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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Fidel Castro and the FARC: Eight Mistaken Thesis of Fidel Castro

I'm reposting this article by James Petras because I think it illuminates a larger problem Leftists have been suffereing from (take the ISO for example). This is what Mao Zedong once called the "It's terrible!" theory. I'm a supporter of Fidel Castro, but these statements of his need to be looked at more closely. That said, while the overall thrust of the article is good, I think some of what Petras says about Cuban elections is unfair. Nonetheless, I encourage people to read it.

Fidel Castro and the FARC:
Eight Mistaken Thesis of Fidel Castro

by James Petras

I have been a supporter of the Cuban Revolution for exactly fifty years and recognize Fidel Castro as one of the great revolutionary leaders of our time. But I have never been an uncritical apologist: On several crucial occasions I have expressed my disagreements in print, in public and in discussions with Cuban leaders, writers and militants.

07.07.2008

Introduction

Fidel Castro’s articles and commentaries on the recent events in Colombia, namely his discussion of the Colombian regime’s freeing of several FARC prisoners (including three CIA operatives and Ingrid Betancourt) and his critical comments on the politics, structure, practices, tactics and strategy of the FARC and its world-renowned leader, Manuel Marulanda, merit serious consideration.

Castro’s remarks demand analysis and refutation, not only because his opinions are widely read and influence millions of militants and admirers in the world, especially in Cuba and Latin America, but because he purports to provide a ‘moral’ basis for opposition to imperialism today. Equally important Castro’s unfortunate diatribe and critique against the FARC, Marulanda and the entire peasant-based guerrilla movement, has been welcomed, published and broadcast by the entire pro-imperialist mass media on five continents. Fidel Castro, with few caveats, has uncritically joined the chorus condemning the FARC and, as I will demonstrate, without reason or logic.

Eight Erroneous Theses of Fidel Castro

1. Castro claims that the ‘liberation’ of the FARC political prisoners “opens a chapter for peace in Colombia, a process which Cuba has been supporting for 20 years as the most appropriate for the unity and liberation of the peoples of our America, utilizing new approaches in the complex and special present day circumstances after the collapse of the USSR…” (Reflections of Fidel Castro, July 4, 2008).

What is astonishing about this thesis (and the entire essay) is Castro’s total omission of any discussion of the mass terror unleashed by Colombia’s President Uribe against trade unionists, political critics, peasant communities and documented by every human rights group in and out of Colombia in both of his recent essays. In fact, Castro exculpates the current Uribe regime, the most murderous regime, and puts the entire blame on ‘US Imperialism’. Since the “collapse of the Soviet Union”, and under the US-led military offensive, a multitude of armed revolutionary movements have emerged in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nepal, and other pre-existing armed groups in Colombia and the Philippines, have continued to engage in struggle. In Latin America, the “new approaches” to revolution were anything but peaceful – massive popular uprisings overthrowing corrupt electoral politicians in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela…costing many hundreds of lives.

The “liberation” of Betancourt has strengthened the iron fist of the Uribe regime, increased the militarization of the countryside, and covered up the on-going death squad murders of trade unionists and peasants. Contrary to Fidel Castro, the US and Colombia’s death squad president have used their ‘success’ to buttress their arguments in favor of joint US-Colombian military action. Fidel’s celebration of the Colombian regime’s action as an “opening for peace” serves to deflect attention from the Colombian Supreme Court decision claiming that the re-election of Uribe was illegal because of the tyrant’s bribing Congress people to amend the constitutional provision allowing the president a second term.

2. Fidel Castro denigrates the recently deceased leader of the FARC, Manuel Marulanda, as a “peasant, communist militant, principle leader of the guerrilla” (Reflections). In his text of July 5, 2008 (Reflections II), Castro condescendingly refers to “Marulanda of notable natural intelligence and leadership qualities, on the other hand never had opportunities to study when he was an adolescent. It is said he only finished the fifth grade. He conceived (of the revolution) as a long and prolonged struggle, a point of view which I never shared.” Castro was the son of a plantation owner and educated in private Jesuit colleges and trained as a lawyer. He implies that education credentials and higher status prepares the revolutionary leadership to lead the peasants lacking formal education, but with ‘natural leadership qualities’ apparently sufficient to allow them to follow the intellectuals and professionals better suited to lead the revolution.

The test of history however refutes Castro’s claims. Marulanda built, over a period of 40 years, a bigger guerrilla army with a wider mass base than any Castro-inspired guerrilla force from the 1960’s to 2000.

Castro promoted a theory of ‘guerrilla focos’ between 1963-1980, in which small groups of intellectuals would organize an armed nucleus in the countryside, engage in combat and attract mass peasant support. Every Castro-ite guerrilla foco was quickly defeated – wiped out – in Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay (urban focos), Bolivia and Argentina. In contrast, Marulanda’s prolonged guerrilla war strategy relied on mass grass roots organizing based on close peasant ties with guerrillas, based on community, family and class solidarity, building slowly and methodically a national political-military people’s army. In fact, a serious re-examination of the Cuban revolution reveals that Castro’s guerrillas were recruited from the mass of urban mass organizations, methodically organized prior to and during the formation of the guerrilla foco in 1956-1958. Although reliable figures on the FARC are available, Castro underestimated by half the number of FARC guerrillas, relying on the propaganda of Uribe’s publicists.

3. Castro condemns the ‘cruelty’ of the FACR tactics “of capturing and holding prisoners in the jungle.” With this logic, Castro should condemn every revolutionary movement in the 20th century beginning with the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. Revolutions are cruel but Fidel forgets that counter-revolutions are even crueler. Uribe established local spy networks involving local officials, as was done in Vietnam during that war. And the Vietnamese revolutionaries eliminated the collaborators because they were responsible for the execution of tens of thousands of village militants. Castro fails to comment on the fact that Ms. Betancourt, upon her celebrated ‘liberation’ embraced and thanked General Mario Montoya. According to a declassified US embassy document, Montoya organized a clandestine terrorist unit (‘American Anti-Communist Alliance’), which murdered thousands of Colombian dissidents, almost all of them ferociously tortured beforehand. The ‘cruelty’ of FARC captivity did not show up in Betancourt’s medical exam: She was in good health!

4. Fidel claims “Cuba is for peace in Colombia but not US military intervention”. It is the Colombian oligarchy and Uribe regime, which has invited and collaborated with the US military intervention in Colombia. Castro implies that US military intervention is imposed from the outside, rather than seeing it as part of the class struggle within Colombia, in which Colombia’s rulers, landowners and narco-traffickers play a major role in financing and training the death squads. In the first 6 months of 2008, 24 trade union leaders have been murdered by the Uribe regime, over 2,562 killed over the past twenty years since what Castro describes as the “new roads of complex and special circumstances.” Fidel totally ignores the continuities of death squad murders of unarmed social movement activists, the lack of solidarity from Cuba toward all the Colombian movements since Havana developed diplomatic and commercial ties with the Uribe regime. Is balancing between Cuba’s state interest in diplomatic and economic ties with Colombia and claiming revolutionary credentials part of the “complexities” of Cuban foreign policy?

5. Castro calls for the immediate release of all FARC-held prisoners, without the minimum consideration of the 500 guerrillas tortured and dehumanized in Uribe’s and Bush’s horrendous high security ‘special prisons’. Castro boasts that Cuba released its prisoners captured during the anti-Batista struggle and calls for the FARC to follow Cuba’s example, rather than the Vietnamese and Chinese revolutionary approach. Castro’s attempt to impose and universalize his tactics, based on Cuban experience, on Colombia lacks the minimum effort to understand, let alone analyze, the specificities of Colombia, its military, the political context of the class struggle and the social and political context of humanitarian negotiations in Colombia.

6. Castro claims the FARC should end the guerrilla struggle but not give up their arms because in the past guerrillas who disarmed were slaughtered by the regime. Instead, he suggests they should accept France’s offer to abandon their country or accept Chavez’ (Uribe’s ‘brother’ and ‘friend’) proposal to negotiate and secure a commission made up Latin American notables to oversee their integration into Colombian politics.

What are ‘armed’ guerillas going to do when thousands of Uribe’s soldiers and death squads ravage the countryside? Flee to the mountains and shoot wild pigs? Going to France means abandoning millions of starving vulnerable peasant supporters and the class struggle.

7. Fidel Castro totally omits from his discussion the manner in which every political leader involved in the ‘humanitarian mission’ used the celebration of Betancourt’s ‘liberation’ to cover up and distract from their serious political difficulties. First and foremost, Uribe’s re-election was ruled illegal by the Colombian Supreme Court because he was accused and convicted of bribing members of Congress to vote for the constitutional amendment allowing his running for a second term. Uribe’s presidency is de facto illegal. Betancourt’s release and delirious embrace of Uribe undermines the judicial verdict and eliminates the court injunction for a new Congressional vote or national election. Sarkozy’s popularity in France was in a vertical free fall, his highly publicized intervention in the negotiations with the FARC were a total failure, his militarist policies in the Middle East and virulent anti-immigrant policies alienated substantial sectors of the French public (as did rising prices and economic stagnation). The release of Betancourt and her effusive praise and embrace of Sarkozy revived his tarnished image and gave him a temporary respite from the burgeoning political and economic discontent with his domestic and foreign policies.

Chavez used the release of Betancourt to embrace his ‘enemy’, Uribe, and to put further distance from the FARC, in particular, and the popular movements in Colombia, as well as to build bridges with a post-Bush US President. Chavez also returned to the good graces of the entire pro-imperialist mass media and favorable comments from the right-wing US Presidential candidate, John McCain, who “hoped the FARC would follow Chavez demands to disarm.” Cuba, or at least Fidel Castro, used the ‘liberation’ of Betancourt to display his long-term hostility to the FARC (dating at least from 1990) for embarrassing his policy of reconciliation with the Colombian regime.

8. Striking a humanitarian and quasi-electoral posture in celebrating Betancourt’s release, Castro lambasted the FARC for its ‘cruelty’ and armed resistance to the terrorist Uribe regime. Castro attacked the FARC’s”authoritarian structure and dogmatic leadership”, ignoring FARC’s endorsement of electoral politics between 1984-90 (when over 5,000 disarmed activists and political candidates were slaughtered), and the free and open debate over policy alternative in the demilitarized zone (1999-2002) with all sectors of Colombian society. In contrast, Castro never permitted free and open debate and elections, even among communist candidates in any legislative process – at least until he was replaced by Raul Castro. The abovementioned political leaders were serving their own personal political interests by bashing the FARC and celebrating Betancourt at the expense of the people of Colombia.

Conclusion

Has Castro clearly thought through the disastrous consequences for millions of impoverished Colombians or is he thinking only of Cuba’s possible improvement of relations with Colombia once the FARC is liquidated? The effect of Castro’s anti-FARC articles has been to provide ammunition for the imperial mass media to discredit the FARC and armed resistance to tyranny and to bolster the image of death squad President Uribe. When the world’s premier revolutionary leader denies the revolutionary history and practice of an ongoing popular movement and its brilliant leader who built that movement, he is denying the movements of the future a rich heritage of successful resistance and construction. History will not absolve him.

July 2008

See also Petras' article, "President Chavez and the FARC: State and Revolution".

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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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Zhou Enlai: How to be a Good Leader

HOW TO BE A GOOD LEADER

April 22, 1943

[Editorial note: The outline of a talk to cadres of the Southern Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, originally entitled "Outline of a Talk on Leadership and Review of Work"]

I. The definition of a leader

Any cadre may at some time have to take up the work of leadership, and very likely he is already doing such work. Therefore, the work of leadership concerns leading cadre at all levels, whether the lower, middle or upper.

Among the staff members at Hongyan and Zengjiayan there is only a difference in the kind of work each does, but no distinction is drawn between the leaders and the led, still less between cadres and non-cadres. Although some comrades working in Hongyan and Zengjiayan and in the office of New China Daily are not directly shouldering the responsibilities of leadership, they are in fact leaders.

II. The stand a leader should take

A leading cadre must proceed from the standpoint of the Party in everything he does. But this is only a general statement. More specifically, a leading cadre should have the following qualities:

1. A firm Marxist-Leninist world outlook and a revolutionary out-look on life;
2. Devotion to principle;
3. Faith in the strength of the people;
4. Dedication to study;
5. A tenacious fighting spirit; and
6. A high sense of discipline.

III. The leaders and the leading organizations

1. Collective leadership and leadership of each level by the next higher level - unified leadership, centralization and democracy (discussion and division of labour).
2. Individual responsibility and individual leadership - this is especially needed in the Great Rear Area and is by no means negated by collective leadership.
3. Direct personal intervention and decision from above - this is not the usual practice but one employed under special circumstances, or to set an example.

IV. What is correct leadership

I shall now elaborate on the three points Stalin once made:

1. Decisions made must be correct. First, leaders should evaluate the situation and anticipate possible changes, seeking out the characteristics of a given place at a given time. Second, they should relate all this to the general task of the Party and determine the tasks and policy for a given period. Third, in line with this policy, they should formulate slogans and tactics appropriate to the current situation. Fourth, they should then work out realistic plans and instructions. They should do all this through in-depth investigation and study of actual conditions, linking up the results with Party tenets and principles.
2. Correct decisions must be implemented. First, leaders should organize discussions of ways to implement the plan and carry out instructions. Second, they should carefully select capable persons and put them in charge of the plan's implementation. Third, they should organize efforts to realize the Party's plan. Fourth, they should organize efforts to realize the Party's plan. Fourth, they should personally take part in the implementation so as to set an example. By so doing, they can discover through practice whether the Party's line and tactics are correct or whether they should be modified.
3. There must be review of the actual implementation of the decisions. Methods of making such reviews: (a) we must note tangible results of work rather than promises; (b) we must not merely look at plans on paper, but inquire whether tasks are being performed conscientiously or only perfunctorily; (c) we must pay attention to content rather than to form and examine whether a decision is really being correctly carried out or is being distorted; (d) reviews should not only be conducted from top to bottom, but also from bottom to top; (e) reviews should be systematic and regular; and (f) leader should personally participate in reviews.

As Stalin has said, leaders must maintain close ties with the masses, and the experience gained by both leaders and masses must be synthesized. Only thus can there be correct leadership.

V. The tasks of leaders

Comrade Mao Zedong says that the tasks of leaders consists in using cadres well and implementing policies. This is true. Breaking the down, I think, they are as follows:

1. Leading cadres should pay close attention to ideological and political leadership. This requires that they constantly raise their own ideological level and strengthen their own political training. We ask our comrades to concentrate on the following: (a) placing emphasis on important matters; (b) sharpening political vigilance; (c) raising their theoretical level; (d) intensifying ideological struggle both inside and outside the Party; and (e) actively publicizing the policies and achievements of the Party.
2. Leading cadres should give careful thought to organizational leadership. Once the political line is laid down, organizational work decides everything. We draw our comrades' attention to the following points: (a) organizational leadership should be raised to the level of political leadership; in other words, all kinds of work should be put on a principled basis and connected with political tasks; (b) all organizational and day-to-day work should serve to guarantee the fulfilment of the Party's political tasks and the realization of its work plans; (c) importance should be attached to the Party's day-to-day leadership, so that Party organizations stay close to the grass roots and their work becomes even more concrete; (d) Party organizations and the masses must be mobilized to strive to surmount all difficulties; and (e) we should combat all forms of opportunism (such as perfunctoriness, empty talk, arrogance, bureaucracy, formalism, and red-taped routinism), corruption, degeneration, etc.
3. Prudence should be exercised in selecting cadres and assigning work. This is also part of organizational work, but it can be taken separately. Both political qualifications and work competence are indispensable criteria for selecting cadres, but political trustworthiness takes precedence. Stalin once pointed out the harm done to the Party when people made appointments not in accordance with principle. He said that such persons were followed by a large "entourage" wherever they went and that they employed only those whom they regarded as their "own" men. In one of his reports on the rectification movement, Comrade Mao Zedong, too, criticized such persons for being "dishonest". That was the failing of those "imperial envoys who rushed everywhere". Given a cadre's political trustworthiness, it is still important to use him properly (in the light of time, place and circumstances).
4. Work should be reviewed. The performance of working personnel and the implementation of the work plan must be reviewed. As Stalin has said, the objectives of the review are: first, to get to know the qualifications of the cadres; second, to determine the virtues and defects of the executive apparatus; and third, to determine the virtues and defects of the tasks or instructions that are set. Some leaders think reviews of this sort are likely to expose their own weaknesses, marring their prestige or shaking their self-confidence. This is incorrect. Leaders enhance their prestige by correcting their mistakes, not by covering them up, and by immersing themselves in hard work, not by bragging or boasting. Confidence will only be strengthened and not weakened through the correction of mistakes. It is only those who are vain and concerned with face-saving who fear the exposure of mistakes.
5. Go among the masses. The leaders should not only educate the masses but should also learn from them. The reason is that the leaders' own knowledge is incomplete and their experience insufficient. Leading positions in themselves cannot bestow knowledge and experience, so it is essential to go to the people and draw experience from them. We ask that comrades: (a) get close to the people, maintain contact with them, and to some extent become one with them; (b) heed the voice of the people; (c) learn from them; and (d) educate them instead of tailing behind them.

VI. Leading the masses and befriending them

1. The masses are not lead in the same way as Party members. The way we lead the masses and the attitude we take towards them should not make them feel that we are exercising leadership.
2. The basic method of leading masses in persuasion, and definitely not command. Only in situations when it is necessary and when the majority agree while a minority still do not, may we compel the minority to carry out the decisions of the majority.
3. The leaders themselves should play an exemplary role in giving leadership to the masses and befriending them.
4. When necessary, leaders should ignore insults hurled at them.
5. Leaders must never underestimate the role they play or the influence they exert, and must work prudently and cautiously.

VII. The art of leadership

According to the art of leadership as expounded by Lenin and Stalin, leaders should not run too far ahead of a movement, nor should they lag behind. Rather, they should grasp the key task and push the movement forward.

According to the art of leadership as expounded by Comrade Mao Zedong, they should take into account the over-all situation, think in terms of the majority and work together with our allies.

VIII. Work methods

1. Examine theoretical tenets and principles in the course of struggle;
2. Determine and review policies in the course of concrete work;
3. Improve work in a revolutionary spirit;
4. Promote democracy and encourage criticism and self-criticism;
5. Employ mainly persuasion and not administrative fiat. Resort to orders only in emergency situations.

IX. Work style

1. Lenin's style of work consisted of: Russian revolutionary sweep; and American efficiency
2. Comrade Mao Zedong's style of work consists of: The modesty and realism of the Chinese people; the simplicity and industriousness of the Chinese peasants; the love of study and deep thought of the intellectual; the flexibility and cool-headedness of the revolutionary soldier; and the tenacity and staunchness of a Bolshevik.
3. Combat all forms of opportunism manifested in day-to-day work. At present, we must especially combat perfunctoriness, empty talk, arrogance, formalism, routinism and all acts which sabotage the fine traditions of the Party and army.

[To my knowledge, I am publishing this article by Zhou Enlai on the internet for the first time. Thanks to Mike B. "How to be a Good Leader" is also being added to the Zhou Enlai Internet Archive at MIA. It is from Selected Works of Zhou Enlai, Volume I, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing: 1981. pp. 146 - 150. I have ommitted the explanitory notes. Please see also Liu Shaoqi's similarly titled How to be a Good Communist as well as Mao Zedong's articles Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, and Methods of Work of Party Committees, as well as Some Points on the Mass Line by Freedom Road Socialist Organization.]

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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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The Fourth of July: A Marxist-Leninist look at the Revolution of 1776

Since the 4th of July (Independence Day) is approaching, I thought I would post up the writings of two important communists from the United States, William Z. Foster and Harry Haywood, who have made major contributions to the application of Marxism-Leninism to proletarian revolution in the U.S. The conditions for the proletarian-socialist revolution were set, or at least set in motion to a considerable degree, by the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1776 and its sequal, the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Here is what the Communist Party USA founder and leader William Z. Foster says about the U.S. American Revolution in his History of the Communist Party of the United States:

'The American Revolution of 1776, which Lenin called one of the "great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars," began the history of the modern capitalist United States. It was fought by a coalition of merchants, planters, small farmers, and white and Negro toilers. It was led chiefly by the merchant capitalists, with the democratic masses doing the decisive fighting. The Revolution, by establishing American national independence, shattered the restrictions placed upon the colonial productive forces by England; it freed the national market and opened the way for a speedy growth of trade and industry; it at least partially broke down the feudal system of tenure; and it brought limited political rights to the small farmers and also the workers, who were mostly artisans, but it did not destroy Negro chattel slavery. And for the embattled Indian peoples the Revolution produced only a still more vigorous effort to strip them of their lands and to destroy them.

'The Revolution also had far-reaching international reprecussions. It helped inspire the people of France to get rid of their feudal tyrants; it stimulated the peoples of Latin America to free themselves from the yoke of Spain and Portugal; and it was an energizing force in the world wherever the bourgeoisie, supported by the democratic masses, were fighting against feudalism. The Revolution was helped to success by the assistance given the rebelling colonies by France, Spain, and Holland, as well as by revolutionary struggles taking place currently in Ireland and England.

'The Revolution was fought under the broad generalizations of the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, which called for national independence and freedom for all men. It declared the right of revolution and the dominance of the secular over the religious in government. But these principles meant very different things to the several classes that carried through the Revolution. To the merchants they signified their rise to dominant power and an unrestricted opportunity to exploit the rest of the population. To the planters they implied the continuation and extension of their slave system. To the farmers they meant free access to the broad public lands. To the workers they promised universal sufferage, more democratic liberties, and a greater share in the wealth of the new land. And to the oppressed Negroes they brought a new hope of freedom from the misery and sufferings of chattel bondage.

'The Constitution, as orginally formulated in 1787, and as adopted in the face of powerful opposition, constituted primarily the rules and relationships agreed upon by the ruling class for management of the society which they controlled. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the Constitution, providing for freedom of speech, press, and assembly, religous liberty, trial by jury, and other popular democratic liberties, was written into the Constitution in 1791 under heavy mass pressure.

'Great as were the accomplishments of the Revolution, it nevertheless left unsolved many bourgeois-democratic tasks. These unfinished tasks constituted a serious hendrance to the nation's fullest development. The struggle to solve these questions in a progressive direction made up the main content of the United States history for the three-quarters of a century. Among the more basic of these tasks were the abolition of slavery, the opening up of the broad western lands to settlement, and the deepening extension of the democratic rights of the people. The main post-revolutionary fight of the toiling masses, in the face of fierce reactionary opposition, was aimed chiefly at perserving and extending their democratic rights won by the Revolution.

'It was a great post-revolutionary political rally of these democratic forces that brought Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. Coming to power on a program of wresting the government from the hands of the privileged few, Jefferson sought to create a democracy based primarily upon the small farmers, but excluding the Negroes. From this fact many have drawn the erroneous conclusion that his policies were a brake on American industrial development. Actually, however, by the abolition of slavery in the North, the opening up of public lands, the battle against British "dumping" in America, and the extension of the popular franchise, all during Jefferson's period, the growth of the country's economy was greatly facilitated.

'The extraordinary rapidity of the United States' economic advance in the decades following the victorious revolution was to be ascribed to a combination of several favorable factors, including the presense of vast natural resources, the relative absence of feudal economic and political remnants, the shortage of labor power, the constant flow of immigrants, and the tremendous extent of territory under one government. Another most decisive factor was the immense stretch of new land awaiting capitalist development, the opening up of which played a vital part for decades in the economic and political growth of the country. It absorbed a vast amount of capital; it largely shaped the workers' ideology and also the progress and forms of the labor movement; and it was a main bone of contention between the rival, struggling classes of industrialists and planters. As Lenin, a close student of American agriculture, noted, "The peculiar feature of the United States ... the availability of unoccupied free land" explains "the extremity and wide and rapid development of capitalism in the United States"' (pp. 16-18).

W. Z. Foster also deals with this question in his Outline History of the World Trade Union Movement:

'With the [Revolutionary] war won, the bourgeoisie typically tried to have the people forget the glowing democratic principles and promises which it had outlined in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Consequently, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which was completely dominated by merchants and planters, the new rulers wrote a constitution that not only left substantially intact the monstrous system of Negro chattel slavery, but also accorded very few civil rights to the white working masses" (p. 98).

Also interesting is what Foster says in his heavy, 600 + page book, The Negro People in American History. People should reference this text if they can find it because it is very helpful in understanding the realtionship between the African American national quesiton and the American Revolution, as well as how the African American nation develops over time.

The discussion of Emancipation and Reconstruction is also dealt with all of these books by W. Z. Foster. People should also look to the great African American Marxist-Leninist theorist, Harry Haywood, who discusses it at length in Black Bolshevik and Negro Liberation. Haywood developed the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the African American national question in the U.S. with others in the Comintern, and after revisionism seized the CPUSA, he became a leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), an important organization in the pro-Chinese "New Communist Movement". Haywood, following in the footsteps of Lenin and Stalin, argued that African Americans made up an oppressed nation with the right to full equality throughout the United States and the right to self-determination in the Black Belt South, meaning Black people had a right to declare independence themselves if they chose to. The African American national question, now a central issue of the proletarian-socialist revolution for the multinational working class, was also an important aspect of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the U.S., and it really came forward as a continuation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution with the American Civil War between the feudal planter class in the South and the Northern industrialist bourgeoisie.

Here is what Haywood says in Negro Liberation:

'The Negro was not freed by the Revolution of 1776, nor was he fully freed by the Second American Revolution of 1861-77the Civil War and Reconstruction. The fact is that the first American republic contained a glaring flaw the institution of chattel slavery. This despite the aims so proudly proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence of man's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Excluded from these "inalienable rights" was an important segment of the American people the Negro slave who, at the time, comprised one-fifth of the country's population.

'Thus, the new American national state created as a result of revolution got off to a false start. This "omission" was to prove almost fatal. The glaring ambiguity of a nation half free and half slave was recognized by the most advanced statesmen of the period, by Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Samuel Adams, and others.

'It was the belief of the Founding Fathers that slavery would soon die out. Slavery was not particularly profitable, except in a very few areas. The tide of history turned with the industrial revolution in England and the various inventions, topped by the cotton gin, which created a world-wide demand for cotton. In 1789, when the 'Constitution was adopted, no one doubted that there would soon be an end of slavery. By 1818, when the debate began on the admission of Missouri, a new slavocracy had arisen which was demanding expansion into new lands.

'The compromises which the Constitution contained on the issue of slavery precluded the participation of the Negro in the first American republic. It prevented his democratic integration into the new national state. He was thus cheated of the fruits of the victory to which he had contributed in terms of 5,000 of his people in the revolutionary armed forces.

'But the constitutional compromises only postponed the issue of slavery. This issue was to flare up anew in the second decade of the nineteenth century and was to occupy the spotlight in American politics up to the end of the Civil War.

'The question of slavery, as Marx observed, was for half a century the moving power of American history. The issue was finally resolved only by the Second American Revolution - the Civil War and Reconstruction.

'Here again, for the second time, hope was held for the full integration of the Negro into American life as a free and equal citizen, for the consolidation of Americans, black and white, into one nation. But again the revolution was aborted, again the Negro was left outside the portals of full citizenship. The great betrayal of 1877, sealed by the Hayes-Tilden gentlemen's agreement, turned over the management of the South to the new Bourbon classes, who were given the chance to reconstruct that region "in their own way."

'Again the Negro was denied the fruits of the victory, which he had helped to win. Deserted by his erstwhile allies, he was left landless and at the tender mercy of the former slaveholders. Again, as in the Revolution of 1776, he was placed at the doorstep of full freedom only to have the door slammed in his face an unwelcome intruder. This second great defeat blasted his hopes for democratic absorption into American national life.

'But a qualitative change had taken place in his status. Freed from chattel slavery by the uncompleted revolution, he -was now ready for the appearance of economic classes within his group, which under the conditions of segregation and imperialist oppression, necessarily served as driving forces for a movement of national liberation. The process of class stratification among Negroes was of necessity a slow and tortuous one, taking place as it did against the overwhelming odds of post-Reconstruction reaction. But proceed it did, so that the Negroes, who at the time of their release from chattel bondage comprised an almost undifferentiated peasant mass, had by the beginning of the twentieth century become transformed into a people manifesting among themselves the class groupings peculiar to modern capitalist society. Along with an increasing mass of wage laborers, there began to appear a class of small business people, with more or less well-defined capitalist aspirations. This class was to find its spokesmen among the educated middle class. The rise of a Negro bourgeoisie marked the appearance of a class which, striving to defend its own interests under American conditions, was destined to initiate an historical movement, which could only develop in the direction of national freedom. The process of class differentiation developing against the background of Jim-Crow oppression, and in conditions of continued majority concentration of Negroes in the Black Belt, thus formed the main objective conditions for their emergence as an oppressed nation.

'The advent of imperialism, the epoch of the trusts and monopolies, at the turn of the century, riveted the yoke of white ruling-class tyranny still tighter, with the result that the Negro was thrust still further out of the pale of American democracy into deeper isolation within his own group. The rise of a finance-capitalist oligarchy to dominant position in American economic and political life precluded the possibility of peaceful democratic fusion of the Negro into a single American nation along with whites. Thenceforth the issue of Negro equality could be solved only via the path of the Negro's full development as a nation. The Negro question had now definitely become the problem of an oppressed nation striving for national freedom against the main enemy, imperialism' (pp. 141-143).

Harry Haywood also deals with this in his autobiography, Black Bolshevik:

'The evolution of American Blacks as an oppressed nation was begun in slavery. In the final analysis, however, it was the result of the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution of the Civil War and the betrayal of Reconstruction through the Hayes-Tilden (Gentlemen’s) Agreement of 1877 . This betrayal was followed by withdrawal of federal troops and the unleashing of counter-revolutionary terror, including the massacre of thousands of Blacks and the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments which had been built on an alliance of Blacks, poor whites and carpetbaggers . The result was that the Black freedmen, deserted by their former Republican allies, were left without land. Their newly won rights were destroyed with the abrogation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and they were thrust back on the plantations of their former masters in a position but little removed from chattel bondage. The revolution had stopped short of a solution to the crucial land question; there was neither confiscation of the big plantations of the former slaveholding class, nor distribution of the land among Negro freedmen and poor whites. It was around this issue of land for the freedmen that the revolutionary democratic wave of Radical Reconstruction beat in vain and finally broke. The advent of imperialism, the epoch of trusts and monopolies at the turn of the century, froze the Blacks in the post-Reconstruction position; landless semi-slaves in the South. It blocked the road to fusion of Blacks and whites into one nation on the basis of equality and put the final seal on the special oppression of Blacks. The path towards equality and freedom via assimilation was foreclosed by these events, and the struggle for Black equality thenceforth was ultimately bound to take a national revolutionary direction. Under conditions of imperialist and racist oppression, Blacks in the South were to acquire all the attributes of a subject nation. They are set apart by a common ethnic origin, economically interrelated in various classes, united in a common historical experience, reflected in a special culture and psychological makeup. The territory of this subject nation is the Black Belt, an area encompassing the Deep South, which, despite massive outmigrations, still contained (and does to this day) the country’s largest concentration of Blacks' (pp. 231-232).

It is worth noting that Black Bolshevik contains an important epilogue, in which Harry Haywood looks at the "Black upsurge" of the 1960s and 70s in light of the national question and the role of Marxist-Leninists. That epilogue begins and ends with two quotes from Mao Zedong:

"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" ("Statement Supporting the Afro-Americans in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism")

And:

"The struggle of the black people in the United States is bound to merge with the American workers' movement, and this will eventually end the criminal rule of the U.S. monopoly capitalist class." ("Statement by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, in Support of the Afro-American Struggle Against Violent Repression").

Happy Independence Day!

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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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The Maoism of Alain Badiou

An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries"

by Alain Badiou

Translated by Alberto Toscano

We are familiar with Mao Zedong's formula: "Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel against the reactionaries." This phrase, which appears so simple, is at the same time rather mysterious: how is it conceivable that Marx's enormous theoretical enterprise, with its ceaselessly and scrupulously reworked and recast analyses, can be concentrated in a single maxim: "It is right to rebel against the reactionaries"? And what is this maxim? Are we dealing with an observation, summarizing the Marxist analysis of objective contradictions, the ineluctable confrontation of revolution and counterrevolution? Is it a directive oriented toward the subjective mobilization of revolutionary forces? Is Marxist truth the following: one rebels, one is right?1 Or is it rather: one must rebel? The two, perhaps, and even more the spiraling movement from the one to the other, real rebellion (objective force) being enriched and returning on itself in the consciousness of its rightness or reason (subjective force).

A. Practice, Theory, Knowledge

We are already handed something essential here: every Marxist statement is—in a single, dividing movement—observation and directive. As a concentrate of real practice, it equals its movement in order to return to it. Since all that is draws its being only from its becoming, equally, theory as knowledge of what is has being only by moving toward that of which it is the theory. Every knowledge is orientation, every description is prescription.

The sentence, "it is right to rebel against the reactionaries," bears witness to this more than any other. In it we find expressed the fact that Marxism, prior to being the full-fledged science of social formation, is the distillate of what rebellion demands: that one consider it right, that reason be rendered to it. Marxism is both a taking sides and the systematization of a partisan experience. The existence of a science of social formations bears no interest for the masses unless it reflects and concentrates their real revolutionary movement. Marxism must be conceived as the accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, the fixation and detailing of their target. Mao Zedong's sentence clearly situates rebellion as the originary place of correct ideas, and reactionaries as those whose destruction is legitimated by theory. Mao's sentence situates Marxist truth within the unity of theory and practice. Marxist truth is that from which rebellion draws its rightness, its reason, to demolish the enemy. It repudiates any equality in the face of truth. In a single movement, which is knowledge in its specific division into description and directive, it judges, pronounces the sentence, and immerses itself in its execution. Rebels possess knowledge, according to their aforementioned essential movement, their power and their duty: to annihilate the reactionaries. Marx's Capital does not say anything different: the proletarians are right to violently overthrow the capitalists. Marxist truth is not a conciliatory truth. It is, in and of itself, dictatorship and, if need be, terror.

Mao Zedong's sentence reminds us that, for a Marxist, the link from theory to practice (from reason to rebellion) is an internal condition of theory itself, because truth is a real process, it is rebellion against the reactionaries. There is hardly a truer and more profound statement in Hegel than the following: "The absolute Idea has turned out to be the identity of the theoretical Idea and the practical Idea. Each of these by itself is still one-sided" (Hegel, Science of Logic). For Hegel, absolute truth is the contradictory unity of theory and practice. It is the uninterrupted and divided process of being and the act. Lenin salutes this enthusiastically: "The unity of the theoretical idea (of knowledge) and of practice—this NB—and this unity precisely in the theory of knowledge, for the resulting sum is the "absolute idea" (Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks). Let us read this sentence very carefully, since, remarkably, it divides the word "knowledge" into two. That is a crucial point, on which we shall often return: knowledge, as theory, is (dialectically) opposed to practice. Theory and practice form a unity, that is to say, for the dialectic, a unity of opposites. But this knowledge (theory/)practice contradiction is in turn the very object of the theory of knowledge. In other words, the inner nature of the process of knowledge is constituted by the theory/practice contradiction. Or again, practice, which as such is dialectically opposed to knowledge (to theory), is nevertheless an integral part of knowledge qua process.

In all Marxist texts we encounter this scission, this double occurrence of the word "knowledge," designating either theory in its dialectical correlation to practice or the overall process of this dialectic, that is, the contradictory movement of these two terms, theory and practice. Consider Mao, "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?": "Often, correct knowledge can be arrived at only after many repetitions of the process . . . leading from practice to knowledge and then back to practice. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge, the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge" (Mao Zedong, Five Philosophical Essays). The movement of knowledge is the practice-knowledge-practice trajectory. Here "knowledge" designates one of the terms in the process but equally the process taken as a whole, a process that in turn includes two occurrences of practice, initial and final. To stabilize our vocabulary,2 and remain within the tradition, we will call "theory" the term in the theory/practice contradiction whose overall movement will be the process of "knowledge." We will say: Knowledge is the dialectical process practice/theory.

On this basis we may expose the reactionary illusion entertained by those who imagine they can circumvent the strategic thesis of the primacy of practice. It is clear that whoever is not within the real revolutionary movement, whoever is not practically internal to the rebellion against the reactionaries, knows nothing, even if he theorizes.

Mao Zedong did indeed affirm that in the theory/practice contradiction—that is, in a phase of the real process—theory could temporarily play the main role: "The creation and advocacy of revolutionary theory plays the principal and decisive role in those times of which Lenin said, 'Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement'" (Mao, On Contradiction). Does this mean that, at that moment, theory amounts to an intrinsic revolutionary possibility, that pure "Marxist theoreticians" can and must emerge? Absolutely not. It means that, in the theory/practice contradiction that constitutes the process of knowledge, theory is the principal aspect of the contradiction; that the systematization of practical revolutionary experiences is what allows one to advance; that it is useless to continue quantitatively to accumulate these experiences, to repeat them, because what is on the agenda is the qualitative leap, the rational synthesis immediately followed by its application, that is, its verification. But without these experiences, without organized practice (because organization alone allows the centralization of experiences), there is no systematization, no knowledge at all. Without a generalized application there is no testing ground, no verification, no truth. In that case "theory" can only give birth to idealist absurdities.

We thus come back to our starting point: practice is internal to the rational movement of truth. In its opposition to theory, it is part of knowledge. It is this intuition that accounts for Lenin's enthusiastic reception of the Hegelian conception of the absolute Idea, to the point that he makes Marx into the mere continuation of Hegel. ("Marx, consequently, clearly sides with Hegel in introducing the criterion of practice into the theory of knowledge," Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks.) Mao Zedong's sentence lends its precision to Lenin's enthusiasm. It is the general historical content of Hegel's dialectical statement. It is not just any practice that internally anchors theory, it is the rebellion against the reactionaries. Theory, in turn, does not externally legislate on practice, on rebellion: it incorporates itself in the rebellion by the mediating release of its reason. In this sense, it is true that the sentence says it all, an all that summarizes Marxism's class position, its concrete revolutionary significance. An all outside which stands anyone who tries to consider Marxism not from the standpoint of rebellion but from that of the break; not from the standpoint of history but from that of the system; not from the standpoint of the primacy of practice but from that of the primacy of theory; not as the concentrated form of the wisdom of the working people but as its a priori condition.

B. The Three Senses of the Word "Reason"

If this sentence says it all, it nevertheless does so according to the dialectic, that is, according to a simplicity that divides itself. What concentrates and sustains this division, while apparently cloaking it, is the word "reason" or "rightness": one is right, the rebellion is right, a new reason stands up against the reactionaries. The fact is that, through the word "reason," the sentence says three things, and it is the articulation of the three that makes the whole.

1. It is right to rebel against the reactionaries does not mean in the first place "one must rebel against the reactionaries" but rather "one rebels against the reactionaries"—it is a fact, and this fact is reason. The sentence says: primacy of practice. Rebellion does not wait for its reason, rebellion is what is always already there, for any possible reason whatever. Marxism simply says: rebellion is reason, rebellion is subject. Marxism is the recapitulation of the wisdom of rebellion. Why write Capital, hundreds of pages of scruples and minutiae, of laborious intelligence, volumes of dialectic often at the edges of intelligibility? Because only this measures up to the profound wisdom of rebellion.

The historical density and obstinacy of rebellion precede Marxism, accumulating the conditions and necessity of its appearance, because they instill the conviction that, beyond the particular causes that provoke the proletarian uprising, there exists a profound reason, which cannot be uprooted. Marx's Capital is the systematization, in terms of general reason, of what is given in the historical summation of causes. The bourgeoisie, which cognizes and recognizes class struggle, is happy to admit and investigate the particular causes of a rebellion, if only in order to forestall its return. But it ignores the reason, which when all is said and done the proletarians hold onto—a reason that no absorption of causes and circumstances would ever satisfy. Marx's enterprise amounts to reflecting what is given, not so much in the particularity of battles but in the persistence and development of the class energy invested in them. The thinking of causes does not suffice here.3 The reason for this persistence must be accounted for in depth. The essence of the proletarian position does not reside in the episodes of class struggle but in the historical project that subtends them, a project whose form of practical existence is given by the implacable duration and successive stages of proletarian obstinacy. That is where reason lies. Only its clarification and exposition—simultaneously in the guise of reflections and directives—do justice to the movement, which rebellion brings to light, of the class being of phenomena.

Today only the Maoist enterprise integrally develops what proletarians do and allow us to know through the unconditional and permanent character of their rebellion. Only thus can we say: yes, contradiction is antagonistic, yes, the workers' rebellion, which is the fire at the heart of this contradiction, is the very reason of history. "It is right to rebel against the reactionaries" means above all: the obstinate proletarians are right, they have all the reasons on their side, and much more besides.

2. "It is right to rebel against the reactionaries" also means: the rebellion will be right, it will have reason on its side. At the tribunal of history, the reactionaries will have to provide reasons, to account for all their misdeeds of exploitation and oppression. The obstinacy of proletarian rebellion is certainly—and this is the first meaning of the word "reason," or "rightness"—the objective, irreducible character of the contradiction that pits the workers against the bourgeois, but it is also the practical certainty of the final victory; it is the spontaneous, ceaselessly renewed critique of worker defeatism. That the state of affairs is unacceptable and divided—this is the first reason for the rebellion against the reactionaries. That it is transitory and doomed is the second. It is reason, no longer from the standpoint of the motivation or of the moment, but from the standpoint of the future. It is reason in the sense of victory, beyond reason in the sense of legitimacy. Rebellion is wisdom because it is just, because it is founded in reason, but also because it is rebellion that legislates about the future. Marxism repudiates any conception of reason solely based on justification. The proletariat does not simply have true reasons to rebel, it has victorious reasons. "Reason" is here at the crossroads of revolutionary legitimacy and revolutionary optimism.

Rebellion is allergic to Kant's moral maxim: "You must, therefore you can." Besides, Kant concluded that an act thus regulated in terms of pure duty had doubtless never taken place. Morality is a defeated prescription. But the workers' rebellion has indeed taken place, and it finds in Marxism its place of victorious prescription. Marxist reason is not an ought, a duty to be, it is the affirmation of being itself, the unlimited power of what stands up, opposes, contradicts. It is the objective victory of popular refusal. Materialistically, workers' reason says: "You can, therefore you must."

3. But "reason" means yet another thing, and this thing is the split fusion of the first two senses. This time, "it is right to rebel against the reactionaries" means: rebellion can be strengthened by the consciousness of its own reason. The statement itself "it is right to rebel against the reactionaries" is both the development of kernels of knowledge internal to the rebellion itself and the return into rebellion of this development. Rebellion—which is right, which has reason—finds in Marxism the means of developing this reason, of assuring its victorious reason. That which allows the legitimacy of rebellion (the first sense of the word "reason") to become articulated with its victory (the second sense of the word "reason") is a new type of fusion between rebellion as a practice that is always there and the developed form of its reason. The fusion of Marxism and of the real workers' movement is the third sense of the word reason, that is to say, the dialectical link, both objective and subjective, of its first two senses.

We encounter here once again the dialectical status of Marxist statements, all of which are divided according to reflection and according to the directive: grasping, beyond its causes, the reason of class energy. By the same token the theory formulates the rule whereby reason can prevail over the cause, the ensemble over the local, strategy over tactics. Rebellion formulates its reason in practical duration; but the clarified statement of this reason breaks with the still-repetitive rule that commands this duration. Rebellion arms itself with its own reason, instead of simply deploying it. It concentrates its rational quality: it organizes its reason and sets out the instruments of its victory.

Knowing that one is right to rebel against the reactionaries, by delivering the (theoretical) reason of this (practical) reason, allows one to make the subjective (organization, the project) equal to the objective (class struggle, rebellion). "Reason," which initially voiced revolutionary legitimacy and optimism, now speaks of the consciousness and mastery of history.

C. Reason as Contradiction

"It is right to rebel against the reactionaries" is indeed a sentence that says everything about historical movement, because it voices its energy, its sense, and its instrument. Its energy is class struggle, the objective rationality internal to rebellion. Its sense is the ineluctable collapse of the world of exploitation and oppression—that is, communist reason. The instrument is the possible direction of the relation, within history, between energy and sense, between class struggle (which is always and everywhere the motor of history) and the communist project (which is always and everywhere the value promoted by the rebellion of the oppressed). The instrument is reason become subject, it is the party.

"It is right to rebel against the reactionaries" voices the whole, because it speaks of class struggle and the primacy of practice, communism and the withering away of the state, the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The sentence voices integral reason, which is to say divided reason, according to the subjective and the objective, reality and project, the endpoint and the stages. And we can see how this integral reason is contradiction: it is impossible to be right, to have reason alone and for oneself. One is right, one has reason, against the reactionaries. One is always right against the reactionaries, the "against the reactionaries" is an internal condition of the true. That is also why Mao Zedong's sentence summarizes Marxism; it says: every reason contradicts. "True ideas emerge in the struggle against false ideas," reason is forged in the rebellion against unreason, against what the Chinese invariably call "reactionary absurdities."

Every truth affirms itself in the destruction of nonsense. Every truth is thus essentially destruction. Everything that simply conserves is simply false. The field of Marxist knowledge is always a field of ruins.

Mao Zedong's sentence tells us the whole dialectic: the class essence of reason as rebellion lies in the struggle to the death of opposites. Truth only exists in a process of scission.

The theory of contradictions is wholly implicated in the historical wisdom of rebels. That is why the dialectic has always existed, just like rebellions. The dialectic philosophically concentrates the conception of the world of the exploited who stand up against the existing world and will its radical change. That is why it is an eternal philosophical tendency, which unremittingly opposes itself to conservative metaphysical oppression: "Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe: the metaphysical conception and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks" (Mao Zedong, On Contradiction).

It is always a question of continuing the dialectic, of continuing it against metaphysics, which means: to give reason to the rebels, to say that they are right. Today, to give reason to the true Marxism against the false. To the Maoists, against the revisionists.

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Alain Badiou, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, works with Organisation Politique, a postparty organization. He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Alberto Toscano is a member of the sociology faculty at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor, with Ray Brassier, of Alain Badiou's Theoretical Writings (2004).

Endnotes

This is a translation of chapter 1 of Alain Badiou's Théorie de la contradiction (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

1. On se révolte, on a raison. Throughout this chapter, Badiou plays with the resonance between being right, avoir raison, or considering right, donner raison, and the concept of reason, raison, recast in a partisan Marxist/Maoist guise.—Trans.

2. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not a formalism. In it words are caught up in the movement of destruction/construction, which is the movement of real knowledge. If the target is attained, the signs matter little. Whence the fact that words can move around: only their power counts. Yet again, force prevails over the respect of places.

3. Lenin strongly underlines the insufficiency of the category of causality when he argues that Hegel, rather than Kant, is right not to give it any pride of place: "When one reads Hegel on causality, it appears strange at first glance that he dwells so relatively lightly on this theme, beloved of the Kantians. Why? Because, indeed, for him causality is only one of the determinations of universal connection." Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks.

Find this and other articles at: http://positions.dukejournals.org/content/vol13/issue3/

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