Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, 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 The French Revolution-Spring 2001
We publish below an edited version of a presentation given by our comrade Susan Adams at a Spartacist League forum to celebrate International Women's Day 2000 in New York City, first published in Workers Vanguard No. 752, 16 February 2001. Susan, who died this February (see obituary, page 2), was a longtime leader of the ICL's French section and maintained an intense commitment to the study of history and culture throughout her years as a communist. These interests were put to particular use in her work as a member of the Editorial Board of Women and Revolution while that journal existed.
International Women's Day originated in March 1908, with a demonstration here in Manhattan by women needle trades workers. They marched to oppose child labor and in favor of the eight-hour day and women's suffrage. March 8 became an international day celebrating the struggle for women's rights. And then on International Women's Day in 1917, right in the middle of World War 190,000 textile workers, many of them women, went on strike in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), the capital of the Russian tsarist empire. They rose up from the very bottom rungs of society, and it was these most oppressed and downtrodden of the proletariat who opened the sluice gates of the revolutionary struggle leading to the October Revolution, where Marx's ideas first took on flesh and blood.
The Soviet state was the dictatorship of the proletariat. It immediately enacted laws making marriage and divorce simple civil procedures, abolishing the category of illegitimacy and all discrimination against homosexuals. It took steps toward replacing women's household drudgery by setting up cafeterias, laundries and childcare centers to allow women to enter productive employment. Under the conditions of extreme poverty and backwardness, those measures could be carried out only on a very limited scale. But they undermined the institution of the family and represented the first steps toward the liberation of women. The collectivized planned economy laid the basis for enormous economic and social progress. Fully integrated into the economy as wage earners, women achieved a degree of economic independence that became so much a matter of course that it was barely noticed by the third generation after the revolution. We fought for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution up until the very last barricade.
The great October Russian Revolution has now been undone and its gains destroyed. Surrounded and pounded by the imperialists for seven decades, the Soviet Union was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The responsibility for that lies primarily with the Stalinist bureaucracy which usurped political power from the working class in 1923-24 and betrayed the revolutionary purpose of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party and the revolutionary Communist International that they founded. Not the least of the Stalinists' crimes was the glorification of the family and the reversal of many gains for women. We called for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.
In celebrating International Women's Day, we reaffirm that the struggle for women's rights is inextricably linked to revolution and we honor the women fighters through the centuries whose courage and consciousness has often put them in the vanguard of struggles to advance the cause of the oppressed. The Russian Revolution was a proletarian socialist revolution; it overthrew the rule of the capitalists and landlords and placed the working class in power. The Great French Revolution of 1789-94was a bourgeois revolution, the most thorough and deep going of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The French Revolution overthrew the rule of the monarchy, the nobility and the landed aristocracy and placed the bourgeoisie in power. It swept Europe with its liberating ideas and its revolutionary reorganization of society. It transformed the population from subjects of the crown to citizens with formal equality. Jews were freed from the ghettos and declared citizens with full rights; slavery was first abolished on the territory of the French nation. It inspired the first successful slave revolt in the colonies, the uprising led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in what became Haiti. And, within the limitations of bourgeois rule, it achieved gains for women that were unparalleled until the time of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Today's capitalist ruling class is unsurpassed in bloody terrorism against working people around the world in defense of its profits and property. As hard as it is to imagine, the ancestors of this bourgeoisie played a historically progressive role then, sweeping away the backwardness, irrationality and inefficiency of the previous feudal system. The leaders of the French Revolution, who represented the most radical sector of the French bourgeoisie, spoke with—and for the most part believed—the words of the Enlightenment, justifying its fight to destroy the nobility as a class and take political power itself as the advent of "liberty, equality and fraternity" for all. They could not, and the majority of them did not intend to, emancipate the lower classes. Nevertheless, something changed in the world.
Particularly since "death of communism" propaganda has filled the bourgeois press and media following the destruction of the Soviet Union, there's been a real attempt to demonize not just the Russian Revolution but any revolution, the French Revolution in particular. The push for retrograde social policies has been historically justified with a virtual flood of books and articles attacking the humanist values of the Enlightenment philosophy which laid the ideological basis for the French Revolution. Today, while the bourgeoisie in its decay disowns the rationalist and democratic values it once espoused, we Trotskyists stand out not only as the party of the Russian Revolution but the champions of the liberating goals of the French Revolution.
Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin identified with the Jacobins, the radical wing of the French revolutionary bourgeoisie, whose most prominent leaders were Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. Lenin wrote that the "essence of Jacobinism" was "the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class" and that Jacobinism was "one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class." You can better understand why Lenin was inspired by the Jacobins from the following words by Saint-Just: "Those who make a revolution, with half-measures are only digging their own grave."
Women's Oppression and Class Society
In the early 19th century, a French socialist named Charles Fourier carefully studied the French Revolution. He wrote biting, witty and humorous criticism of existing social relations, including working out a whole scheme—kind of nutty but fun and food for thought—for perpetually satisfying sexual relations. Needless to say, he thought sexual monogamy was a curse worse than death. In a famous statement quoted by Karl Marx in his 1845 book The Holy Family, Fourier said:
"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation."
And that quite profound observation guides us today in our understanding of society.
Women's oppression is rooted in the institution of the family and has been a feature of all class societies. At one point before recorded history, it didn't much matter who the father of a child was, since children were largely cared for communally. But then inventions such as agriculture made it possible to produce more than the producers could actually consume. This ability to produce a surplus meant that a leisure class could live off the labor of others and accumulate property. It became important to know who the father of a child was so that he could pass on his property to his own children. Monogamy appeared, making the man dominant and the woman subservient, enslaved.
The family is a key social unit for the maintenance of capitalism. For the capitalists, the family provides the basis for passing on accumulated wealth. And where there is no property to pass on, the family serves to rear the next generation of workers for the capitalists and to inculcate conservative social values. It is the family—and the necessity to control sexual access to the woman to ensure that the man knows who his real heir is—which generates the morality codified in and reinforced by religion. It is the family which throughout a woman's life gives definition to her oppressed state: as daughter, as wife, as mother.
We Marxists fight to rip the means of production out of the hands of the capitalists in order to put them at the service of the needs of the working people that create the wealth. Only then can household drudgery be replaced with socialized child-care, restaurants, laundries and so on. The program of communism is for a classless society in which the family is transcended by superior sexual and social relations which will be free of moral or economic coercion. Our slogan is: "For women's liberation through socialist revolution!"
Marx said that revolution is the locomotive of history. In the Great French Revolution, the women of Paris were often the engineers in that locomotive. I'm going to be talking about the role of thousands of women leaders, military commanders, propagandists and organizers whose role at key junctures of the French Revolution was quite simply decisive. Groups like the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women literally shaped history. Count Mirabeau, one of the major actors in the beginning of the revolution, was an extremely sleazy guy, firmly in favor of a constitutional monarchy, occasionally in the pay of the king. But even he said: "Without women, there is no revolution."
Most histories of the French Revolution concentrate their chief attention on the upper levels of society and the top layers of the plebeian masses. In recent years, a number of French and American women historians have done very interesting and important research into the dusty archives of the revolution in Paris—police reports, newspaper articles. Some of these historians are feminists; that is, they see the fundamental division in society as that between the sexes.
At the time of the revolution, a movement focused specifically on women's rights was in the minority. One person who was what you would call a feminist today, at least as far as I have been able to put together her history, was Olympe de Gouges. In her pamphlet, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen, written in the fall of 1791, she implicitly called for the vote for women, for a women's assembly and for equal rights with men. She also dedicated her pamphlet to the despised queen Marie Antoinette! De Gouges was not an aristocrat but a butcher's daughter from outside Paris, yet she remained a royalist throughout most of the revolution and was guillotined in November 1793.
Some of the recent analysis by feminist historians feeds right into today's reactionary climate. Taking aim at the French Revolution itself, they claim that the failure of women to secure the right to vote for national parliaments and the suppression of the exclusively women's political clubs during the most radical period of the revolution proves that misogyny triumphed. This view is also promoted in an article in the New York Times Magazine (16 May 1999) called "The Shadow Story of the Millennium: Women." The article states that the French Revolution's "new philosophy of rational natural rights placed all men on an equal footing in regard to citizenship and the law" but adds: "Men of the revolution said that women should stay home and rear their sons to be good citizens."
Let us allow a participant to refute this falsehood. Mere Duchesne was a domestic servant, a cook, who, unlike most domestic servants then, defied her aristocratic masters. She was described in a police report as "the satellite and missionary to all women under Robespierre's orders, a most ferocious woman." The Mere Duchesne newspaper wrote in September 1792:
"In the past, when we wanted to speak, our mouths were shut while we were told very politely, 'You reason like a woman'; almost like a goddamn beast. Oh! Damn! Everything is very different now; we have indeed grown since the Revolution."
"The Columns of French Liberty"
Now I want to go into some detail about the French Rev¬olution itself. A revolution is a monumental military and social battle between classes. The dominant class in any society controls the state—the police, courts, army—which protects its class interests. In modern society there are two fundamental classes: the big capitalists who own the means of production (the mines, factories, etc.) and the workers who own absolutely nothing except their personal effects and are compelled to sell their labor power to the capitalists. At the time of the French Revolution, there were essentially four
classes. The king and the nobility who owned nearly all of the land, the rising bourgeoisie, the peasants (who constituted over 80 percent of the population) and the urban sans culottes. The latter consisted of artisans, who worked either at home or in very small workshops, shopkeepers, day laborers, the poor and unemployed. Those who did manual labor wore loose trousers and were sans—without—the tight silk leggings worn by aristocrats and those imitating them.
A revolution happens when the ruling class can no longer rule as before, and the masses are no longer willing to be ruled in the same way. We're talking about a political crisis in which the rulers falter and which tears the people from the habitual conditions under which they labor and vegetate, awakening even the most backward elements, compelling the people to take stock of themselves and look around. That political crisis was provoked in France by the 1776 American Revolution.
France had taken the side of the American colonies against its perpetual enemy England and so had emerged on the side of the victors, but totally broke. In May 1789, King Louis XVI convened an Estates General—a meeting of representatives of the nobility, the clergy and the non-noble property owners and lawyers (the so-called Third Estate)— at Versailles, where his palace was located, about 12 miles from Paris. He hoped to convince some of them to pay more taxes. But they refused, while every village throughout the country wrote up its grievances to be presented at Versailles. The meeting of the three estates transformed itself into a National Assembly.
It was clear that the king was gathering troops to disperse the National Assembly. The negotiations out at Versailles might have gone on forever, except the Parisian masses took things into their own capable hands and organized to arm themselves, seizing 60,000muskets from armories like the Invalides and the Bastille prison fortress around the city on 14 July 1789. You know of this event as the storming of the Bastille. The freeing of the handful of prisoners was incidental; it was the arms that were the goal. The Paris garrisons had been deeply influenced by revolutionary propaganda following a massacre of rioters in the working-class quarters of Faubourg Saint-Antoine some months earlier. In June, the troops paraded through the streets to shouts of "Long live the Third Estate! We are the soldiers of the nation!"
The king backed down, but the monarchy still had its army and its throne. The bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, mutually hostile classes, were relying on essentially incompatible government institutions, the National Assembly and the royal throne. One or the other would have to go. Either the king (and his many royal cousins and relations by marriage ruling other countries of Europe) would crush the National Assembly or the king would meet up with what came to be known as "Madame la Guillotine."
The weeks following the July 14 events were known as the "Great Fear," the fear that the aristocrats were coming to take the land back and were organizing brigands and robbers and bands of pirates and so forth. So the peasants armed to protect themselves. Then it turned out to be a rumor, but there they were, armed and ready, and being practical sorts, they turned on the landlords' manor houses and made use of the arms that they'd gotten.
The people's representatives, who were deliberating out at Versailles, took note of the insurrection and on August 4 passed laws eliminating feudal privileges, which had been the original issue all summer. The problem was that you had to buy your way out of your feudal duties and pay 25 times your feudal taxes in order to free yourself from them. Most peasants simply ignored that and had been seizing the land all over the country since July 14. They also would burn down the lord's manor house, where the records and the deeds were kept. You know, straightforward and practical.
The next major event is crucial to our understanding of the women's role. It was October and the people of Paris were starving again. October is usually a cold and wet month in Paris. It was indeed raining at 8 a.m. on the morning of 5 October 1789. Thousands of women—eventually some 8,000—had already gathered in front of City Hall. They knew where to find the arms because it was they who had helped store them here after July 14.
The king had allowed the symbol of the revolution—the red-white-and-blue cockade (rosette)—to be trampled underfoot by some foreign troops brought in to protect him and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette. The women intended to stop this anti-revolutionary activity and they wanted bread. Huge stores of fine white flour waited at Versailles. They began to walk there. They couldn't get anyone to come with them, but later in the afternoon about 20,000 troops of the National Guard—which had been formed by the bourgeoisie—forced the very reluctant General Lafayette, whom you might know as a hero of the American Revolution, to lead them there. One of the women was Pauline Leon, a chocolate maker, who was later to lead the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. That day she was armed with a pike, which was known as the people's weapon, because it was so easy to make. You could pull something off the top of a railing and attach it to a good hefty stick. It was said that "the pikes of the people are the columns of French liberty."
This was no protest march—it was a sea of muskets and pikes. The women were determined not to come back without the king and his family. There were still plenty of illusions in the king, but they wanted him under their watchful eye, in Paris. At one point the crowd apparently invaded the palace and was wandering through Marie Antoinette's chambers and some things were getting broken and stepped on and stomped and so forth. One very respectable woman in a velvet hat and cloak turned around and said very haughtily, "Don't do that, we're here to make a point, not to break things." And a woman from the artisan class turned around and said, "My husband was drawn and quartered for stealing a piece of meat." Finally the women demanded that the royal family get into their carriage. Lafayette's troops led the way and the women marched in front carrying on their pikes loaves of fresh, very white bread—the kind reserved for the upper classes—and the heads of two of the king's bodyguards.
The Revolutionary Jacobin Dictatorship
While pretending to be happy with the situation, the king was secretly corresponding with the other royal heads of state and nobles began to emigrate en masse, establishing counterrevolutionary centers outside the country. In June 1791, the king and queen disguised themselves and tried to escape, intending to return with the backing of the Austrian army. But an observant revolutionary recognized them in the town of Varennes, and they were brought back to Paris. This destroyed the people's remaining illusions in the monarchy and triggered an upsurge in revolutionary agitation. But the bourgeoisie, fearing things could get out of hand, sought to maintain the monarchy and clamp down on the mass turmoil. A month after the king's arrest, a petition to abolish the monarchy was being circulated among the crowd on the broad expanse of the Champs de Mars. The National Guard fired on the crowd and many were killed. Commanded by the aristocrat Lafayette, the National Guard had been organized as a force not only against the king but also against the threat that the bourgeoisie had already seen coming from the Parisian working people.
The Champs de Mars massacre marked a split within the bourgeois revolutionary forces. The two main factions that emerged—the Girondins and the Jacobins—represented the same social class, but they were deeply politically divided. The Prussian monarchy and the rest of royal Europe were mobilizing militarily and in April 1792 revolutionary France went to war. The Girondins sought a "negotiated solution" with the reactionary feudal armies combined with concessions to the nobility and the clergy. The Jacobins were ready to make temporary concessions to the hungry urban masses in order to thoroughly vanquish feudal reaction. You could say that the Girondins were the reformist wing and the Jacobins the revolutionary wing of the bourgeoisie.
In June 1792, thousands of armed marchers, including numerous women armed with sabers, paraded through the Assembly in the first of what became known as journees, or days of action. One official observed at the time, "The throne was still standing, but the people were seated on it, took the measure of it." The monarchy was finally overthrown by a second journee on 10 August 1792, when the masses invaded the king's residence at the Tuileries Palace in Paris and imprisoned the royal family.
The war was not going well. Most of the former officers, aristocrats, had emigrated. A government representative appealed for recruits by invoking "the heartbreaking thought that, after all the efforts that have already been made, we might be forced to return to the misery of our former slavery." While the best of the revolutionaries volunteered for the front, they were untrained and assumed to be undisciplined. Most of the new recruits were trades people, artisans and journeymen, not the sons of the bourgeoisie as before. The road to Paris seemed open to the Prussian royal armies.
The king of Prussia expected the French troops to scatter in disarray when his troops moved to drive them out of a strip of land near Valmy in eastern France. But not a man flinched as the French general waved his hat in the air on the point of his sword, shouting "Long live the nation!" The sans-culottes fired straight and repeatedly at the enemy. With a torrential rainstorm some hours later, the armies fell back. The German writer Goethe was present at Valmy, and as he looked out over the battlefield that night he said, "This day and this place open a new era in the history of the world."
He could not have been more prescient. On that day, the Assembly gave way to the Convention, which was elected by universal male suffrage and convoked expressly to give the nation a constitution which codified the overthrow of the king. Also, as we will see, the most progressive marriage and divorce laws until the Bolshevik Revolution were passed on exactly the same day as the victory at Valmy. Five months later, the king was beheaded.
In a third uprising in June 1793, the people of Paris and 80,000 National Guard troops surrounded the Convention and demanded the arrest of the Girondins and a comprehensive program of revolutionary defense of the country. This ushered in the Jacobin revolutionary dictatorship, which irremediably abolished seigneurial (feudal) rights, instituted the price controls (referred to as the "maximum") demanded by the sans-culottes and destroyed the resistance of the feudal order through a reign of revolutionary terror carried out by the Committee of Public Safety.
A month after the foreign troops were driven from France in mid-1794, on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar), the conservative wing of the bourgeoisie took the reins of power. The next day Robespierre followed the Grindings to the guillotine. The Thermidorians thought they could do without the alliance with the lower classes. That calculation was proved false, and they were themselves replaced in 1799 in the coup of the 18th Brumaire (November 9) by Napoleon Bonaparte, who subsequently declared himself emperor. But the Jacobin dictatorship had irreversibly consolidated the central achievement of the French Revolution, the rooting out of feudal relations in the countryside.
Marriage, Divorce and Inheritance
As materialists, we understand, as Marx put it, that "Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society conditioned by that structure." The rising capitalist class was firmly committed to the preservation of private property, as indeed it had to be. It was precisely this which staked out the limits of the revolutionary social changes that could be carried out, although the most radical years of the French Revolution went very far indeed.
The family was temporarily undermined in order to serve the needs of the revolution against its enemies, the feudal nobility and Catholic church. This is one demonstration of the fact that social institutions which seem to be immutable, to be "natural" and "eternal," are in fact nothing more than the codification of social relations dictated by the particular economic system that is in place. After the bourgeoisie consolidated its power as the new ruling class, it re-established the constraints of the family. But nothing would ever be the same again. The contradictory reality of the French Revolution—the breathtaking leap in securing individual rights and the strict limits imposed on those rights by the fact that this was a bourgeois and not a socialist revolution—was captured by Karl Marx in The German Ideology:
"The existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as good as legally abolished."
The feminists who want to dismiss the bourgeois revolution as anti-woman end up echoing those who justify suttee (widow-burning) in India and the imposition of the chador in Iran and Afghanistan as "cultural differences." Where the bourgeois revolution did not triumph, the status of women is qualitatively inferior. It is enough to contrast the condition of women today in West Europe with Afghanistan, groaning under the rule of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban.
I'll give you a very small example of what it meant to have a society in which a rising, vigorous, productive class—the bourgeoisie—was held in check by outmoded institutions. France was a Catholic country. In 1572, tens of thousands of French Protestants were killed in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and more fled the country. The 1598 Edict of Nantes assured them the free exercise of their religious beliefs, but this was revoked in 1685. Some of the richest merchants were Protestant, but marriages performed by their own pastors were not officially recognized. At the death of a spouse, you would have distant Catholic relatives claiming the inheritance, because legally there was no spouse and the children were illegitimate. Both Protestants and Jews accepted divorce. In 1769, according to James Traer in his Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (1980), a respected author advocated permitting divorce on the grounds that "the Protestant nations of northern Europe were enjoying both population growth and prosperity while the Catholic states of southern Europe were suffering from declining population and poverty." But the conservatives always managed to get the law postponed.
Under the Old Regime, women had the right to exactly nothing. The monarchy consistently sought to reinforce, supplement and extend the father's control over the marriage of his children. Women found guilty of adultery were sentenced to public whipping or imprisonment. Women were also put into convents for life for adultery. Marriage was indissoluble—a life sentence. If you were a man, you couldn't marry until you were 30 without your parents' permission. If your family had property, your father could get the king to issue a lettre de cachet, something like an unlimited arrest warrant, and you could be locked up indefinitely. If you married a minor (under the age of 25 for women) without permission, the penalty was death for rape notwithstanding the woman's consent. By the way, actors and actresses couldn't marry either, because their profession was viewed by the church as immoral.
The aristocracy was hardly committed to the sanctity of marriage. It was said at the court of Louis XIV some decades before the revolution that the aristocracy frowned on marital fidelity as being in bad taste, and a German visitor noted, "I know of not a single case of mutual affection and loyalty." I introduce this to make the point that marriage for the upper classes was all about property. Many of the sans-culottes did not marry at all. But in the Paris of the French Revolution, women were still largely dependent on men for economic reasons (whether or not they were legally married).
Much debate and several pieces of draft legislation on marriage and divorce had already been considered by the National Assembly before September 1792. All proposed to make marriage d simple civil affair. However, what stood in the way of this was the Catholic church. Those clergy who refused to swear an oath of loyalty were threatened with deportation. But the Pope forbade it, and a lot did refuse. Though some were deists or free thinkers, the bourgeois deputies in the Assembly had no intention of suppressing religion; they nearly all agreed that some kind of religion was necessary to keep the people pacified. But now they had a big problem on their hands as the village priests became organizers for counterrevolution.
The local priests not only carried out marriage ceremonies, baptisms and funerals, but also recorded them. If these records were in the hands of hostile forces, how could you count the population? You wouldn't even know if you had enough draftees for the army. When in June 1792 the Minister of Justice wrote that the civil war launched by the aristocracy and the church in the Vendee region in southwest France had completely disrupted the keeping of records, one delegate rose to propose that the marriage ceremony be abolished with the cry, "Freedom or death!" So in some ways, the progressive marriage and divorce laws enacted in September the same day as the victory at Valmy were war measures.
The age of adulthood was lowered to 21 and marriage without parental consent was legalized. This was followed by a June 1793 decree that proclaimed the right of illegitimate children to inherit from both their mothers and their fathers. At a stroke, the institution of the family lost one of its main functions as the framework for the transfer of property from one generation to the next. While inheritance rights didn't mean much to those without property, the new laws also tended to legitimize "free unions." For example, soldiers' common-law wives could receive government pensions.
Divorce had not been high on the list of grievances before the revolution, but as the pamphlets flowered, so did the notion that divorce was a necessary right in society. Probably rarely in history had a simple law so delighted the female population. When a certain citizen Bellepaume came to the town hall intending to oppose the divorce demanded by his wife, he found that she had organized "a considerable number of citizens of both sexes, but chiefly women" who pursued him in the corridors, abused him and tore his clothes. In the first year after the divorce law was passed, women
initiated over 70 percent of all divorces. One woman wrote to the Convention:
"The female citizen Govot, a free woman, solemnly comes to give homage to this sacred law of divorce. Yesterday, groaning under the control of a despotic husband, liberty was only an empty word for her. Today, returned to the dignity of an independent woman, she idolizes this beneficial law that breaks ill-matched ties and returns hearts to themselves, to nature, and finally to divine liberty. I offer my country six francs for the expense of war. I add my marriage ring, which was until today the symbol of my slavery."
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women
The question of women's status in society had been a subject of debate throughout the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia, published just before the revolution and intended as a compendium of all knowledge, contained four contributions under the category "Women": one in favor of equality, one ambiguous and two against. Even in a very radical work like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), woman's role as subordinate to man inside the family was not seriously called into question. Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of British radical-democratic revolutionaries who supported the French Revolution against English monarchical reaction, even participating in the French government.
Most of the Enlightenment thinkers and writers concentrated on education for women, and that was about it. Now, this is undeniably a very important question, and it refuted the prevalent idea that women were inferior to men and their brains worked in an inferior way. Only about a third of French women at the time were literate. You'd find them during the revolutionary years at the corner cafe with their glass of red wine, reading or listening to someone else read Robespierre's latest speech. The hunger for knowledge was totally linked to the desire to change society. Before 1777, France had no daily newspaper. Two years later, there were 35 papers and periodicals and by 1789 there were 169. Thousands of political pamphlets rolled off the printing presses.
One of the novels based on the new research published in the last few years has the Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet, who wrote very eloquently about women's rights, and his lovely young wife enjoying long mornings reading a bit of Voltaire or the equivalent of the Sunday New York Times in bed with their cafe au lait, making love, and then getting up in the afternoon to walk in the garden and do their very serious intellectual work. Not a bad life, right? But it wasn't available to most people, of course. Condorcet ended by opposing the execution of Louis XVI, ostensibly on the grounds of opposition to the death penalty.
The working women of Paris who were a motor force in the revolution lived very different lives. Perhaps 45,000 women in Paris, some 20 percent, were wage earners; a similar percentage of women in cities like Lyon and Rouen worked. Because of the war, women were able to break into traditionally male professions and they were also employed at sewing, as domestic servants. Some were proprietors of shops. Wives, legal or otherwise, of soldiers at the front were given subsidies. The Paris municipal government and the political clubs set up spinning workshops that at a certain point employed several thousand women, though the wages were miserable. They were centralized by the government office responsible for producing clothes for the troops.
It was from among these women of the sans-culottes that the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was formed in the spring of 1793. One of the leaders of the society was the chocolate maker Pauline Leon, whom we last saw with her pike on the October 1789 march to Versailles. Another was the actress Claire Lacombe, who always followed her signature with "A Free Woman." A third was Anne Felicite' Colombe, who owned a print shop. Typography was generally a man's job, so she was already exceptional for this. In 1791, she had been one of the four women arrested when the National Guard shot down demonstrators at the Champs de Mars calling for the overthrow of the monarchy. Colombe printed the revolutionary newspapers of Jean-Paul Marat, L'Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People) and L'Orateur du Peuple (The Orator of the People). She was dragged into a libel suit, which she eventually won, and distributed the 20,000-//vre settlement to the poor in her neighborhood.
While women did not win the right to vote for delegates to the Convention, especially after the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1793 they played a full role in the Parisian sectional assemblies, intervening, presenting positions, voting and being elected as delegates. They refused to be "servile women, domestic animals," as one put it in May 1793. Interestingly, the one widespread demand for formal equality was for the right to bear arms. In March 1792, Pauline Leon had led a delegation to present a petition to the Assembly declaring:
"You cannot refuse us and society cannot remove from us this right which nature gives us, unless it is alleged that the Declaration of Rights is not applicable to women and that they must allow their throats to be slit, like sheep, without having the right to defend themselves."
The women demanded the right to arm themselves with pikes, pistols, sabers and rifles, and to assemble for maneuvers on the Champs de Mars. After much debate, the Assembly moved to put the petition in the minutes with honorable mention. Dozens of women actually went to the front when the war began, a few as officers.
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women solidly backed the Jacobins as the revolutionary government and politically supported the extreme left Enrages around Jacques Roux, who spoke for the popular masses. Just after the Revolutionary Republican Women was founded, they mobilized the support of the masses in the streets for the Jacobins, whose battle to oust the Girondins was then coming to a head. As the split deepened, there were many more women than men in the street gatherings, according to police reports. The Revolutionary Republican Women dressed in military clothes and carried sabers. One account has them waging a military battle in the Convention to get back the seats which had been taken from them by supporters of the right-wing Gironde.
Reversal of Gains Under Thermidor
In October 1793, the society became one of the first organizations to be banned by the Jacobin government. Those feminist historians I mentioned earlier claim that this proves that the French Revolution was essentially hostile to women. That's wrong. The society was banned not because it was composed of women, but because it was one of the most radical expressions of the sans-culottes.
Here's what happened. The Enrages and the Revolutionary Republican Women fought for strict price controls, especially on food, and an upper limit on the size of personal fortunes. In October, the Revolutionary Republican Women launched a campaign to force all women to wear the revolutionary cockade. They brought their campaign to Les Halles, the central marketplace in Paris. The market women were of course hostile to the price maximum on food that had just been imposed by the Jacobin government as a concession to the sans-culottes. The question of the cockade was just the pretext for the major-league brawl that ensued between the market women and the women revolutionaries. This fight represented an early split in the Jacobins' base, and the Jacobins sided with the market women, banning the Revolutionary Republicans.
The peasants wanted maximum food prices, the artisan-proletariat in the cities wanted minimum ones, pointing to the spectre of a civil war which the sans-cullotes could not win. The Jacobins could have tried to strike a deal, but ultimately they could not satisfy the conflicting demands of the urban poor and the peasantry. When revolutionary Russia in the early 1920s was confronted with the "scissors crisis," as the price of scarce manufactured goods rose and the price of agricultural products fell 3nd the peasants threatened to withhold their produce, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky proposed a course of planned industrialization to make more manufactured goods available to the peasants and maintain their support for the proletarian dictatorship. Trotsky's proposal was rejected at the time (only to be implemented at forced-march pace a few years later by Stalin). But such an option was objectively unrealizable in the capitalist economic system of pre-industrial France.
By the fall of 1793, the Jacobins and revolutionary France were gasping for air. Mandatory conscription had provoked mass uprisings in the Vendee; there had been treachery at the front; the armies of the European monarchies had reinvaded France; and Girondin provinces were seceding; Marat, the "friend of the people," had been assassinated by the royalist Charlotte Corday. Against this backdrop, the Revolutionary Republican Women, in their revolutionary zeal against the market women, threatened to get in the way of prompt and regular deliveries of food to the city from the countryside, without which the Jacobins would have lost the allegiance of the urban masses.
Many of the revolutionary women continued to be active as individuals. Even after being arrested by the Jacobin government, Claire Lacombe stayed loyal to Robespierre. She never renounced her support, and after Robespierre's execution she always refused to point out that she had been arrested by his revolutionary government because she hated the idea of becoming a hero of the Thermidorians. Women played a vanguard role in the last uprising of the French Revolution in the spring of 1795, after Thermidor. The rallying cry was "Bread and the Constitution of 1793!"
The modern feminist historians believe that the role of women who rose up from the "cellars and catacombs" has been largely obscured because of prevailing patriarchal attitudes in society. Or they seek to show that women acted only on "women's issues," mainly food shortages. While there's some truth in both these observations, they fundamentally miss the point. The mass of active women in the French Revolution did not fight and organize as women but as revolutionaries. And, as the October 1789 march that brought the king back from Versailles showed, it wasn't simply the question of bread that motivated them.
Thermidor marked the end of the radical phase of the revolution, and women were among the first to feel this. This was especially true for divorced women, who would have trouble finding work and maintaining themselves under the conservative Thermidorians. Divorce became identified with the "ruin of society" and the "torrent of corruption that invaded the cities and especially Paris" during the Terror and the months that followed it. Proof of a legitimate marriage became a requirement for soldiers' wives seeking to receive aid. After May 1795, the Convention banned women from "attending political assemblies," urging them to withdraw to their homes and ordering "the arrest of those who would gather together in groups of more than five."
The Napoleonic Code saw a further reversal of the gains of women. It's reported that the only part of the deliberations on the Napoleonic Code that Bonaparte sat in on was the Family Code enacted in 1804. The Family Code again made women minors from the standpoint of the law, mandating that they had to have the approval of their husbands for all contracts and so forth. In 1816, a year after Napoleon was overthrown and the monarchy restored, divorce was abolished.
For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
I want to briefly trace the revolutionary continuity extending from the French Revolution through the 19th century. The French Revolution, refracted through Napoleon's armies, brought the first notions of women's equality to hideously backward tsarist Russia. Following Napoleon's defeat, Paris was occupied by Russian troops for a period of time. A number of young officers spent a lot of time in the cafes talking to people about what had been going on, and went back to St. Petersburg and led the Decembrist Uprising against the tsarist autocracy in 1825. They fought, among other things, for women's equality.
The very first communist ideas came out of the analysis developed by some of the radical Jacobins while in prison after the defeat of the Jacobin dictatorship. Revolutionaries like Gracchus Babeuf, who organized the Conspiracy of Equals, and Philippe Buonarroti came to believe that private property itself was the cause of oppression. They provided a living link to Marx and Engels, who issued the Communist Manifesto as the next revolutionary wave swept Europe in 1848, declaring: "The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital." In France, a program was advanced for women's emancipation that called for replacing domestic slavery with socially organized and financed services. I found this 1848 program reprinted in an early 1920s women's journal published by the French Communist Party, L'Ouvriere (The Woman Worker).
In the Paris Commune in 1871, women once again played an extremely important role. Marx described the Commune as the first realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat, though it lasted less than three months. The women of the Paris Commune were called the "incendiaries" by the reactionary press, and a correspondent for the London Times wrote, "If the French Nation were composed of nothing but women, what a terrible nation it would be." But Marx hailed them: "The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives on the barricades and execution grounds" (quoted in Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries [1967]). When the French capitalist rulers finally defeated the Commune after heroic resistance, they slaughtered at least 30,000 people in one week, and many thousands more were sent to penal colonies.
Today, bourgeois France is an imperialist power, where the July 14 storming of the Bastille is celebrated as a chauvinist glorification of the "grandeur of France"—much like July 4 here—while French colonial atrocities are carried out to the music of the once-revolutionary hymn, the Marseillaise.
We Trotskyists know that it will take world socialist revolution to do away with the institutions which are the root cause of women's oppression. In our fight to reforge Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution, to lead new October Revolutions around the planet, we are guided by the words of the Fourth International's founding document, the 1938 Transitional Program: "The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class, consequently among the women workers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness, and readiness to sacrifice." Join us!
Thursday, July 14, 2011
*Poet's Corner- William Wordsworth's "Ode To The French Revolution"- In Honor Of The 222nd Anniversary
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip about William Wordsworth.
Markin Comment:
Here is William Wordsworth's famous ode to the beginning of the French revolution full of all the youthful enthusiasm such a world historic event can elicit. That he, like many another former 'friend' of revolutions over the ages, went over to the other side when things got too hot does not take away from his efforts here.
The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts
. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—
Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
William Wordsworth
Markin Comment:
Here is William Wordsworth's famous ode to the beginning of the French revolution full of all the youthful enthusiasm such a world historic event can elicit. That he, like many another former 'friend' of revolutions over the ages, went over to the other side when things got too hot does not take away from his efforts here.
The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts
. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—
Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
William Wordsworth
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Brother, Build Them Gallows High - Robert Mitchum’s “Out of the Past”
Click on the headline to link to Wikipedia entry for the crime noir classic Out Of The Past.
DVD Review
Out Of the Past, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, 1947
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime noir aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and usually need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1947, Out Of The Past, get a double pass for the plot and for the femme fatale. And what a femme fatale.
A little summary of the plot line is in order to make my point. A young Robert Mitchum plays a not too choosey, just south of the shady-side but street smart, well street smart for a while, detective Jeff Markham (along with his gumshoe partner Fisher who enters into the scheme of things just a little, just like Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon ) hired by mobster Whit (played by a young Kirk Douglas) to find his mistress, Kathy, (enter drop-dead beautiful Jane Greer) after she off-handedly shots him (and takes his dough, a lot of dough, although the amount to him is not the issue it is the fact of the taking that hurts his pride, hurts his pride big time). That mix, that flammable mix, of a malleable gumshoe, a touchy mobster, and drop-dead femme fatale who has the morals of an alley cat, maybe fewer, is what drives this one, especially the doings of that femme fatale. Well, a girl has to take care of herself in this wicked old world and the boys, well, the boys, can figure the angles for themselves, if they can ever think straight for a minute when she is within fifty yards of them.
Now no question if one had to think, and not think hard, of a 1940s movie star to play a detective who had to get his hands dirty, had to move his heft around, and take a few punches, if necessary, Robert Mitchum (along with Humphrey Bogart) would head the list. But he is strictly in over his head here, like all guys when it comes to tackling a dame. So naturally Jeff, while off-handedly chasing Kathy around Mexico on Whit’s dime, falls, falls hard for Kathy. Once he smells the perfume, eyes her shape, well let’s call a thing by its right name, once she gets under his skin he is a goner. And nobody could blame him really, life is short and how many times are you going to get a chance at a drop-dead beauty that, for the minute, is on the loose. Not me.
The problem is that Whit has his own sense of honor, or revenge, take your pick. And the fact of the matter is that Kathy has her tentacles into him as well, whatever mischief she may have done, whatever off-hand shot he might have to take when she is within fifty yards. So Whit will move might and main to get Kathy back, no questions asked, no quarter given. And Jeff, poor sap Jeff, will wind up behind the eight- ball. See, after another off-hand shooting by Kathy (this should have warned the boys off, a dame with a quick trigger finger should be given a wide berth, but what are you going to do when that perfume smell starts coming your way. Besides it’s a dangerous world anyway), this time fatal, against Jeff’s old detective partner Fisher who was now in the employ of Whit, Kathy winds up back under Whit’s wing.
Whit, with Kathy back in tow and no stranger to intrigue, plots to frame Jeff, plots hard, and frames him big time, while getting out from under some blackmail from an accountant that has the goods on him. That frame drives the last half of the movie, but what really drives the thing is the now “reformed” Jeff’s lingering taste for wildcat Kathy, although he has another honey, a non femme fatale honey, Ann, waiting for him in the wings. So like a moth to the flame when Kathy beckons Jeff is half-way there already.
And, no question, under ordinary circumstances, Jeff would have been able to get out from under but as he said in the course of trying to get out from under Kathy had “built those gallows high.” So the lesson is clear, stay clear of femme fatales, especially wicked ones. Unless of course you think you are smart enough to keep up with them. If you think so though, build those gallows high, brother, build them high. See this beauty, see it several times, I have.
DVD Review
Out Of the Past, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, 1947
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime noir aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and usually need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1947, Out Of The Past, get a double pass for the plot and for the femme fatale. And what a femme fatale.
A little summary of the plot line is in order to make my point. A young Robert Mitchum plays a not too choosey, just south of the shady-side but street smart, well street smart for a while, detective Jeff Markham (along with his gumshoe partner Fisher who enters into the scheme of things just a little, just like Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon ) hired by mobster Whit (played by a young Kirk Douglas) to find his mistress, Kathy, (enter drop-dead beautiful Jane Greer) after she off-handedly shots him (and takes his dough, a lot of dough, although the amount to him is not the issue it is the fact of the taking that hurts his pride, hurts his pride big time). That mix, that flammable mix, of a malleable gumshoe, a touchy mobster, and drop-dead femme fatale who has the morals of an alley cat, maybe fewer, is what drives this one, especially the doings of that femme fatale. Well, a girl has to take care of herself in this wicked old world and the boys, well, the boys, can figure the angles for themselves, if they can ever think straight for a minute when she is within fifty yards of them.
Now no question if one had to think, and not think hard, of a 1940s movie star to play a detective who had to get his hands dirty, had to move his heft around, and take a few punches, if necessary, Robert Mitchum (along with Humphrey Bogart) would head the list. But he is strictly in over his head here, like all guys when it comes to tackling a dame. So naturally Jeff, while off-handedly chasing Kathy around Mexico on Whit’s dime, falls, falls hard for Kathy. Once he smells the perfume, eyes her shape, well let’s call a thing by its right name, once she gets under his skin he is a goner. And nobody could blame him really, life is short and how many times are you going to get a chance at a drop-dead beauty that, for the minute, is on the loose. Not me.
The problem is that Whit has his own sense of honor, or revenge, take your pick. And the fact of the matter is that Kathy has her tentacles into him as well, whatever mischief she may have done, whatever off-hand shot he might have to take when she is within fifty yards. So Whit will move might and main to get Kathy back, no questions asked, no quarter given. And Jeff, poor sap Jeff, will wind up behind the eight- ball. See, after another off-hand shooting by Kathy (this should have warned the boys off, a dame with a quick trigger finger should be given a wide berth, but what are you going to do when that perfume smell starts coming your way. Besides it’s a dangerous world anyway), this time fatal, against Jeff’s old detective partner Fisher who was now in the employ of Whit, Kathy winds up back under Whit’s wing.
Whit, with Kathy back in tow and no stranger to intrigue, plots to frame Jeff, plots hard, and frames him big time, while getting out from under some blackmail from an accountant that has the goods on him. That frame drives the last half of the movie, but what really drives the thing is the now “reformed” Jeff’s lingering taste for wildcat Kathy, although he has another honey, a non femme fatale honey, Ann, waiting for him in the wings. So like a moth to the flame when Kathy beckons Jeff is half-way there already.
And, no question, under ordinary circumstances, Jeff would have been able to get out from under but as he said in the course of trying to get out from under Kathy had “built those gallows high.” So the lesson is clear, stay clear of femme fatales, especially wicked ones. Unless of course you think you are smart enough to keep up with them. If you think so though, build those gallows high, brother, build them high. See this beauty, see it several times, I have.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Where Hip-Hop Nation Corner Boys Meet The Be-Bop Night Corner Boys- A Nod To J. Cole's "Dolla And A Dream"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of J. Cole performing Dolla and a Dream.
Dolla and a Dream lyrics- j. cole
For all my ville niggas man,
All my Carolina niggas man, (lights off and shit)
All my real niggas, no matter where you come from
A dolla and a dream, thats all a nigga got
So if its about that c.r.e.a.m., then I'm all up in the spot.
I was raised in the F-A-
Why a nigga never gave me nothing?
Pops left me, I ain't never cry, baby, fuck him, that's life.
And trust me I'm living,
Look what a nigga made out,
The shit that I was given,
Look what a nigga came out
The shit that I was given,
Look what a nigga came out
Momma sewing patches on my holes,
Man, our hoes couldn't put this flame out.
Straight up, I got my back against the brick wall,
I'm from a world where niggas never pop no Cristal, it was pistols.
You pass through, you better pray them bullets missed y'all,
I thank the Lord He let a nigga make it this far,
A lot niggas don't, a lot of moms weep.
I gotta carry on, all the weight is on me.
You never know when a nigga might try to harm me.
Rest In Peace that nigga John Lee,
I pour liquor, homie.
It's foul, but yo the world keeps spinning,
Gotta keep winning, get up off this cheap linen,
Nigga Imma eat, even if it means sinning,
Niggas want beef, Imma sink my teeth in 'em.
Pause, I go harder, I am all about a dollar.
You niggas street smart? I'm a motherfucking scholar.
So trust me, I ain't stopping 'til my money is long,
So much dough, them hoes will think I'm rocking money cologne.
Have a model at the crib waiting, "Honey, I'm home."
Cooking greens for a nigga, give 'em plenty, a dome.
It's funny, we dream about money so much its like we almost got it,
Until we reach up in our pockets, its time to face reality,
The ville is a trap nigga now,
And if you ain't focused you gonna be here for awhile, yeah.
*******
Markin comment:
On the face of the matter it would seem improbable, very improbable, that a leading voice of the hip-hop nation today, j. cole, and an old reprobate communist mired in be-bop 1950s youthful memories would have any points of intersection. And if it hadn’t been for happenstance that I ran into a young woman, Kelly, at a political event and mentioned to her that I was somewhat bewildered by the lack of political focus in today’s music and she mentioned some of j. cole’s stuff that she was crazy about it still would have been so. Naturally, since I am also in the midst of a craze of my own in trying to present archival material from the 1960s and 1970s concerning youth work among the leftist groups of the time, I checked out some of his lyrics.
| BOSTON IWW’S TO GCI: F U! | |
| by Boston IWW | 04 Oct 2014 |
| Reposted from the Boston IWW blog. Today Wobblies from Boston took to the street to support Portland OR canvassers, employed by Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), who formed the United Campaign Workers* union in response to poverty pay, impossible quotas, meager training, and blatant disrespect. Canvassers’ demands included $15/hr, overtime pay, and sick leave. The company retaliated by shutting down its Portland operation, laying off employees with no notice and just two days’ wages! | |
Click on image for a larger version
 | |
| GCI has its headquarters here in Boston at 186 Lincoln Street. Today local IWW’s leafleted to expose GCI’s union-busting and exploitation. We sent the message to GCI and the neighborhood: there is nothing progressive about terminating canvassers for not meeting unreachable quotas, or for banding together to negotiate better terms and conditions. GCI apparently heard we were coming, and had to arrange for special security goons, who however were camera-shy and hid demurely inside the building when we attempted to preserve their images for posterity. It was a great time & we’ll be back! | |
Click on image for a larger version
 | |
Click on image for a larger version
 | |
The distance between a young black man growing up in the ‘hood of Fayetteville, North Carolina in the recent past, post-civil rights marches time, “post-racial” time and a 1950s be-bop rock white kid growing up in “the projects” turns out not to be so far after all. The connection: a simple lyric taken from j. cole’s Dolla and a Dream about how his mother, blessed mother of course, had to sew patches on his pants “to make do” when he was young. No heavy message needed there. I remember, and have written about, my own hand-me-down patched non-fashionista childhood. Now this lyric may no represent the “high” communist theory that we communist propagandists thrive on but if we can’t get to those kids, those ‘hood, barrio, projects kids who are also basically living on hand-me-downs, then we are going to have a very hard time trying to fight for our communist future, and theirs.
From "Comrade Nikas"- Photos Of Russian Bolshevik Leader Leon Trotsky
Click on the headline to link to Comrade Nikas's Facebook page for photos, some rare, of the great Communist leader, Leon Trotsky.
Markin comment:
Those who honor the great Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and his fight for our communist future are kindred spirits.
Markin comment:
Those who honor the great Bolshevik Leon Trotsky and his fight for our communist future are kindred spirits.
Those Oldies But Goodies- Folk Branch- Bob Dylan’s “John Brown”- An Encore- For Those Who Come After
John Brown
John Brown went off to war to fight on a foreign shore
His mama sure was proud of him!
He stood straight and tall in his uniform and all
His mama’s face broke out all in a grin
“Oh son, you look so fine, I’m glad you’re a son of mine
You make me proud to know you hold a gun
Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get
And we’ll put them on the wall when you come home”
As that old train pulled out, John’s ma began to shout
Tellin’ ev’ryone in the neighborhood:
“That’s my son that’s about to go, he’s a soldier now, you know”
She made well sure her neighbors understood
She got a letter once in a while and her face broke into a smile
As she showed them to the people from next door
And she bragged about her son with his uniform and gun
And these things you called a good old-fashioned war
Oh! Good old-fashioned war!
Then the letters ceased to come, for a long time they did not come
They ceased to come for about ten months or more
Then a letter finally came saying, “Go down and meet the train
Your son’s a-coming home from the war”
She smiled and went right down, she looked everywhere around
But she could not see her soldier son in sight
But as all the people passed, she saw her son at last
When she did she could hardly believe her eyes
Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off
And he wore a metal brace around his waist
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!
Oh! Lord! Not even recognize his face
“Oh tell me, my darling son, pray tell me what they done
How is it you come to be this way?”
He tried his best to talk but his mouth could hardly move
And the mother had to turn her face away
“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home . . . acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”
“Oh, and I thought when I was there, God, what am I doing here?
I’m a-tryin’ to kill somebody or die tryin’
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine”
Oh! Lord! Just like mine!
“And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling and stink
That I was just a puppet in a play
And through the roar and smoke, this string is finally broke
And a cannonball blew my eyes away”
As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
*********
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor RA048433691 to be exact, was still in a reflective mood a few days after he had made his way from home town Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the jut of land Christopher Columbus Park for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance). And while he was glad, glad as hell, and felt about ten feet tall for a while, that he had done so these observance, memory trips triggered many old days Vietnam thoughts, too many sometimes. Although, mercifully, mercifully for his “sweet pea,” his better other, Lillian, not this time(he had named her that for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too).
This time his thoughts dwelt on an old comrade-in-arms from ‘Nam, Johnny Jakes, a buddy who had just recently passed away after a long struggle with about seven known medical complications, and about twelve unknown ones, including the mysterious war-frenzy disease (not carried by him, not quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes, but caught from others, family others, Richard Nixon and his crowd others, VFW and American Legion others, back in the day, and now too for that matter, although the names of the frenzied have changed, if not the frenzy).
Yes, John Lee Jakes, Johnny Jakes out of nowhere Georgia (actually Dalton Junction but we will call it nowhere, okay) all, or a nowhere that Fritz, northern boy Fritz, had ever heard of, and from Johnny’s night stories, sometimes night barroom stories along the way, no where he needed to go. And as long as the two had known each other, and as many adventures, dead-ends, wrong roads, and, occasionally, a right road they had traveled together in a forty year friendship, through hot and cold friendship phases, he had never been there. And Johnny never pressed the issue, never pressed it after he told Fritz the rough outline details, the blood-stained, sweat-fermented, star-spangled details. And the story, the thoughtless rush to war, the hoopla three-ring circus, brass band blaring, waving off soldier boy at the station story, was not that unfamiliar then. Fritz had been caught up in a little quieter cousin of that same story. Fritz hoped against hope to high heaven that the story was uncommon now but he felt, felt deep in his war- scarred gut, that that was not true. But right now it is Johnny’s turn in the limelight. Speak, good god, quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes speak, and maybe it will become an uncommon story:
“Jakes, and for that matter McKays (my mother’s side), have fought out of little nowhere Georgia in all of the American military adventures since back in Civil War times. Naturally that Civil War military adventure was under the auspices of the Confederate version of American military adventures but don’t tell me, my kin, my brethren, or any complete Southern stranger that it was a failed, flawed or any of that other yankee stuff about cloud-puff dreams for bad, or ugly, reasons. Let’s just say, so we stay even now, that we fought, that there was an honored tradition of fighting, and any odd-ball relative, male of course, our women don’t fight but stay at home and worry, who didn’t, well, I never heard about anyone like that so I don’t know what would have happened. We fought, some of us bled, and most of us grabbed a fist-full of medals along the way. And our womenfolk cheered us on, as we left for the world’s fronts at that still working little nowhere Georgia railroad station that took us to some god-forsaken military camp. We mostly came back that same way, mostly okay but not all, and not my father, Jefferson Davis Jakes.
See Jefferson Davis Jakes, before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, was the king hell-raiser of Forsythe County, was known far and wide as such and was not known to back down from anything, anything any male, or female for that matter, put in his way. But little did anyone know, anyone in the public know, that old Jeff (that’s the name he liked to be called by in latter life, by friend and foe alike, so I will use it here), was smitten by my mother, Doris McKay Jakes, so smitten that he had turned to putty in her hands. Not things that anyone, anyone in public anyway, would notice. All they would see is a king-hell-raiser and maybe a cut or other wound for their efforts, or the wise ones would cut a wide path away from his fury. But Doris had a spell over him, and he craved being with her, craved it more than anything even being king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. Soft, and he knew it. So when those Jap bombs landed at Pearl and all Georgia thought it was William Tecumseh Sherman returned to burn the land and every red-blooded, hell, every any- blooded male, even black guys, were running to the railroad station to get signed up Jefferson Davis Jakes hesitated, hesitated just that minute, just that Doris McKay back home minute. Until Doris McKay, no squeamish damsel, and maybe with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed dad out the door- “Go now, and go fast.” And I will quote here, quote because I heard it about six times a year, at least, the first few years of growing up, “Kill every Jap you can get your hands on, and more if you can. And when you come back I will be a Jakes, and proudly.” So naturally she and half the town show up at that nowhere train station to see the boys, including in the lead my father, off.
And as such scenes go that is the nice, upbeat part. The not so up-beat part was that after almost four years of South Pacific war, relentless, heat-scrabbled, hell-underbrush and hard rock-scrabbled war on more nowhere islands than one would think possible as big as the Pacific is Jefferson Davis Jakes, Jakes fist-full of medals collected, some odd souvenirs of as many Japs as he could collect, and only a few small purple heart wounds he returned home, home to his ever-loving Doris McKay. They married, as Doris had promised, and they had four children, all boys, including number two, me, John Lee Jakes. Just a normal American post World War II scenario.
Hold on; hold on just a minute, please. Jefferson Davis Jakes came home, and to the public eye, he seemed just like the pre-war king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. But on some nights, sometimes late at night, after a few hours of hard, hard drinking he would go up into the attic of the old-time Jakes home where we lived and begin to howl, howl like a wolf at the moon. And everyone around thought that was what it was. We knew better, or got to know better, especially Ma. This went on for a few years, every once in a while, but as time went on more frequently as such things do. And dad got quieter, more home quiet, although out in public he was still Jefferson Davis Jakes whose family had fought in this country’s battles since back in Civil War days. Then one night when I was eight he went up to the attic and we didn’t hear him howl like we expected. A few minutes later we heard a shot, one shot. They buried Jefferson Davis Jakes with full military honors down at our nowhere Georgia cemetery, believing the story we had concocted about his having interrupted an intruder and had accidentally discharged his old M-1. And that was the end of it.”
Fritz thought; well, not quite the end of it. Once nowhere Georgia heard about the commies in Vietnam in the 1960s every red-blooded male, hell, every any-blooded male, even black guys, headed down to the fading railroad station to sign up. Including quiet, unassuming John Lee Jakes, the late Johnny Jakes. But see Johnny had also hesitated, hesitated just that non-Jakes moment, just that Doris McKay Jakes moment. Until Doris McKay, still no squeamish damsel, and maybe still with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed Johnny out the door- “Go now, and go fast. Kill every gook you can get your hands on, and more if you can.”
John Brown went off to war to fight on a foreign shore
His mama sure was proud of him!
He stood straight and tall in his uniform and all
His mama’s face broke out all in a grin
“Oh son, you look so fine, I’m glad you’re a son of mine
You make me proud to know you hold a gun
Do what the captain says, lots of medals you will get
And we’ll put them on the wall when you come home”
As that old train pulled out, John’s ma began to shout
Tellin’ ev’ryone in the neighborhood:
“That’s my son that’s about to go, he’s a soldier now, you know”
She made well sure her neighbors understood
She got a letter once in a while and her face broke into a smile
As she showed them to the people from next door
And she bragged about her son with his uniform and gun
And these things you called a good old-fashioned war
Oh! Good old-fashioned war!
Then the letters ceased to come, for a long time they did not come
They ceased to come for about ten months or more
Then a letter finally came saying, “Go down and meet the train
Your son’s a-coming home from the war”
She smiled and went right down, she looked everywhere around
But she could not see her soldier son in sight
But as all the people passed, she saw her son at last
When she did she could hardly believe her eyes
Oh his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off
And he wore a metal brace around his waist
He whispered kind of slow, in a voice she did not know
While she couldn’t even recognize his face!
Oh! Lord! Not even recognize his face
“Oh tell me, my darling son, pray tell me what they done
How is it you come to be this way?”
He tried his best to talk but his mouth could hardly move
And the mother had to turn her face away
“Don’t you remember, Ma, when I went off to war
You thought it was the best thing I could do?
I was on the battleground, you were home . . . acting proud
You wasn’t there standing in my shoes”
“Oh, and I thought when I was there, God, what am I doing here?
I’m a-tryin’ to kill somebody or die tryin’
But the thing that scared me most was when my enemy came close
And I saw that his face looked just like mine”
Oh! Lord! Just like mine!
“And I couldn’t help but think, through the thunder rolling and stink
That I was just a puppet in a play
And through the roar and smoke, this string is finally broke
And a cannonball blew my eyes away”
As he turned away to walk, his Ma was still in shock
At seein’ the metal brace that helped him stand
But as he turned to go, he called his mother close
And he dropped his medals down into her hand
Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music
*********
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor RA048433691 to be exact, was still in a reflective mood a few days after he had made his way from home town Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the jut of land Christopher Columbus Park for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance). And while he was glad, glad as hell, and felt about ten feet tall for a while, that he had done so these observance, memory trips triggered many old days Vietnam thoughts, too many sometimes. Although, mercifully, mercifully for his “sweet pea,” his better other, Lillian, not this time(he had named her that for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too).
This time his thoughts dwelt on an old comrade-in-arms from ‘Nam, Johnny Jakes, a buddy who had just recently passed away after a long struggle with about seven known medical complications, and about twelve unknown ones, including the mysterious war-frenzy disease (not carried by him, not quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes, but caught from others, family others, Richard Nixon and his crowd others, VFW and American Legion others, back in the day, and now too for that matter, although the names of the frenzied have changed, if not the frenzy).
Yes, John Lee Jakes, Johnny Jakes out of nowhere Georgia (actually Dalton Junction but we will call it nowhere, okay) all, or a nowhere that Fritz, northern boy Fritz, had ever heard of, and from Johnny’s night stories, sometimes night barroom stories along the way, no where he needed to go. And as long as the two had known each other, and as many adventures, dead-ends, wrong roads, and, occasionally, a right road they had traveled together in a forty year friendship, through hot and cold friendship phases, he had never been there. And Johnny never pressed the issue, never pressed it after he told Fritz the rough outline details, the blood-stained, sweat-fermented, star-spangled details. And the story, the thoughtless rush to war, the hoopla three-ring circus, brass band blaring, waving off soldier boy at the station story, was not that unfamiliar then. Fritz had been caught up in a little quieter cousin of that same story. Fritz hoped against hope to high heaven that the story was uncommon now but he felt, felt deep in his war- scarred gut, that that was not true. But right now it is Johnny’s turn in the limelight. Speak, good god, quiet, unassuming Johnny Jakes speak, and maybe it will become an uncommon story:
“Jakes, and for that matter McKays (my mother’s side), have fought out of little nowhere Georgia in all of the American military adventures since back in Civil War times. Naturally that Civil War military adventure was under the auspices of the Confederate version of American military adventures but don’t tell me, my kin, my brethren, or any complete Southern stranger that it was a failed, flawed or any of that other yankee stuff about cloud-puff dreams for bad, or ugly, reasons. Let’s just say, so we stay even now, that we fought, that there was an honored tradition of fighting, and any odd-ball relative, male of course, our women don’t fight but stay at home and worry, who didn’t, well, I never heard about anyone like that so I don’t know what would have happened. We fought, some of us bled, and most of us grabbed a fist-full of medals along the way. And our womenfolk cheered us on, as we left for the world’s fronts at that still working little nowhere Georgia railroad station that took us to some god-forsaken military camp. We mostly came back that same way, mostly okay but not all, and not my father, Jefferson Davis Jakes.
See Jefferson Davis Jakes, before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, was the king hell-raiser of Forsythe County, was known far and wide as such and was not known to back down from anything, anything any male, or female for that matter, put in his way. But little did anyone know, anyone in the public know, that old Jeff (that’s the name he liked to be called by in latter life, by friend and foe alike, so I will use it here), was smitten by my mother, Doris McKay Jakes, so smitten that he had turned to putty in her hands. Not things that anyone, anyone in public anyway, would notice. All they would see is a king-hell-raiser and maybe a cut or other wound for their efforts, or the wise ones would cut a wide path away from his fury. But Doris had a spell over him, and he craved being with her, craved it more than anything even being king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. Soft, and he knew it. So when those Jap bombs landed at Pearl and all Georgia thought it was William Tecumseh Sherman returned to burn the land and every red-blooded, hell, every any- blooded male, even black guys, were running to the railroad station to get signed up Jefferson Davis Jakes hesitated, hesitated just that minute, just that Doris McKay back home minute. Until Doris McKay, no squeamish damsel, and maybe with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed dad out the door- “Go now, and go fast.” And I will quote here, quote because I heard it about six times a year, at least, the first few years of growing up, “Kill every Jap you can get your hands on, and more if you can. And when you come back I will be a Jakes, and proudly.” So naturally she and half the town show up at that nowhere train station to see the boys, including in the lead my father, off.
And as such scenes go that is the nice, upbeat part. The not so up-beat part was that after almost four years of South Pacific war, relentless, heat-scrabbled, hell-underbrush and hard rock-scrabbled war on more nowhere islands than one would think possible as big as the Pacific is Jefferson Davis Jakes, Jakes fist-full of medals collected, some odd souvenirs of as many Japs as he could collect, and only a few small purple heart wounds he returned home, home to his ever-loving Doris McKay. They married, as Doris had promised, and they had four children, all boys, including number two, me, John Lee Jakes. Just a normal American post World War II scenario.
Hold on; hold on just a minute, please. Jefferson Davis Jakes came home, and to the public eye, he seemed just like the pre-war king hell-raiser of Forsythe County. But on some nights, sometimes late at night, after a few hours of hard, hard drinking he would go up into the attic of the old-time Jakes home where we lived and begin to howl, howl like a wolf at the moon. And everyone around thought that was what it was. We knew better, or got to know better, especially Ma. This went on for a few years, every once in a while, but as time went on more frequently as such things do. And dad got quieter, more home quiet, although out in public he was still Jefferson Davis Jakes whose family had fought in this country’s battles since back in Civil War days. Then one night when I was eight he went up to the attic and we didn’t hear him howl like we expected. A few minutes later we heard a shot, one shot. They buried Jefferson Davis Jakes with full military honors down at our nowhere Georgia cemetery, believing the story we had concocted about his having interrupted an intruder and had accidentally discharged his old M-1. And that was the end of it.”
Fritz thought; well, not quite the end of it. Once nowhere Georgia heard about the commies in Vietnam in the 1960s every red-blooded male, hell, every any-blooded male, even black guys, headed down to the fading railroad station to sign up. Including quiet, unassuming John Lee Jakes, the late Johnny Jakes. But see Johnny had also hesitated, hesitated just that non-Jakes moment, just that Doris McKay Jakes moment. Until Doris McKay, still no squeamish damsel, and maybe still with some vision of Scarlett O’Hara, pushed Johnny out the door- “Go now, and go fast. Kill every gook you can get your hands on, and more if you can.”
Sunday, July 10, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School Of Falsification Revisted- A Reply To The "Guardian", Part Seven- MAO'S CHINA: FROM STALIN TO NIXON
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*******
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
7. MAO'S CHINA: FROM STALIN TO NIXON
The ghosts of the Mings and Manchus in the Forbidden Palace must be chuckling familiarly over the plotting of the disloyal heir apparent against the emperor. They no doubt believe that a new dynasty rules in Peking, one rather like their own. However, Marxists have the advantage over such ancient specters in recognizing that the intrigues in Mao's court are, in the last analysis, generated and shaped by the pressures of the imperialist world order on an isolated and backward nation that has broken out of the capitalist system. The internal struggles within the Maoist bureaucracy, even in their most bizarre, personalist manifestations, are inextricably interwoven with the fate of the Chinese revolution and the socialist future of humanity.
Coming to power through a massive peasant uprising which destroyed capitalism in China and established a deformed workers state, the petty-bourgeois nationalist elite led by Mao was determined to restore China's status as a great power. During the 1950's the pressure of imperialism forced the Maoist bureaucracy to remain within the USSR-led camp. However, as it became increasingly clear that the Kremlin's rulers were determined to prevent China from attaining its place in the sun, the Chinese bureaucracy broke with the Soviet bloc. Once China had cut adrift from its moorings to the Soviet Union, the conflict between China's material backwardness and the great power aspirations of its rulers produced a convulsive factional struggle in the late 1960's (the Cultural Revolution). The outcome of that struggle has been the transformation of Mao's China from an ally of the Soviet Union against American imperialism to a semi-ally of American imperialist diplomacy against the Soviet Union.
The Economics of Utopian Adventurism
The Cultural Revolution was directly related to the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and its impact on Mao's standing in the party. The Great Leap Forward, in turn, arose from the impossibility of imposing orthodox Stalinist industrialization policies during China's First Five Year Plan (1953-56). The Stalin model of industrialization consisted in devoting the bulk of economic surplus to large, modern heavy industrial complexes. The food for the increased urban working class and agricultural raw materials are extracted from the peasantry through forced collectivization. This necessarily involves sacrificing total agricultural output and food consumption in order to increase the agricultural surplus available to the growing urban population. During the 1930's, the Russian food consumption fell 15 percent and there were widespread famines among the peasants, notably in the Ukraine.
However, China was simply too poor to apply the Soviet method for rapid economic growth. Compared to the Soviet Union in 1929, China in 1953 produced roughly one-half as much food per person. A reduction in food output comparable to that which occurred in Russia during the 1930's would literally have produced mass starvation in China. The conflict between China's poverty and orthodox Soviet-Stalinist industrialization came to a head in 1956, when rapidly expanding investment created shortages in consumer goods and raw materials leading to inflation. Instead of plowing through as Stalin had done, the Chinese bureaucracy abandoned the First Five Year Plan and retrenched. In 1957 investment was actually reduced and workers were laid off and shipped back to the countryside.
As often occurs under Stalinist regimes, economic retrenchment was associated with political liberalization (in this case, the Hundred Flowers Campaign). However, the aroma of blooming flowers was not at all to the bureaucrats' liking. The scope and depth of discontent which the Hundred Flowers Campaign revealed alarmed the Maoist regime. The bureaucracy felt it necessary to reassert its authority and impose greater discipline and an enforced sense of national purpose on the masses.
Another important source of the Great Leap Forward policy arose from the contradictory state of agricultural collectivization. In contrast to Stalin's Russia, the collectivization of agricultural production through 1956 had a large voluntary component. This was possible because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoyed considerable moral authority among the peasants through its victory over the landlords and the egalitarian distribution of land. The peasants had real influence over the scale and pattern of production in the cooperatives. However, the local party cadre who administered the cooperatives were expected to maximize output, which meant plowing back a larger share of income and putting in more labor time than the peasants would agree to voluntarily. Thus the rural party cadre were required to expand agricultural production without having the power to do so. Consequently there was pressure from the party ranks to transform the cooperatives into de facto state farms where the peasants could be ordered about.
These pressures culminated in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. The heart of the Great Leap policy was the amalgamation of cooperatives into mammoth, self-sufficient production units (the communes) of several thousand families. It was expected that the Commune system would liberate enormous quantities of labor which would be used to expand industry by handicraft methods, to produce heavy industrial goods by primitive techniques (e.g., the backyard steel furnaces) and to carry out huge water conservation projects. Commune members were to be paid solely on the basis of labor input, in effect transforming the peasants into wage laborers with no property claims on either their land or direct products. The Great Leap was sold to the peasantry in a manner approaching religious millenialism. China would catch up with the West in a few years and achieve full communism within 15 years. In brief, the peasants were told that after a few years of heroic sacrifice they would be living in a paradise on earth.
Whatever its practical effects in accelerating economic growth, the "communist vision" behind the Great Leap Forward was one of reactionary utopianism. Instead of communism's resulting from the international division of labor of several advanced workers states (and the elimination of scarcity), Chinese-style "communism" was to be brought about by the primitive labor of millions of peasants (i.e., the equal sharing of poverty). But so long as there is massive poverty, the economic basis for the creation of a parasitic bureaucracy--and ultimately a return to capitalist exploitation through counterrevolution--will remain. The Chinese leaders are not unaware of this fact for, despite their absurd claim that China is a socialist state, each new "anti-party clique of black-minded crime-steeped traitors" being thrown out of office is claimed to have been preparing the way for a return to capitalism. Socialism means the abolition of classes by the abolition of the material basis for class exploitation--economic scarcity. For Marxists, the proletariat is the bearer of socialism not simply because it is a victim of deprivation and oppression, but because it embodies the highest technical achievements of mankind, the material basis for a real cultural revolution. For Marxists communism means the replacement of a hundred peasants by a tractor; for Maoists, communism means the substitution of the labor of a hundred peasants for the (unavailable) tractor.
In practice, the Great Leap was an unprecedented attempt at the militarization of labor. The bureaucracy worked the peasants to the limits of physical endurance. The hellish conditions created by the forced-draft page of production can be seen in the fact that it was necessary for the Central Committee to issue the following directive to the communal party cadre:
"But in any event, eight hours for sleep and four hours for meals and recreation, altogether 12 hours, must be guaranteed and this must not be reduced."
--Peking Review, 3 December 1958
It is now universally acknowledged that the Great Leap Forward led to an economic collapse unique in the history of the Sino-Soviet states. The exact magnitude of the production decline remains unknown because the regime has never published any economic statistics for the years 1960-63, which is itself a telling sign of economic catastrophe. However, reasonable estimates are that food crop output fell 15-20 percent between 1958-60 (Current Scene, January 1964), while industrial output fell 30-40 percent between 1959-62 (China Quarterly, April-June 1970).
The precise reasons for the catastrophe caused by the Great Leap are numerous. Bad weather was indeed a factor, although the Maoists have turned it into a total alibi. The regime, believing its own hopelessly inflated statistics, actually cut back grain acreage sown in 1959. Commune managers diverted labor to the glamor projects of backyard steel smelting and irrigation, devoting too little to basic farming. In the hysteria to produce output statistics, quality control was totally abandoned. Most of the communal steel was unusable and more than half the reported newly irrigated land was non-arable. The drive for commune self-sufficiency resulted in attempts to grow crops (e.g., cotton) under impossible geographic conditions. The abrupt cut-off of Soviet aid in 1960 was an important factor causing the decline in heavy industrial production.
However, the overpowering truth is that it was the gross violation of the peasants' property interests and rigid militarization of labor that were the fundamental cause of the economic catastrophe. The peasants rebelled against the commune system in the only way they could--refusal to produce. That peasant incentives were at the heart of the Great Leap's failure is attested to by the Chinese bureaucracy itself. In its retreat, the regime was forced to make major concessions to individualistic, peasant appetites. In this sense, the Great Leap Forward was decisive. It dissipated the moral capital the Communist Party had achieved in the civil war and through the egalitarian distribution of land. After 1960, the peasants could no longer be motivated by social ideals or promises of future plenty, but only on the basis of hard cash.
Mao's Demotion and the Great Limping Backward
Mao was uniquely responsible for the Great Leap Forward. And of all the party leaders, he alone continued to defend it. He even defended the backyard steel furnaces, while observing that China's lack of railroads made it difficult to apply the ingots produced for any useful purpose. While the rest of the party leadership realized the Great Leap had failed because it grossly violated the peasants' self-interest, Mao claimed the failures were caused by the "errors" and "excesses" of the local cadre. Thus Mao never rejected the principles underlying the Great Leap.
Since he kept defending a policy that had led China to the brink of mass starvation, it was predictable that Mao would come under attack by other sections of the bureaucracy. In 1959, Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai, an orthodox, pro-Russian Stalinist, launched a direct attack on Mao for alienating the masses, producing economic chaos and fostering unnecessary friction with the Soviet Union. While Marshal Peng's frontal assault failed and he was purged, it weakened Mao's stature.
During 1959-61, as the disastrous results of the Great Leap became more and more apparent, Mao lost much of his authority among the leading cadre. He was nudged out of the central leadership and was replaced by a grouping led by Liu Shao-chi (Mao's long-time number two), Chou En-lai, Teng Hsiao-ping (the CCP secretary-general) and Peng Chen. Mao and his supporters (Lin Piao, and Chen Po-ta) were reduced to a left-critical tendency within the broader party leadership. The changes in the central party leadership were hidden from the public, although two of Peng Chen's subordinates (Wu Han and Teng To) published thinly disguised attacks on Mao, which later served as the pretext for launching the Cultural Revolution.
To recover from the Great Leap, the Liu regime embraced a Bukharinite economic policy with respect to both agricultural and industrial production. The communes were disbanded and replaced with the lowest level of collectivization, the "production brigade" of about twenty families. The free market was encouraged, as were private plots and private ownership of livestock. In 1962, the private grain harvest in Yunan was larger than the collective harvest. In 1964, in Kweichow and Szechuan there was more private than collective tilling.
In 1961 the government placed a total ban on new industrial construction. The pace of industrial expansion was to be geared to the freely marketed surplus coming from the peasants and production brigades. Under Chinese conditions, allowing industrial development to be determined by the growth of the peasant market is profoundly anti-proletarian in the most elemental sense. In 1964 China's leading economic planner, Po I-po told Anna Louise Strong that the regime intended to reduce the urban population by 20 million (Strong, Letters from China).
The return to a market economy combined with the CCP's sharp decline in popular authority created powerful disintegrative tendencies within the bureaucracy itself. Personal greed, careerism, the defense of narrow vested interests and regional warlordism became rife. During the Cultural Revolution it was reported that in 1962 the Shanghai and other regional parties requested grain from Chekiang, one of the few surplus regions. The first secretary of the Chekiang party is reported to have replied, "Chekiang is not a colony of Shanghai....I have pigs to feed" (China Quarterly, October-December 1972). This response typifies the relations between different sections of the bureaucracy in this period.
Mao has represented the national messianic utopian wing of the bureaucracy. He was therefore deeply disturbed by the growing decline in discipline, unity and sense of national purpose within the party cadre. In 1962 he set up a pressure group, the Socialist Education Committee, with the dual purpose of restoring the party cadre's sense of elan and of limiting the trend toward peasant individualism in economic policy. The efforts of the Socialist Education Committee proved impotent against the strength of bureaucratic routinism.
In view of the Cultural Revolution, it is necessary to emphasize the considerable overlap between Mao's policies and those of the Liu-led party center in 1961-65. While Mao was in favor of greater agricultural collectivization, he firmly supported policies which strengthened the social weight of the peasantry as against the working class, such as the transfer of the urban population to the countryside. Mao has always tried to liquidate the Chinese proletariat as a distinctive social group and dissolve it into the rural masses.
There was no significant difference between Mao and Liu over their attitude toward the proletariat. This was demonstrated by Mao's defense of the "worker-peasant" system during the Cultural Revolution, despite its deep unpopularity and negative economic consequences. This viciously anti-proletarian policy (instituted by Liu in 1963) required peasants to do industrial work during the slack season. They were paid less than the permanent workers, did not receive the extensive social benefits available to the regular workers and were not allowed to join the unions. In turn, permanent unionized workers were replaced by "worker-peasants" and forcibly shipped to the countryside! The "worker-peasant" system well conforms to Mao's "ideal" of a communist society and is an effective mechanism for holding down wages to increase state accumulation. The "worker-peasant" system was the single most important cause of labor unrest during the Cultural Revolution. The Maoists not only defended the system but suppressed the contract labor organizations which had emerged spontaneously to defend the "worker-peasants."
Nor is there any evidence that there were significant differences between Mao and the rest of the CCP leadership over foreign policy before 1965. It was Liu and Teng, not Mao, who organized the campaign against "Khrushchevite revisionism." Many of today's Maoists should consider that they were won to the Chinese line by the "anti-revisionist" campaign led by Liu, Teng and Co., after they had nudged Mao out of the central leadership.
Indonesia and Vietnam on the Road to Washington
During a party plenum in 1962 Mao revealed that Stalin had not trusted the CCP in the late 1940's, suspecting it of potential Titoism. Mao further related that while he sought to gain Stalin's trust, the CCP never sacrificed its independence. However, the Cold War polarization, particularly the Korean War, left China little choice but to become part of the Soviet-led bloc. During the mid-1950's the CCP sought to develop its own tendency within the Soviet bloc, actively maneuvering among the East European parties on a more independence-from-Moscow line. As an important by product of these activities, Mao's regime played a key role in pushing the Russians to crush the 1956 Hungarian uprising, then in justifying this internationally.
Part of the "Spirit of Camp David" (the Eisenhower-Khrushchev peaceful coexistence) was the understanding that the Kremlin would police expansion of Chinese national power. The main instances of this and likewise the main events leading to the Sino-Soviet split were Khrushchev's attempt to get China to abandon its military pressure on the Taiwan Strait islands in 1958; Soviet reneging on its promise to supply China with the capacity to produce nuclear weapons; and the USSR's pro-India "neutrality" during the 1960 Sino-Indian border war. China's increasingly strident political attacks on the Soviets led them to retaliate by cutting off all economic aid in 1960. This may be taken as the official date of the split.
Following the break from the Soviet camp, Chinese foreign policy consisted of an attempt to line up the "Third World"--a term defined to include Gaullist France!--against the two super-powers. In this period Chinese foreign policy registered some episodic diplomatic gains. However, in 1965 the Third World suddenly became off-limits for Chinese diplomats. A number of "friends of China" were toppled by military coups, notably Nkrumah, who appropriately was visiting Peking at the time. In the wake of these right-wing coups the Second Afro-Asian Conference, which the Chinese had expected to turn into an anti-Soviet forum, was cancelled. However, the truly crushing blow was the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, which resulted in the bloody physical liquidation of the pro-Chinese PKI, then the largest Stalinist party not holding state power.
The rightist coups that swept Asia and Africa in 1965 demonstrated that the strength of U.S. imperialism lies not solely in its direct military power, but also in its organic ties to the propertied classes throughout the world. Whenever the class struggle reaches a certain intensity, the colonial bourgeoisie breaks its flirtation with Peking or Moscow and embraces the American ruling class as the main defender of the capitalist order in this epoch.
With China's Third World grand strategy buried under the decapitated bodies of the Indonesian workers and peasants, a new danger threatened China--the U.S.'s escalation in Vietnam. The manifest impotence of the "Third World" in protecting China, combined with U.S. imperialism's bombing its doorstep, caused sharp differences within the bureaucracy. A group around Liu, Peng Chen and People's Liberation Army Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching wanted to halt the deterioration of relations with the Soviet Union and arrange some kind of military united front with the Kremlin over Vietnam. The Mao-Lin grouping wanted to continue to escalate the split with the USSR and to avoid another Korean War situation above all else.
In a sense the first battle of the Cultural Revolution was fought out in the PLA high command. Under the pretext of "professionalism" versus "politics," it was in reality a struggle over policy toward Vietnam and a Soviet military alliance. Lo Jui-ching wanted to actively prepare for a possible massive ground intervention into Vietnam. In fact, a call for "people's war" was, in fact a call for the de-escalation of the Vietnam war back to low-level guerrilla fighting so as to avoid the danger that China would be drawn into another Korean situation. Lin's victory over his chief of staff was a victory for China-first military isolationism.
The decisive point came in early 1966 when the formally pro-Chinese Japanese Communist Party attempted to work out a military united front of Communist powers over the Vietnam War. A joint Chinese-Japanese CP statement on Vietnam was negotiated which did not attack the Russians for "revisionism," thereby opening the door for Sino-Soviet collaboration. At the eleventh hour, Mao sabotaged the agreement and openly attacked the party leaders, notably Peng Chen, who were responsible for it. Mao was determined not to provoke the Americans' suspicion by a show of solidarity with Russia. Under the pretext of fighting "revisionism," Mao thus informed U.S. imperialism that as long as China was not directly attacked, it would not intervene even in the face of the most murderous attacks against the workers and peasants of other countries. Thus the detente with the U.S. was not simply a right turn marking a retreat from the Cultural Revolution. Mao's appetite for an alliance with American imperialism, in order to better prosecute the struggle with his "principal contradiction" with "Soviet Social-Imperialism," was in fact one of the essential underpinnings of the "Cultural Revolution."
There was a clear connection between the factional line-ups over domestic and foreign policy. Because the Liu-led center was prepared to let the bureaucracy sink into careerist routinism and creature comforts and to let the economy expand at the pace of a peasant cart, the party center could envision defending China only within the general Soviet military sphere. Because Mao and Lin were determined that China would be a super-power second to none, they were determined to mobilize and discipline the bureaucracy and masses to overcome China's material backwardness as rapidly as possible.
The Anti-Proletarian, Anti-Cultural Revolution
In brief the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to mobilize the masses to create the material conditions for Chinese great-power politics on the basis of national messianic fervor. To do this, the Maoists had to purge an increasingly conservative and self-interested administrative bureaucracy. For this task, Mao turned to the PLA officers and to plebian student youth. Once it had been purged of pro-Russian conciliationist tendencies it was natural that the officer corps should find itself in the Maoist camp. The officers' social position led them to be more concerned with the long-term strength of the Chinese state than committed to local vested interests. In addition, they were removed from the direct pressure of the Chinese masses and naturally favored extracting a larger economic surplus for armament production. The Chinese student youth were, in the main, the bureaucracy of tomorrow. They were the inheritors of the Chinese government and wanted that government to be great and powerful and its subjects hard-working and frugal. The vested interest of ambitious petty-bourgeois educated youth is in the future of the petty-bourgeois stratum. For that reason they easily embrace utopian ideals and attack those whose workaday concerns prevent those ideals from being realized.
With the support of Lin and the PLA command, Mao easily ousted his main factional opponents--Liu, Teng and Peng--in 1966, before the Cultural Revolution was taken into the streets. The wholesale purge of the bureaucracy proved more difficult. In the end, it proved impossible. To understand how the entrenched bureaucrats resisted the Cultural Revolution it is necessary to see what happened when the Red Guard "proletarian revolutionaries" confronted the Chinese proletariat--on the other side of the barricades!
Whatever illusions the Chinese masses may have had about what the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution meant, it rapidly became clear that it did not mean more for the proletariat. Under the slogan of combating "economism," the radical Maoists made it very clear they intended to hold down wages and intensify labor. During 1966 there were a number of labor struggles culminating in the January 1967 Shanghai general strike and nationwide railway strike, the greatest clash between the Chinese proletariat and Stalinist government to date.
The railroad workers were one of the most self-consciously proletarian sections of Chinese society, with their own housing centers and schools. The Cultural Revolution was particularly hard on the railroad workers because, in addition to the normal traffic, they had to transport huge armies of Red Guards around the country. In addition, they were required to study the Thought of Chairman Mao after putting in a long day of work. Because of the extra traffic, existing safety regulations were violated. When the workers complained, the Red Guards attacked "old [safety] regulations which do not conform to the thought of Mao Tse Tung" (Current Scene, 19 May 1967). No doubt the Red Guards believed that the Thought of Mao was more powerful than the laws of physics! The railway union in Shanghai organized other workers in negotiations centering on either reducing the longer working hours or being paid for them. In December, the local Shanghai authorities granted a general wage increase. When the Maoist center in Peking reversed the wage increase, Shanghai and China's railroads stopped working.
The Red Guards and PLA overthrew the local Shanghai government and proceeded to smash the strike. The famous "Letter to All Shanghai People" (Shanghai Liberation Daily, 5 January 1967) began with the command "Grasp Revolution, Stimulate Production." The "Letter" went on to blame anti-party elements for inciting workers to leave their jobs and converge on Peking. This was curious propaganda coming from the supposed leaders of a "proletarian" revolution against those holding political power. The railway strike took longer to suppress and university students had to be used as unskilled railway scab labor.
After the January 1967 events, those bureaucrats under attack by the Red Guards had little trouble organizing their own "Red Guards," composed of workers, to defend them. The workers sensed that if the Red Guards took over they would be working twelve hours a day, seven days a week and studying the Thought of Mao for another eight hours. And in the street fighting that erupted throughout China's cities, the radical Maoists were not winning.
Despite the "participation" of the masses, the Cultural Revolution remained a struggle within the bureaucracy. It was a battle between the Mao-Lin faction and the atomized, conservative party apparatus. In the main, the students and workers were organized and cynically manipulated by the bureaucratic groupings. Revolutionary Marxists could not support either the utopian-militarist nationalism of the Mao faction or the various careerists struggling to keep their jobs.
From the standpoint of communists, the Cultural Revolution polarized Chinese society along the wrong lines by pitting subjectively revolutionary student youth, who believed they were fighting bureaucratism, against workers defending their standard of living. Had a Chinese Trotskyist organization been able to intervene, its task would have been to cut across these false lines of division and build a genuine communist opposition to the bureaucracy as a whole.
To the Red Guards, Trotskyists should have said the following: First, communist consciousness among the workers cannot be created by the methods of religious mysticism (has the spirit of Mao seized your soul?) but only when the workers are really responsible for governing Chinese society through democratic institutions. Secondly, the concept of socialism must be purged of military barracks asceticism. Communists are genuinely concerned about the material well-being of the masses and do not glorify poverty and endless toil. And perhaps most importantly, a communist society cannot be built in China simply through the willpower and sacrifices of the Chinese people. That requires the support of victorious proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries-revolutions which are blocked by Stalinist China's foreign policy. A central task for Chinese communists is to use the power and authority of the Chinese state to further the world socialist revolution. This means not only a break from the policy of supporting anti-proletarian nationalist bourgeois regimes, but also immediately demanding a military bloc with the Soviet Union, most urgently in Indochina, even while the USSR remains under bureaucratic rule.
To those workers drawn into defending the incumbent apparatchiks against the radical Maoists, Trotskyists should say the following: the material interests of the workers cannot be furthered by supporting the "soft," venal elements within the bureaucracy. Those material interests can only be served when a workers government controls the Chinese economy, replacing the deadening control of the conservative bureaucracy. To maintain political power, the workers government would indeed have to restrain wage increases in order to generate a surplus needed for military purposes and to absorb the peasantry into the industrial work force. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot survive with a small, aristocratic working class surrounded by a sea of impoverished peasants. However, a fundamental improvement in the material conditions of the Chinese people can only come about through resources supplied by more advanced workers states. Economic aid to China through international revolution need not be a long-term prospect. A workers revolution in China would give an enormous impetus to a socialist revolution in Japan, Asia's industrial power, with a highly conscious proletariat and brittle social structure. The complementary, planned development of Japan and China would go a long way toward overcoming the poverty of the Chinese people. And these are the politics the Trotskyist movement should have presented to the embattled Chinese workers and students during the Cultural Revolution.
Who Were the Victors?
With the incumbent bureaucrats able to mobilize groups of workers to fight the Red Guards, the radical Maoists were stalemated. The Maoist center then took a step which fundamentally changed the course of the Cultural Revolution and eventually led to its liquidation. In February 1967 the army was called in to support the Red Guards in "seizing power." Now the PLA officer corps is of the flesh-and-blood of the bureaucracy, tied to the rest of China's officialdom by innumerable personal and social affiliations. As a condition for militarily supporting the Red Guards the PLA command demanded that there be no wholesale purge of the incumbent administrators, that they be allowed to rehabilitate themselves. This was the so-called "mild cadre policy." The role of the PLA in preserving the bureaucracy was codified by a change in the formal program of the Cultural Revolution. When launched in 1966, the Cultural Revolution was supposed to produce a political system modeled on the Paris Commune. In early 1967, this was changed to the so-called "triple alliance" of "revolutionary rebels" (Red Guards), the PLA and the "revolutionary cadre" (incumbent bureaucrats). Clearly the officer corps was in charge.
The real relationship between the PLA and the Red Guards was revealed by the famous Wuhan incident in August 1967, although the army commander went too far. In a faction fight between two Red Guard groups, the army commander naturally supported the more right-wing one. When a couple of Maoist emissaries came from Peking to support the more radical faction the commander had them arrested. For this act of near-mutiny, he was dismissed. However, the fate of the principals involved in the Wuhan incident is highly significant. The mutinous commander, Chen Tsai-tao, is today back in power and the two Maoist emissaries were purged as "ultra-leftists."
The Wuhan incident temporarily turned the Maoist center against the PLA command and the Cultural Revolution reached its peak of anarchistic violence, including the burning of the British chancellery. By the end of 1967 the pressure from the PLA command to crack down on the Red Guards became irresistible.
The 28 January 1968 issue of the Liberation Army Daily announced that the PLA would "support the left, but not any particular faction"--a not-so-veiled threat to smash the Red Guards. The article went on to attack "petty-bourgeois factionalism." About the same time, Chou En-lai asserted that the leadership of the Cultural Revolution had passed from the students and youth to the workers, peasants and soldiers. Throughout 1968, attacks on "petty-bourgeois factionalism," "anarchism" and "sectarianism" drowned out attacks on "capitalist roadism" and "revisionism."
And it ended with a mango. The final curtain fell on the Cultural Revolution in August 1968 when Mao personally intervened to resolve a faction fight between student Red Guards at Peking's Tsinghua University, where the first Red Guard group was formed. Having failed to resolve the dispute to his liking, Mao is supposed to have said, "You have let me down and what is more you have disappointed the workers, peasants and soldiers of China" (Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 August 1968). Within 48 hours, China's first "Worker-Peasant Thought of Mao Tse-tung Propaganda Team," commanded by PLA officers, arrived at Tsinghua University and dissolved the Red Guards. For this service the Chairman personally sent the group a gift of mangoes. The Red Guards were suppressed by similar methods throughout the country. The more resistant activists were sent to the country side to "remold" their thinking through toiling with the peasants, the usual fate for those who "disappoint" Mao.
The Mao faction did not win the Cultural Revolution. Mao had clearly expected to replace the administrative bureaucracy with cadre unambiguously loyal to himself interspersed with young zealots and engendering mass enthusiasm while doing so. Instead the popular reaction against the Cultural Revolution strengthened the resistance of the incumbent bureaucracy. Once the army was called indirectly, Mao was forced to play a bonapartist role between the PLA officers representing bureaucratic conservatism and the radical student youth.
That the bureaucracy was largely conserved is demonstrated by the composition of the Central Committee elected at the Ninth CCP Congress in 1969--the so-called "Congress of Victors." The average age of the CC was 61 and the length of time in the party 25 years. Two-thirds of the CC elected in 1945 (who had not died or been purged before the Cultural Revolution) were re-elected to the 1969 Central Committee! The 1969 CC did show an increase in the proportion of those who had been on the Long March (the Maoist old guard) and a marked increase in the proportion of PLA officers (45 percent). Hardly what a naive Maoist enthusiast would expect as the aftermath of a supposedly anti-bureaucratic "revolution"!
The final liquidation of the Cultural Revolution came with the fall of the Lin faction. Lin Piao was associated with a series of manifestly bankrupt policies. On the domestic economic front, he was accused of wanting to launch a production drive in 1969 and of "allowing peasants to be deprived of their legitimate income" (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1973 Yearbook). Clearly Lin was pushing for another Great Leap Forward. However, the Cultural Revolution had revealed enormous economic discontent and the willingness of the workers to fight the regime to preserve their living standards. A Great-Leap-Forward campaign in 1969 could only have been suicidal. In fact, since the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese economy has been more market-oriented, more inegalitarian, more localized than it was in 1965. The Mao/Chou regime seems anxious to assure the masses that great economic sacrifices will not be demanded of them. Almost every official statement on economic policy asserts the peasant's right to a private plot.
On foreign policy, the man who announced that "the countryside of the world would conquer the cities of the world" was equally a loser. In the late 1960's, only a political idiot could believe that China was successfully leading the "Third World" against the U.S. and Russia. The Cultural Revolution left China diplomatically isolated. Despite the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy up through 1968 continued to orient toward a bloc with Russia against China. With objective conditions favorable for diplomatic and economic gains, a rightward turn in foreign policy was inevitable. It is probable that Lin broke in opposition to the rapprochement with Nixon.
With his base in the army, Lin undoubtedly launched a factional struggle against the emerging Mao/Chou axis. He lost. It is quite possible that he planned a military coup as the Maoists now claim. However, whatever ill Lin may have wished Mao and Chou while he was alive, his corpse has more than made up for it. He is the perfect scapegoat for everything that went wrong because of the Cultural Revolution. Whenever a purged "capitalist-roader" is brought back into power, it was Lin who framed him up. When Chou apologized to the British for the burning of their chancellery, he put the blame on Lin.
With every passing day the victims of the Cultural Revolution seem to replace the victors. Even the "number two person in power taking the capitalist road," Teng Hsiao-ping, is back on the road with Mao. And yet the Cultural Revolution has clearly left a badly divided party. The secretiveness and extreme brevity of the Tenth Party Congress points to a tense internal situation. It is as if the slightest formal concession to inner-party democracy would produce murderous factionalism. The elevation of the unknown Wang Hungwen to number three is probably a sop to the radical Maoists who are understandably distrustful of Chou En-lai--the man who is never on the losing side of a faction fight. However, Wang is probably a figurehead with no real base in the party cadre. When Mao dies, the CCP should have a succession crisis that will make the Cultural Revolution look like a formal debate. Of course, the Chinese proletariat may take the question of which bureaucratic aspirant succeeds Mao off the historic agenda by establishing its own democratic class rule.
Down with Mao and Brezhnev! For Sino-Soviet Communist Unity!
The most important development since the Cultural Revolution has been in China's foreign relations. State relations with the Soviet Union have drastically worsened, flaring into actual armed conflict in 1970. The Sino-Soviet boundary has become one of the most militarized borders in the world. The Mao/Chou regime's new love affair with Richard Nixon is clearly designed as a counter to what it sees as its principal enemy--the Soviet Union. This past year the Chinese attempt to line up Western imperialism against the Soviet Union has reached a new low. China is campaigning to strengthen NATO in order to divert the Russian army from Siberia. For example the 3 August Peking Review approvingly cites Lord Chalfont's letter to the London Times calling for expansion of NATO:
"Chalfont has of late published a number of articles in The Times to expose the Soviet threat to European security and plead for strengthened defense cooperation by the West European countries."
Whatever episodic changes occur in diplomatic moods, the objective relationship of U.S. imperialism to the Soviet Union is fundamentally different than that toward China. The Soviet Union is economically and militarily qualitatively superior to China, and the military peer of the U.S. Therefore it is the Soviet Union which is the core of the anti-capitalist regimes in the world and the main objective obstacle to U.S. imperialism. (Could China have supplied the U.S. blockaded Cubans?) Conversely, the Soviet Union could defeat China in a major war without imperialist intervention, while China could expect victory only in alliance with another power. Thus the logic of the great power triangle is for a U.S.-China alliance against the Soviet Union. However, great-power politics are not historically rational and a U.S.-Soviet attack on China remains a possibility.
Under any circumstances, a war between Russia and China would be an enormous setback for the cause of socialism. If a Sino-Soviet war breaks out independently of the direct intervention of imperialism, such as an expanded version of the 1970 border clash, Trotskyists must call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides. However, if the U.S. allies itself with one side in a Sino-Soviet war to the extent that the outcome could be the restoration of capitalism through imperialist victory, Trotskyists must call for unconditional military defense of that deformed workers state directly under the assault essentially of U.S. imperialism.
The focus of the Russian-Chinese conflict is the Siberian border.
Significantly the legal basis for the conflicting claims is an eighteenth-century treaty signed by the Romanoff dynasty and the Manchus--who as we all know were scrupulous in their concern for national rights! Those new to the socialist movement may find it impossible to understand why the leadership of a deformed workers state should be willing to go to war with another deformed workers state over a sparsely populated slice of territory and connive with capitalist powers in order to do so. Does this mean that workers states can be imperialists, just like capitalist powers? Is there an economic drive making war between these two Stalinist-ruled countries inevitable? Not at all.
In fact, the Moscow and Peking regimes are politically threatened by each other's very existence, since both competing powers claim to represent the interests of the workers but are in fact the instruments of an isolated bureaucracy which can maintain itself in power only by forcibly suppressing any political life of the proletariat. Khrushchev and Brezhnev have dealt with Liu and Mao the same way Stalin dealt with Tito (against whom he had no territorial claims) and every internal opposition, from Trotsky on the left to Bukharin on the right, and with any potentially independent members of his own faction as well. A competing tendency claiming to represent the workers and with the resources of state power to propagate its views is doubly threatening to the precarious stability of these anti-proletarian regimes.
As Trotsky pointed out, the origins of the bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union could be traced to the national limitation and isolation of the Russian Revolution in a backward country. This led to the elaboration of the nationalist ideology of "Socialism in one country"--a necessarily false consciousness for a ruling bureaucratic stratum. Thus these supposed "Communists" speak airily of proletarian internationalism but at the same time truly believe that it is their sacred duty to extend the fatherland. And what is true for Moscow is equally true for Peking or the second-rate nationalist bureaucracies in Sofia, Tirana, etc.
In the conflict over Siberia, the Russians now have an overwhelming advantage. In addition to absolute nuclear superiority, the Soviet army would have an advantage in conventional war not offset by China's greater manpower reserves. The Russian side of the border is much more heavily populated. And the Turkic-speaking peoples inhabiting China's northern border regions are resentful of centuries of Great Han chauvinism and may well be sympathetic to the Russians. Moreover, the Kremlin is also hard at work lining up the support of the capitalist powers. In addition to purely financial considerations, a major reason Brezhnev is so anxious for foreign capital in the Siberian oil and gas fields is to give the U.S. and Japan a stake in keeping Siberia Russian.
However, the Soviet military advantage is rapidly being undermined by the development of Chinese nuclear capacity. Thus there is now pressure within the Brezhnev regime for a preventive nuclear strike against China before the Chinese develop much greater retaliatory capacity. The Soviet authorities are presently generating a major war scare, particularly among Siberian residents, based on the worst kind of "yellow peril" racism. A correspondent for the London Economist (25-31 August) quoted a school teacher in Siberia as stating that:
"The Chinese radio, broadcasting in Russian, had threatened that the Chinese would occupy the south of Siberia, kill all the Russian men and keep the Russian girls for marrying."
If revolutionary workers governments were in power in Moscow and Peking, the conflict over Siberia would be easily resolved in the interests of the Russian and Chinese workers. Siberia would be open to Chinese immigration and jointly administered to ensure rapid economic development. Moreover, the existence of the unified and revolutionary workers states of Russia and China could well spark the Japanese socialist revolution, liberating Japan's economic resources for the development of Siberia, as well as of China.
Trotskyists understand that the Stalinist bureaucracies are caught in a fundamentally contradictory position. On the one hand they seek to defend themselves from imperialist attack, while on the other hand they strive for an impossible accommodation with the capitalist powers and fear above all the spread of world revolution, which would inevitably topple their parasitic regimes. In the long term, the deformed workers states (bureaucratically ruled states based on collectivized property forms) can survive only through the international extension of workers power. By pursuing nationalist policies, the Stalinist bureaucracies of China and Russia undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat and open the way for its overthrow by domestic counterrevolution or imperialist conquest. The Chinese revolution (the most important defeat for imperialism since the October Revolution in Russia) is now mortally threatened by nuclear war. It is war not with an imperialist power, but with the other powerful deformed workers state--the Soviet Union.
Only by overthrowing the reactionary Mao and Brezhnev governments can the Russian and Chinese working masses prevent going to war against each other and instead bring about the political, military and economic unification of the Sino-Soviet states against world capitalism.
For Communist Unity Against Imperialism Through Proletarian Political Revolution in the Sino-Soviet States!
For the Defense of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions Through International Proletarian Revolution!
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*******
The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
7. MAO'S CHINA: FROM STALIN TO NIXON
The ghosts of the Mings and Manchus in the Forbidden Palace must be chuckling familiarly over the plotting of the disloyal heir apparent against the emperor. They no doubt believe that a new dynasty rules in Peking, one rather like their own. However, Marxists have the advantage over such ancient specters in recognizing that the intrigues in Mao's court are, in the last analysis, generated and shaped by the pressures of the imperialist world order on an isolated and backward nation that has broken out of the capitalist system. The internal struggles within the Maoist bureaucracy, even in their most bizarre, personalist manifestations, are inextricably interwoven with the fate of the Chinese revolution and the socialist future of humanity.
Coming to power through a massive peasant uprising which destroyed capitalism in China and established a deformed workers state, the petty-bourgeois nationalist elite led by Mao was determined to restore China's status as a great power. During the 1950's the pressure of imperialism forced the Maoist bureaucracy to remain within the USSR-led camp. However, as it became increasingly clear that the Kremlin's rulers were determined to prevent China from attaining its place in the sun, the Chinese bureaucracy broke with the Soviet bloc. Once China had cut adrift from its moorings to the Soviet Union, the conflict between China's material backwardness and the great power aspirations of its rulers produced a convulsive factional struggle in the late 1960's (the Cultural Revolution). The outcome of that struggle has been the transformation of Mao's China from an ally of the Soviet Union against American imperialism to a semi-ally of American imperialist diplomacy against the Soviet Union.
The Economics of Utopian Adventurism
The Cultural Revolution was directly related to the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and its impact on Mao's standing in the party. The Great Leap Forward, in turn, arose from the impossibility of imposing orthodox Stalinist industrialization policies during China's First Five Year Plan (1953-56). The Stalin model of industrialization consisted in devoting the bulk of economic surplus to large, modern heavy industrial complexes. The food for the increased urban working class and agricultural raw materials are extracted from the peasantry through forced collectivization. This necessarily involves sacrificing total agricultural output and food consumption in order to increase the agricultural surplus available to the growing urban population. During the 1930's, the Russian food consumption fell 15 percent and there were widespread famines among the peasants, notably in the Ukraine.
However, China was simply too poor to apply the Soviet method for rapid economic growth. Compared to the Soviet Union in 1929, China in 1953 produced roughly one-half as much food per person. A reduction in food output comparable to that which occurred in Russia during the 1930's would literally have produced mass starvation in China. The conflict between China's poverty and orthodox Soviet-Stalinist industrialization came to a head in 1956, when rapidly expanding investment created shortages in consumer goods and raw materials leading to inflation. Instead of plowing through as Stalin had done, the Chinese bureaucracy abandoned the First Five Year Plan and retrenched. In 1957 investment was actually reduced and workers were laid off and shipped back to the countryside.
As often occurs under Stalinist regimes, economic retrenchment was associated with political liberalization (in this case, the Hundred Flowers Campaign). However, the aroma of blooming flowers was not at all to the bureaucrats' liking. The scope and depth of discontent which the Hundred Flowers Campaign revealed alarmed the Maoist regime. The bureaucracy felt it necessary to reassert its authority and impose greater discipline and an enforced sense of national purpose on the masses.
Another important source of the Great Leap Forward policy arose from the contradictory state of agricultural collectivization. In contrast to Stalin's Russia, the collectivization of agricultural production through 1956 had a large voluntary component. This was possible because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoyed considerable moral authority among the peasants through its victory over the landlords and the egalitarian distribution of land. The peasants had real influence over the scale and pattern of production in the cooperatives. However, the local party cadre who administered the cooperatives were expected to maximize output, which meant plowing back a larger share of income and putting in more labor time than the peasants would agree to voluntarily. Thus the rural party cadre were required to expand agricultural production without having the power to do so. Consequently there was pressure from the party ranks to transform the cooperatives into de facto state farms where the peasants could be ordered about.
These pressures culminated in the Great Leap Forward of 1958. The heart of the Great Leap policy was the amalgamation of cooperatives into mammoth, self-sufficient production units (the communes) of several thousand families. It was expected that the Commune system would liberate enormous quantities of labor which would be used to expand industry by handicraft methods, to produce heavy industrial goods by primitive techniques (e.g., the backyard steel furnaces) and to carry out huge water conservation projects. Commune members were to be paid solely on the basis of labor input, in effect transforming the peasants into wage laborers with no property claims on either their land or direct products. The Great Leap was sold to the peasantry in a manner approaching religious millenialism. China would catch up with the West in a few years and achieve full communism within 15 years. In brief, the peasants were told that after a few years of heroic sacrifice they would be living in a paradise on earth.
Whatever its practical effects in accelerating economic growth, the "communist vision" behind the Great Leap Forward was one of reactionary utopianism. Instead of communism's resulting from the international division of labor of several advanced workers states (and the elimination of scarcity), Chinese-style "communism" was to be brought about by the primitive labor of millions of peasants (i.e., the equal sharing of poverty). But so long as there is massive poverty, the economic basis for the creation of a parasitic bureaucracy--and ultimately a return to capitalist exploitation through counterrevolution--will remain. The Chinese leaders are not unaware of this fact for, despite their absurd claim that China is a socialist state, each new "anti-party clique of black-minded crime-steeped traitors" being thrown out of office is claimed to have been preparing the way for a return to capitalism. Socialism means the abolition of classes by the abolition of the material basis for class exploitation--economic scarcity. For Marxists, the proletariat is the bearer of socialism not simply because it is a victim of deprivation and oppression, but because it embodies the highest technical achievements of mankind, the material basis for a real cultural revolution. For Marxists communism means the replacement of a hundred peasants by a tractor; for Maoists, communism means the substitution of the labor of a hundred peasants for the (unavailable) tractor.
In practice, the Great Leap was an unprecedented attempt at the militarization of labor. The bureaucracy worked the peasants to the limits of physical endurance. The hellish conditions created by the forced-draft page of production can be seen in the fact that it was necessary for the Central Committee to issue the following directive to the communal party cadre:
"But in any event, eight hours for sleep and four hours for meals and recreation, altogether 12 hours, must be guaranteed and this must not be reduced."
--Peking Review, 3 December 1958
It is now universally acknowledged that the Great Leap Forward led to an economic collapse unique in the history of the Sino-Soviet states. The exact magnitude of the production decline remains unknown because the regime has never published any economic statistics for the years 1960-63, which is itself a telling sign of economic catastrophe. However, reasonable estimates are that food crop output fell 15-20 percent between 1958-60 (Current Scene, January 1964), while industrial output fell 30-40 percent between 1959-62 (China Quarterly, April-June 1970).
The precise reasons for the catastrophe caused by the Great Leap are numerous. Bad weather was indeed a factor, although the Maoists have turned it into a total alibi. The regime, believing its own hopelessly inflated statistics, actually cut back grain acreage sown in 1959. Commune managers diverted labor to the glamor projects of backyard steel smelting and irrigation, devoting too little to basic farming. In the hysteria to produce output statistics, quality control was totally abandoned. Most of the communal steel was unusable and more than half the reported newly irrigated land was non-arable. The drive for commune self-sufficiency resulted in attempts to grow crops (e.g., cotton) under impossible geographic conditions. The abrupt cut-off of Soviet aid in 1960 was an important factor causing the decline in heavy industrial production.
However, the overpowering truth is that it was the gross violation of the peasants' property interests and rigid militarization of labor that were the fundamental cause of the economic catastrophe. The peasants rebelled against the commune system in the only way they could--refusal to produce. That peasant incentives were at the heart of the Great Leap's failure is attested to by the Chinese bureaucracy itself. In its retreat, the regime was forced to make major concessions to individualistic, peasant appetites. In this sense, the Great Leap Forward was decisive. It dissipated the moral capital the Communist Party had achieved in the civil war and through the egalitarian distribution of land. After 1960, the peasants could no longer be motivated by social ideals or promises of future plenty, but only on the basis of hard cash.
Mao's Demotion and the Great Limping Backward
Mao was uniquely responsible for the Great Leap Forward. And of all the party leaders, he alone continued to defend it. He even defended the backyard steel furnaces, while observing that China's lack of railroads made it difficult to apply the ingots produced for any useful purpose. While the rest of the party leadership realized the Great Leap had failed because it grossly violated the peasants' self-interest, Mao claimed the failures were caused by the "errors" and "excesses" of the local cadre. Thus Mao never rejected the principles underlying the Great Leap.
Since he kept defending a policy that had led China to the brink of mass starvation, it was predictable that Mao would come under attack by other sections of the bureaucracy. In 1959, Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai, an orthodox, pro-Russian Stalinist, launched a direct attack on Mao for alienating the masses, producing economic chaos and fostering unnecessary friction with the Soviet Union. While Marshal Peng's frontal assault failed and he was purged, it weakened Mao's stature.
During 1959-61, as the disastrous results of the Great Leap became more and more apparent, Mao lost much of his authority among the leading cadre. He was nudged out of the central leadership and was replaced by a grouping led by Liu Shao-chi (Mao's long-time number two), Chou En-lai, Teng Hsiao-ping (the CCP secretary-general) and Peng Chen. Mao and his supporters (Lin Piao, and Chen Po-ta) were reduced to a left-critical tendency within the broader party leadership. The changes in the central party leadership were hidden from the public, although two of Peng Chen's subordinates (Wu Han and Teng To) published thinly disguised attacks on Mao, which later served as the pretext for launching the Cultural Revolution.
To recover from the Great Leap, the Liu regime embraced a Bukharinite economic policy with respect to both agricultural and industrial production. The communes were disbanded and replaced with the lowest level of collectivization, the "production brigade" of about twenty families. The free market was encouraged, as were private plots and private ownership of livestock. In 1962, the private grain harvest in Yunan was larger than the collective harvest. In 1964, in Kweichow and Szechuan there was more private than collective tilling.
In 1961 the government placed a total ban on new industrial construction. The pace of industrial expansion was to be geared to the freely marketed surplus coming from the peasants and production brigades. Under Chinese conditions, allowing industrial development to be determined by the growth of the peasant market is profoundly anti-proletarian in the most elemental sense. In 1964 China's leading economic planner, Po I-po told Anna Louise Strong that the regime intended to reduce the urban population by 20 million (Strong, Letters from China).
The return to a market economy combined with the CCP's sharp decline in popular authority created powerful disintegrative tendencies within the bureaucracy itself. Personal greed, careerism, the defense of narrow vested interests and regional warlordism became rife. During the Cultural Revolution it was reported that in 1962 the Shanghai and other regional parties requested grain from Chekiang, one of the few surplus regions. The first secretary of the Chekiang party is reported to have replied, "Chekiang is not a colony of Shanghai....I have pigs to feed" (China Quarterly, October-December 1972). This response typifies the relations between different sections of the bureaucracy in this period.
Mao has represented the national messianic utopian wing of the bureaucracy. He was therefore deeply disturbed by the growing decline in discipline, unity and sense of national purpose within the party cadre. In 1962 he set up a pressure group, the Socialist Education Committee, with the dual purpose of restoring the party cadre's sense of elan and of limiting the trend toward peasant individualism in economic policy. The efforts of the Socialist Education Committee proved impotent against the strength of bureaucratic routinism.
In view of the Cultural Revolution, it is necessary to emphasize the considerable overlap between Mao's policies and those of the Liu-led party center in 1961-65. While Mao was in favor of greater agricultural collectivization, he firmly supported policies which strengthened the social weight of the peasantry as against the working class, such as the transfer of the urban population to the countryside. Mao has always tried to liquidate the Chinese proletariat as a distinctive social group and dissolve it into the rural masses.
There was no significant difference between Mao and Liu over their attitude toward the proletariat. This was demonstrated by Mao's defense of the "worker-peasant" system during the Cultural Revolution, despite its deep unpopularity and negative economic consequences. This viciously anti-proletarian policy (instituted by Liu in 1963) required peasants to do industrial work during the slack season. They were paid less than the permanent workers, did not receive the extensive social benefits available to the regular workers and were not allowed to join the unions. In turn, permanent unionized workers were replaced by "worker-peasants" and forcibly shipped to the countryside! The "worker-peasant" system well conforms to Mao's "ideal" of a communist society and is an effective mechanism for holding down wages to increase state accumulation. The "worker-peasant" system was the single most important cause of labor unrest during the Cultural Revolution. The Maoists not only defended the system but suppressed the contract labor organizations which had emerged spontaneously to defend the "worker-peasants."
Nor is there any evidence that there were significant differences between Mao and the rest of the CCP leadership over foreign policy before 1965. It was Liu and Teng, not Mao, who organized the campaign against "Khrushchevite revisionism." Many of today's Maoists should consider that they were won to the Chinese line by the "anti-revisionist" campaign led by Liu, Teng and Co., after they had nudged Mao out of the central leadership.
Indonesia and Vietnam on the Road to Washington
During a party plenum in 1962 Mao revealed that Stalin had not trusted the CCP in the late 1940's, suspecting it of potential Titoism. Mao further related that while he sought to gain Stalin's trust, the CCP never sacrificed its independence. However, the Cold War polarization, particularly the Korean War, left China little choice but to become part of the Soviet-led bloc. During the mid-1950's the CCP sought to develop its own tendency within the Soviet bloc, actively maneuvering among the East European parties on a more independence-from-Moscow line. As an important by product of these activities, Mao's regime played a key role in pushing the Russians to crush the 1956 Hungarian uprising, then in justifying this internationally.
Part of the "Spirit of Camp David" (the Eisenhower-Khrushchev peaceful coexistence) was the understanding that the Kremlin would police expansion of Chinese national power. The main instances of this and likewise the main events leading to the Sino-Soviet split were Khrushchev's attempt to get China to abandon its military pressure on the Taiwan Strait islands in 1958; Soviet reneging on its promise to supply China with the capacity to produce nuclear weapons; and the USSR's pro-India "neutrality" during the 1960 Sino-Indian border war. China's increasingly strident political attacks on the Soviets led them to retaliate by cutting off all economic aid in 1960. This may be taken as the official date of the split.
Following the break from the Soviet camp, Chinese foreign policy consisted of an attempt to line up the "Third World"--a term defined to include Gaullist France!--against the two super-powers. In this period Chinese foreign policy registered some episodic diplomatic gains. However, in 1965 the Third World suddenly became off-limits for Chinese diplomats. A number of "friends of China" were toppled by military coups, notably Nkrumah, who appropriately was visiting Peking at the time. In the wake of these right-wing coups the Second Afro-Asian Conference, which the Chinese had expected to turn into an anti-Soviet forum, was cancelled. However, the truly crushing blow was the overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, which resulted in the bloody physical liquidation of the pro-Chinese PKI, then the largest Stalinist party not holding state power.
The rightist coups that swept Asia and Africa in 1965 demonstrated that the strength of U.S. imperialism lies not solely in its direct military power, but also in its organic ties to the propertied classes throughout the world. Whenever the class struggle reaches a certain intensity, the colonial bourgeoisie breaks its flirtation with Peking or Moscow and embraces the American ruling class as the main defender of the capitalist order in this epoch.
With China's Third World grand strategy buried under the decapitated bodies of the Indonesian workers and peasants, a new danger threatened China--the U.S.'s escalation in Vietnam. The manifest impotence of the "Third World" in protecting China, combined with U.S. imperialism's bombing its doorstep, caused sharp differences within the bureaucracy. A group around Liu, Peng Chen and People's Liberation Army Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching wanted to halt the deterioration of relations with the Soviet Union and arrange some kind of military united front with the Kremlin over Vietnam. The Mao-Lin grouping wanted to continue to escalate the split with the USSR and to avoid another Korean War situation above all else.
In a sense the first battle of the Cultural Revolution was fought out in the PLA high command. Under the pretext of "professionalism" versus "politics," it was in reality a struggle over policy toward Vietnam and a Soviet military alliance. Lo Jui-ching wanted to actively prepare for a possible massive ground intervention into Vietnam. In fact, a call for "people's war" was, in fact a call for the de-escalation of the Vietnam war back to low-level guerrilla fighting so as to avoid the danger that China would be drawn into another Korean situation. Lin's victory over his chief of staff was a victory for China-first military isolationism.
The decisive point came in early 1966 when the formally pro-Chinese Japanese Communist Party attempted to work out a military united front of Communist powers over the Vietnam War. A joint Chinese-Japanese CP statement on Vietnam was negotiated which did not attack the Russians for "revisionism," thereby opening the door for Sino-Soviet collaboration. At the eleventh hour, Mao sabotaged the agreement and openly attacked the party leaders, notably Peng Chen, who were responsible for it. Mao was determined not to provoke the Americans' suspicion by a show of solidarity with Russia. Under the pretext of fighting "revisionism," Mao thus informed U.S. imperialism that as long as China was not directly attacked, it would not intervene even in the face of the most murderous attacks against the workers and peasants of other countries. Thus the detente with the U.S. was not simply a right turn marking a retreat from the Cultural Revolution. Mao's appetite for an alliance with American imperialism, in order to better prosecute the struggle with his "principal contradiction" with "Soviet Social-Imperialism," was in fact one of the essential underpinnings of the "Cultural Revolution."
There was a clear connection between the factional line-ups over domestic and foreign policy. Because the Liu-led center was prepared to let the bureaucracy sink into careerist routinism and creature comforts and to let the economy expand at the pace of a peasant cart, the party center could envision defending China only within the general Soviet military sphere. Because Mao and Lin were determined that China would be a super-power second to none, they were determined to mobilize and discipline the bureaucracy and masses to overcome China's material backwardness as rapidly as possible.
The Anti-Proletarian, Anti-Cultural Revolution
In brief the Cultural Revolution was an attempt to mobilize the masses to create the material conditions for Chinese great-power politics on the basis of national messianic fervor. To do this, the Maoists had to purge an increasingly conservative and self-interested administrative bureaucracy. For this task, Mao turned to the PLA officers and to plebian student youth. Once it had been purged of pro-Russian conciliationist tendencies it was natural that the officer corps should find itself in the Maoist camp. The officers' social position led them to be more concerned with the long-term strength of the Chinese state than committed to local vested interests. In addition, they were removed from the direct pressure of the Chinese masses and naturally favored extracting a larger economic surplus for armament production. The Chinese student youth were, in the main, the bureaucracy of tomorrow. They were the inheritors of the Chinese government and wanted that government to be great and powerful and its subjects hard-working and frugal. The vested interest of ambitious petty-bourgeois educated youth is in the future of the petty-bourgeois stratum. For that reason they easily embrace utopian ideals and attack those whose workaday concerns prevent those ideals from being realized.
With the support of Lin and the PLA command, Mao easily ousted his main factional opponents--Liu, Teng and Peng--in 1966, before the Cultural Revolution was taken into the streets. The wholesale purge of the bureaucracy proved more difficult. In the end, it proved impossible. To understand how the entrenched bureaucrats resisted the Cultural Revolution it is necessary to see what happened when the Red Guard "proletarian revolutionaries" confronted the Chinese proletariat--on the other side of the barricades!
Whatever illusions the Chinese masses may have had about what the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution meant, it rapidly became clear that it did not mean more for the proletariat. Under the slogan of combating "economism," the radical Maoists made it very clear they intended to hold down wages and intensify labor. During 1966 there were a number of labor struggles culminating in the January 1967 Shanghai general strike and nationwide railway strike, the greatest clash between the Chinese proletariat and Stalinist government to date.
The railroad workers were one of the most self-consciously proletarian sections of Chinese society, with their own housing centers and schools. The Cultural Revolution was particularly hard on the railroad workers because, in addition to the normal traffic, they had to transport huge armies of Red Guards around the country. In addition, they were required to study the Thought of Chairman Mao after putting in a long day of work. Because of the extra traffic, existing safety regulations were violated. When the workers complained, the Red Guards attacked "old [safety] regulations which do not conform to the thought of Mao Tse Tung" (Current Scene, 19 May 1967). No doubt the Red Guards believed that the Thought of Mao was more powerful than the laws of physics! The railway union in Shanghai organized other workers in negotiations centering on either reducing the longer working hours or being paid for them. In December, the local Shanghai authorities granted a general wage increase. When the Maoist center in Peking reversed the wage increase, Shanghai and China's railroads stopped working.
The Red Guards and PLA overthrew the local Shanghai government and proceeded to smash the strike. The famous "Letter to All Shanghai People" (Shanghai Liberation Daily, 5 January 1967) began with the command "Grasp Revolution, Stimulate Production." The "Letter" went on to blame anti-party elements for inciting workers to leave their jobs and converge on Peking. This was curious propaganda coming from the supposed leaders of a "proletarian" revolution against those holding political power. The railway strike took longer to suppress and university students had to be used as unskilled railway scab labor.
After the January 1967 events, those bureaucrats under attack by the Red Guards had little trouble organizing their own "Red Guards," composed of workers, to defend them. The workers sensed that if the Red Guards took over they would be working twelve hours a day, seven days a week and studying the Thought of Mao for another eight hours. And in the street fighting that erupted throughout China's cities, the radical Maoists were not winning.
Despite the "participation" of the masses, the Cultural Revolution remained a struggle within the bureaucracy. It was a battle between the Mao-Lin faction and the atomized, conservative party apparatus. In the main, the students and workers were organized and cynically manipulated by the bureaucratic groupings. Revolutionary Marxists could not support either the utopian-militarist nationalism of the Mao faction or the various careerists struggling to keep their jobs.
From the standpoint of communists, the Cultural Revolution polarized Chinese society along the wrong lines by pitting subjectively revolutionary student youth, who believed they were fighting bureaucratism, against workers defending their standard of living. Had a Chinese Trotskyist organization been able to intervene, its task would have been to cut across these false lines of division and build a genuine communist opposition to the bureaucracy as a whole.
To the Red Guards, Trotskyists should have said the following: First, communist consciousness among the workers cannot be created by the methods of religious mysticism (has the spirit of Mao seized your soul?) but only when the workers are really responsible for governing Chinese society through democratic institutions. Secondly, the concept of socialism must be purged of military barracks asceticism. Communists are genuinely concerned about the material well-being of the masses and do not glorify poverty and endless toil. And perhaps most importantly, a communist society cannot be built in China simply through the willpower and sacrifices of the Chinese people. That requires the support of victorious proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries-revolutions which are blocked by Stalinist China's foreign policy. A central task for Chinese communists is to use the power and authority of the Chinese state to further the world socialist revolution. This means not only a break from the policy of supporting anti-proletarian nationalist bourgeois regimes, but also immediately demanding a military bloc with the Soviet Union, most urgently in Indochina, even while the USSR remains under bureaucratic rule.
To those workers drawn into defending the incumbent apparatchiks against the radical Maoists, Trotskyists should say the following: the material interests of the workers cannot be furthered by supporting the "soft," venal elements within the bureaucracy. Those material interests can only be served when a workers government controls the Chinese economy, replacing the deadening control of the conservative bureaucracy. To maintain political power, the workers government would indeed have to restrain wage increases in order to generate a surplus needed for military purposes and to absorb the peasantry into the industrial work force. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot survive with a small, aristocratic working class surrounded by a sea of impoverished peasants. However, a fundamental improvement in the material conditions of the Chinese people can only come about through resources supplied by more advanced workers states. Economic aid to China through international revolution need not be a long-term prospect. A workers revolution in China would give an enormous impetus to a socialist revolution in Japan, Asia's industrial power, with a highly conscious proletariat and brittle social structure. The complementary, planned development of Japan and China would go a long way toward overcoming the poverty of the Chinese people. And these are the politics the Trotskyist movement should have presented to the embattled Chinese workers and students during the Cultural Revolution.
Who Were the Victors?
With the incumbent bureaucrats able to mobilize groups of workers to fight the Red Guards, the radical Maoists were stalemated. The Maoist center then took a step which fundamentally changed the course of the Cultural Revolution and eventually led to its liquidation. In February 1967 the army was called in to support the Red Guards in "seizing power." Now the PLA officer corps is of the flesh-and-blood of the bureaucracy, tied to the rest of China's officialdom by innumerable personal and social affiliations. As a condition for militarily supporting the Red Guards the PLA command demanded that there be no wholesale purge of the incumbent administrators, that they be allowed to rehabilitate themselves. This was the so-called "mild cadre policy." The role of the PLA in preserving the bureaucracy was codified by a change in the formal program of the Cultural Revolution. When launched in 1966, the Cultural Revolution was supposed to produce a political system modeled on the Paris Commune. In early 1967, this was changed to the so-called "triple alliance" of "revolutionary rebels" (Red Guards), the PLA and the "revolutionary cadre" (incumbent bureaucrats). Clearly the officer corps was in charge.
The real relationship between the PLA and the Red Guards was revealed by the famous Wuhan incident in August 1967, although the army commander went too far. In a faction fight between two Red Guard groups, the army commander naturally supported the more right-wing one. When a couple of Maoist emissaries came from Peking to support the more radical faction the commander had them arrested. For this act of near-mutiny, he was dismissed. However, the fate of the principals involved in the Wuhan incident is highly significant. The mutinous commander, Chen Tsai-tao, is today back in power and the two Maoist emissaries were purged as "ultra-leftists."
The Wuhan incident temporarily turned the Maoist center against the PLA command and the Cultural Revolution reached its peak of anarchistic violence, including the burning of the British chancellery. By the end of 1967 the pressure from the PLA command to crack down on the Red Guards became irresistible.
The 28 January 1968 issue of the Liberation Army Daily announced that the PLA would "support the left, but not any particular faction"--a not-so-veiled threat to smash the Red Guards. The article went on to attack "petty-bourgeois factionalism." About the same time, Chou En-lai asserted that the leadership of the Cultural Revolution had passed from the students and youth to the workers, peasants and soldiers. Throughout 1968, attacks on "petty-bourgeois factionalism," "anarchism" and "sectarianism" drowned out attacks on "capitalist roadism" and "revisionism."
And it ended with a mango. The final curtain fell on the Cultural Revolution in August 1968 when Mao personally intervened to resolve a faction fight between student Red Guards at Peking's Tsinghua University, where the first Red Guard group was formed. Having failed to resolve the dispute to his liking, Mao is supposed to have said, "You have let me down and what is more you have disappointed the workers, peasants and soldiers of China" (Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 August 1968). Within 48 hours, China's first "Worker-Peasant Thought of Mao Tse-tung Propaganda Team," commanded by PLA officers, arrived at Tsinghua University and dissolved the Red Guards. For this service the Chairman personally sent the group a gift of mangoes. The Red Guards were suppressed by similar methods throughout the country. The more resistant activists were sent to the country side to "remold" their thinking through toiling with the peasants, the usual fate for those who "disappoint" Mao.
The Mao faction did not win the Cultural Revolution. Mao had clearly expected to replace the administrative bureaucracy with cadre unambiguously loyal to himself interspersed with young zealots and engendering mass enthusiasm while doing so. Instead the popular reaction against the Cultural Revolution strengthened the resistance of the incumbent bureaucracy. Once the army was called indirectly, Mao was forced to play a bonapartist role between the PLA officers representing bureaucratic conservatism and the radical student youth.
That the bureaucracy was largely conserved is demonstrated by the composition of the Central Committee elected at the Ninth CCP Congress in 1969--the so-called "Congress of Victors." The average age of the CC was 61 and the length of time in the party 25 years. Two-thirds of the CC elected in 1945 (who had not died or been purged before the Cultural Revolution) were re-elected to the 1969 Central Committee! The 1969 CC did show an increase in the proportion of those who had been on the Long March (the Maoist old guard) and a marked increase in the proportion of PLA officers (45 percent). Hardly what a naive Maoist enthusiast would expect as the aftermath of a supposedly anti-bureaucratic "revolution"!
The final liquidation of the Cultural Revolution came with the fall of the Lin faction. Lin Piao was associated with a series of manifestly bankrupt policies. On the domestic economic front, he was accused of wanting to launch a production drive in 1969 and of "allowing peasants to be deprived of their legitimate income" (Far Eastern Economic Review, 1973 Yearbook). Clearly Lin was pushing for another Great Leap Forward. However, the Cultural Revolution had revealed enormous economic discontent and the willingness of the workers to fight the regime to preserve their living standards. A Great-Leap-Forward campaign in 1969 could only have been suicidal. In fact, since the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese economy has been more market-oriented, more inegalitarian, more localized than it was in 1965. The Mao/Chou regime seems anxious to assure the masses that great economic sacrifices will not be demanded of them. Almost every official statement on economic policy asserts the peasant's right to a private plot.
On foreign policy, the man who announced that "the countryside of the world would conquer the cities of the world" was equally a loser. In the late 1960's, only a political idiot could believe that China was successfully leading the "Third World" against the U.S. and Russia. The Cultural Revolution left China diplomatically isolated. Despite the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy up through 1968 continued to orient toward a bloc with Russia against China. With objective conditions favorable for diplomatic and economic gains, a rightward turn in foreign policy was inevitable. It is probable that Lin broke in opposition to the rapprochement with Nixon.
With his base in the army, Lin undoubtedly launched a factional struggle against the emerging Mao/Chou axis. He lost. It is quite possible that he planned a military coup as the Maoists now claim. However, whatever ill Lin may have wished Mao and Chou while he was alive, his corpse has more than made up for it. He is the perfect scapegoat for everything that went wrong because of the Cultural Revolution. Whenever a purged "capitalist-roader" is brought back into power, it was Lin who framed him up. When Chou apologized to the British for the burning of their chancellery, he put the blame on Lin.
With every passing day the victims of the Cultural Revolution seem to replace the victors. Even the "number two person in power taking the capitalist road," Teng Hsiao-ping, is back on the road with Mao. And yet the Cultural Revolution has clearly left a badly divided party. The secretiveness and extreme brevity of the Tenth Party Congress points to a tense internal situation. It is as if the slightest formal concession to inner-party democracy would produce murderous factionalism. The elevation of the unknown Wang Hungwen to number three is probably a sop to the radical Maoists who are understandably distrustful of Chou En-lai--the man who is never on the losing side of a faction fight. However, Wang is probably a figurehead with no real base in the party cadre. When Mao dies, the CCP should have a succession crisis that will make the Cultural Revolution look like a formal debate. Of course, the Chinese proletariat may take the question of which bureaucratic aspirant succeeds Mao off the historic agenda by establishing its own democratic class rule.
Down with Mao and Brezhnev! For Sino-Soviet Communist Unity!
The most important development since the Cultural Revolution has been in China's foreign relations. State relations with the Soviet Union have drastically worsened, flaring into actual armed conflict in 1970. The Sino-Soviet boundary has become one of the most militarized borders in the world. The Mao/Chou regime's new love affair with Richard Nixon is clearly designed as a counter to what it sees as its principal enemy--the Soviet Union. This past year the Chinese attempt to line up Western imperialism against the Soviet Union has reached a new low. China is campaigning to strengthen NATO in order to divert the Russian army from Siberia. For example the 3 August Peking Review approvingly cites Lord Chalfont's letter to the London Times calling for expansion of NATO:
"Chalfont has of late published a number of articles in The Times to expose the Soviet threat to European security and plead for strengthened defense cooperation by the West European countries."
Whatever episodic changes occur in diplomatic moods, the objective relationship of U.S. imperialism to the Soviet Union is fundamentally different than that toward China. The Soviet Union is economically and militarily qualitatively superior to China, and the military peer of the U.S. Therefore it is the Soviet Union which is the core of the anti-capitalist regimes in the world and the main objective obstacle to U.S. imperialism. (Could China have supplied the U.S. blockaded Cubans?) Conversely, the Soviet Union could defeat China in a major war without imperialist intervention, while China could expect victory only in alliance with another power. Thus the logic of the great power triangle is for a U.S.-China alliance against the Soviet Union. However, great-power politics are not historically rational and a U.S.-Soviet attack on China remains a possibility.
Under any circumstances, a war between Russia and China would be an enormous setback for the cause of socialism. If a Sino-Soviet war breaks out independently of the direct intervention of imperialism, such as an expanded version of the 1970 border clash, Trotskyists must call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides. However, if the U.S. allies itself with one side in a Sino-Soviet war to the extent that the outcome could be the restoration of capitalism through imperialist victory, Trotskyists must call for unconditional military defense of that deformed workers state directly under the assault essentially of U.S. imperialism.
The focus of the Russian-Chinese conflict is the Siberian border.
Significantly the legal basis for the conflicting claims is an eighteenth-century treaty signed by the Romanoff dynasty and the Manchus--who as we all know were scrupulous in their concern for national rights! Those new to the socialist movement may find it impossible to understand why the leadership of a deformed workers state should be willing to go to war with another deformed workers state over a sparsely populated slice of territory and connive with capitalist powers in order to do so. Does this mean that workers states can be imperialists, just like capitalist powers? Is there an economic drive making war between these two Stalinist-ruled countries inevitable? Not at all.
In fact, the Moscow and Peking regimes are politically threatened by each other's very existence, since both competing powers claim to represent the interests of the workers but are in fact the instruments of an isolated bureaucracy which can maintain itself in power only by forcibly suppressing any political life of the proletariat. Khrushchev and Brezhnev have dealt with Liu and Mao the same way Stalin dealt with Tito (against whom he had no territorial claims) and every internal opposition, from Trotsky on the left to Bukharin on the right, and with any potentially independent members of his own faction as well. A competing tendency claiming to represent the workers and with the resources of state power to propagate its views is doubly threatening to the precarious stability of these anti-proletarian regimes.
As Trotsky pointed out, the origins of the bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union could be traced to the national limitation and isolation of the Russian Revolution in a backward country. This led to the elaboration of the nationalist ideology of "Socialism in one country"--a necessarily false consciousness for a ruling bureaucratic stratum. Thus these supposed "Communists" speak airily of proletarian internationalism but at the same time truly believe that it is their sacred duty to extend the fatherland. And what is true for Moscow is equally true for Peking or the second-rate nationalist bureaucracies in Sofia, Tirana, etc.
In the conflict over Siberia, the Russians now have an overwhelming advantage. In addition to absolute nuclear superiority, the Soviet army would have an advantage in conventional war not offset by China's greater manpower reserves. The Russian side of the border is much more heavily populated. And the Turkic-speaking peoples inhabiting China's northern border regions are resentful of centuries of Great Han chauvinism and may well be sympathetic to the Russians. Moreover, the Kremlin is also hard at work lining up the support of the capitalist powers. In addition to purely financial considerations, a major reason Brezhnev is so anxious for foreign capital in the Siberian oil and gas fields is to give the U.S. and Japan a stake in keeping Siberia Russian.
However, the Soviet military advantage is rapidly being undermined by the development of Chinese nuclear capacity. Thus there is now pressure within the Brezhnev regime for a preventive nuclear strike against China before the Chinese develop much greater retaliatory capacity. The Soviet authorities are presently generating a major war scare, particularly among Siberian residents, based on the worst kind of "yellow peril" racism. A correspondent for the London Economist (25-31 August) quoted a school teacher in Siberia as stating that:
"The Chinese radio, broadcasting in Russian, had threatened that the Chinese would occupy the south of Siberia, kill all the Russian men and keep the Russian girls for marrying."
If revolutionary workers governments were in power in Moscow and Peking, the conflict over Siberia would be easily resolved in the interests of the Russian and Chinese workers. Siberia would be open to Chinese immigration and jointly administered to ensure rapid economic development. Moreover, the existence of the unified and revolutionary workers states of Russia and China could well spark the Japanese socialist revolution, liberating Japan's economic resources for the development of Siberia, as well as of China.
Trotskyists understand that the Stalinist bureaucracies are caught in a fundamentally contradictory position. On the one hand they seek to defend themselves from imperialist attack, while on the other hand they strive for an impossible accommodation with the capitalist powers and fear above all the spread of world revolution, which would inevitably topple their parasitic regimes. In the long term, the deformed workers states (bureaucratically ruled states based on collectivized property forms) can survive only through the international extension of workers power. By pursuing nationalist policies, the Stalinist bureaucracies of China and Russia undermine the dictatorship of the proletariat and open the way for its overthrow by domestic counterrevolution or imperialist conquest. The Chinese revolution (the most important defeat for imperialism since the October Revolution in Russia) is now mortally threatened by nuclear war. It is war not with an imperialist power, but with the other powerful deformed workers state--the Soviet Union.
Only by overthrowing the reactionary Mao and Brezhnev governments can the Russian and Chinese working masses prevent going to war against each other and instead bring about the political, military and economic unification of the Sino-Soviet states against world capitalism.
For Communist Unity Against Imperialism Through Proletarian Political Revolution in the Sino-Soviet States!
For the Defense of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions Through International Proletarian Revolution!
Out In The 1950s Crime Noir Night-The Doctor Is Out- Robert Mitchum’s“Where Danger Lives”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Where Danger Lives.
DVD Review
Where Danger Lives, starring Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue, Claude Rains, Paramount Pictures, 1950
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy: films like Out Of the Past, Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and The Big Sleep need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass, or as in Gilda a double nod for the plot and for the femme fatale. (Be still my heart, at the thought of Rita Hayworth, ah, dancing and singing, okay lip synching, and looking, well, fetching while doing those difficult tasks.). Having just mentioned the classic Out Of The Past allows me to segue into this 1950 crime noir vehicle, Where Danger Lives, another film starring Robert Mitchum.
No question jut-jawed, slightly hazy lazy-eyed, made for heavy-lifting, Robert Mitchum would make the top of any crime noir aficionados idea of guy that fits the bill in this genre. And he proved it out of box in Out Of The Past where he was “smitten” by classic bad girl, no, rotten, low-down femme fatale, Jane Greer, who, unfortunately, unfortunately for Mitchum was “owned” by a mobster (Kirk Douglas) a little further up the food chain. And paid the price for that indiscretion, paid big time. So we know two things about Robert Mitchum. He likes the lively ladies, the ones that come with bells and whistles and plenty of baggage, usually distressful baggage, and he can take care of himself in the clinches. Well almost. Actually we know three things about Brother Mitchum. He does not have enough sense to come in out of the rain, or any place else where danger lurks for that matter. Why? Well in this film he is at it again, back up against a two-timing femme fatale, although as they come in all sizes and shapes a dark-haired one this time (Faith Domegue).
A quick run through the plot line will bring us up to date on Brother Mitchum’s problem. Seems that in this one Mitchum plays a young doctor, a very good young doctor as such doctors go, but he makes the number one cardinal mistake in medical practice (he must have skipped that class in med school, the one about proper bedside manner, minus the bed)- don’t get involved personally with the patients. Especially drop-dead beautiful, alluring, capricious (yes, capricious), calculating ones who show up in the emergency room after attempted suicides. Yes, a big red flag should have been flying in Doc’s head
But see he is young, and she is drop-dead beautiful. Put those two together, and well, what is a man to do. Only problem is said drop-dead beauty is one, married, very married, to a wealthy, older, hell, ancient man, and maybe, tad bit jealous and protective (Claude Rains) and, two, is under some mental distress, hell, she is cuckoo, bonkers, crazy, okay, murderously crazy, if you really want to know. Well for me that would take a certain edge off that drop-dead beauty part but for Doc, no way, no way at all as he is well, let’s just call it smitten.
Of course the price of smitten, smitten to a crazy (sorry), married, very married woman can be very high and here is no exception. After a little bout/confrontation with hubby in which Doc got the worst of it, it seems that when Doc came to said hubby was dead, very dead. See here is where smitten gets you in trouble though. Doc is not going to be the fall guy, and he is not letting his paramour take the fall either. So they decide to high-tail it to Mexico, and freedom, or so they think like a million other people in a tight spot, although not all that crowd decide to high-tail it to Mexico. The trials and tribulations of this now on-the-run couple is what drives the rest of the film, even though Doc is pretty hazy about why he is running (except she is running), given his own medical condition. The rest you can figure out for yourself, just like, in the end Doc, had to figure things out. The hard way.
So you can see that I was not kidding about Brother Mitchum’s little femme fatale problem. But I blame the whole thing on Claude Rains. See there is no way an old guy, a wealthy old guy, or poor for that matter, is suppose to be hanging out with young, drop-dead beautiful women, crazy or not. And see worldly Claude Rains should know such stuff from back in the days when he was running around grabbing dough at Rick’s Place in Casablanca. So the next time you see a crime noir film like this one you will know what’s what.
DVD Review
Where Danger Lives, starring Robert Mitchum, Faith Domergue, Claude Rains, Paramount Pictures, 1950
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy: films like Out Of the Past, Gilda, The Lady From Shang-hai, and The Big Sleep need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass, or as in Gilda a double nod for the plot and for the femme fatale. (Be still my heart, at the thought of Rita Hayworth, ah, dancing and singing, okay lip synching, and looking, well, fetching while doing those difficult tasks.). Having just mentioned the classic Out Of The Past allows me to segue into this 1950 crime noir vehicle, Where Danger Lives, another film starring Robert Mitchum.
No question jut-jawed, slightly hazy lazy-eyed, made for heavy-lifting, Robert Mitchum would make the top of any crime noir aficionados idea of guy that fits the bill in this genre. And he proved it out of box in Out Of The Past where he was “smitten” by classic bad girl, no, rotten, low-down femme fatale, Jane Greer, who, unfortunately, unfortunately for Mitchum was “owned” by a mobster (Kirk Douglas) a little further up the food chain. And paid the price for that indiscretion, paid big time. So we know two things about Robert Mitchum. He likes the lively ladies, the ones that come with bells and whistles and plenty of baggage, usually distressful baggage, and he can take care of himself in the clinches. Well almost. Actually we know three things about Brother Mitchum. He does not have enough sense to come in out of the rain, or any place else where danger lurks for that matter. Why? Well in this film he is at it again, back up against a two-timing femme fatale, although as they come in all sizes and shapes a dark-haired one this time (Faith Domegue).
A quick run through the plot line will bring us up to date on Brother Mitchum’s problem. Seems that in this one Mitchum plays a young doctor, a very good young doctor as such doctors go, but he makes the number one cardinal mistake in medical practice (he must have skipped that class in med school, the one about proper bedside manner, minus the bed)- don’t get involved personally with the patients. Especially drop-dead beautiful, alluring, capricious (yes, capricious), calculating ones who show up in the emergency room after attempted suicides. Yes, a big red flag should have been flying in Doc’s head
But see he is young, and she is drop-dead beautiful. Put those two together, and well, what is a man to do. Only problem is said drop-dead beauty is one, married, very married, to a wealthy, older, hell, ancient man, and maybe, tad bit jealous and protective (Claude Rains) and, two, is under some mental distress, hell, she is cuckoo, bonkers, crazy, okay, murderously crazy, if you really want to know. Well for me that would take a certain edge off that drop-dead beauty part but for Doc, no way, no way at all as he is well, let’s just call it smitten.
Of course the price of smitten, smitten to a crazy (sorry), married, very married woman can be very high and here is no exception. After a little bout/confrontation with hubby in which Doc got the worst of it, it seems that when Doc came to said hubby was dead, very dead. See here is where smitten gets you in trouble though. Doc is not going to be the fall guy, and he is not letting his paramour take the fall either. So they decide to high-tail it to Mexico, and freedom, or so they think like a million other people in a tight spot, although not all that crowd decide to high-tail it to Mexico. The trials and tribulations of this now on-the-run couple is what drives the rest of the film, even though Doc is pretty hazy about why he is running (except she is running), given his own medical condition. The rest you can figure out for yourself, just like, in the end Doc, had to figure things out. The hard way.
So you can see that I was not kidding about Brother Mitchum’s little femme fatale problem. But I blame the whole thing on Claude Rains. See there is no way an old guy, a wealthy old guy, or poor for that matter, is suppose to be hanging out with young, drop-dead beautiful women, crazy or not. And see worldly Claude Rains should know such stuff from back in the days when he was running around grabbing dough at Rick’s Place in Casablanca. So the next time you see a crime noir film like this one you will know what’s what.
"Ain't Got No Time For The Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise"- The World Of Whitey Bulger And The Early Boston Corner Boys
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated July 10, 2011 concerning the old time corner boy life in Boston, the time of the now media-saturated Whitey Bulger and his cohorts.
Markin comment:
I have spent much time in this space detailing my own corner boy experiences in North Adamsville, a town very close to Whitey Bulger's South Boston haunts, in the 1950s. This article explores that same world, just a generation before. More importantly, if you look closely at the picture accompanying this article that could have been a picture of Markin, his pal Billy Bradley and his other pal Frankie Riley growing up. Fortunately for Frankie and me (although it was a close thing)we followed the Tom Waits lyrics- "ain't got no time for corner boys down in the streets making all that noise." Billy (and my two brothers), unfortunately didn't listen so well.
Markin comment:
I have spent much time in this space detailing my own corner boy experiences in North Adamsville, a town very close to Whitey Bulger's South Boston haunts, in the 1950s. This article explores that same world, just a generation before. More importantly, if you look closely at the picture accompanying this article that could have been a picture of Markin, his pal Billy Bradley and his other pal Frankie Riley growing up. Fortunately for Frankie and me (although it was a close thing)we followed the Tom Waits lyrics- "ain't got no time for corner boys down in the streets making all that noise." Billy (and my two brothers), unfortunately didn't listen so well.
Shades Of "Doctor Gonzo" Hunter Thompson- The Passing Of Mad-Hatter Journalist George Kimball
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Sunday Globe article, dated July 10, 2011 concerning the passing of legendary sports/life journalist George Kimball.
Markin comment:
There was a time that I would read everything that journalist George Kimball wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Not because I agreed with their political perspectives, or their cultural critiques but because, as Kevin Cullen, points out they represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. And of course, as well, for their love of language, language that curled around an idea. Yes, those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so.
Markin comment:
There was a time that I would read everything that journalist George Kimball wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Not because I agreed with their political perspectives, or their cultural critiques but because, as Kevin Cullen, points out they represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. And of course, as well, for their love of language, language that curled around an idea. Yes, those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)