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.
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Carl Davidson's "Left in Form,Right in Essence:Trotskyism and China today"
“The ‘Russian question’ has been the main axis in world politics for nearly four decades,” states the Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution.
“It now has found its extension and deepening,” the SWP continues, “in the ‘Chinese question.’ ”
The Trotskyists pose the question fairly enough. Their conclusions, however, just as in the past, lead them to the other side of the barricades.
What made the “Russian question” a touchstone for revolutionaries, demarcating Marxist-Leninists from right and “left” revisionists, was the existence of the proletarian dictatorship and its undertaking of the task of socialist construction “in one country.” The Trotskyists opposed the former in practice by denying the latter in theory.
Today China represents the main example in the world of the proletarian dictatorship and is likewise a touchstone for revolutionaries. But the Chinese revolution has also “deepened and extended” the question on two fronts: in the international arena through its call for a united front of all the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism and in the domestic arena through its example of continuing the class struggle by the means of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in socialist society.
Liu and Lin
In these two arenas the SWP has opposed the gains of the Chinese revolution. In general, it has attacked the policies of the Chinese Communist party under the leadership of Mao Tsetung as “ultraleftist” domestically and “rightist” internationally. In reality, however, it is the Trotskyists who vacillate between right and “left” opportunism and to the extent that their views have been reflected in China, it has been in the lines pursued by Liu Shao-chi and Lin Piao.
How is this manifested? In China’s socialist construction the theoretical link between Trotsky and Liu Shao-chi can be seen in the “theory of productive forces” put forth by both figures.
The Sept. 19, 1969 issue of Peking Review sums up the “theory” as claiming that “the socialist road cannot be taken in any country where capitalism is not highly developed and the productive forces have not reached a high level ... After the seizure of power (Liu Shao-chi) raised it to oppose socialist transformation in a futile effort to lead China on the road to capitalism.”
Liu Shao-chi’s line came into sharp conflict with Mao’s over the collectivization of agriculture through the development of the cooperative system. “Some people have expressed the opinion,” Liu is quoted as saying in The Struggle Between the Two Roads in China’s Countryside, “that steps should be taken gradually to shake the foundations of private ownership, weaken it until it is nullified and raise the mutual aid organizations for agricultural production to the level of agricultural producers cooperatives as a new factor for ‘overcoming the peasants’ spontaneous tendency.’ This is an erroneous, dangerous and utopian conception of agricultural socialism.”
Liu held the view that farming had to develop for some time on an individual basis and that “mechanization” had to occur before “cooperation.” His struggle with Mao on the issue, together with severe natural calamities, hindered the development of China’s people’s communes and was not decisively defeated until the cultural revolution.
What are the Trotskyist views on this struggle? “China’s productive forces,” states the SWP in 1955, “are far from adequate to give the statized property a socialist character.” This is rooted in Trotsky’s own position where, in 1936, he summed up the essence of the “productive forces” line.
Vulgar evolutionism
“Marxism,” writes Trotsky, “sets out from the development of technique as the fundamental spring of progress.” Marxism, of course, does no such thing. It posits the class struggle as the motive force of historical development, including the development of the productive forces. Trotsky simply replaces revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism.
The SWP also sympathized with Liu’s line on the communes. “Abolition of private property on the land,” states Daniel Roberts in the May 1959 SWP Discussion Bulletin, is an “irrational and utopian” objective, “as long as China’s technological development and industrial equipment remain low. Communist social relations can evolve only on the basis of a technology that stands higher in its development and universal application than the heights reached under capitalism in the advanced industrial countries.”
“Does setting up the communes violate the peasants’ petty bourgeois aspirations to be individual farmers?” Roberts asks. He believes that it does and that, at most, the peasants might defer this individualism, for a brief time. After this period some peasants will have become bureaucrats or workers “and then we can also expect that tens of millions of peasants will want at last to engage in individual farming plus some form of voluntary cooperation.”
“The peasantry,” as Lenin put it, “has two souls,” one aspiring toward petty capitalism and the other casting its lot with the proletariat. What the Chinese experience has demonstrated is that “technique in command” leads them along the former path while “politics in command” leads to the latter. Given correct leadership the peasant masses, states Mao, “have a potentially inexhaustible enthusiasm for socialism.”
“The ‘theory of productive forces’ hawked by Liu Shao-chi,” states Peking Review, “onesidedly describes the progress of society as the natural outcome of the development of the productive forces, chiefly the instruments of production. It completely denies that, Under certain conditions, the superstructure and the relations of production play the principle and decisive role in relation to the economic base and the productive forces; it also denies the proletariat’s consciously making revolution under the guidance of revolutionary theory, seizing political power and changing the relations of production that play the decisive role in greatly developing the productive forces and pushing social development ahead.”
China’s cultural revolution represented the massive class struggle between these two lines in every sphere of life. Its results have represented a tremendous advance for proletarian revolutionary forces, not only in China but throughout the world.
Side with revisionists
The Trotskyists, however, have tended to side with the modern Soviet revisionists in their evaluation of its results. They view it as an anti-intellectual, anti-cultural purge of one group of bureaucrats by another and if any “progressive tendencies” were involved at all, they would be found in the camp opposed to Mao Tsetung’s line.
For instance, SWP activist Les Evans, writing in the January 1973 International Socialist Review, interprets the cultural revolution in China’s educational system in the same fashion as the revisionists:
“The new standards,” he writes, commenting on university admissions policies, “are supposed to favor the children of workers and peasants, but clearly when the total enrollment is so sharply restricted this can have little application for the Chinese masses.”
Loyalty “downgrades”
The new standards downgrade educational performance and replace it with the criterion of unwavering loyalty to the regime ...
While the universities have been restricted to party members (a false claim – CD), the regime has stepped up its campaign to deport masses of city youth to remote areas of the countryside.
What the CPC has done, of course, is to apply Mao’s line of “serving the people” to its academic standards, rather than relying solely on the grading system in evaluating students. It also requires that students be selected directly from production in factories and communes, rather than entering the universities directly from the lower schools.
Its “deportation of youth” consists of the policy of tempering the masses of urban youth in continuing the revolution, going among the masses of rural workers and peasants – the basic social reality of China – to learn from them, assist the revolution in the countryside and remold their class outlook in the process.
Evans also attacks the principle of criticism and self-criticism, the leading role in the revolutionary committees of the CPC and the May 7 cadre schools, where cadres manifesting bureaucratic attitudes toward the masses are re-educated in the spirit of serving the people.
Al] this, according to the Trotskyists, amounts to so many violations of what they term “worker’s democracy” but in reality represents the practice of the CPC slogan, “Fight self, repudiate revisionism.”
To the SWP this is unbearable and only confirms their 1955 assertion that “the Mao bureaucracy succeeded in the very course of the third Chinese revolution in imposing a totalitarian state power” which the SWP claims must be overthrown “by iron necessity.”
In evaluating China’s role in international affairs, the Trotskyists switch over and put on their ultra-“leftist” hat. Here the 1955 SWP statement attacks Mao for working to “confine the revolution to China’s borders.”
What does this mean? One indication is the Trotskyist attack on China for “betraying” the Vietnamese revolution. The “evidence” is that China has not given the Vietnamese “adequate” aid. Since the Vietnamese state that China has given them whatever they needed and the Chinese have given whatever the Vietnamese have asked, what do the Trotskyists consider “adequate?”
In his pamphlet, China and the U.S., SWPer Dick Roberts gives a hint. The imperialists were stopped in Korea when China sent in its troops, he points out. “But the Chinese did not send troops to aid the Vietminh,” he adds.
Thus “adequate” aid boils down to China’s giving the People’s Liberation Army their marching orders. This is the theory of the “export” of revolution, which is opposed by both the Chinese and Vietnamese leaderships, as contrary to the basic principle that the revolution in each country must be based mainly on self-reliance, on the masses of people in each country themselves. Only then can international aid have its greatest effect.
“We have always believed,” a Chinese official stated in a 1972 interview with the Guardian, “that revolution cannot be exported ... Look at the countries of Eastern Europe which depended primarily on the Soviet Union to make revolution. They have very limited independence. Albania achieved victory by relying on its own efforts – and it is staunch and independent today. A revolution cannot succeed if the revolutionary forces do not rely on their own efforts and do not mobilize the great masses of people but place hope on aid from abroad.” (From Unite the Many, Defeat the Few, a Guardian pamphlet on China’s foreign policy.)
In addition to their opposition to the principle of self-reliance as “autarchic,” Trotskyism also attacks the Chinese call for an international united front of the world’s peoples against the “two superpowers” of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism as a class collaborationist betrayal of the national movements in the small and medium-sized countries in the colonial world.
Support for struggles
“In our objective,” the Chinese official told the Guardian, “national struggles must not be subordinated. China has friendly and diplomatic relations with a number of countries. This should not have any effect on the revolutionary forces in those countries ... China is not against peoples’ struggles in reactionary countries or in countries where a progressive government is in power. Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution. We support this.”
Regarding countries with which we have diplomatic relations, we support the government insofar as it is engaging in struggle against the two superpowers, not in its suppression of local struggles. We believe that in giving firm backing to governments against the domination of one or two superpowers we are helping the forces of national liberation and revolution.
United front
Just as in their views on the national united front in the colonial countries, the Trotskyist line on the world scale makes no distinctions in the enemy camp, between enemies in general and particular or principal enemies at various times and stages. As a result, the revolutionary forces are left more isolated from both strategic and tactical allies, however temporary and wavering they may be.
Finally, the Trotskyists blur the distinction between the revisionist countries and the socialist countries and on most questions side with the former. For instance, in 1963 the SWP denounced Albania as one of the most despicable Stalinized regimes in Europe and added that “the internal regime of communist Yugoslavia is much freer.”
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