When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"

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:Origins of U.S. Trotskyism"

The Trotskyists have been known – both historically and in the present period – as “wreckers and splitters” of the people’s organizations and movements.

While they vociferously deny the charge, an examination of their history demonstrates that they have earned it. The Trotskyists themselves even celebrate their wrecking and splitting tactics as high points in their theoretical development.

This conclusion becomes particularly obvious in view of certain aspects of the history of the Trotskyists in the U.S.: their initial break with the Communist party and their “entry” into the Socialist party.

The Trotskyists were first organized in this country as a secret faction within the CP. They were led by James P. Cannon, active in the party’s defense work and a member of its central committee.

What was unique about this faction – and undoubtedly required its secrecy – was that it was formed after Trotskyism has been repudiated by the Communist International as a petty bourgeois trend, a variety of Menshevism. The question was discussed within the CPUSA as well. Cannon and his followers, however, never presented their views, but worked surreptitiously toward a split in violation of the basic democratic centralist norms of party organization. In his History of American Trotskyism, written in 1942, Cannon tries to justify this by pleading ignorance at the time.

“Someone may ask,” he writes, “‘why didn’t you make speeches in favor of Trotsky?’ I couldn’t do that either because I didn’t understand the program.”

This was in 1928, after he had voted in favor of resolutions against Trotskyism. Yet in the same book, Cannon states that in 1926 he had read Trotskyist documents attacking Soviet relations with British trade unions and agreed with them.

“It had a profound influence on me,” he said. “I felt that at least on this question ... the Oppositionists had the right line. At any rate. I was convinced that they were not the counter- revolutionists they were pictured to be.”

Why didn’t Cannon speak out on this point he was sure about? The answer he gives is instructive. It reveals the Trotskyist view of inner-party life, their contempt for criticism and self-criticism as a “self-denigrating” practice borrowed from the Catholic Church. It also shows why there are so many Trotskyist splinter groups today.

“A serious and responsible revolutionist,” says Cannon, “cannot disturb a party merely because he becomes dissatisfied with this, that or the other thing. He must wait until he is prepared to propose concretely a different program, or another party ... Of course, if one had no responsibility to the party, if he were a mere commentator or observer, he would merely speak his doubts and have it over with. You can’t do that in a serious political party. If you don’t know what to say, you don’t have to say anything. The best thing is to remain silent.”

But Cannon didn’t maintain his false naivete for long. As a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, he claims to have come across a basic document of Trotsky’s, to which he was instantly converted. Still, he kept his mouth shut.

“We didn’t begin the fight in Moscow,” writes Cannon, “although we were already thoroughly convinced ... We couldn’t have best served our political ends by doing so.”

What were those ends? “The task was to recruit a new faction in secret before the inevitable explosion came, with the certain prospect that this faction, no matter how big or small it might be, would suffer expulsion ...”

By the time of his return to the U.S., Cannon’s activities had raised suspicions within the party. When a resolution against Trotskyism was raised within a party caucus in order to determine where his group stood, Cannon brags about his group’s deceitful methods in skirting the issue:

We objected on the ground...that the question of Trotskyism’ had been decided long ago, and that there was absolutely no point in raising this issue again. We said we refused to be a party to any of this folderol ...
They nourished the hope – oh how they hoped! – that a smart fellow like Cannon would eventually come to his senses and not just go and start a futile fight for Trotsky at this late day. Without saying so directly, we gave them a little ground to think that this might be so ...

Cannon’s ruse exposed

Cannon’s ruse didn’t last long. Within a few weeks he was exposed, brought to trial under the party’s rules and expelled.

Thus began American Trotskyism. At first there were only three: Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman. Within the next months, they only gathered a few dozen people around them. Through political propaganda and organizational measures, the CP had effectively isolated them as renegades.

“A wall of ostracism separated us from the party members,” says Cannon, “We were cut off from our old associations without having new ones to go to. There was no organization we might join, where new friends and co-workers might be found ... We lived in those first days under a form of pressure which is in many respects the most terrific that can be brought to bear against a human – social ostracism from people of one’s own kind.”

Cannon’s description of his movement’s “dog days” are a back-handed tribute to the CP’s political work and hegemony within’ the movement at the time. But his account also reveals the mistakes that were made – primarily the use of violence to disrupt the tiny Trotskyist meetings – and how these turned around to help the Trotskyists build their organization.

“We came back stronger after every fight,” Cannon writes, “and this attracted sympathy and support. Many of the radical people in New York, sympathizers of the Communist party, and even some members, would come to our meetings to help protect them in the interest of free speech. They were attracted by our fight, our courage, and revolted by the methods of the Stalinists. They would then start reading our material and studying our program ... We built these little groups in various cities, and soon we had the skeleton of a national organization.”

Nonetheless the Trotskyists remained a tiny sect. At this point they called themselves the “Communist League of America (Opposition).” In their view, they were not a party and engaged in no mass work, but an unofficial faction of the Communist party. All their propaganda work – which was all they did – was aimed at the CP rank and file and aimed at dividing them from their leadership.

They had little success. The progress of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, in the midst of capitalist crisis and proletarian upsurge throughout the world, attracted millions of people to the parties of the Communist International. The struggle against right opportunism within the movement also took its toll of the “opposition.”

“By this maneuver,” states Cannon, “they dealt us a devastating blow. Those disgruntled elements in the party, who had been inclined toward us and who opposed the opportunism of the Lovestone group, became reconciled to the party. They used to say to us: You see, you were wrong. Stalin is correcting everything. He is taking a radical position all along the line in Russia, America and everywhere else.”

Then Cannon adds: “We were utterly isolated, forced in upon ourselves. Our recruitment dropped to almost nothing ... Then, as is always the case with new political movements, we began to recruit from forces none too healthy ... Freaks always looking for the most extreme expression of radicalism, misfits, windbags, chronic oppositionists who had been thrown out of half a dozen organizations-such people began to come to us in our isolation, shouting, ‘Hello Comrades.’ I was always against admitting such people,. but the tide was too strong.”

Recruit from the right

Rebuked in their efforts to recruit from the left, the Trotskyists had only one place to go – recruit from the right. The victory of fascism in Germany had exposed the treachery of the leadership of the social-democratic parties of the Second International. Splits were developing. discontent was growing among social- democratic workers and many groupings among them were looking more and more to the leadership of the Communists. This was especially true following the Seventh Congress of the Comintern. which corrected a number of “left” errors in its call for the united and popular front against fascism.

The main historical responsibility for the victory of fascism in Germany had been placed squarely on the Social-Democrats. The main trend was toward unity with the Communists. What did the Trotskyists do? Exactly the opposite. They declared the Communists responsible for fascism, denounced the Comintern as hopelessly counter-revolutionary and moved to join the parties of the Second International.

In the United States this was accomplished in two steps, through the Trotskyist tactics of “fusion” and “entryism.” The first step consisted of joining with a group of reformist trade unionists led by A.J. Muste and forming the “Workers party.” After a short time it was decided that this group was too “sectarian” in its opposition to the Socialist party, which was even further to the right.

Actually the Trotskyists were intent on dissolving the Workers party into the Socialist party and destroying both organizations in the process, hoping they would raid enough recruits to form their own party after the dust had settled.

As in their break with the CP, the Trotskyists were completely dishonest in their approach. “We had join individually,” states Cannon, “because they wanted to humiliate us, to make it appear that we were simply dissolving our party. humbly breaking with our past and starting anew as pupils of the ‘Militants,’ caucus of the SP. It was rather irritating, but we were not deflected from our course by personal feelings. We had been too long in the Lenin school for that. We were out to serve political ends.”

What ends? Cannon mentions two. One was to recruit a liberal, petty-bourgeois base to defend Trotsky in the international arena from a platform of “respectability.” The other was to oppose developments toward a united front between the CP and the SP.

“We had stirred up the rank and file of the Socialist party,” Cannon says, “against the idea of unity with the Stalinists. This blocked their games and they took it out in increased resentment against us.”

But even serving these political ends was not necessary to justify the Trotskyist tactics. Cannon comments on Trotsky’s evaluation of the action “when we were talking with him about the total result of our entry into the Socialist party and the pitiful state of its organization afterward. He said that alone would have justified the entry into the organization even if we hadn’t gained a single new member.”

The Trotskyists did gain a number of recruits, however, and doubled their size. This still did not break their isolation from the working class. Their attitude toward the trade union struggle and the Afro-American people guaranteed that, despite their ensuing formation of the Socialist Workers party.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -"Left in Form,Right in Essence"- A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism by Carl Davidson

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.
********
"Left in Form,Right in Essence A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism
(1973)", Carl Davidson

This pamphlet was originally published as a series of 12 articles in early 1973 in the Guardian newsweekly.
Second printing Spring 1974.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

What is the role of Trotskyism in the people’s struggles today? What are its historical origins and what new forms has it taken in recent times? These are the questions addressed in this pamphlet, which first appeared as a 12-part series in the Guardian in the Spring of 1973.
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National and class struggle

The Trotskyist movement in the U.S. today finds itself organizationally isolated from the rising trend of workers’ struggles.

At the same time it is in the position of tailing after – alternately – the trade union bureaucracy and the petty bourgeois nationalist trends in the struggles of the oppressed nationalities.

As a result, the Trotskyists can only respond negatively to what must be the strategy for proletarian revolution in the U.S. – the united front against imperialism, the fundamental alliance of which is between the multi-national working class and the oppressed nationalities.

The ideological reasons for this were present from the beginnings of the American Trotskyist movement and its rejection of Marxism-Leninism, particularly on the national question and the attitude to the trade unions.

The Trotskyists’ last major involvement in a labor struggle was also their first: the five-week union recognition struggle of the Minneapolis Teamsters in 1934. A number of members of the Communist League of America (Opposition), the predecessor to the Socialist Workers party, were also members of the Teamsters Local 574. While they did not hold any official positions of leadership in the union, the Trotskyists were heavily represented in the strike’s organizing committee and generally played the role of activist trade union militants in the day-to-day leadership of the struggle.

The problem is that they did not go beyond the role of trade unionists and in fact at one point answered red-baiting charges by denying that their militants were communists. James P. Cannon describes the outlook of his organization in Minneapolis in his History of American Trotskyism with an almost classic portrayal of tailism and bowing to the spontaneity of the masses:

“Adapt to their trend”

“Following the general trend of the workers,” he writes, “we also realized that if we were to make the best of our opportunities, we should not put unnecessary difficulties in our path. We should not waste time and energy trying to sell the workers a new scheme of organization they did not want. It was far better to adapt ourselves to their trend and also to exploit the possibilities of getting assistance from the existing official labor movement.”

It would be a mistake, however, to view the trade union work of the Trotskyists as apolitical. One of its main ingredients was anti-communism in the guise, of course, of “anti-Stalinism.” In a 1940 discussion with Trotsky on whether or not to “critically support” Communist party candidates in the elections, Cannon claims “such a line would disrupt our work” in the “broad anti-Stalinist movement.”

We built our strength on opposition to Stalinist control of the union ... The Stalinists are the main obstacle. A policy of maneuver would be disastrous. What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise.
This policy was soon to bear its fruit. Tim Wohlforth, head of the Trotskyist Workers League, describes the period of the late 1940s in his own “left” history of the SWP, The Struggle for Marxism in the United States:

This was the period when the “progressive” caucuses, which had fought the Stalinists during the latter part of the war essentially on sound trade union lines, were now settling down to their bureaucratic control of the unions and establishing their relations with the capitalist government and its cold war drive. Faced with this situation the SWP trade unionists were in a very difficult situation. They could not support their allies of the previous period, they were wary of seeking any relationship with the Stalinist workers who were being witch-hunted in the unions and they did not have the strength to throw up independent third trade union caucuses ...
Wohlforth points out that the SWP now began losing many of the workers it had managed to recruit, especially black workers. He apologetically describes the SWP’s inability to deal with white supremacy:

This failure is understandable considering the short duration of the party’s direct experience in Negro work and considering that the overwhelming majority of the party came from a more privileged layer of the working class who in their daily lives had little contact with Negroes.
That the SWP “had little contact” with Afro-Americans was not surprising, since the U.S. “left opposition” ignored their existence for the first 10 years of its existence. Even Trotsky was moved to remark, in 1939: “It is very disquieting to find that until now the party has done almost nothing in this field. It has not published a book, a pamphlet, leaflets, nor even any articles in the New International.” Wohlforth even points out that in 1933 an SWP leader was unable to answer a question of Trotsky’s as to whether or not Black people in the South spoke a different language.

This can be contrasted with the work of the Communist party, which, together with the Comintern, had developed a revolutionary analysis of the Afro-American question from the perspective of viewing it as a national question. The Afro-American people in the “Black Belt” region of the South, they said, constituted an oppressed nation. Communists were duty-bound to support its struggle for national liberation, including the right to secede.

At the same time the CP saw the struggle for full democratic rights for black people throughout the country as part and parcel of the class struggle and a key component of the struggle against opportunism. As a result the CP made great gains in this area of work, as well as many worthy contributions to the struggle against national oppression in the U.S.

The Trotskyists have attacked this line as “imposed by orders from Moscow” and distorted it by claiming that the CP demanded a separate Black state (rather than the right of self- determination) without regard to the aspirations of the Black masses.

The Trotskyists were not helped out of their quandary by Trotsky. He responded to the SWP’s white blindspot by interpreting the Afro- American national question on a completely subjective basis. “We do, of course, not obligate the Negroes to become a nation,” said Trotsky in 1939, “if they are, then that is a question of their consciousness, that is, what they desire and what they strive for.”

This repudiates any scientific approach to the national question which takes into account such factors as common history, territory, economic life and culture. The Trotskyists are thus unable to distinguish an oppressed nation from an oppressed national minority, or between the progressive democratic content of nationalist struggles and the narrow reactionary views of “cultural-national autonomy.”

This has led to considerable vacillation among the various Trotskyist groups. The Worker’s League, for instance, holds the view that “all nationalism is reactionary,” while the SWP falls into the “all nationalism is revolutionary” swamp. What unites the two is tailism. The first tails after the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy while the latter tails after the nationalism of the petty bourgeoisie. Both oppose proletarian internationalism in practice. The SWP is most explicit on its tailist line on the demand for the right of self-determination. “It is not,” writes Tony Thomas in the October 1970 International Socialist Review, “up to the revolutionary party to raise that demand, but only to support it once raised by Blacks.”

The SWP is aware, of course, that there are moderate, conservative and reactionary trends among Black nationalists. In their view, however, these are not “real” or “consistent” nationalists, since “consistent” nationalism is proletarian internationalism.

“Neutral” consciousness

This is idealism and it is manifested continuously in the SWP’s outlook. On the question of trade unionism, for instance, Ernest Mandel states in the December 1970 ISR that “trade union consciousness is in and by itself socially neutral. It is neither reactionary nor revolutionary.” Mandel’s “in and by itself” stand takes him outside and “above” classes and class struggle and into the realm of pure thought. In the process he throws out the whole burden of Lenin’s What is to be Done, a work that insisted that trade union consciousness was bourgeois and had to be struggled against, whether it played a progressive or backward role in certain circumstances.

This method extends to the SWP’s overall view of Marxism-Leninism. “Marxism,” says SWP leader Joseph Hansen, amounts to “empiricism systematically carried out.” Here Hansen views dialectical materialism as simply a quantitative and evolutionary development of pragmatism, the world outlook of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

What it actually means, however, is that the Trotskyists have never broken with bourgeois ideology themselves, but jump back and forth between bourgeois rationalism and bourgeois empiricism. Both are forms of idealism and reflect their present-day petty bourgeois class character. One area in which this becomes most apparent is the SWP’s approach to the woman question.
*****
The woman question

The Trotskyist stand on the woman question, like their approach to politics in general, is “left” in form and right in essence.

The views on the women’s struggle of the two major Trotskyist groupings in the U.S. – the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and the Workers League – also express the vacillating character of their movement in tailing after the spontaneity of the masses.

The two organizations appear to be fundamentally opposed on the issue. The SWP, for instance, considers itself to be “revolutionary feminist.” “If you love revolution,” goes one of their slogans, “then you’ll love feminism.”

The Workers League heads in another direction. “The feminist movement,” says one of their polemics against the SWP, “plays a reactionary role, splitting the working class and sowing the illusion that the problems of working class women could be solved apart from the fight for socialism. The movement is directed against the working class and the revolutionary party.”

In essence the two positions are the same. Both abandon the struggle for proletarian leadership of the mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women.

The SWP bows to the spontaneity of the just struggle waged by the women of the middle classes. The Workers League, for its part, liquidates even the pretense of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the woman question and tails after the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers at the point of production.

Both are similar in another respect. Both identify the entire women’s movement with the feminist trend. The Workers League does this in the guise of dismissing the movement as “middle class reformism.” The SWP view takes this form:

“Feminism,” writes Linda Jenness in the April 27, 1973 Militant, “is where women are out fighting for things that are in their interest. Feminism is wherever women are challenging the traditional roles assigned to them.”

The Workers League, of course, has no influence in the women’s movement, except as a negative example that strengthens conservative and anti-communist trends.

The SWP, however, plays a more pernicious role. It considers itself an uncompromising champion of women’s rights and by adapting itself to feminism, has gained a following for its ideas among a section of the middle class youth.

Main blow on the family

The SWP gives a “left” cover to its views by concentrating its attack on the family as the principal institution perpetuating the oppression of women. “The feminist movement today,” states the SWP’s 1971 convention resolution entitled Towards a Mass Feminist Movement, “started out by questioning the basic structure and institutions of this society, especially the family.” Caroline Lund, writing in the October 1970 International Socialist Review adds, “The oppression of women by other institutions has been directly related to their role in the family.”

In this, she follows the lead of Trotsky. While he gave the appearance of championing the cause of Soviet women and criticised some mistaken positions of the CPSU – e.g. banning abortions at one time – he too panicked over the tasks of socialist construction, and launched a utopian attack on the family.

Lund goes on to attack the idea of struggling for equality within the family: “Women have had enough of being so-called partners! We want to be whole individuals, with our own lives and aspirations. There should be no ‘head of the family,’ neither a man nor a woman, no domination of human beings over other human beings – including children.” As for the youth, they too should abandon the struggle in that arena. “Young people,” she says, “cannot as a rule work out their own lives satisfactorily until they break from their families.”

The Marxist-Leninist movement should have no illusions about the character of the family nor romanticize its traditional role, which Engels described as one of the pillars of class society. It is not the role of the proletarian movement, however, to center its attack on the family nor to call for its abolition. The imperialists themselves are causing its erosion, as the fact that one out of three marriages now ends in divorce shows at a glance.

The point is that there is no mass alternative to the nuclear family in capitalist society or even in the first stages of socialist construction. Without the family unit, working women with children would have to abandon even the minimal protections that it affords.

This is why the workers’ movement, in the course of the struggle for socialism, aims to win jobs for women, emphasizes the daycare struggle and raises the fight for equality within the family, for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home.

As to what form the family will take under fully developed communism, Engels said there could only be speculation and that it was a task for future generations to decide. In the first stages of socialism, however, he said that the working-class family would probably take a purely monogamous form for the first time, since in capitalist society monogamy was, in practice, primarily for the woman.

Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the state. In his polemics with the anarchists, Lenin agreed that the classless society would have no state. History and class struggle, however, have determined the need for a transitional proletarian state that would only wither away with the dying out of classes and class struggle. Thus it would be incorrect to call for the abolition of any type of state or the abolition of the workers’ state just after the seizure of power.

But to the Trotskyists the fact that the monogamous nuclear family continues to exist in socialist countries like China and to develop along lines of greater equality for women is not seen as a progressive step forward. Instead it is slandered as “a reformist policy continuing the subjugation of women and reinforcing a bureaucratic caste.”

The Trotskyists also capitulate to the feminist trend by raising the idea of “sisterhood” and placing it above the class struggle in practice.

“The truth is,” states the SWP’s 1971 document, “that women are at the same time united by sexual oppression and divided by class society.”

It is true that there are two aspects to the oppression of women by male supremacy. The principal aspect. is a class question, the antagonistic contradiction between the masses of women and the imperialists. The secondary aspect is a non-antagonistic contradiction among the people, the contradiction between men and women.

Broad unity possible

Thus even the women of the exploiting classes – to a certain extent and in a limited way – share in the general oppression of women and as a consequence can make a contribution to the united front. But this potential unity among primarily working-class and middle-class women can develop in a progressive way only through the struggle for leadership by the proletarian women and their class outlook within the united front against imperialism, one of the spearheads of which is the mass democratic women’s movement. If left to spontaneity, the class contradiction between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie becomes primary and the movement remains fragmented.

This is exactly what the SWP does. In place of the leading role of the proletariat, it substitutes the idealist notion of “inherent logic.” In answering the question of which will become primary, the unity or division in the women’s movement, the SWP states: “Sisterhood is powerful because of this universal female oppression, and this is the basis for the existence of an independent, nonexclusive, mass feminist movement with an anti-capitalist logic.”

Thus “sisterhood” prevails over class struggle and the role of the working women is reduced to the obvious comment that they have “the most to gain” from democratic reforms.

The SWP likes to claim that it is building the women’s movement among the masses. In addition to the fact that it is raising a petty bourgeois line; this claim is not even true by their own admission. At a time when the rising trend in the women’s movement is developing among the working women, particularly in the daycare battles being led by third world working women, the SWP focuses its attention on the women students. “Building campus women’s liberation groups,” says the SWP, “is a key task, since the campus groups are the largest and fastest growing sector of the movement.”

Reflects SWP’s base

The particular concerns of this section of women, while part of the woman question in general, are reflected in the emphasis the SWP puts forward in its line and tactics. Most women students do not have children, family responsibilities or jobs. Many are still under the thumb of parental authority or in the process of rebelling against it, and this is manifested in the SWP’s concentrated fire on the family.

But the main reflection is in the Trotskyist’s approach to the struggle to repeal anti-abortion laws. Here the SWP has focused on the abortion question as the most important issue of the women’s movement, raised it in isolation and refused to raise other demands such as childcare and job equality together with it in united front coalitions. The result has been obvious. Now that the reform has been won, the “single-issue” coalitions have disintegrated and the Trotskyists are floundering in a quandary over what to do next.

But the SWP has had some success. Its single-issue approach made its contribution to increasing the divisions in the women’s movement. The refusal to unite the abortion struggle with the movement for daycare, for instance, has the consequence of failing to combat the prejudice among some sections of the masses that the women’s struggle is against children and aimed at destroying the family.

Reich’s idealism

At the same time that the SWP conducts a semi-anarchist attack on the family, emphasizing the neo-Freudian idealism of Wilhelm Reich, they draw back one step from the logical conclusion of demanding its abolition. Instead, in classic form, they switch over to reformism.

“The heart of the struggle for liberation,” states the SWP’s 1971 statement, “is not toward counter-institutionism, but fighting to wrest the vast resources ... away from the ruling classes.”

The difference between “wresting away resources” and expropriating the expropriators through the proletarian dictatorship is the difference between reform.and revolution, between revisionism and Marxism-Leninism.

“The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out,” Lenin told Clara Zetkin in 1920. “That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.”

The SWP’s failure in this regard is followed by its general extension into the modern revisionist theory of “structural reform.”
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Reform or revolution?

The Trotskyists in this country are relatively well known for their ultra-left opposition to the strategy of revolution by stages in the colonial countries.

To the anti-imperialist united front, aimed at forming a transitional new democratic state and led by the proletariat, they counterpose the line of immediate transition to the proletarian dictatorship.

What is less apparent, however, is that the Socialist Workers party, the largest Trotskyist group in the U.S. and representing the main trend in Trotskyism internationally, puts forward just the opposite strategy for revolution in the advanced capitalist countries.

In fact, despite their fulminations against the revisionist Communist party, they go a long way toward advocating a two-stage “anti-monopoly coalition” strategy, flirt with the idea of “peaceful transition” and scrap the theory of the proletarian dictatorship.

But there is actually a unity between the SWP’s “two lines.” In both cases they set the democratic movement and the class struggle against each other by denying the leading role of the proletariat in the united front against imperialism.

The Trotskyist position raises the question: What is the fundamental contradiction in the U.S.? “The irrepressible antagonism,” writes SWP theoretician George Novack in his book, Democracy and Revolution, “between the dominant monopolists and the strivings for equality, social justice and even for life itself among the masses of the American population holds out two opposing lines of long-range development for American politics.”

Thus it is not the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the contradiction between the “masses” and the “dominant monopolists” that is the determining factor in the development of the proletarian revolution.

There is no doubt among Marxist-Leninists that the development of the democratic struggles of the masses can serve to advance the class struggle and even in certain periods play a leading role in raising mass anti-imperialist consciousness. This is the meaning, for instance, of Mao Tsetung’s statement that the Afro-American people’s struggle has served as a “clarion call” to all the oppressed and exploited to rise up against the imperialists.

But when all is said and done, it is also the “ABC” of Marxism-Leninism that it is the development and resolution of the class struggle that determines the development and resolution of She ~r democratic struggles, including the struggle against national oppression. This is the meaning of Mao’s statement that, in the final analysis, national struggle is a matter of class struggle and the reason why Marxist-Leninists place in the forefront the struggle for leadership by the proletariat in the national liberation movements and all other democratic anti-imperialist struggles.

The position of the SWP is completely opposed to this view. Their approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the “vanguard” leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the “vanguard of the vanguard” in each sector is presently made up of the student youth.

Another SWP theoretician, George Breitman, makes this subordination of class struggle to democratic struggle clear in his pamphlet, How a Minority Can Change Society. “The Negro people,” he writes, “although a minority, can, with consistent leadership, lead the American working class in the revolution that will abolish capitalism.”

Breitman then sums up the Marxist position that oppressed nationalities cannot win full democratic rights under capitalism, thus making their struggle a revolutionary question. Then he adds: “But that is not what I am discussing here. What I am talking about now is something else – the capacity of the Negro people to lead the working-class revolution to replace capitalism.”

Breitman’s shell game

This is backed up with a sleight of hand maneuver. Breitman first says Black people are a “racial minority” that is “overwhelmingly proletarian” in composition. Next he states, “Negroes are an important section of the working class as well as a racial minority.” Then he concludes that “unless we are blind” we can see that Black people are “the most radicalized section of the working class.”

But Breitman is the one who is blind. He has distorted the elementary truth that Black workers stand at the center and play a leading role in both the national and class struggles into the false claim that all Blacks are workers, thus liquidating the national question, the class divisions among the Black people and then demagogically topping it all off with an absurd analogy with the Russian revolution, where he casts the Black people in the role of the proletariat and the masses of the white workers as the peasantry.

That the SWP does not see this line as any special attribute of the national question is evident in their course since Breitman’s statement was first put forward in January 1964. Since then they have applied the same line of reasoning to the youth movement, the women’s movement, the Chicano movement and finally to the gay liberation movement.

How does the SWP propose to lead each of these “independent forces” to power? Again, the initial line is stated by Breitman in his attitude toward forming an all-Black political party with a “transitional” reformist program. “Without Negro votes, the present two-party system will pass from the scene and be replaced by something different, out of which Negroes may be able to acquire new and more reliable allies than up to now. And all of this can be accomplished by the simple device of forming a Negro party and running independent Negro candidates.”

“Something different”?

What is the “something different” that will so miraculously replace the two-party system? The next step would be the formation of a reformist parliamentary labor party, which the SWP would try to join as dual members. The labor party and the Black party would then form an alliance with a Chicano party and possibly, although this has only been raised in SWP internal bulletins, a women’s party.

All these together, of course, would make a bid for a parliamentary majority. The SWP’s role would be to make them “consistent” in their fight for reforms by pursuing the path of “anti-capitalist structural reform” put forward by the revisionist Italian Communist party. “The fundamental goal of these reforms,” writes Ernest Mandel in his Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, “would be to take away the levels of command in the economy from the financial groups, trusts and monopolies and place them in the hands of the nation, to create a public sector of decisive weight in credit, industry and transportation and to base all of this on workers’ control.”

Mandel calls this “stage” where the “nation” has “taken command” of the monopolies through its governmental “public sector”, a period preceding the development of “dual power” which “could” precede socialist construction.

Even his slogan of “workers control” – to which the SWP would add their version of “community control” – is a reformist fraud, paralleling on the factory floor his approach on the floor of parliament.

Workers’ control, says Mandel, “is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook the books when they talk of prices and profits. In other words, it is the opening of the books and the calculation of the real production costs and the real profit margins by the workers.”

Why the importance of the calculations? So the workers can accurately determine their productivity and thus achieve a “socially just distribution” in wages.

Despite the obvious clash with Marx’s famous statement, “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ let us emblazon our banners with the revolutionary watchword, abolition of the wage system,’ ” Mandel goes all the way and suggests to the capitalists that his proposals would help them run their system more rationally “... From the standpoint of anti-cyclical policy, it is more intelligent to reduce profits and increase wages. This would permit the demand from wage workers and consumers to come to the relief of investment in the interest of maintaining the conjuncture at the high level.”

Marxist-Leninists have long maintained that the dividing line between revolutionaries and reformists in the proletarian movement is on the question of the proletarian dictatorship, on the necessity to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and to create a new proletarian state in its place; a state that would insure democracy for the workers and their allies and dictatorship against he exploiters for the entire period of transition between capitalism and the classless society of communism.

Not only do Mandel and his SWP co-thinkers put forward in essence a reformist anti-monopoly coalition line for the first “stage” of their revolution in the capitalist countries, they also join with the modern revisionists in liquidating the proletarian dictatorship in the second stage.

George Novack managed to write an entire book on the subject of democracy and the various forms of state in slave, feudal, bourgeois and socialist society without even once using the term or explaining its essence in other words. Novack, in fact, claims the “dividing line” between reformists and revolutionaries is on the question of democracy, “the one viewing democracy as a means of disposing of capitalism, the other as an excuse for maintaining it indefinitely.”

Novack also joins the CP in putting forward the necessity of armed struggle as a hypothetical statement. “In order to protect all such – democratic institutions, Marxists are ready to fight, arms in hand if need be, against ultra-reactionary movements.”

Finally, Novack admits that during the Civil War following the October revolution, “dictatorial enactments were directed exclusively against the class enemies of the revolution” and that these were necessary at the time. But then he adds, “It was not to be considered the permanent and normal state of affairs throughout the period of the transition to a classless society, as Stalinism and Maoism later preached.”

Here Novack joins hands with the Khrushchev revisionists in asserting that while the proletarian dictatorship might have been necessary earlier, what is now required is a “state of the whole people.

What Novack is combating, of course, is not only Stalin and Mao, but also Lenin, thus joining the revisionists and social democrats in a common counter-revolutionary swamp. It is followed through in the Trotskyist view of the party.
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The vanguard party

Trotsky began his career as a disrupter of the revolutionary movement during a struggle with Lenin over the character of the proletarian vanguard party.

Today his followers have – in one form or another – continued this role of attacking Leninist parties wherever they actually exist by attempting to substitute petty bourgeois ideas on organization in their place.

In his struggle with the Mensheviks, Lenin put forward the position that the proletarian revolutionary party, in addition to being guided by the most advanced scientific theory, had to be an organization of professional revolutionaries, full-time and trained activists comprised of the best elements of the working class and the revolutionary intellectuals.

This “party of a new type” is seen as the proletariat’s “general staff” in the class struggle with the bourgeoisie. It is not a debating society but an instrument to prepare the masses for smashing the existing state power, establishing and leading the proletarian dictatorship and continuing to wage the class struggle throughout the entire transition period of socialist construction to the classless society of communism.

As a weapon of class struggle, the party requires an iron discipline, subordinating the individual to the collective, and the combination of secret and open work. Decisions and policies are developed and changed through democratic discussion, debate and the process of criticism and self-criticism. Once a majority in the party has agreed, however, any minority must set aside its opinions and act in carrying out the views of the entire party with a monolithic unity in the face of the class enemy.

The party represents the vanguard of the proletariat but not by self-proclamation. It must be thoroughly integrated with the masses, learn from them and win the role of leader, not only of the workers, but of the broad masses of various classes through its revolutionary practice in the actual course of struggle.

Trotsky’s opposition

Trotsky stood in open and hostile opposition to this view of the party almost to the eve of the October revolution in 1917. He took a centrist position, demanding that the Bolsheviks unite in the same party with the Mensheviks. The only way this could happen, of course, would be for Lenin to dissolve the type of organization he had constructed. Hence the term “liquidationist,” which Lenin applied to Trotsky with a vengeance, defining it as opportunism gone to the extreme of dissolving the proletariat’s key weapon – its organization.

Trotsky agreed with the Menshevik position on organization. He wanted a party without a strict discipline, with contending groups and factions that could be “broad” enough to contain those who proclaimed themselves members by simply stating agreement with general principles. He attacked Lenin viciously:

“Not an accident but a deep ‘omen,’ ” Trotsky wrote in 1904, “is the fact that the leader of the reactionary wing of our party, Comrade Lenin, who is defending the tactical methods of caricature Jacobinism. was psychologically forced to give such a definition of Social- Democracy which represents nothing but a theoretical attempt at destroying the class character of our party.”

This is Trotsky’s classic anti-communist summary of Lenin’s policy: “The barracks regime cannot be the regime of our party, just as the factory cannot be its example. These methods bring about a situation that the party organization will replace the party, the central committee will replace the party organization, and finally the ‘dictator’ will replace the central committee ... The committees will do all the ‘directing’ while ‘the people remain silent.’ ”

Despite the fact that Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks just before October, he never gave up the essence of these views. Although he formally stated he was wrong on the party, his view that it was his particular strategic line of “permanent revolution” that won out over Lenin’s has the clear implication that the issue was not all that important. As Michael Miller points out in the recently published pamphlet, From Trotskyism to Social-Imperialism:

From Trotsky’s paint of view a miracle happened at this propitious moment in history. The revolution joined Trotsky. Trotsky didn’t really join the Bolsheviks. They joined him! 40,000 Bolshevik workers joined Trotsky since he had foreseen everything! ... The problem with Trotsky’s theory is that it requires no party at all ... Trotsky’s theory of October is that the Bolsheviks, having finally come around to the “correct idea,” were able to lead the revolution despite having an incorrect line for 14 years prior to the event.

After Lenin’s death Trotsky reasserted his old ideas on the party in a new form. He now paid lip service to democratic centralism, but demanded “freedom of criticism” within the party in the form of the freedom to organize factional groupings, each with its own leadership structures, platforms, programs and press. As the history of Trotsky’s “left opposition” also demonstrated, in practice he wanted factions with their own internal discipline that could be exercised against the party’s, even to the extent of carrying out actions among the masses expressly forbidden by the party and in opposition to its line.

In 1904 Trotsky had attacked Lenin for “destroying the class character of our party.” In a sense, this was true, although it was not what Trotsky had in mind. Lenin clearly aimed at defeating the petty bourgeois character of the party and it is precisely the petty bourgeois view of both the party and state as an ideal form of radical democratic parliament that Trotsky was never able to abandon.

Trotsky’s perspective comes out most clearly in his 1935 articles, If America Should Go Communist. Despite the fact that the U.S. bourgeoisie is far more sophisticated in the practice of counter-revolution than their Russian counterparts, Trotsky thinks the revolution will be much easier here. Since the monopoly capitalists are in a minority and “everybody below this group is already economically prepared for communism,” Trotsky claims “there is no reason why these (non-monopoly) groups should oppose determined resistance.” As for the monopolists, “they will cease struggling as soon as they fail to find people to fight for them.”

The non-monopoly capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, inspired by the productivity of a planned economy after “a good long time to think things over,” could be “kept solvent until they were gradually and without compulsion sucked into the socialized business system. Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures which circumstances have often imposed on the Russians.”

Which drastic measures? While Trotsky admits the monopolists would find no place in U.S. soviets, he adds that “with us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which itself has become a bureaucracy.” In contrast, “The American soviets will be full-blooded and vigorous, without need or opportunity for such measures ... A wide struggle between interests, groups and ideas is not only conceivable – it is inevitable ... All of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle, and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings.”

In addition to asserting the need for a multiparty electoral system, another “drastic measure” to be thrown out is the proletarian control of the press. Instead, “it might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election. Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press will depend on their numerical strength.”

It is a basic principle of Marxism that different parties represent the interests of different classes and sections of classes. Commenting on this same article by Trotsky, M.J. Olgin wrote in his 1935 book, Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise:

Soviet parliaments

If the Communist party represents the workers, then obviously the other parties must represent the rich farmers, the poor farmers, the middle bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, perhaps the intellectuals. How will these parties function? Naturally by struggle ... A soviet very much resembling a bourgeois parliament. Several parties represented in it with equal rights. Each party fighting the others. Several parties making a coalition to defeat the dangerous common rival. Why not a coalition of all the other parties against the party of the workers? This latter party, in Trotsky’s conception, should be split into a number of legalized groups and factions with their own separate platforms. The population will have its choice of parties, groups, programs. No special discipline is needed for any party; no monolithic unity for the communist party.

Olgin sums up: “How unity can be achieved under these conditions remains a secret of Trotsky’s. But then he does not worry much about unity because his slogan is, ‘Without compulsion!’ ”

In stark contrast stands Lenin’s view. “The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most stubborn, the most acute, the most merciless struggle of the pew class against the more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance has grown tenfold after it has been overthrown. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stubborn struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative, against the powers and traditions of the old society.”

The Trotskyist parties today continue to repudiate this line and follow the bankrupt views of their mentor. One consequence, of course, is that they themselves are riddled with factions and comprise a galaxy of competing organizations, all claiming the label, “Trotskyist.”

The direction of some, like the Socialist Workers party, has been in the direction of the modern revisionists, liquidating the leading role of the party into a “revolutionary nucleus” that aims to become a mass party playing simply a “catalytic” role in forming an anti-monopoly coalition.

Rationalist deviation

Others, like the Workers League, emphasize Trotsky’s idealist rationalism and remain ensconsed firmly in “left” sectarianism. As their leader, Tim Wohlforth, put it, “At heart what the party is is its program. It is nothing else. The apparatus, the forces, the people, the equipment, the paper, are all expressions of what? A program ... and a program is an idea. So at its heart you could say that the party is an idea.”

In essence, however, they can all justly claim to be Trotskyists. They are united in their opposition to Marxism-Leninism.

Trotsky’s opposition, his sabotage of the proletarian movement and his wrecking activities in the period of the united front against fascism, eventually cost him his life.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the danger of Trotskyism could be eliminated in such a manner. Trotskyism is an ideological trend within the petty bourgeoisie and as such a social basis for it exists and will continue to exist as long as there are middle classes.

The struggle against Trotskyism is also bound up with the struggle against modern revisionism, the existence and development of which has added new fuel and created new conditions for a revival of Trotskyism.

The decisive condition for a successful struggle against Trotskyism – and all forms of opportunism – is to be found in the growth of the Marxist-Leninist movement itself, in the development of the proletarian vanguard party and its winning of the masses in their millions to the banner of revolution.

The Heroic Days Of The Chinese Revolution

BOOK REVIEW

Red Star Over China, First Revised and Enlarged Edition, Edgar Snow, Bantam Books, New York, 1994

I am using the the then current spelling of names and places as they are used in this edition of the book.

For militant leftists the defense of October 1917 Russian Revolution was the touchstone issue of international politics for most of the 20th century. In the end the demise of the Soviet Union and the other non-capitalists states of East Europe in the early 1990’s formally, at least, put an end to that question in those areas. However, the issue of the fate of China in the first half of the 21st century is in an important sense the touchstone Russian question of international politics today. The question, forward to socialism or back to some neo-capitalist formation like those in Russia and East Europe to this reviewer is an open question today. With that perspective in mind, and not unmindful of the publicity given China recently as the host of the 2008 Olympics, it is high time that this reviewer spent more time on this issue than he has thus far in this space. As preparation, it is always best to get some historical background, especially so for that new generation of militants who are unfamiliar with the last hundred years of leftist history.

As I have recently mentioned in another China review in this space, The History of The Chinese Communist Party 1921-1949, the Communist International and Russian Communist Party fights over strategy for the Chinese revolution between the Stalinists and the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the mid-1920’s are must reading. As is the history of the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution in the cities in 1927 and a little later. However, for a view of the Chinese Revolution in the period after its defeat no better place to start for a quick early overview of the heroic days of the Chinese revolution and the besieged Chinese Communist Party before the seizure of power, is journalist Edgar Snow’s reportage on the military fight to shape China’s future between the Maoist-led Red Army and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army in the mid-1930s.

Snow’s journalistic endeavors have come in for more than their fair share of criticism, especially in the post-1949 period when the debate over who ‘lost’ China raged in the West, especially the United States. That criticism is somewhat irrelevant (and antiqued) now. The value of his work for us is that he was the first Western journalist to actually go to the outer regions of China where the Red Army was holed up in Yenan after the heroic and historic Long March. The Long March itself represented an understanding that the pro-Communist forces which held so much promise of seizing power in the 1920’s were fighting a rearguard action in the mid-1930s. Snow’s first-hand interviews with Mao, Chu Teh, Lin Piao, Ho Lung or, in their absence, those close to them provided that critical “first draft of history” that is always being touted by newspaper people. Moreover, his analysis and description of life in the Chinese soviet areas, the kind of issues that were on the top of people’s minds and the critical 1930s issue of the struggle against the furiously encroaching Japanese holds up fairly well.

The first question that any working class militant today has to ask, at least one who has imbibed the Russian Revolution as the touchstone event of the 20th century, is how a communist party assumed to represent the historic interests of the urban working class came out of the boondocks building a peasant army which at its height was fighting for land distribution and a national independence struggle against the Japanese. Part of that answer is the afore-mentioned defeat in the cities in the 1920s due to disastrous strategic problems concerning the nature of the “third-word” national bourgeoisie in the age of imperialism (a question that still stymies the international working class movement). Part was the overwhelming peasant nature of early 20th century Chinese society and the practical difficulties of creating any military force not centered on the peasantry. However, the biggest part is a conception on the part of the Chinese Communist leadership that guerrilla warfare was the only practical way to defeat the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek, American imperialism or who ever decided to take aim at China.

This distortion led to serious problems later, not only in practical matter of organizing a rural society for the tasks of industrialization but by making a virtue out of, perhaps, necessity. The so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) that convulsed China for a decade from the mid-1960s emblazoned on its banner the notion of the countryside (on a world scale) defeating the cities (on a world scale). That is the Chinese struggle writ large. But so much for that now.

The true value of Snow’s book lies for its detailing of the following accounts. First, a rather vivid description of the various hardships of his getting to Yenan as an individual that reflected the Communists' difficulties in trying to bring a whole army north. Secondly, a vivid description of the set up of the soviets and the social, political and cultural arrangements of life in the soviet areas. Thirdly, in Snow’s random interviews of the rank and file soldiers of the Red Army, the peasants whose co-operation was critical to the defense of the soviet areas and of the cultural/educational/administrative workers who kept the apparatus working through thick and thin. Lastly, Snow has painstakingly provided a plethora of end notes and biographical sketches concerning the fates of the various characters from all factions that people his journals, a wealth of data about various events up until 1937 and, perhaps, most importantly, much updated information including material on the GPCR from subsequent trips to China. This later material gathered at a time when very little was known about what was going on in China, especially around the intra-bureaucratic struggle behind the scenes of the GPCR. Retroactive kudos to Edgar Snow.

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.
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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.
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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!