in China

PART ONE OF TWO

"The revolt of women has shaken China to its very depths In the women of China, the
Communists possessed, almost ready made, one of the greatest masses of disinherited human beings the world has ever seen. And because they found the keys to the heart of these women, they also found one of the keys to victory over Chiang Kai-shek."

—Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (1951)

The French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier maintained that the liberty of women stands as a decisive index of social progress in general. Fourier was surely right. Compare the advanced capitalist societies formed by the bourgeois-democratic revolution with the backward capitalist societies of Asia and Africa. The elementary rights Western women take for granted— to choose one's marriage partner, contraception and divorce, access to education, not to speak of political rights—do not exist for women in the tradition-bound and priest-ridden countries of the East. And efforts to achieve such rights are invariably met with murderous reaction. By all accounts the feudalist insurgency in Afghanistan (against which the Soviet army fortunately intervened) was fueled, above all, by attempts of the left-nationalist government to reduce the bride price and to teach young girls to read.

In the twentieth century the backward countries can no longer be transformed through a bourgeois-democratic revolution. Indeed, the "democratic" imperialist powers, centrally the U.S., prop up the most reactionary, obscurantist regimes in the world from Chiang Kai-shek's China to Emperor Bao Dai's Vietnam to the Saudi monarchy. Only in those countries of the East where capitalism has been overthrown, in however bureaucratically limited or deformed a manner, do women enjoy elementary democratic rights. To cross the border from old Afghanistan, for example, into Soviet Uzbekistan is to traverse centuries of the oppression of women.

That women cannot be freed in the countries of the East without overthrowing capitalism was perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the case of China. The democratic reforms Western feminists organized and agitated around—equal access to education, suffrage, access to contraception—were inconceivable in a country like China without a profound social revolution. Chinese women activists, including those initially influenced by Western feminism, were inexorably drawn into the broader currents of revolutionary radicalism, first that of modernizing nationalism and later that of Communism. The history of revolution in twentieth-century China is in no small measure the history of its women struggling for their liberation.

Modernizing Nationalism and the 1911 Revolution

The complete subjugation of woman in traditional Confucian China was proverbial. The Confucian Book of Rites prescribed that "to be a women means to submit." A women was totally subject to her father and later her (arranged) husband or, by convention, mother-in-law. Women were socialized to be not merely submissive but invisible. If someone came to her home when her husband wasn't there, a woman traditionally responded, "No one is at home." Women had no protection against flagrant physical abuse save community disapproval of an especially cruel husband. For many a Chinese woman the only escape from an intolerable family situation was suicide.

The oppression and social segregation of Chinese women was intensified by the hideous practice of foot-binding introduced in the tenth century A.D. The purpose of this painful and crippling process was to further restrict women to bedroom and kitchen. As a folk ditty put it, "Bound feet, bound feet, past the gate can't retreat." Contrary to a common misconception in the West, the custom was not limited to women of the upper classes. All Chinese women had their feet bound except those of the poorest families and of the non-Han ethnic minorities (e.g., Manchus, Hakka) among whom women generally had greater freedom.

The liberation of women from their total bondage was a fundamental aspect of the modernizing nationalist current which developed among China's intellectuals and officials at the end of the nineteenth century. A key target for these reformers and radicals was, understandably, foot-binding, which enlightened Westerners condemned (and rightly so) as barbaric. More important for nationalistic Chinese, it was commonly believed (without any genetic basis) that the male children of foot-bound women were physically weaker than Westerners. The movement against foot-binding was therefore largely motivated by the desire to produce a new generation of fighters against imperialist domination. In the 1890s Unbound Feet and Natural Feet Societies mushroomed throughout China. The membership of these societies, it should be pointed out, were almost entirely men. And where the reforming intelligentsia/officialdom were influential, the proportion of girl children with bound feet did diminish.

The same reformers and radicals who agitated against foot-binding also advocated education for women. Here again most were not concerned with sexual equality per se, but rather with overcoming China's backwardness vis-a-vis Western imperialism. They recognized that women who could read, write and do sums were a valuable national resource, even in their traditional role as mothers of male children. As one reforming official argued, "If the mothers have not been trained from childhood where are we to find the strong men of our nation" (quoted in Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China [1978]).

Whatever their personal outlook and motivations, these Westernizing intellectuals/officials set up the first schools for girls, often their own daughters, which produced a new Chinese woman who would play an important role in the subsequent revolutionary upheavals of her country. The new girls' schools were naturally hotbeds of anti-Manchu and anti-traditionalist nationalism. In Shanghai, Peking, Canton and elsewhere disciplined contingents of schoolgirls regularly participated in the mass protests against foreign privilege. In one such school a secret girls' militia was formed under the guise of physical education classes.

The outstanding woman revolutionary of the pre-1911 period was Chiu Chin (Jiu Jin). The oldest daughter of a scholarly family, she was allowed to study the classics with her brothers (not that uncommon a practice). In addition she was proud of her ability to ride a horse, use a sword and consume large quantities of wine. Despite this liberal upbringing, Chiu, like all Chinese women, was subject to an arranged marriage, which was not a happy one.

Influenced by the Western ideas sweeping the Chinese intellectual classes, at the age of 30 Chiu left her family and in 1904 went to Japan, then the main organizing center for Chinese revolutionary nationalists. Overcoming chauvinist objections that a cultured woman should not associate with men of the common classes, she became the first woman member of Sun Yat-sen's Restoration Society, the principal anti-Manchu organization. In 1906 Chiu returned to China where she divided her energies between putting out the Chinese Women's Journal, manufacturing explosives and organizing secret militias. Chiu saw in the women of China—so deeply oppressed under the old order—a kind of elemental vanguard force for national regeneration. Her outlook was encapsulated in a 1907 poem, "Women's Rights":

"We want our emancipation!
For our liberty we'll drink a cup,
Men and women are born equal,
Why should we let men hold sway?
We will rise and save ourselves,
Ridding the nation of all her shame.
In the steps of Joan of Arc,
With our own hands will we regain our land." ,,

—quoted in Wei Chin-chih, "An Early Woman Revolutionary," China Reconstructs, June 1962

One Western student of her political activities concluded:

"When Ch'iu Chin turned to revolution she anticipated ways in which women were eventually liberated in China. She implicitly recognized that sexual equality was
not likely to be achieved without some major structural changes, and saw the liberation of women as one result of the revolution to which she chose to devote her greatest energy."

—Mary Backus Rankin, "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing: The Case of Ch'iu Chin" in Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (1975)

In 1907 Chiu was deeply involved in an abortive anti-Manchu uprising. Though warned that she was about to be arrested, she refused to flee. She was captured, questioned under torture (but did not reveal her colleagues) and was beheaded without trial. Her execution provoked large-scale demonstrations throughout China. Popular outrage over the martyrdom of Chiu Chin helped forge the spike that was driven into the heart of the hated Manchu dynasty four years later. And Chiu would have been pleased to see women's battalions too fighting the imperial forces as they went down to defeat.

It is common for contemporary Western feminist academics to label Chinese women activists of Chiu Chin's generation as "feminists," as does, for example, Elisabeth Croll in her valuable study, Feminism and Socialism in China. This is a case of ideological obfuscation. While there were women's journals in the pre-1911 period, there was no women's movement separate and distinct from the broader current of modernizing nationalism. Nor was women's equality seen as separable from the overall transformation of China into a modern society. Croll herself recognizes that the women activists of this period were first and foremost radical nationalists, an ordering of ideological priorities of which she is somewhat critical:

"Rather, the early feminists, who wrote the first magazines, thought that no question was so urgent as the threatened autonomy of China and the overthrow of the
Manchu dynasty and the foreign yoke of tyranny It is
particularly apparent from the early women's magazines and newspapers that the women contributors felt very deeply for their country, and the issue around which women first met, demonstrated and organised was that of 'national salvation'."

With the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, China appeared to have become a Western-type parliamentary democracy. This was, however, a soon-to-be-discarded facade behind which rival militarists sought to fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the imperial bureaucracy. Bourgeois-democratic politicians like Sun Yat-sen became mere playthings in the hands of one or another of the warring warlord cliques.

The immediate aftermath of the revolution witnessed the emergence of a genuine feminist movement consciously modeled on the British suffragettes. When the National Assembly refused to write women's equality into the new constitution, members of Women's Suffrage Association stormed the Assembly hall, smashed windows and floored some constables. These militant Chinese feminists also aggressively displayed Western social mores, which affronted the old China perhaps even more than their demand for equality under the law. The Chinese suffragettes were soon to discover that they were not living in a restricted bourgeois democracy like Edwardian Britain.

The now-republican militarists, and their landlord and usurer backers, were as ruthlessly committed t defending the old order, including the subjugation of women, as had been the imperial bureaucracy. In 191 a girl about to elope with a militiaman was arrested and publicly executed as a lesson to all women that the new republic did not mean "personal freedom to do what they like." With the consolidation of Yuan Shih-kai military dictatorship the following year, all suffragette organizations were banned and a number of wome activists found with arms were publicly beheaded. A new movement for women's liberation had to await new wave of revolutionary nationalism set into motio by the world war and the red dawn arising out of Bolshevik Russia.

From the May Fourth Movement to Communism

On May 4, 1919 huge student protests erupted Peking against Japan's 21 demands, which would have totally reduced China to a Japanese colony. The homes of pro-Japanese ministers were ransacked. The movement rapidly spread throughout the country, and a new note was sounded when factory workers struck support of the student demands for a new government. The May Fourth Movement went far beyond protest against the immediate Japanese threat or even the depredations of the imperialist powers in general, marked the beginning of a new wave of radical activism directed no less at the existing Chinese order th against foreign domination:

"Traditional ideas and modes of conduct were crumbling and the echo of their fall sounded from one end of the country to the other. Young men and women in towns and villages began to break with the old authority of the family and the village elders. A fissure opened between the generations that was never again closed."

—Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (1961)

High up among the traditional ideas and modes of conduct which came under attack was the subjugation of women. A manifesto issued by the most influential journal of the movement, Chen Tu-hsiu's New Youth, declared:

"We believe that to respect women's personality and rights is a practical need for the social progress at present, and we hope that they themselves will be completely aware of their duty to society."

—quoted in Croll, op cit.

And women responded to these ideas. The May Fourth ferment gave rise to the so-called "five proposals" movement: equal access to education and employment, suffrage and the right to hold office, the right of inheritance and the right to choose one's marriage partner. It should be emphasized that the struggle for the equality of women was in no sense regarded as women's work. When the Peking Alliance for Women's Rights Movement was established among university students in 1919, two-thirds of its members were men! For China's educated youth, the May Fourth Movement was a veritable political/cultural renaissance with which all could identify from the mildest liberal reformers to the most wild-eyed anarchists. However, the naive unity among China's New Youth could not last long. And it did not. Two of the movement's leading figures, Chen Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao, through contact with Soviet envoys, were soon won to Marxism and set out to organize a Chinese Communist party, which was formally founded in July 1921. The issue of Communism split the loose, heterogeneous organizations which made up the May Fourth Movement into hostile camps. The left wing became the core of the newly formed Communist Party (CCP); the right-wingers joined the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang or other national-liberal for¬mations like the Chinese Youth Party. One such right-winger recalled that after a stormy argument a friend who had just become a Communist left saying half jokingly, "Well, Shun-sheng, we'll see each other again on the battlefield" (quoted in Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movemen([1960]). These words proved to be prophetic.

The left-right polarization of the May Fourth Movement likewise extended to the women's movement. The more conservative women's groups stressed social work and legalistic reforms. Christian women activists, who had earlier vigorously opposed Confucian traditionalism, now increasingly defended the status quo against "red revolution." During the 1920s the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) became a kind of conservative, pro-imperialist anti-pode to the Women's Department of the Communist Party. One of the leading lights of the Chinese YWCA was a young heiress recently returned from Wellesley, Soong Mei-ling, later better known to the world as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek.

The outstanding woman revolutionary of this period—who embodied the transition of May Fourth radicalism to Communism—was Hsiang Ching-yu (Xiang Jingyu). In 1915 at the age of 20 she opened the first coeducational primary school in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and also organized an anti-foot-binding society. She was naturally caught up in the May Fourth Movement (as was a fellow Hunanese student activist named Mao Tse-tung). In 1919 Hsiang, along with some friends, went to France to continue her studies. To pay her way she worked in a rubber plant and then a textile mill, thus acquiring first-hand knowledge of a highly class-conscious proletariat. In France she (along with Chou En-lai) organized a Marxist study group which later developed into an organization of Chinese Communist student youth abroad.

Expelled from France for political agitation, Hsiang returned to China in early 1922 and immediately joined the Communist Party. She was elected to the party's central committee at its second congress in 1922 and a year later became the head of its newly formed Women's Department. The Communists thus became the first Chinese party to organize women as a distinct oppressed group.

Like most other newly formed Communist parties in the colonial world, the CCP's original cadre were recruited from the radical intelligentsia. To win over the best women activists, Hsiang polemicized against Western-style feminism which had gained a certain currency in Chinese intellectual circles at the time. (Margaret Sanger, for example, visited China in 1922 and lectured at Peking University.) Hsiang insisted that "the new-emerging labouring women are the strongest and most revolutionary," and she charged the feminists that they "have not the courage to take part in the real political movement—the national revolutionary movement—the prerequisite to the movement for women's rights and suffrage" (quoted in WangYi-chih, "A Great Woman Revolutionary," China Reconstructs, March 1965).

China's newly emerging laboring women would certainly demonstrate their revolutionary force in the next few years. However, the program of a "national revolutionary movement," implying as it did collaboration with a supposedly "progressive" wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie, would lead the youthful Communist movement into an historic defeat in which Hsiang among countless others would lose their lives.

Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1925-27

The fate of the women's movement and revolutionary mass movement in general was to a large extent determined by the bloc between the inexperienced Communist Party and the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang. At the prodding of the Comintern (Communist International) representative, Maring (Hendrik Sneevliet), in 1923 the Communists entered Sun Yat-sen's party as individuals, originally intending to take short-term advantage of the Kuomintang's loose structure. (Significantly, Trotsky voted against this policy in the Russian party leadership.) At first the entry tactic appeared highly successful as Communist influence grew by leaps and bounds.

The Canton general strike/boycott directed against the British in the summer of 1925 marked the beginning of the second Chinese revolution and consequently the beginning of the decisive conflict between the Kuomintang leaders and the" Communists. The nationalist bourgeoisie suddenly became frightened of the powerful Communist-influenced labor movement it had helped to mobilize in extracting concessions from the imperialists. In March 1926 the commander of the Kuomintang armed forces, Chiang Kai-shek, staged a coup in Canton. Chiang's coup was a clear signal that the bourgeois nationalists were about to behead the workers movement. Despite this (and the strident warnings of the Trotskyist opposition in Russia) the Stalin/Bukharin leadership of the Comintern ordered the Chinese Communists to preserve the bloc with the "patriotic" bourgeoisie at all costs. The cost was the Chinese revolution which over the next year and a half was drowned in blood, first by Chiang and then by the "left" Kuomintang leaders.

Far more centrally than the anti-Manchu revolution of 1911, the betrayed and defeated Chinese revolution of the 1920s posed the issue of women's liberation. No area of Communist activity was more spectacularly successful than its work among women. Within two years of its founding the Women's Department of the CCP had 100,000 members; by 1927 it had 300,000 members. In 1924 International Women's Day in Canton—the Communist/nationalist stronghold— drew less than a thousand. Two years later 10,000 women marched through the city under the slogans "Down with imperialism," "Down with warlords" and "Same work, same pay." The Communist organization of women simply swamped the small bourgeois feminist groups, like the Women's Rights League, and in doing so won over their most committed activists. An American feminist academic, not sympathetic to Marxism, acknowledges that by the mid-1920s, "More and more women activists were moving toward the position held by Hsiang Ching-yu in 1922: feminist rebellion was meaningless without general political revolution" (Suzette Leith, "Chinese Women in the Early Communist Movement" in Marilyn B. Young, ed., Women in China [1973]).

At the height of the revolutionary upsurge in 1926-27 an estimated million and a half women were members of women's organizations generally led by Communists. These organizations were tribunes of the oppressed in the truest sense. Runaway slave girls, prostitutes wanting to leave their degrading profession, peasant women abused by their husbands, as well as women factory workers, flocked to these organizations with their grievances. For some observers, aware of the traditional total submissiveness of Chinese women, the eruption of an aggressive women's movement was the clearest proof that age-old China was undergoing a revolution. A sympathetic Westerner wrote at the time:

"Whatever the fate in store for the Nationalist government, it may be that historians of the future will find that the greatest and most permanent achievement to its credit has been the promotion of the women's movement."

—H.O. Chapman, The Chinese Revolution, 1926-27 (1928)

The demands made upon the Communist-led women's organizations far exceeded their material capacities. Even a relatively straightforward task like finding alternative livelihood for tens of thousands of prostitutes and concubines required the economic resources of a government department. And, in fact, many Chinese women looked upon the Women's Department of the Communist Party as if it were the women's department of a soviet government. (In some areas women's groups set up their own divorce courts.) Yet the fatal policy of limiting the revolution to bourgeois-democratic tasks prevented the establishment of a Chinese soviet government. And it likewise condemned the women's movement, despite the radicalism of its participants, to acting as a pressure group upon "anti-imperialist" militarists, landlords and factory owners whose idea of the role of women was shaped by the Confucian Book of Rites and the requirements of hoped-for capitalist stability.

The emergence of a militant women's movement in a society like China was bound to produce a conservative backlash. And so it did. This was aggravated by the overzealousness of some women activists. Older, conventionally minded women had their hair bobbed or feet unbound often under considerable pressure, if not by actual force. Over and above such excesses, however, many a peasant husband deeply resented his wife taking their family problems to the local women's group. And even some Communist fathers still insisted on arranging marriages for their daughters. These backward prejudices against women's equality served as an important point of support for the gathering white terror. Horror stories about "the wild, wild women" (that they organized women to march naked in the streets) became a major theme—if not the major theme—of anti-red propaganda.

And when the ax fell, it fell with especial force on the women's movement. Women's movement activists were, if anything, treated more savagely under the Kuomintang terror than even labor organizers or agrarian agitators. China's militarists, gentry and bourgeoisie could understand why peasants would want to stop paying rent or factory workers strike for higher pay and shorter hours. But the demand of women for independence and equality was radically new and appeared to them as a truly sinister attack on their entire social universe. So they reacted accordingly.

For a woman to have short hair now became a crime punishable by a painful death. Women wearing men's clothing were stripped to the waist in public so that "every man in town may see she is in reality a woman" before being killed. Girl Communists in Canton were wrapped in cotton blankets soaked in -gasoline and then burned alive. A particularly audacious young women's leader in a small Hunan village was hacked to death by enraged soldiery. Between 1927 and 1930 tens of thousands of Communist women were killed, among them Hsiang Ching-yu. She was arrested in the French concession of Hankow and turned over to the Kuomintang to be executed.

Yet the spirit of rebellion of those young Chinese women who had rallied to the Communist banner wa not broken. One of them wrote in a poem on the eve of her execution: "Red and White will ever be divide" and we shall see who has victory, who defeat."

*******

Part Two will contrast the role of women unde Kuomintang reaction and in the rural areas liberated b the Communist-led Red Army. It will recount th struggle for women's liberation as a motor force in th civil war which culminated in the victory of Mao's Red Army in 1949. And it will discuss the effect of thi deformed social revolution on the traditional Chinese family and the place of women in society."


*************

Women and Permanent Revolution
in China

This is the conclusion of a two-part article. Part One (Women and Revolution No. 25, Winter 1982-83) covered the interrelation of women's liberation and social revolution from the emergence of a modernizing nationalist movement in China in the late nineteenth century through the defeated revolution of 1925-27.

PART TWO OF TWO

That women cannot achieve elementary democratic freedoms in the countries of the East without overthrowing capitalism is perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in China. The Kuomintang counter-revolution in the late 1920s was directed with especial savagery at the radical women's movement. Tens of thousands of Communist and other women activists were raped, tortured and killed for the "crime" of wearing short hair or men's clothing. During the 1930s the Kuomintang militarists sought to reimpose traditional Confucian subjugation upon Chinese women.

This mass of oppressed women would provide much of the social dynamite which blew away Kuomintang China in the civil war of 1946-49. In the rural areas liberated by the Red Army, women were mobilized to fight for their emancipation. While these measures would not have been radical in Shanghai or Canton with their modern industrial proletariat and Westernized intelligentsia, Communist "woman-work" had a radical impact in the primitive tradition-bound villages of Kiangsi (jiangxi) and Shensi (Shaanxi).

However, between 1937 and 1946 Mao's Red Army entered into an alliance with the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang regime, one of the conditions for this being that the Communists stopped the confiscation of the landlords' property. This policy basically froze the old social order in the countryside, perpetuating the enslavement of peasant women to housework and husband. Only when the civil war forced the Chinese Stalinists to place themselves at the head of the agrarian revolution did the mass of peasant women achieve the basis for social emancipation. And it was only after the Communists conquered state power in 1949 that the feudalist garbage suffocating Chinese women (ar¬ranged marriages, foot-binding, female infanticide) was swept into the dustbin of history.

Yet the People's Republic of China was the product of a bureaucratically deformed social revolution, and that deformation imprinted itself on all aspects of social life, not least the woman question. Like its counterpart in the USSR, the Chinese Stalinist (Maoist) regime has perpetuated and defended the most basic institution of women's oppression—the family. The Stalinists' conservative attitude toward the family was further reinforced in China by the peasant-based nature of the revolution. For unlike the urban proletariat, for the peasantry, the family is the existing unit of small-scale agricultural production. And this continues to be thecase today on the collective farms.

The gradual replacement of oppressive family functions by social alternatives (communal laundries, childcare facilities, etc.)—the precondition for the complete equality of women—is not a matter of voluntarism and cannot be achieved within an isolated, backward country like China. It requires a level of economic productivity far above even the most advanced capitalist country. Thus the liberation of women—a basic condition for a genuinely socialist society—demands the international extension of proletarian revolution, i.e., the heart of Trotsky's program of permanent revolution.

Women Under Red Army Rule

To escape the white terror which followed the crushing of the 1925-27 revolution, armed Communist bands retreated to the more inaccessible reaches of the vast Chinese countryside. In 1931 a number of these Communist-led forces consolidated into the Kiangsi Soviet Republic in south-central China under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh.

In abandoning the cities to take the road of peasant-guerrilla warfare the Chinese Communist Party changed not only the environment in which it operated but its own nature. In the 1920s the CCP had been a revolutionary proletarian party supported by the radicalized urban intelligentsia. That is, it was based primarily on the most advanced, Westernized sections of Chinese society. During the 1930s the Communist Party became essentially a peasant-based military force with a declassed petty-bourgeois leadership.

In September 1930 the Bolshevik "International Left Opposition" led by Leon Trotsky issued a "Manifesto on China" which warned against the Chinese Stalinists' abandonment of the urban working class. The Left Opposition, which included a substantial number of Chinese Communists, recognized the need for a period of retrenchment following the brutal crushing of the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution and the strategic nature of all decisive moments follows either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat— Soviets are the organs of power of a revolutionary class in opposition to the bourgeoisie. This means that the peasantry is unable to organize a soviet system on its own— Only the predominance of the proletariat in the decisive industrial and political centers of the country creates the necessary basis for the organization of a Red army and for the extension of a soviet system into the countryside. To those unable to grasp this, the revolution remains a book closed with seven seals."

The social transformation of the CCP had a highly contradictory effect on the CCP's approach to the woman question. On the one hand, the most basic measures (e.g., teaching women to read and practice basic hygiene, elimination of foot-binding) had a profoundly radical impact on the backward villages of Kiangsi and Shensi. At the same time, the Mao leadership was concerned not to affront the traditional social mores of the peasant men, especially those serving in the Red Army, upon whom they depended for their very survival. Thus, "woman-work" in the liberated areas was cautious and conservative in comparison to the radical Communist-led women's movement which had been a major force in the 1925-27 revolution.

If the Kiangsi Soviet did not actually experience "a sexual revolution," the condition of women certainly improved, in some ways radically. Slavery, concubinage and prostitution were outlawed. The war against the Kuomintang in itself tended to break down the traditional role of women. While few women served as combat troops, many were attached to the Red Army as nurses, porters, couriers, laundresses, etc. Perhaps more importantly large numbers of women were encouraged to work in the fields for the first time in order to free up men to fight in the Red Army. The Kuomintang reactionaries hated and feared the signs of women's liberation which they saw in Kiangsi. The accusation that the Reds practiced "free sex" and "debauchery" was a major focus of anti-Communist propaganda.

In late 1934 the Kuomintang armies, advised by a German general, finally broke through and destroyed the Kiangsi Soviet. The core of the Red Army retreated in the heroic Long March of 6,000-8,000 miles. A year later the survivors reached the relative safety of the Yenan area in northern Shensi province. This region, near Mongolia, was one of the poorest, most backward in all China. Almost all women were illiterate, modern medicine was unknown, foot-binding and female mfanticide were common practices. The participation of women in agricultural production (based on winter wheat and millet rather than rice) was lower than in almost any other region of China. Thus, the contradictions which had characterized the CCP's "woman-work" in Kiangsi were reproduced in a more extreme form in Yenan. The commissar of education, Hsu Teh-|ih, explained to American journalist Edgar Snow:

"This is culturally one of the darkest places on earth. Do you know the people in north Shensi and Kansu believe that water is harmful to them?...

"Such a population, compared with Kiangsi, is very backward indeed. There the illiteracy was about 90 percent, but the cultural level was very much higher, we had better material conditions to work in, and many more trained teachers— "Here the work is very much slower." —Red Star Over China (1937)

However, the slow pace of the social transformation in Yenan was not due simply to its extreme economic and cultural backwardness.

As it became increasingly clear that Japan was about to invade China from its Manchurian base, Mao raised the call for a "National Anti-Japanese Front" based on cooperation between the Kuomintang and CCP. Chiang at first rejected this overture, but pressure from his fellow militarists (one of whom kidnapped the Generalissimo until he relented) forced him to negotiate an agreement with the Communists in September 1937, a few months after the Japanese imperial army crossed the Marco Polo bridge and invaded China.

Central to the CCP-Kuomintang agreement was a ban on the confiscation of landlords' property in the areas under Red Army control. The Communists would henceforth limit themselves to rent and interest reductions and similar palliatives. This policy was codified in a 1942 CCP document whose counterrevo¬lutionary intent is entirely unambiguous:

"Recognize that most of the landlords are anti-Japanese, that some of the enlightened gentry also favour democratic reforms. Accordingly, the policy of the Party is only to help the peasants in reducing feudal exploitation but not to liquidate feudal exploitation entirely, much less to attack the enlightened gentry who support
democratic reforms

"The guarantee of rent and interest collection and the protection of the landlord's civil, political, land, and economic rights are the second aspect of our Party's land policy."

—"Decision of the CC on Land Policy in the Anti-Japanese Base Areas" (28 January 1942) reproduced in Conrad Brandt et al., eds., A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (1966)

The policy not to liquidate the landlords' exploitation of the peasantry had a profound and negative effect on the position of women. Since women could not own land (the major source of income in Yenan), they remained economically dependent on their husbands, fathers, brothers, etc. If her husband ordered her to stay home and take care of the house and children, a peasant woman had no practical recourse. For women, the legal right of divorce was meaningless without an alternative means of livelihood. Thus, during the popular front period the mass of women under Red Army rule remained tied to housework as they had for centuries. In her scholarly study, Woman-Work (1976), Delia Davin concludes that "it was still unusual for them [women] to work on the land on any scale until the time of land reform." The Mao regime did promote home industry, especially for textiles, and to some degree this provided women with an independent income. But as long as property relations in the Chinese countryside remained unchanged, the mass of Chinese women would remain unliberated. The manifest gap between communist, and even democratic, principles and social reality in the misnamed Yenan Soviet Republic would soon produce dissension within the Communist camp.

Debate Over the Woman Question in Yenan

Following the Japanese invasion large numbers of radical student youth and leftist intellectuals made their way from the cities to Yenan. In part they were escaping Japanese and Kuomintang repression and in part they wanted to fight Japanese imperialism. Chiang's armies were notoriously corrupt and incompetent, and the Red Army was widely seen as the only effective anti-Japanese force in China.

Prominent among the newcomers to Yenan was Ting Ling (Ding Ling), the best-known leftist woman writer in China. As a teenage girl she had been a family friend of Hsiang Ching-yu, the founding leader of the Communist women's movement, who was killed in the white terror of the late 1920s. Later Ting Ling became a protege of Lu Hsun, universally regarded as China's greatest modern man of letters. Ting thus represented the avant-garde of China's radical intelligentsia.

Many of the newcomers, like Ting, were disappointed when life in Yenan did not measure up to their idea of what a Soviet Republic should be. They gradually developed into a dissident current or milieu, which one commentator termed the Yenan "literary opposition." They criticized the sterility and .dogmatism of official Communist propaganda, the tendencies toward bureaucratic commandism and the exceedingly slow pace of social transformation. But basically the dissident intellectuals objected to certain effects of Mao's peasant-guerrilla strategy and the alliance with the Kuomintang but did not challenge these underly¬ing policies.

The Mao regime crushed the "literary opposition" in the so-called "rectification campaign" of 1942-44. A major target for "rectification" was the views Ting Ling expressed in a 1942 essay, "Thoughts on 8 March" (International Women's Day). (This essay was reproduced in translation in New Left Review, July-August 1974, from which we quote.) Here she criticized the Mao leadership for retreating from the struggle for sexual equality. Ting contended that women in Yenan, while certainly better off than in the rest of China, remained unemancipated. Despite the "free-choice marriage" laws, social pressure forced most women to marry anyone who would have them:

"But women invariably want to get married. (It's even more of a sin not to be married, and single women are even more of a target for rumors and slanderous gossip.) So they can't afford to be choosy, anyone will do—"

Once married, Ting went on, women were pressured into having children whether or not they really wanted to. In this way they were forced back into a life of housework, curtailing their political activity and education. Then they were accused of "backward-
ness," a standard ground for husbands suing their wives for divorce:

"Afraid of being thought 'backward', those who are a bit more daring rush around begging nurseries to take their children. They ask for abortions, and risk punishment and even death by secretly swallowing potions to produce abortions. But the answer comes back: 'Isn't giving birth to children also work? You're just after an easy life, you want to be in the limelight. After all, what indispensable political work have you performed?'... Under these conditions it is impossible for women to escape this destiny of 'backwardness'."

The Maoists reacted strongly to these bitter barbs. Ting Ling was banned from writing and sent to "study" with the peasantry in order to overcome what they called her "outdated feminism." In 1943 a new CCP document on "woman-work" criticized "tendencies to subjectivism and formalism which isolate us from ordinary women" (reproduced in Davin, op. cit.). This document presents increased economic productivity as a cure-all for women's oppression. The actual retreat from the liberating goals of authentic communism expressed by this rather abstract document was spelled out in a speech by Kai Chang, a leading Maoist spokesman on "woman-work": "Our slogans are no longer 'free choice marriage' and 'equality of the sexes' but rather 'save the children', 'a flourishing family', and 'nurture health and prosperity'" (quoted in Davin, ibid.).

While condemning the bureaucratic way in which Ting Ling and her co-thinkers were treated, how are we to judge the substance of the debate? The Maoists argued in Yenan that a more radical policy on the woman question would have alienated the peasant masses, women as well as men. However, when a few years later the Maoists under the pressure of civil war confiscated the landlords' property and gave peasant women an equal share of the land, these women responded with unbounded enthusiasm. The agrarian revolution laid the basis for a revolution in sexual relations.

If the Maoists were guilty of opportunism, then Ting Ling can be convicted of idealist voluntarism. She appears to have been blind to the economic obstacles to social transformation in this most backward province and to the fundamental difference in social outlook between workers and peasants. Working-class and professional women were potentially in a position to be economically independent of their menfolk, and this shaped their consciousness. But the peasant women of Yenan had no independent means of livelihood. How could a young woman who left her father's home and chose to remain single support herself? How could an older woman with young children survive if she abandoned an abusive husband? Ting expected and demanded for the Yenan area full sexual equality in advance of the nationwide political and social revolution which alone could bring this about. Some of the policies advocated by Ting in 1942 were in fact carried out after the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (a bureaucratically deformed workers state) in 1949. But this required that the Maoists break their alliance with Chiang and place themselves at the head of an agrarian revolution which they had previously sought to suppress.

Women Under Kuomintang Reaction

Whatever the limitations, contradictions and retreats of Communist "woman-work" in Kiangsi and Yenan, the difference between that and the policies of the Kuomintang was like day and night. The inability of the "national bourgeoisies" in the colonial countries to shatter the feudal past and carry through a bourgeois-democratic revolution was conclusively demonstrated in China. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, the dominant bourgeois force, depended on relics of the feudal past (the corrupt warlords, landlords, gangsters). The native bourgeois classes in the colonial world are unable to separate themselves from the entanglement with imperialist domination for fear of setting off forces— principally the anti-capitalist struggle of the workers, in alliance with the peasantry—which will sweep them from power as well.

While the immediate target of the Kuomintang counterrevolution was "the Red menace," anti-Communism was soon extended to attacks on "decadent" Western liberalism in all its manifestations, especially on the woman question. In 1934 Chiang launched the New Life Movement based on an amalgam of Neo-Confucian, Christian and European fascist ideologies. The New Life which Chiang prescribed for Chinese women was the Kuomintang equivalent of the Nazis' "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" (children, kitchen, church).
Here is how the leading ideologue of Neo-Confucianism, Lin Yu-tang, defined the role of women in society:

"There are talented women as there are talented men, but their number is actually less than democracy would have us believe. For those women, self-expression has a more important meaning than just bearing children. But for the common people, whose number is legion, let the men earn the bread to feed the family and let the women bear children— Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother."

—quoted in Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (1980)

A leading inspirer and organizer of the New Life Movement was Madame Chiang Kai-shek, one of China's wealthiest women and a Wellesley graduate, who declared that "virtue is more important than learning." It is poetic justice that some of the hoary Neo-Confucianists around Chiang's court criticized Madame Chiang herself as too Westernized and attacked her public political appearances as "immod¬est" (sort of the Phyllis Schlafly of her day)!

The moral climate in Kuomintang ruling circles is well depicted in the memoirs of writer Han Suyin, who was trained abroad as a doctor. Han returned to China in the late 1930s to marry an officer on Chiang's staff, who constantly admonished her that "a woman of talent is not a virtuous woman" and that "to contradict your husband is a sign of immorality" (Birdless Summer [1968]).

If this is how the women of the educated elite were treated, one can imagine the situation facing women of the lower classes. Behind a faqade of bourgeois-democratic laws, a carryover from the revolutionary upheaval of the 1920s, the subjugation of the mass of Chinese women was fundamentally unchanged from the days of the Manchus or, for that matter, the Mings.

Deformed Social Revolution and Women's Liberation

It is now widely recognized that the American nuclear bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Naga¬saki in August 1945, even though Japan was ready to surrender, were dropped mainly to intimidate the Soviet Union. An even more immediate target for the American imperialists were the Chinese Communists. Having fought and defeated Japanese imperialism in large part to dominate and exploit China, the U.S. was not about to let Mao's Red Army stand in its way. With the guidance and support of Washington, Generalissimo Chiang was supposed to physically annihilate the Communist-led forces. For a year following the Japanese surrender the Generalissimo consolidated his position while spinning out phony negotiations with the CCP for a coalition government. Then in mid-1946 Chiang struck, initially with great effect. The Red Army was driven out of central China entirely and had to retreat on all fronts.

Stalin, as usual, was prepared to sacrifice his foreign "comrades" for the sake of "peaceful coexistence" with U.S. imperialism and its allies (in this case, Chiang's China). The Great Helmsman in the Kremlin later told Yugoslav Communist Eduard Kardelj that he advised the Chinese comrades to "join the Chiang Kai-shek government and dissolve their army" because "the development of the uprising in China had no prospect" (quoted in Stuart Schram, MaoTse-tung [1966]). Stalin's advice to the Chinese "comrades" was in effect that they commit suicide.

With their survival at stake the Maoists finally unleashed their most potent weapon: the mobilization of the Chinese peasantry against the landlords. A powerful wave of agrarian revolution carried the initially smaller Red Army, with its greater combativity and discipline, to victory over Chiang's forces, totally demoralized and grotesquely corrupt (Kuomintang generals sold food on the black market while their men went hungry).

Integral to the agrarian revolution and Red Army victory was the liberation of women from their previous total economic dependency. The Agrarian Reform Law promulgated by the CCP in 1947 divided the land equally between men and women. Women were given their own certificate of ownership, if they so chose, or joint ownership with their husbands. The impact of this revolution in property relations on the women of the Chinese countryside was electrifying. American journalist William Hinton, an eyewitness to these events, reported some typical responses: "When I get my share, I'll separate from my husband. Then he won't oppress me any more." "If he divorces me, never mind, I'll get my share and the children will get theirs. We can live a good life without him " (Fanshen [1966]). Particularly strong partisans of the Communist land policies were widows for whom the traditional Confucian code prescribed suicide at the death of husbands and providers.

The civil war itslef reinforced the agrarian revolution in radically changing the postion of women in society. The transition for guerilla to large-scale positional warfare drew masses of men into the Red Army and so created labor shortages in many villages. Large numbers of women were thus drawn into agricultural production out of sheer economic necessity. According to Teng Ying-chao (Deng Yingzhao), a leader of the CCP-led Women's Association and also Chou En-lai's wife, whereas in 1945 it was still unusual for women to work in the fields, by 1949 in the older liberated areas 50-70 percent of women worked on the land. In some villages peasant women were the main activists in confiscating the landlords' property.

More than any other aspect of CCP policy, it was the mobilization of women which shocked the Chinese ruling class as it was being destroyed. In her memoirs, Birdless Summer, Han Suyin recounts the absolute horror with which the'Kuomintang ruling circles in their last days viewed the revolt of women in the liberated areas:

"They actually had women in the Red armies, girls dressed as boys and carrying guns! They encouraged slave girls and concubines to revolt against their masters! Their widows remarried! They did not insist on 'chastity'! They incited the peasant women to stand up and denounce their husbands misdeeds."

For China's rulers, these were among the worst of the "crimes" of the Communists.
A social system which had oppressed women for millennia was overthrown in the course of a few years of civil war. The first years of the People's Republic of China saw the effective elimination of foot-binding, the general establishment of free choice in marriage, mass campaigns to overcome illiteracy and the drawing of most women into work outside the home.

Yet Mao's China was the product of a bureaucratically deformed social revolution, and that deformation imprinted itself on all aspects of social and political life. The popular enthusiasm and authority which the Maoists gained by overthrowing the old order was dissipated through the insane economic adventurism of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and the bureaucratic delirium of the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). The deeply nationalist character of the Maoist regime eventually led it into an alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union, dramatically signaled in 1971 when the Chairman embraced Richard Nixon as American B-52s bombed Vietnam. And today the "People's Liberation Army" is the main instrument by which the American ruling class seeks to wreak vengeance against the heroic Vietnamese people, who inflicted upon U.S. imperialism the most humiliating defeat in its history.

The deformed character of the Chinese revolution has naturally also affected the condition of women. To take but a few of the more glaring manifestations: the policy toward contraception and abortion has zigzagged between extremes, from practically eliminating any means of birth control during the disastrous Great Leap Forward to the present policy of pressuring women to have abortions they do not want in order to reduce the population. Official puritanism has the force of law, making premarital sex a crime. Many jobs are still typed by sex, and there is unequal pay for equal work, especially on the collective farms.

Women and Revolution, in an article on Maoism and the family (subtitled "In China, women hold up half the sky—and then some," W&R No. 7, Autumn 1974), wrote of both the historic achievements and fundamental limitations of Maoist-Stalinist China in furthering the liberation of women:

"The revolution has, among other things, given women legal equality, freedom of choice in marriage, greater access to contraception and abortion, a greater role in social production and political life and, for some, child care centers, dining halls and schools. It is indisputable that the lives of Chinese women, who in pre-revolutionary times were barely recognized as human beings, have been radically transformed and that Chinese women are less oppressed in many ways than are women in bourgeois democracies. "But while we note such gains and therefore call for the unconditional military defense of China against imperialist attack, we are also aware that China has not achieved socialism—a historical stage marked, among other things, by the withering away of the state—and that the Chinese bureaucracy sabotages those measures leading toward the emancipation of women which could be undertaken by the dictatorship of the proletariat in even a poor and underdeveloped healthy workers state. Chinese women, therefore, continue to be specially oppressed."

The key to understanding the interrelationship between the Chinese deformed workers state and the family lies precisely in the fact that while the bourgeoisie has been smashed and the means of production nationalized, the working class does not wield political power. The state is administered by a bureaucratic caste which, in order to maintain its undemocratic rule, must, among other things, rely upon and foster the nuclear family as one more point for reinforcing respect for authority.

Only a proletarian political revolution which ousts the Maoist-Stalinist bureaucracy, establishes workers democracy and places the resources of the Chinese workers state fully in the service of world socialist revolution can open the road to fulfilling the struggles for women's liberation which have been integral to the tumultuous history of China in the modern era. And only the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution offers the enslaved women of the East—from India to Iran to Sri Lanka and Indonesia—the path to emancipation."