William Z. Foster on Mao Zedong

(from William Z. Foster's History of the Three Internationals, 1955)

The Role of Mao Tse-tung

The great leader of the Chinese Revolution possesses many of the qualities of leadership that characterized Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. A man of resolution, initiative, and boundless energy, Mao is a brilliant theoretician, an exceptional organizer, and a very powerful leader of the masses in open struggle. These were the qualities that enabled this creative Marxist genius, in the face of prodigious difficulties, to lead the more than half a billion of the Chinese people to decisive victory.

Mao's theoretical work ranges over a vast scope. It sums up to an adaptation of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions prevailing in China, a monumental task which he has done with profound skill and thoroughness. The basis of this work was a Marxist evaluation of the character, over the years, of the developing Chinese Revolution - his differentiation of the new-type bourgeois democratic revolution from the old type, and the establishment of its relationship to the socialist revolution, constitute major contributions to the general body of Marxist theory. Mao also paid close attention to the Marxist analysis of class forces in China and the relation to each other of democratic forces in united-front movements, his work in this respect being one of the classics of Communist political writing. Classical, too, are Mao's writings on military strategy and tactics, in the situation of a guerilla army gradually growing into a mass military force and carrying on the struggle in the face of a vastly stronger enemy. Splendid also is Mao's development theoretically of the leading role of the small Chinese proletariat especially in the midst of the vast sea of peasants. Another of Mao's many theoretical achievements was his skilled utilization of the three principles of Sun Yat Sen, which are widely popular among the masses, as part of the minimum program of the Communist Party, thus taking over the democratic traditions of the famous Chinese bourgeois revolutionist. Brilliant also were his innumerable polemics with every sort of deviator and enemy. Mao's theoretical work extended not only into the fields of economics, politics, and military strategy, but also into literature, and philosophy. His work On Contradiction is a comprehensive, profound and popular exposition of the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge.

Mao is also a splendid mass organizer and administrator. He is not one merely to throw out broad slogans; he also knows how to go to the masses and organize them to realize these slogans. His works are filled with consideration of the most detailed questions of organizational work, in the building of the Communist Party, the people's army, the trade unions, and all other organizations of the people. And it is all written in the simplest of language. A classical example of this is his work On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party, dealing with such errors as "the purely military viewpoint, extreme democratization, non-organizational viewpoint, absolute equalitarianism, subjectivism, adventurism, etc." Mao himself, born in 1893 of a poor peasant family in a village of Hunan, has had a hard life as a worker, soldier, student, and political leader. He is, indeed, a true son of the Chinese people, living their lives, knowing their thoughts and needs, and speaking their political language.

In the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, all of whom were fighters as well as great thinkers and organizers, Mao is also a superlatively good general, whether in the economic or political struggle or on the field of military battle. Along with Chu Teh and other leaders, Mao made the "Long March;" he was a noted guerilla fighter as well as tactician, and he took personal part in innumerable military campaigns. Mao's greatest political achievements have been in the sphere of direct leadership of vast masses of the people in different struggles against oppressors of every type.

When the Chinese people won the leadership of their country, there were very many elements in the capitalist world who said with final assurance: "Well, maybe it is not so bad after all; China is a vast, impossible chaos, and the Communists will break their necks trying to organize and govern it." But this was only wishful thinking, typical capitalist underestimation of the revolutionary abilities of the Chinese Communists, and especially of their great leader, Mao Tse-tung. Now such remarks are rarely heard. Already, the Chinese Communists, with Mao at their head, have clearly demonstrated that they can organize and lead forward their huge people. This adds just one more to the many "impossibilities" that they have accomplished in their epic struggle for freedom.

[I put this article up on the web for the first time, as far as I can tell. It has now been added to the William Z. Foster Archive at the MIA as well.]

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Harry Haywood: "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question"

Harry Haywood wrote the pamphlet, "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question" in 1957 to fight back against the revisionist assault on the CPUSA. It deals mainly with attacks on Harry Haywood's revolutionary line which come from James Allen, Eugene Dennis, and James Jackson. It was intended for a discussion at a meeting, following the 16th National Convention, which was to adopt on position on the African American national question. That meeting was never held, the paper in question was suppressed, and Harry Haywood, who first developed the theory that African American constituted an oppressed nation while working in the Comintern, was expelled, along with many other revolutionaries. This left the CPUSA as the hopelessly reformist organization that it is today.

This pamphlet was republished by Liberator Press in 1975, the publishing house of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which was one of the important parties and organizations that made up the New Communist Movement. Harry Haywood, after his expulsion form the CPUSA, went on to be a leader of the Mao Zedong-oriented CPML. His main theoretical work on the African American national question, Negro Liberation, is available online as a PDF file, and can be found relatively cheaply used. His autobiography, Black Bolshevik, is also obtainable. This pamphlet is difficult to find these days, but since its contents are significant in their application of Marxism-Leninism to the revolutionary movement in the United States I wanted to post a few short excerpts here in the hopes that interested persons would try to find the pamphlet and learn more about Harry Haywood and the revolutionary line he has come to represent.

Here are some selections from the pamphlet.

'The key question involved in projecting a solution for the Negro question is the universal problem of reform or revolution. The reformist position on the Negro question claims that it is being solved on the basis of gradual, progressive gains within the framework of the existing monopoly dominated system. There are variations on this theme, ranging form the Southern "liberal" gradualists to the assimilationist line of the NAACP, the most recent variation of which is solution of the Negro question through "full integration into every aspect of American life."
'While we Communists fight for every possible democratic demand of the Negro people, and welcome all advances made, we have pointed out that the Negro question is at bottom the question of an oppressed nation in the South and a national minority in the North. Therefore, the Negro question can only be solved on the basis of a revolutionary change in the Deep South. This difference is fundamental.
'When our Party adopted the position that the Negro question is in essence the question of an oppressed nation, it made a great leap forward from the bourgeois liberal view, which regarded it solely as a question of race that had to be resolved through education and humanitarian uplift. Characteristically, this bourgeois liberal view placed the main onus of racial prejudice not on the ruling class oppressors but on ignorance of the white masses.
'The Party's position was also a sharp break with the Social-Democratic viewpoint, in which racist oppression was considered of no relevance in defining the position of the Negro people in the United States. According to this view, the plight of the Negro people was regarded as purely a question of class, the same as that of the working class in general. Thus, in the name of the general class struggle it denied the specific character of the Negro question, regarding the fight for special demands of the Negro people as divisive and tending to distract workers from the struggle for socialism.
'Both views are not only scientifically incorrect but conceal the profound revolutionary and anti-imperialist character of the struggle for Negro rights which could only be finally resolved through the land revolution and the right of self-determination in the Black Belt, the historic area of Negro majority, and through winning equal rights in the North.
'The formulation of the Negro question by the Party as in essence a question of an oppressed nation correctly related the struggle of the Negro people to the class struggle of the American working class against capitalism, imperialism, and for socialism.
'Our revolutionary position on the Negro question has been challenged only during the three periods of major crisis in the Communist Party, all three of which were caused by the deeply embedded right-revisionist liquidationist trend in our Party, which has its roots in the corruptive influence of the leading imperialist bourgeoisie, to which the U.S. working class is directly subjected. It also has its roots in the overwhelmingly predominant petty-bourgeois and highly skilled worker composition of our Party and its leadership, and the low level of theoretical development of both the leadership and the rank and file' (pp 1-2).

(...)

'The right-revisionists are hard put to explain the fact it was on the basis of our revolutionary position on the Negro question that we led these great mass struggles, and won the respect of the Negro masses as the most militant, consistent fighters for Negro rights: the accolade of "The Party of the Negro People." They try to explain this phenomenon in terms of "our militancy" or "the mass upsurge of the crisis years."
'What they refuse to see is that our militancy, our orientation in the South as the fountainhead of Negro oppression, and our ability to rally the white workers in defense of Negro rights was based upon our placing of the Negro question as a revolutionary question, vital to the interests of the entire working class.
'In sum, our militant and effective struggle flowed from our understanding that the Negro question was a question of national revolution in the Deep South. It was only on the basis of this line that we were able to lead the masses in struggle for Negro rights during the 1930's' (p 35).
(...)

'This is the programmatic significance of our position that the Negro question is a question of national revolution in the Deep South. The correctness of our approach to the Negro question was proved during the struggles of the 1930's.
'The line of the C.P. brought the issue of Negro equality out of the realm of bourgeois humanitarianism, where it had been the special property of the bourgeois philanthropists and professional uplifters who sought to strip the Negro struggle of its revolutionary implications and to make it a feeble adjunct of safe and sane reforms - all obtainable presumably within the existing imperialist-dominated system. It grounded the issue of Negro liberation firmly in the fight of the American people for full democracy and in the struggle of the working class people against capitalism' (p 36).

(...)

'We, Negro Communists, do not accept the status of "aliens" to which the [revisionist] Negro Resolution relegates us. We are an integral part of the Negro movement, embodying the great revolutionary traditions of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, etc. We do not become "foreigners" when we become Communists.
'It is therefore, not only the right, but the duty of Negro Communists to project forms and methods of struggle consistent with the great revolutionary traditions of the Negro people. As true patriots, we call for a consistent fight against U.S. imperialism as the main enemy of the Negro people. We call for an alliance with the white working class based upon common revolutionary aims. We call for international solidarity with the heroic struggles for national liberation, peace and Socialism which embrace the vast majority of mankind' (p 38).

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Harry Haywood on Trotskyism

"Trotskyism is taking action now in order to discredit Bolshevism and to undermine its foundations. It is the duty of the Party to bury Trotskyism as an ideological trend." - J. V. Stalin, "Trotskyism or Leninism?"

The great African American Marxist-Leninist theorist Harry Haywood is particularly known for his work on the African American national question, but he made contributions on other issues and was involved in the other struggles of the day. Here's what Harry Haywood, who lived in the Soviet Union for four and half years as a member of the Comintern, said in the chapter of his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, entitled "Trotsky's Day in Court" regarding Trotskyism.

First, he says that "[Trotsky's] writings were readily available throughout the school [KUTVA, where Haywood and others were studying], and the issues of the struggle were constantly on the agenda in our collectives. These were discussed in our classes, as they were in factories, schools and peasant organizations throughout the country" (p. 182).

He goes on to say that "The struggle raged over a period of five years (1922-27) during which time the Trotsky bloc had access to the press and Trotsky's works were widely circulated for everyone to read. Trotsky was not defeated by bureaucratic decisions or Stalin's control of the Party apparatus - as his partisans and Trotskyite historians claim. He had his day in court and finally lost because his whole position flew in the face of Soviet and world realities. He was doomed to defeat because his ideas were incorrect and failed to conform to objective conditions, as well as the needs and interests of the Soviet people" (ibid).

Haywood describes the Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1926:

"Stalin made the report for the Russian delegation. Trotsky then asked for two hours to defend his position; he was given one. He spoke in Russian, and then personally translated and delivered his speech in German and then in French. In all, he held the floor about three hours.

"Otto said it was the greates display of oratory he had ever heard. But despite this, Trotsky and his allies (Zinoviev and Kamenev) suffered a resounding defeat, obtaining only two votes out of the whole body. The delegates from outside the Soviet Union didn't accept Trotsky's view that socialism in one country was a betrayl of the revolution. On the contrary, the success of the Soviet Union in building socialism was an inspiration to the international revolution. (...)

"The American Party united across factional lines in support of Stalin. The Trotsky opposition, already defeated within the Soviet Union, was now shattered internationally. From there on out, it was downhill for Trotsky. I witnessed Trotsky's opposition bloc degenerate from an unprincipled faction within the Party to a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the Party and the Soviet state. We learned of secret, illegal meetings held in the Silver Woods outside of Moscow, the establishment of factional printing presses - all in violation of Party discipline. Their activities reached a high point during the November 7, 1927 anniversary of the Revolution.

"At the Tenth Anniversary, Trosky's followers attempted to stage a counter-demonstration in opposition to the traditional celebration. I remember vividly the scene of our school contingent marching its way to Red Square. As we passed the Hotel Moscow, Trotskyist leaflets were showered down on us, and oraters appeared at the windows of the hotel shouting slogans of 'Down with Stalin.'

"They were answered with catcalls and booing from the crowds in the streets below. We seized the leaflets and tore them up. This attempt to rally the people against the Party was a total failure and struck no responsive chord among the masses. It was equivalent to rebellion and this demonstration was the last overt act of the Trotskyist opposition.

"During the next month Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were expelled - along with seventy-four of their chief supporters." (pp. 183-184).

Other helpful articles on Trotskyism are here:

"Preface to Trotskyism or Leninism?" by Harpal Brar of the CPGB-ML.
http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/trotvslenin.htm

Similar but more concise:"Trotskyism or Leninism?: An Historical Outline" by Tim Logan (CPGB-ML) to the Stalin Society (UK)
http://leftspot.com/blog/?q=node/255

See also:"Critiques of Contemporary Trotskyism" - a collection
http://leftspot.com/blog/?q=trotskyism

On Trotskyism: Problems of Theory and History by Kostas Mavrakis
http://marx2mao.com/Other/OT73NB.html

"Trotskyism or Leninism?" by J. V. Stalin
http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/TL24.html

"The Trotskyist Opposition Before and Now" by J. V. Stalin
http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/TO27.html

Report of Court Proceedings: The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre: Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R.
http://marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1936/moscow-trials/index.htm

Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens
http://www.plp.org/books/Stalin/book.html

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Suggested Reading in Marxism

Here is some literature I would suggest people read, some of my favorites. Listed below is what is in the photo above. Some of this material is available online, and I'll provide a link where that is the case. I don't agree with every word of everything in these books, but I do agree with them overall. Finally, I should add that there are some things I would suggest which aren't included, merely because I structured this list around a picture of some books I actually physically posses. So some books are included as representative a larger body of work, such as that of the important U.S. Marxist-Leninist leader and theorist William Z. Foster, for example.

Marx & Engels, "The Communist Manifesto"

V. I. Lenin, "What is to be Done?", "Left-Wing Communism", and "Marx-Engels-Marxism"

J. V. Stalin, "Problems of Leninism"

Mao Zedong, "Selected Works" and "Quotations from Chairman Mao"

Harry Haywood, "Negro Liberation", "For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question", and "Black Bolshevik"

William Z. Foster, "American Trade Unionism"

Revolutionary Union, "Build the Anti-Imperialist Student Movement"

Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, "Build the Black Liberation Movement"

Proletarian Unity League, "2, 3, Many Parties of a New Type?"

League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), "Founding Statement"

Freedom Road Socialist Organization, "Unity Statement", "Unity Statement on the National Question", "Some Points on the Mass Line", and "Summing up the Communist Movement"

Workers Party of Belgium, "Another View of Stalin"

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (FARC-EP), "Historical Outline"

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, "A Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine"

Communist Party of the Philippines, "Philippine Society and Revolution"

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New pamphlet from Freedom Road: "Summing up the History of the Communist Movement - From Marx to 1999"

Though the text of the document has been on the Freedom Road Socialist Organization website for a long time, FRSO has just released the 1999 Declaration of the International Communist Seminar as a new pamphlet: 1999 Declaration of the International Communist Seminar: Summing up the History of the Communist Movement - From Marx to 1999.

FRSO is one of many Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations from around the world who participate in the International Communist Seminar and who signed onto this important document. As such, it represents Freedom Road's understanding of some of the key questions of Marxism.

This document represents a superb attempt at summing up the experiences of building socialism in the 20th century. It looks at the contributions of V. I. Lenin, J. V. Stalin, and Mao Zedong in particular and, examining the rise of revisionism and the struggle against it, draws out some principal theses of Marxism-Leninism.

I'd like to encourage everyone to read it. Marxists should print out the pamphlet and distribute it. It is an excellent piece for introducing people to Marxist theory and practice and provides a good basis for deeper discussion of some of the more complex questions of the experiences of socialist revolution in the last 100 years.

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Mao! Mao! : Review of Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise"

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." - Bertolt Brecht

As of this May, La Chinoise (1967), Jean-Luc Godard's classic film about the Maoist movement in France (based on Dostoevsky's book, The Devils), is now available on DVD! I just finished watching it for the first time, and I'd like to share a few initial thoughts, which, because of the film's freshness in my mind, are not very systematic.

First, I'd seen two of Godard's movies before: Breathless (1960), which I didn't care for, and Le Petit Soldat (also from 1960), which I enjoyed. So I wasn't sure what to expect, aside from a general idea that this was a somewhat experimental film about Maoism. Godard himself identified as a Maoist, and along with Jean-Paul Sartre, was gravitating around the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP). Additionally, this film had a big impact on French Maoism after the events of May 1968. It is characteristic of the ultraleft, however, in that it is fairly light on the Mass Line - "from the masses, to the masses" and all that.

One is reminded of a quote from Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art:

'To study Marxism means to apply the dialectical materialist and historical materialist viewpoint in our observation of the world, of society and of literature and art; it does not mean writing philosophical lectures into our works of literature and art. Marxism embraces but cannot replace realism in literary and artistic creation, just as it embraces but cannot replace the atomic and electronic theories in physics. Empty, dry dogmatic formulas do indeed destroy the creative mood; not only that, they first destroy Marxism. Dogmatic "Marxism" is not Marxism, it is anti-Marxism. Then does not Marxism destroy the creative mood? Yes, it does. It definitely destroys creative moods that are feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualist, nihilist, art-for-art's sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat. So far as proletarian writers and artists are concerned, should not these kinds of creative moods be destroyed? I think they should; they should be utterly destroyed. And while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed.'

Here is the Trailer:


While it is an interesting and entertaining film, perhaps targeted at Leftist students and young intellectuals, who were becoming more and more militant in those days, it does indeed seem to be "writing philosophical lectures into our works of literature and art". Godard attempts to incorporate into cinema some of Bertolt Brecht's Marxist theory of "epic" or "dialectical" theatre, which, through "estrangement effect" is all about art as presentation of philosophical arguement through dialogue, along with an audience that must be very conscious of itself as an audience (basically the opposite of "suspension of disbelief"). Godard put it like this in a famous quote: "I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie." It even includes direct shots of the camera and other tools of the trade so as not to allow the viewer to forget that they are watching a movie. It is not a subtle film, by any means, but Godard seems to have seen this somewhat in-your-face Brechtian style as necessary towards the destruction of all of those reactionary "creative moods" that Mao said "should be utterly destroyed" so that something new could be created.

It is also worth mentioning as a secondary point and especially for those who are not familiar with the pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist movement in France, that the Maoist groups in France criticized the film for making individual terrorism (as opposed to mass actions and class struggle) the absolute and central question and making it appear as though the Maoists fetishized violence. This shows a great deal of the youthful impatience that the activists of the 60's felt in the face of the genocidal war in Vietnam on the one hand and the inspirational event of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the other. But this question of mass or individual violence is actually dealt with quite well in the scene on the train towards the close of the film. Here, in a dialogue between the protagonist, Véronique, and the militant philosophy professor, Francis Jeanson, the question is explored fully from both sides. I'm not going to spoil that for you though.

Here is an interesting and illustrative clip from the film showing the Maoists discussing the Vietnam war:


Like the Maoist GP with which Godard was associated, this is a very intellectual film. As one bourgeois reviewer put it, "La Chinoise is not an easily accessible film, in the same way that the Himalayas are not easily accessible for a casual stroll on a Thursday afternoon. Even within the sphere of other complicated works of Godard, this film requires serious educational cojones to appreciate its multilayered oblique narrative, the dense social theory spouted by its protagonists, the railing assault on Gaullist ideology, and the political context within the growing New Left movement of France in the 1960s. Expect to feel dumb. It is a normal side effect."

"Expect to feel dumb," may be a bit of an overstatement, but the discourse of the movie is at a pretty high level.

I would suggest that people see this film. It is a film about students inspired and stirred up by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and all the ideas and struggles surrounding it. And at the same time it is an experiment, by a film-maker likewise inspired, in artistic creation and destruction. Jean-Luc Godard's film, in his words, is attempting to break down a "capitalistic reactionary aesthetic" and create something new. For all of that, for the ideas it discusses and generates, and for the proletarian culture it seeks to help create, it is an excellent film.

For an opinion from the ultraleft regarding the film, you may as well check out the MIM movie review of La Chinoise while you're at it. They may be a little weird, and rather atypical as far as Maoism goes, with their "Maoist Third-Worldism" and all the rest, shunned as nuts by the rest of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist movement. Nonetheless, let's give credit where credit's due; you gotta love their propensity for watching a lot of movies and writing about them, if nothing else!

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Freedom Road on Maoist Revolution in Nepal

Maoists Sweep Constituent Assembly Elections in Nepal
Commentary by Josh Sykes

A new day had dawned in Nepal. After fighting a decade-long people’s war, which led to a coalition government replacing martial law imposed by the King of Nepal, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is leading the Constituent Assembly elections in Nepal. The vote counting is not completely finished, but at the time of this writing the CPN (Maoist) has won a total of 120 seats, with the opposition Nepali Congress Party coming in a distant second at 37 seats. The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) won 33 seats, but following the their election defeat their ministers have resigned from the coalition government cabinet.

A total of 601 seats are up for grabs in a complex voting system. According to the Interim Constitution of Nepal adopted in 2006, a ‘mixed system’ must be utilized for elections to the Constituent Assembly. The ‘first past the post’ system determines 240 members of the Constituent Assembly while a proportional representation system determines the other 335 directly elected members. With 120 of the total 240 first past the post election seats, the Maoists should win at least 100 more seats through proportional representation emerging as the single largest party, much to the surprise of the western media who expected the CPN (Maoist) to come in third, behind the Congress Party and CPN-UML.

The purpose of the Constituent Assembly is to draft a new constitution for Nepal following the ouster of the monarchy as a result of the people’s war led by the Maoists. According to the CPN (Maoist), the elections represent the beginning of the New Democratic process for Nepal. This refers to a two-stage revolutionary process, wherein a bloc of progressive classes, led by the CPN (Maoist), first intend to move through a ‘New Democratic’ phase of the revolution, build a People’s Republic of Nepal and eliminate the vestiges of feudalism and imperialism before moving on to the construction of socialism.

According to Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, one of the main leaders of the Maoists, the victory of the CPN (Maoist) in the constituent assembly election is the direct result of the protracted people’s war. “The people were looking for total change. We advanced the political agenda for total change during the decade-long people’s war. We have people from different castes, ethnicities, genders and people from different regions. The main agenda of the people’s war was to restructure the state. It took ten years of the people’s war to establish our political agenda. The people felt that the country’s socio-political and economic structure needed a complete overhaul. So we couldn’t look at things through our old lenses. The media and the elite missed the picture. As a result, the CA results surprised many. The ground realities had changed and they helped us to emerge as the largest party."

The CPN (Maoist) waged armed struggle against the Nepali government from 1996 to 2006 based on the military theories developed by Mao Zedong through the course of the Chinese Revolution. The Nepali’s strategy for people’s war, called Prachanda Path, after the founder and Chairman of the CPN (Maoist), Prachanda, involved combining the strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside with insurrectionary actions in the urban centers. During this process, the CPN (Maoist) established its immense popularity among the masses of workers and peasants of Nepal through radical agrarian reform, fighting with determination for the rights of women and oppressed nationalities, labor organizing and student mobilizations. (For more information about the people’s war in Nepal, see Movement fights poverty and oppression in Nepal, September/October 2005.)

The people’s war was able to advance relatively quickly because the U.S. has been tied down elsewhere, most notably by the resistance in Iraq, and has been unable to intervene to the degree that it has against similar struggles in the Philippines and Colombia. The U.S. has given some military aid to Nepal’s monarchy but has not been able to commit a sizable number of troops. Because of the U.S.’s overextension, these and other movements, such as the people’s war being led by the communists in neighboring India, have been able to make advances.

Following King Gyanendra’s dissolution of the parliament and seizure of absolute power in early 2005, the CPN (Maoist) joined with other parties in an alliance to oust the king and establish the constituent assembly elections that are now taking place. The CPN (Maoist)’s People’s Liberation Army grouped their military forces and arms into ‘cantons’ under the supervision of U.N. monitors, in 2006 as part of the peace process.

The repressive measures instituted by Gyanendra were very unpopular and at this time only a handful of Hindu fundamentalists tied to the old feudal system still support the king.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Center has been observing the elections, said that he hopes the United States will drop the CPN (Maoist) from its terrorist list and recognize the Maoist government.

The U.S. is driven by its own interests however - the maintenance of an empire in service of a corporate elite - and it is possible that it may attempt to intervene against the democratically elected Maoist government, as it did when Hamas was similarly elected in Palestine.

The elections paint a very different picture of the Maoists than a group of ‘terrorists’ as the U.S. government insists. The elections demonstrate that the CPN (Maoist) has been very popular in Nepal throughout the difficult period of the people’s war, and additionally gives the lie to claims that the guerrillas ruled the countryside through terror and intimidation. It demonstrates clearly that there is a call from the people of Nepal to end imperialism and feudalism and to work toward the possibility of a socialist future.

Josh Sykes is a member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

(Originally posted on the FRSO website: http://www.frso.org/about/statements/2008/nepal.htm)

Also from FRSO:
Resolution in Solidarity with the Revolutionary Movement in Nepal and Against U.S. Intervention (May 2007)

From Fight Back! News:
Movement Fights Poverty and Oppression in Nepal (July 2005)
On the Verge of Revolution in Nepal (April 2006)

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CPN (Maoist) Sweeping Constituent Assembly Elections

See the "History in the Making" sidebar (on the main page) for updates and info as things develop with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the historic elections there. The official information from the Elections commission is here. The info from the Nepal Elections Portal should also prove helpful.

What is basically clear is this:

1.) The CPN (Maoist) controlled basically the entire rural portion of the country during the decade-long protracted people's war. The communist movement has been a leading force in Nepal for some time. The Maoists established themselves through the people's war by building dual power in the rural areas, where they acted as a popular government. Through a combination of radical land reform, student organizing, and labor work, they were able to build a strong base among workers and peasants of Nepal. The U.S., tied down in its losing battle with the national resistance in Iraq, has been unable to directly intervene militarily thus far.


2.) Now that the initial vote counting is underway for the constituent assembly elections, it is very clear that the Maoists are sweeping an overwhelming majority. Of the two other major parties, the Nepali Congress Party has won significantly less then they had expected, and the CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist) has dropped out altogether. It would take a huge upset for the Maoists to come out shy of tremendous control of the constituent assembly and parliament. This gives the lie to all of the nonsense about the Maoists ruling the countryside through terror and shows that they are immensely popular among the Nepalese workers and peasants. Jimmy Carter is calling for the U.S. to drop the "terrorist" label form the CPN (Maoist) and recogize their democratically elected government. From here the Maoists say they will build a New Democratic Republic.


3.) King Gyanendra is now completely isolated and nobody but a handful of Royalists, a few big landlords and Hindu fundamentalists, still support him since his seizure of power in 2005 and the repressive crackdowns since. He and the monarchy he represents will never be a force in Nepal again. The future of Nepal is not certain, but one thing that is certain is this: The Monarchy is finished and feudalism is on the way out.



So what happens next?

Maoist leader, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai gave an excellent interview following his election in his constituency. Asked to assess the election results, Bhattarai said, "The people were looking for total change. We advanced the political agenda for total change during the decade-long people’s war. We have people from different castes, ethnicities, genders and people from different regions. The main agenda of the people’s war was to restructure the state. It took 10 years of the people’s war to establish our political agenda. The people felt that the country’s socio-political and economic structure needed a complete overhaul. So we couldn’t look at things through our old lenses. The media and the elite missed the picture. As a result, the CA results surprised many. The ground realities had changed and they helped us to emerge as the largest party."

This is what Comrade Gaurav of the CPN (Maoist) said would happen back in July 2007:

"In Nepal we are making New Democratic Revolution and according to the three stage of the People’s War it is in the concluding stage of ‘strategic offensive’. In order to achieve the countrywide victory, further preparation was felt necessary and the revolution had to take a new course. It was necessary to enter into the process of negotiation with the seven political parties to launch a strong mass movement whose immediate aim was to overthrow the monarchy, which is the representative institution of feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism and comprador bourgeoisie and establish democratic republic. It is true that the term ‘republic’ represents only a system without monarchy. There are many types of republic. What type of republic will be established and institutionalized in Nepal depends on who wins the majority in the election of the constituent assembly. If the left force gets majority in the assembly, there will be ‘People’s Democratic Republic’ in place and the constitution will be written and promulgated accordingly. In this context, it is definitely a new experiment based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and risk is involved into it. This new experiment should bring the desired result. If there is indication that the experiment is not going to deliver acceptable results, we should dare to deter such experiment and should be prepared for other experiments which can deliver the desired results. If we feel that the new experiment is not going to deliver the desired result, no body can compel us to be sticking into the same. In that case, the revolution will take a new course and further new experiment will be required that can help revolution to succeed." ("New Tactics: challenges and opportunities", The Worker, #11, July 2007, pp. 11-14.)


To get a better understanding of the events in Nepal, interested persons should also check out some of the CPN (Maoist)'s writings at the Single Spark Collective's Learn from Nepal project, as well as some of the analysis there. Check out Mao Zedong's On New Democracy as well.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization put out a resolution in solidarity with the Nepalese Revolution and against U.S. intervention at its Fifth Congress in 2007.

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Freedom Road on the Mass Line

"The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history." - Mao Zedong

One of the main things that attracted me to Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong when I was becoming an activist and getting involved in popular struggles, particularly in the antiwar movement, was the revolutionary theory and practice of the mass line.

I was drawn to this method of organizing and leadership because it answers in a practical and straightforward way many questions that people have to deal with if they want to fight for fundamental change in society. When I was first beginning to organize and work is large mass meetings in the anti-war movement I felt the need for a revolutionary theory that could measure up to the test of practice. And the mass line measures up.

I first encountered the mass line in Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. Later I read other articles by Mao Zedong on the subject, such as Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership and his January 30, 1962 talk on democratic centralism. I also studied articles by other communists like Liu Shaoqi's Concerning the Mass Line of our Party and the short collection of Lenin's writings, Party Work in the Masses.

That being said, I just wanted to draw people's attention to this newly released pamphlet by the U.S. Marxist-Leninist group, Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the subject, Some Points on the Mass Line. It is a study of the mass line that was developed by FRSO which explains many of the key points of communist organizing, theory and practice, philosophy and revolution, in a very clear way. If an activist/organizer wants to know what Marxism has to offer in practical terms, in terms of getting stuff done, talk to them about the mass line and show them this pamphlet. It is about how to organize for revolution and change the world.

Well, though it is being published officially by Freedom Road now, in February 2008, it is really sort of a re-release, because as a study it has been floating around for a while now. So at the very beginning of Some Points on the Mass Line it says, "This study was prepared by a leading member of FRSO in the late 1980s. Since then this study has been used extensively inside and outside our organization and it has been reprinted in a number of different political settings. The application of the mass line is basic to how we do our work in trade unions, in the movements of oppressed nationalities, in anti-war and other progressive struggles. It informs our work on building a new communist party." So the real target audience of Some Points on the Mass Line is clearly Marxist-Leninists, though I think advanced activists and organizers who aren't necessarily Marxists or communists could get a a lot out of studying it as well. When combined with a strong, Marxist-Leninist class analysis, a clear view of the national question in the U.S., and important texts like the Main Political Report and other documents from FRSO's 5th Congress (2007) we see that this document on mass line organizing is well contextualized within the rest of what Freedom Road has to offer.

When you get right down to it, Some Points on the Mass Line is an organizing handbook, with 20 points dealing with various aspects of the mass line, and including study questions. Some Points on the Mass Line deals with questions ranging from the philosophical (Marxist theory of knowledge, relationship between theory and practice) to the political (democratic centralism and communist organization), to the very practical (methods of work and methods of leadership). It shows how the mass line allows organizers to deals with questions as seemingly simple as how to respond practically to apathy and cynicism. It discusses the importance of summing up experiences and the struggle for summation. It talks about how to do united front work. It even deals with questions regarding how to build a stable core of activists to mobilize masses of poeple. And, importantly, it links all of these points with deeper questions such as how to raise the level of people's consciousness.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is recommended reading at the end. The point is made that "although the term mass line was coined by the Communist Party of China, the basic method of reliance on, and the mobilization of, the masses of people has been utilized by all successful revolutionary parties." So along with the well known texts of Mao Zedong and Chinese communism, others like Lenin's On Confounding Politics with Pedagogics and Stalin's Armed Insurrection and our Tactics are listed there as well for people to do more research into the classics of Marxism-Leninism.

It is in the mass line that the dialectical relationship between theory and practice is the most clear. As a revolutionary method, the mass line has be proven by successful revolutionary movements all over the world. This pamphlet from Freedom Road shows, point by point, just how that works. I would highly suggest that people read it and apply it.

"The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge." - Mao Zedong

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On the National Question

When the Sino-Soviet split began folowing Khrushchev's denunciation of Comrade Stalin, the founder of the modern antirevisionist movement, Comrade Mao Zedong, wrote, first in Ten Major Relationships (1956), that "it is the opinion of the Central Committee that Stalin's mistakes amounted to only 30 per cent of the whole and his achivements to 70 per cent, and that all things considered Stalin was a great Marxist."

This simple ratio, 70-30, has done a great deal towards the evaluation of Stalin and has framed a substantial portion of the debate within the antirevisionist movement. Though I would argue that it is not so simple.

Only a year later, in Be Activists in Promoting the Revolution (1957), Mao wrote,

We have put Stalin's portrait up in Tien An Men Square. This accords with the wishes of the working people the world over and indicates our fundamental differences with Khrushchev. As for Stalin himself, you should at least give him a 70-30 evaluation, 70 for his achievments and 30 for his mistakes. This may not be entirely accurate, for his mistakes may be only 20 or even 10, or perhaps somewhat more than 30. All things considered, Stalin's achievments are primary and his shortcomings and mistakes are secondary. On this we take a view different from Khrushchev's.

It is strange that the question of Stalin is so unclear! In the interest of clarity it is therefore necessary to establish, bit by bit, which of Stalin's contributions must be chalked up as positive and which as negative. Thanks to a comment from Celtic Fire regarding how he "upholds Stalin" ("Stalin's definition of nationalities was wrong. Stalin's understanding of contradictions among the people was mechanical. And Stalin's understanding of socialist development was wrong"), we have a nice set of issues wherein to ground this question. So we shall go through each of these "errors" of Stalin, in the interest of "summing up the success and failures, and understanding how to advance," as Celtic Fire says.

First then, we shall look at Stalin's "definition of nationalities" and the application of the Marxist-Leninist national question in the Soviet Union. I intend to show here that we should chalk this one up on the "achievements" side of the 70-30 (or 80-20, or 90-10), and that, in summing it up and applying it to our conditions in the U.S., we can see how to advance.

Josef Stalin and the National Question in the Soviet Union

In 1912, Josef Stalin developed the Marxist-Leninist definition of a nation: "A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture" (Stalin, Marxism and the National Question). This definition became the standard used in Marxist-Leninist analysis until the 50s when revisionism took over in the USSR and elsewhere. It influenced Communists the world over, including Lenin, who, in 1913 wrote that Stalin's work on the national question should be given "prime place" in theoretical Marxist literature (Lenin, The National Program of the R.S.D.L.P.).

We must remember that Russia, under the Tzar, was called the "prisonhouse of nations." The Lenin-Stalin line was that oppressed nations had the right to secession, that is, to seperate statehood. Just as Lenin, in the split with the Second International (the social-democrats of the Second International argued that the imperialist war taking place was benefitting the workers in the imperialist countries and should not be opposed), would make a central issue out of opposing "ones own" imperialist government, (see Lenin, Socialism and War), so to would he make an issue of dealing with imperialism within "one's own" country. Lenin addresses this at length in Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914). He goes to great lengths to show that nations have a right to self-determination, that in the end, that means a right to political power, and even a right to seceed. Union is like a marriage. It is voluntary. Secession is a right, like divorce. Lenin also goes to great lengths to show that this does not mean a right to form bourgeois seperatist movements that will harm the international working class:

By supporting the right to secession, we are told, you are supporting the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed nations ... Our reply to this is: No, it is to the bourgeoisie that a "practical" solution to this question is important. To the workers the important thing is to distinguish the principles of the two trends. Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favor, for we are the staunchest and most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone striving for privilages on the part of the oppressed nation.

This is clear enough.

The most common criticism of Stalin's handling of oppressed nationalities first entered mass consciousness with the much publicized Islamic seperatist rebellion in Chechnya which began in 1991 with the declartion of Chechen independence from Russia. This matured into a civil war when Yeltsin sent in troops in 1994 to restore Russian authority. The Russian's were defeated and Aslan Maskhadov was elected and recognized by Russia as the presedent of Chechnya. In 1999 Chechens crossed into Dagestan to start another armed Islamic uprising and the war began anew with the Chechen mujahidin intending to set up an Islamic state based on Sharia law.

This violence is blamed, like most other problems in the former Soviet Union, on Stalin.

Stalin, as everybody knows, deported the Chechens en mass in 1944 hundreds of miles to the east of their homeland. Stalin's view was basically that, in general, the Chechens seperatist tendencies would serve the Nazis and that basically Hitler's armies would be able to recruit them into service agianst the USSR merely by handing out guns. Now, picking up something the size of Chicago and moving it over to New York in the middle of the largest and most brutal war in human history with very few available resources (such as transportation, trains, etc) would be no easy feat. This is roughly what Stalin achieved. Was it a difficult trip? Yes, of course it was. Was it necessary? Yes, I think it was. The leaders told the Nazis that they would support them if the Nazis would back Chechen independence (bourgeois seperatism; see also "Ethnic Crisis in the Caucuses). Stalin destroyed this nationalist revolt just behind the Caucasian line by picking up these people and moving them away from the front. They were not allowed to return until after Stalin's death, when they found other nationalities on the land they had so long considered theirs.

As Stalin himself says in Foundations of Leninism (1924):

[The right of nations to self-determination] does not mean that the proletariat must support every national movement, everywhere and always, in every individual case. It means that support must be given to such national movements as tend to weaken, to overthrow imperialism, and not to strengthen and perserve it. Cases occur when the national movements in certain oppressed countries come into conflict with the interests of the development of the proletarian movement. In such cases support is, of course, entirely out of the question. The question of the rights of nations is not an isolated, self-sufficient question; it is a part of the general problem of proletarian revolution, subordinate to the whole, and must be considered from the point of view of the whole.

Stalin's critics want to blame him for the problem but I just don't see the evidence for such a blanket claim. I don't see that the Stalin government had any other choice but to quell the Chechen seperatist rebellion and save the Soviet Union. This is Leninism.

Even so, there is reason to believe that the Chechen mujahidin might see things slightly differently than your average anticommunist. Let us just consider this quote from Celtic Fire's interview with Grover Furr:

The older Chechen fighters like Mr. Basayev occasionally refer to a common Soviet past when communicating with Russians. Maksim Shevchenko, a Russian journalist who interviewed him frequently during the first war, recalled one such appeal by Mr. Basayev, who wears the long beard of Islamic radicals."He switched off the tape recorder and he said, `You think I was always this bearded fighter with a machine gun?' " recalled Mr. Shevchenko, who at the time was writing for the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. " `I also sang the song, "My address is not a home or street; my address is the Soviet Union." Those were very good times.' " (“With Few Bonds to Russia, Young Chechens Join Militants.” NYT November 19, 2002.)

One of the points Furr makes that I agree with in that interview (I agree with his positive assesment of Stalin on the national question in general) is that "Great-Russian chauvinism got progressively worse after Stalin died. But it never got to the point it is now."

Harry Haywood and the National Question in the United States

The South controls the nation and Wall Street controls the South - W.E.B. DuBois

Of course the Lenin-Stalin line on the National Question was not only applied in the Soviet Union, but in other Comintern countries as well. Comrade Harry Haywood was a leading African American Communist who was in the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1930. There he travelled extensively and his observations of national relations in the former "prisonhouse of nations" are very positive, particularly in the Caucuses (see Haywood's critical and self-critical autobiography, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist). With the Comintern he worked to seek out solutions for the national question in the United States and South Africa.

It took intervention from Comrade Stalin and the Comintern to put an end to the factionalism that was on the verge of tearing apart the young CPUSA. Additionally, Stalin and the Comintern had to intervene in the CPUSA's line on the national question, which had long suffered from white chauvanism. As the pioneering theorist of the national question in the United States, Haywood's theoretical contributions are tremendous. Apart from the two Comintern Resolutions on the African American National Question (1928 and 1930) which Haywood helped to draft, his major contributions to the Lenin-Stalin line on the national question were in his book Negro Liberation (1948) and the pamphlet For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question (1957), where he analyzes conditions in the U.S. and developed the theory that African American people made up an oppressed nation with territory in the Black Belt South. He argued, basically, that the Hayes-Tilden comprimise of 1877 had left unfinished the agrarian bourgeois democratic revolution of Reconstruction, leaving African Americans frozen as landless semi-slaves in the South, forged into nationhood by the uneven development which accompanies the rise of monopoly capitalism. African Americans found themselves shifted abruptly from revolution to Jim Crow and Klan terror. (Please see also, Lenin, Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America, particularly the section on "the former slave-owning south".)

This being the case, the only way to develop the revolution would be for the CPUSA to demand self-determination in the South and full equality throughout the rest of the country. Without this demand the CP could not dream of giving leadership to the national liberation movement and establishing genuine multinational working class unity. As Karl Marx himself put it, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded" (Capital).

It was this revolutionary line that gave rise to the struggle of the Sharecroppers Union in the 1930s. The battles of the Sharecroppers Union are some of the greatest moments of labor history. When the Great Depression hit, many small landowning farmers became tenant farmers and many tenant farmers were further disenfranchized. This left sharecropping, where tenants are provided with tools, land, and basic subsistance goods in exchange for a substantial portion of the value produced, basically a form of serfdom, as the dominant property relations in the rural South. The struggle to fight back advanced rapidly under the leadership of the party with the call for self-determination and agrarian revolution. The union grew to over 3,000 very militant members in a couple of years, at some points even involving armed struggle (see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990 for a thorough discussion of the sharecroppers struggle. It is also covered to lesser extent in Haywood's autobiography, as he was a participant).

The Freedom Road Socialist Organization document, The Third International and the struggle for a correct line on the African American National Question, sums all of this up rather well: "The net result was a developed base among all progressive classes in the Black community. The position of the multi-national working class was strengthened in the process, as was the communist movement." Of course, the document continues, revisionism damaged this severely:

While Marxist-Leninists inside the Communist Party waged a serious fight to oppose revisionism on a host of questions - including a defense of a revolutionary line on the African American National Question - in the end it proved necessary to break with revisionism and to create new communist organizations. In the 1960s many of these anti-revisionists, including Harry Haywood and others who grasped the importance of the African American national movement, were able to propagate an advanced line to a new generation of communists.

The Civil Rights Movement then was forced to grow up in a world where the CP, the party of the proletariat, had abandoned its revolutionary line on the national question. This left the party to tail behind the NAACP and Martin Luther King. Therefore we saw the development of the bourgeois democratic revolution fall under the leadership of rightists, and we saw the institutionalization of bourgeois right in the South with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. We saw where this led - to Watts and countless other uprisings accross the country and to the militant "Black Power" national liberation movement. For working class African Americans, little had changed. And, unfortunately, the New Communist Movement lacked the experience or unity to take an effective leading role.

Not that important reforms weren't won in the Civil Rights Movement. Some important and necessary gains were made. But we didn't win all that could be won, that's certian. Malcolm X put it so simply. After discussing revolution in the U.S., France, the Soviet Union, China, and Algeria, and discussing their common characteristics (namely land and bloodshed) he talks about the "Negro revolution", that is, the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement:

The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro reovlution. It's the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit next to white folks - on the tiolet. That's no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality ("Message to the Grassroots").

The National Question for Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. Today

The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew up along with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people. - Mao Zedong, "Statement calling on the People of the World to Unite to Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism and Support the American Negroes in the Struggle Against Racial Discrimination"

There is nothing more important, more necessary for the revolution here in the United States, than the building of a strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the national liberation movements under the leadership of the genuine vanguard party of the proletariat. Only such a new Communist Party can play a leading role in the mass movements of all working and oppressed people.

Despite some outmigrations and industrialization, the African American Black Belt has persisted, along with the need for national liberation and socialist revolution. We see national oppression in the Black Belt and in the Chicano nation in the Southwest (Aztlan). Still we see the lag of uneven development in the South destroying the revolutionary possibilities of the working class all over the country, and as long as this domestic imperialism persists, there will never be revolution in the United States.

Haywood, struggling against the revisionism in the party, wrote "On the Negro Question" in 1959. This was his final intervention in the line of the CPUSA before joining with the nascent Maoist movement where he continued to fight for the revolutionary line on the national question. In "On the Negro Question" he states very clearly,

It cannot be stressed enough that the changes which have taken place in the Black Belt have sharpened immeasurably the contradiction involved in the Negro Question, and do not blunt them as the proponents of the draft resolution assert in their efforts to create a rationale for desertion of our internationalist obligation toward the oppressed Negro nation. The urbanization of the Negro people, the vast extension of the Negro working class, the growth of trade union membership, the emergence of free Asian and African nations, the changed relationship of world forces, have brought into being new and fresh forces, inspiring the Negro people with new aspirations and confidence, and severly sharpening the crisis of Wall Street-Dixiecrat rule in the South ("On the Negro Question," reprinted in, Towards Victorious Afro-American National Liberation: A Collection of Pamphlets, Leaflets and Essays Which Dealt In a Timely Way With the Concrete Ongoing Struggle for Black Liberation Over the Past Decade and More. Bronx: Ray O. Light, 1982).

The question is, as it has always been, one of power. This is the conclusion of the revolutionary Lenin-Stalin line on the national question. Chalk it up with the merits. Again we must raise the cry that our great teacher Harry Haywood raised.

Self-Determination for the African American and Chicano Nations!

Workers and Oppressed Peoples Unite!

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Revisionism and Capitalist Restoration: Contribution to the debate on the line of Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Some interesting discussion of revisionism and antirevisionism has come up lately, particularly in relation to the position put forward by Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Marxist-Leninist]. (People are using brackets these days it seems to distinguish by ideology the two groups that use the same name, the other being FRSO [Left Refoundationist]).

First Pottawatomie Creek (henceforth PC) struck at the line of the Marxist-Leninist FRSO (the publishers of Fight Back! Newspaper) with his article, FRSO [Fight Back!]'s Decent into Revisionism? to which Left Spot (LS) responded polemically in Debate on FRSO and Revisionism. Celtic Fire (CF) chimed in with Understanding Revisionism in an attempt to reopen the debate.

I'll summarize the debate thus far as I see it:

PC began by basically equating "revisionism" with not upholding the Left Refoundationists' Crisis of Socialism document, upholding the DPRK and the PRC as a socialist countries, and by referring to 1989 events in China as an attempted counter-revolution.

LS took note of these central points, and in my view, did pretty well at addressing them in his article.

Regarding the "Crisis of Socialism," LS addresses the defeatism of the statement.

While the statement makes some good points, its overall verdict on socialism in the 20th century is defeatist and is fundamentally wrong. The worst error of the Crisis statement is that it sums up all the efforts of socialist revolution in the 20th century as an overall failure. I quote: “overall the experience of building socialism in the Soviet Union must be summed up as a failure. All subsequent socialist revolutions have drawn to a great extent from the Soviet model, and the crisis of socialism is not confined to the Soviet Union.” This is straight-up wrong, and is drenched in the confusion and defeatism that much of the U.S. left succumbed to around 1991 when the statement was first adopted.

Regarding the socialist countries, LS notes some confusion regarding the Left Refoundationist line on the question.

And if they believe that Cuba is socialist [I understand there is a resolution put forward by FRSO [LR] to that effect], I would ask what FRSO [Left Refoundationist] sees as the distinction between the political economy of Cuba and that of, say, Vietnam, and why one is allegedly socialist and the other is allegedly capitalist.

And regarding the 1989 counter-revolutionary events at Tiananmen Square:

As for Tiananmen in 1989, would anyone deny that there were forces prominent, including some of the leadership, in the 1989 student movement that were aiming for Western-style capitalism? And that forces within the Chinese Communist Party that supported moving toward Western-style capitalism were working very closely with, and supporting, the protests?

He summed it all up, saying:

FRSO [ML] has successfully steered away from the many varieties of revisionism that have confounded many other groups. I think that compared to the alternatives, FRSO [ML] is the most advanced revolutionary organization in the US. FRSO [ML] is grounded in proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism, incorporating key contributions of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution. FRSO [ML] engages in dynamic mass work using the mass line better than anyone else on the US left (to be fair, FRSO [Left Refoundationist] has some mass work I’m familiar with that is also very good). FRSO [ML] maintains a regular bilingual publication (Fight Back Newspaper www.fightbacknews.org) that highlights advanced experience in mass struggles around the country and world. And FRSO [ML] sees the need for Leninist organization and is building toward a new communist party to lead revolution in the US. That is not revisionism – that is Marxism-Leninism.

That's the essense of it.

Time I made my little contribution.

I think we've been messing around with secondary contradictions for too long in these debates. Lets get down to principal.

While some want to contest that while FRSO does some really good mass work, it isn't communist mass work. This seems to be, from what I've heard, because of a percieved lack of ideological content in Fight Back! I presume this to be the case, as I don't think those who have raised this have encountered much of FRSO's mass work first hand. I've worked along side some of these people for a while though, and I'd say that its very revolutionary, and that while Fight Back! may not be tailored for a petite bourgeois "communist" readership, it does well as a mass line publication to build the struggle among rank & file workers.

But that's not the crux of the matter.

Again and again on the blogs (not only the above mentioned blogs, but on Burningman's as well) we see the problem as coming down to the question of giving support to actually existing socialism. This gets to the heart of the issue: what is revisionism and what is capitalist restoration and how are they related? The crux of the argument seems to revolve around whether revisionism in command equals capitalist restoration, and further, what role is played by the dialectical relationship between relations of production and superstructure.

I would want to look at the history of the USSR and CPSU to get at this. Of course since we're talking about antirevisionism we'll have to get into the PRC and CPC as well. While it would be simple enough to use some of the documents from the Workers Party of Belgium which have dealt with the issue very throughly, I've done that here before and the trend is to dismiss them, apparently because they aren't "Maoist" in RIM sense of the term or because they don't see Mao as having surpassed Stalin. So, instead, I'll jump off of an article put out by the Communist Party of the Philippines (a group recognized around here as firm antirevisionists) in their theoretical journal Rebolusyon, number 2, series 1992, April-June. The article is "Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism," by Armando Liwanag (some say this is the nom de guerre of Jose Maria Sison). It should be noted that this document represents the line of the organization at that time is approved by the Central Committee of the CP Philippines. I have the relevant issue in pamphlet form so I'll summarize the relevant passages, give page numbers, and quote where necessary.

Here (pp. 17-36) Liwanag outlines the "process of capitalist restoration" in the USSR through three stages:

The first stage is the Krushchev regime (1953-64). Ideologically this began with the secret speech to the XXth Congress of the CPSU - the slanderous diatribe against Comrade Stalin, successor of Lenin and architect of the world's first socialist society. Liwanag notes this "inspired the anticommunist forces in Poland and Hungary to carry out uprisings" and gave the green light to other Eastern European Rightists to "adopt captialist-oriented reforms." This was more or less the coming to power of an almost identical line as that put forward by Bukarin and the Right Opposition in the late 1920s and early '30s, which was defeated in the intra-party struggle by the Stalin-led party majority. This Rightist line meant putting "NEP style" reforms (liberalization and privatization of industry and agriculture and a turn toward a preference of light industry, that is, consumer goods, over heavy industry which had long been the backbone of socialist construction) in place.

Subjectivism reigns in the "blogosphere" where everyone really values their "independence" and a lot of claims and terms are thrown around like boulders without much of an attempt to scientifically think them through or back them up. "Brezhnevism" is one of those terms. Whereas it was once applied to those parties who were considered "puppets" of Soviet "Social-Imperialism" (as the Chinese called it) under Brezhnev, it is now thrown at anyone who thinks the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev period was still socialist. It is worth noting that if that is your charge (and it isn't mine), it must be leveled here against Liwanag, who considered the Breshnev regime (1964-82) to be the second of the three stages. While Liwanag states that in this period "socialism was converted fully into state monopoly capitalism" he goes on to say that the Gorbachav regime (1985-91) "marked the third and final stage in the anti-Marxist and antisocialist revisionist counterrevolution to restore captialism and bourgeois dictatorship." Here liberalization was extended from the base to the superstructure, with the legalization of the bourgeois parties, the institution of multi-party contested elections and the eventual liquidation of the CPSU and the USSR and the overturning of the socialist revolution. This marks the completion of a counter-revolution that took over 30 years.

To quote Liwanag:

To restore capitalism, the Soviet revisionist regimes had to revise the basic principles of socialist revolution and construction and to go through stages of camoflaged counterrevolution in a period of 38 years, 1953 to 1991. It is a measure of the greatness of Lenin and Stalin that their accomplishments in 36 years of socialist revolution and construction took another long period of close to four decades to dismantle. Stalin spent 20 years in socialist construction. The revisionist renegades took a much longer period of time to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. (ibid. p.17)

This is more or less the same line on revisionism and capitalist restoration put forward by the WPB (see, for example, the International Communist Seminar 1999 Declaration, On Certain Aspects of the Struggle Against Revisionism (.doc), and Breznjev and the National Democratic Revolution for a few samples) and by the Marxist-Leninist FRSO. Revisionism is a real danger and counter-revolution is a lengthy process.

This means we are at the point where we must clearly define socialism. I'll use as a working definition the one put forward by Lenin in his Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism and communism there lies a definite transition period which must combine the features and properties of both these forms of social economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism -- or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble.

Now, some (mostly Maoists, and I count myself among those who uphold Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) argue that the instant persons come into power who take a revisionist line (who Mao and the Leftists in China called "capitalist roaders" for their desire to set the party and the state on the captialist, rather than the communist, road) capitalism is restored. In the past, we called this "Great Man Theory" and recognized it as metaphysical and unmarxist, but we'll put that aside for now (if you want a debate on Great Man Theory, please see the interventions put forth by LS in this debate on the role of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung in North Korea that took place on Burningman's Blog). Surely we all know that the masses are the makers of history.

And this theory of instant capitalist restoration seems to discount the experience of the Cultural Revolution (GPCR) more than uphold it, contrary to what the proponents of this theory would like to have us believe. It is very clear that the call in 1966 was in fact to "bombard the headquarters" and to criticize and expose those "persons in power taking the capitalist road." The GPCR was also seen as an extension of the socialist revolution given the theory of "two line struggle" - the view that there are two roads in contradiction during the socialist transition to communism - the contradiction between captialist and communist relations of production - and thus two lines at odds with one another in the party at all times during the socialist revolution. This means that the Chinese understood this in such a way that revisionism in command did not mean an end to the socialist revolution and capitalist restoration.

So, my contribution to the debate - two questions:

Is it the case that capitalist restoration means restoration and consolidation of capitalist relations of production, or does it mean the comming to power of revisionist leadership in the party? I don't think, from a materialist point of view, that one could argue that these things are equivalent.

The question that follows this one is what does that mean for us?

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