This is the second in a series of articles about major transformations taking place in the world imperialist system.

Part 1 of this series discussed how the balance of international economic power is shifting among the major imperialist powers and how new geoeconomic blocs of countries are taking shape. The potential is growing for various powers, or alliances of powers, to gain greater geopolitical capacity to challenge U.S. dominance—not necessarily through direct confrontation in this period but nonetheless in increasingly strategic ways. These developments are interacting with other contradictions, conflicts, and struggles in the world.

The U.S. still occupies the primary position in the imperialist world economy. It is the largest economy; the financial glue of the whole world system; and the political-military “guarantor” of a global order that benefits, at least for now, all the big powers.

The U.S.’s economic position in the world has been declining. But U.S. imperialism possesses unparalleled military strength relative to rivals and would-be rivals. And since 2001, it has been pressing this advantage—mounting a global military offensive, focused in Iraq and Afghanistan, to secure unchallengeable dominance for decades to come.

But the United States is encountering difficulties in pursuing its global agenda. Its financial system has been experiencing growing turmoil. The shifts and changes in world economics are impacting U.S. imperialism’s freedom of maneuver.

In short, the imperialist system is in flux. And China is a highly dynamic element in the equation.

The nature of China’s development, and the implications of China’s rise in the world imperialist system, is the topic of this article.

I. INTRODUCTION: NOT A SOCIALIST SOCIETY, A COMPLEX DYNAMIC OF DEVELOPMENT

Many people assume that China is a socialist society—after all, its leaders describe their system as socialist and there is, in name, a ruling communist party. But socialism no longer exists in China. It was overthrown in October 1976. Deng Xiaoping and other leading neo-capitalist forces within the Chinese Communist Party carried out a military coup soon after Mao Tsetung died. These forces moved quickly to arrest the Maoist leadership core and to suppress revolutionary opposition.

Glossary:

The bourgeoisie. The ruling class of capitalist society. This modern exploiting class commands private control (ownership) over large-scale, highly developed, social productive forces—workable only by the collective efforts of a class, the proletariat which, dispossessed of means of production, must sell its labor power in order to survive. The bourgeoisie embodies the capitalist imperative to expand or die. It stands in antagonistic relation to the proletariat. It enforces its rule over society through control of the state and its organs of repression and force.

A new capitalist class rules China. It is subordinate to and dominated by imperialism. Indeed, imperialism has deeply penetrated Chinese society and economy: through investments by transnational corporations…through the activities of global finance…through the influence of imperialist-controlled institutions like the World Bank and World Trade Organization…and through channels of culture and ideology.

China is dependent on imperialism: on massive inflows of investment capital into the Chinese economy; and on access to the export markets of the advanced capitalist countries, like the U.S., Japan, and Germany. This is what has been and what is now most determining of China’s capitalist development.

At the same time, precisely because China has been such a profitable arena for imperialist investment—based on its vast supply of super-exploitable labor, which is China’s “competitive advantage” in the world system—China’s economy has been growing rapidly. As this has continued, and as China’s rulers have acted to strengthen their base of power and initiative, China has gained increasing influence and leverage. This is occurring in a framework in which imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, dominates China.

China’s rulers are, increasingly, seeking to carve out space and pursue their own geostrategic interests within this framework and on the same underlying basis: the savage exploitation of wage labor. But in pursuing their interests, China’s capitalist rulers are presenting challenges to a framework that has largely benefited U.S. imperialism.

China may in fact be in transition to becoming an imperialist power. But whether it does, or does not, will not just be a function of economic factors, and certainly not simply those internal to China. Rather, this will turn on different and interpenetrating economic, political, and military developments in the world system, including unexpected developments: crises, wars, class struggles in China and the world, and revolutions.

Overall, a complex dynamic of dependency and growing strength is shaping China’s development and rise in the world imperialist system—and reacting back on this system. How this plays out is not predetermined. But it is already a major and defining faultline in the world.  

II. CHINA’S RAPID GROWTH: DRIVEN BY FOREIGN CAPITAL, EXPORT-DEPENDENT

China is now the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. China’s rate of growth has been the fastest among all major economies in the world, averaging close to 10 percent growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the last two decades. By contrast the imperialist countries’ average annual growth rate was 2-4 percent. China’s GDP, its output of goods and services, doubled between 1990 and 2005. China, however, remains a poor country, with output (and income) per person far below that of the advanced capitalist countries.

China’s exceptionally high and sustained rate of growth and industrialization over the last two decades may well be without precedent in the history of capitalism. More to the point, this sustained growth is a) leading to an enormous buildup of productive capacity in China; b) profoundly influencing the trajectory of global capitalist development; and c) contributing to China’s rapid rise as a world economic power.

A. China in the World Economy

China is becoming the center of gravity of world manufacturing. In recent years, China has been among the top five major destinations for foreign investment, and it is the main destination for foreign industrial investment in the world. China has been a growth engine for the imperialist world economy. China consumes some 20 to 25 percent of the global supply of iron, steel, aluminum, and copper. China accounts for one-third of the world’s rise in demand for oil.[1]

China is deeply involved in the world economy. It is the world’s largest non-U.S. holder of dollars. It is engaged in competitive struggles for raw materials and energy resources in Africa and elsewhere with the U.S. (and other imperialist powers). China is emerging as a growing and increasingly assertive geoeconomic force in the world. And U.S. imperialism, for its part, has been increasingly targeting China as a potential long-term competitor and adversary.

China’s rapid growth is inextricably bound up with huge inflows of foreign investment capital:

* Foreign capital controls the majority of assets of 21 of China’s 28 leading industrial sectors.[2]
* By the early 2000s, transnational corporations, like General Electric, accounted for over one-third of China’s industrial output.[3]
* Enterprises in which foreign capital is invested account for almost 60 percent of China’s imports and exports.[4]

Investment by foreign capital in China has spawned the development of vast new production complexes in China’s coastal areas, where 80 percent of all foreign investment goes. And in the last twenty years, some 200 million rural laborers have relocated to the urban areas to find work.[5] This super-exploitable army of migrant labor, facing low pay in work and discrimination in housing and services, feeds the labor requirements of these production complexes.

Foreign capital in China is heavily invested in low-cost, low-value manufactured goods, like garments. China is also producing electronics and information technology (IT) goods—and is now the biggest exporter to the U.S. of computers, computer electronics, and other IT goods. But a high proportion of those exports involve assembly in foreign-owned plants in China or operations contracted to local Chinese capitalists of high-tech components manufactured outside of China.[6] This is an example of China’s distorted development.

China is the largest recipient of direct foreign investment in the Third World. And overseas firms derive exceptionally high profits from their operations in China. As Chart 1 shows, rates of return on U.S. manufacturing investments in China are twice the level of comparable investments in the European Union (EU) countries, and higher than in Latin America.

Another example of imperialist-led development: when imperialist capital contracts out to Chinese firms, the flow of profits is disproportionately towards imperialism. Take an iPod sold in the United States for $299. Only $4 stays in China with the firms that assemble the devices, while $160 goes to American companies that design, transport, and retail the iPods.[7]

International capital has molded China’s economy into, and integrated it as, a key link in an East Asian regional system of high-profit, export-oriented production.

China relies heavily on the U.S. market, which is its top export destination. Thus China’s economic vitality hinges crucially on growth of demand in the U.S. market, demand that is increasingly financed by debt. China is also dependent on export markets in another way: it must exponentially expand exports to pay for its rising bill for imports of energy, minerals, food, semifinished goods, capital goods (like machinery), and luxury goods catering to its new affluent classes.

B. Some Historical Perspective and the Crimes of China’s New Capitalist Rulers

In the 19th century, Western capitalism came to dominate China—through wars, the imposition of unequal treaties, and the splicing up of China into foreign spheres of influence. The economic and military penetration by foreign powers brutally continued: the U.S.’s economic pressure to “open up” the Chinese market, Japanese aggression and occupation in the 1930s, and U.S backing of the corrupt and reactionary Chiang Kai-shek forces in China’s civil war of 1945-49. China had lost its sovereignty, and economic development in China was twisted and stunted by imperialist domination.

The Chinese revolution of 1949-76 changed all of this. It broke the vise-grip of foreign control. It destroyed the foundations of exploitative and corrupt landlord and bureaucrat-capitalist rule. China’s resources now served the needs of all-around development. Under Mao’s leadership, China constructed a self-reliant and balanced economy. A modern industrial base was built. Transport and power stations, part of a new infrastructure created by the collective efforts of society, served this balanced development. Industry was spread to towns and villages. Communes were established in the countryside: farming was carried out cooperatively at different levels, peasants joined together to construct vast irrigation and flood control systems, health services and education were provided at low cost. A skilled and healthy labor force was the result.

After overthrowing socialism in 1976, China’s new capitalist rulers basically opened China up and delivered it over to foreign capital. Imperialism, together with the new capitalist rulers in China, plugged into and transformed China’s past socialist development to serve the accumulation of capital. The new regime stripped workers of rights and turned them into wage slaves for foreign and new domestic capital. They dismantled the communes; and peasants dispossessed of land or unable to support themselves in agriculture migrated out of desperation (and the lure of higher incomes) to the cities in the booming coastal regions to become a caste of flexible, super-exploitable, and disposable workers. The infrastructure built up during the socialist period functioned as a kind of subsidy for imperialist-led development.

C. China’s Bourgeoisie and the State Sector

A state-based section of the ruling class is at the core of power in China and rules through its political instrumentality, the Chinese Communist Party—which has nothing in common with socialism or communism. This core fraction of the Chinese bourgeoisie has control over key levers of the Chinese economy. It regulates monetary and tax policy. It is closely linked to and dependent on foreign capital, and it is integrated with large domestic private capital. And it commands the military and repressive force of state power—and uses this power brutally against the masses, as we saw in the suppression of students and workers during the Tiananmen Square upheaval of 1989.

The state economic sector includes government-owned industrial enterprises and banks, and accounts for about 35 percent of China’s economy. The private capitalist sector of the economy is growing much more rapidly—and much of the state sector has been privatized. Since 1995, China’s state sector has undergone considerable restructuring. It has shed a vast number of firms and tens of millions of employees. But a core of state enterprises dominates much of heavy industry and key service sectors.[8] And the state sector remains an economic base of power of this leading fraction of China’s bourgeoisie.

State control remains very strong in the banking and insurance sectors, even as they have sold shares to private international investors.

Within the framework of imperialist domination and dependency on imported technology, the Chinese state has, to some degree, been strategically steering China’s development. One of its goals is for China to “move up” the manufacturing ladder to more sophisticated production. China is producing more capital-intensive goods, engaging in more modular (technologically advanced, standardized) manufacturing, and so forth.

China’s ruling class is attempting to expand and diversify China’s industrial-technological base and to influence patterns of development.

An auto industry, spearheaded by foreign capital (companies like Volkswagen and General Motors), is now rapidly developing in China. But as a condition of entry into the China market, the Chinese government is requiring unprecedented technology transfers from transnational corporations. The regime has insisted that its domestic automotive makers maintain joint ventures with its competing foreign partners.

Very importantly, China is investing in large-scale and long-term research and development. And the government is promoting national private and state companies to be national frontrunners in industries like computers and telecommunications.

China’s rulers are seeking to turn imperialist, foreign-dominated development into a base to fortify China’s position as a world economic power and from which to project and amplify that power on a world scale.

Still, China’s high-speed development as it has unfolded remains dominated by foreign capital and reliant on international markets. It is vulnerable to fluctuations in world market demand. It must attract foreign capital—which is constantly looking for even more low-cost zones of production—from Mexico…to China…to Vietnam. This project requires and puts a premium on social and political stability in society and the economy but has, at the same time, produced extreme and acute agricultural-industrial distortions and vast regional and social inequalities. The gap in incomes between China’s urban and rural areas is, by some statistical reckonings, greater than in any other country in the world, and this is profoundly destabilizing.[9]

D. Reality Check

Cost-minimizing, high-profit, rapid growth is a key objective of China’s ruling class. It is based on the exploitation of wage labor and peasant labor—on the blood and bones of the Chinese people. It is chaotic, ruinous, and environmentally disastrous economic development.  

Five of the ten most polluted cities in the world are in China. The Three Gorges Dam project, the scale of which is unparalleled in human history, has massively destroyed ecosystems and uprooted huge populations. Ravenous commercial development is destroying farmland at a quickening pace (farmers are pressured by local government officials to sell their land-use rights and are barely compensated). China has now lost half of its wetlands. Capitalist development is an ecological disaster. It has been estimated that air pollution, water pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation are responsible for disease and premature deaths claiming the lives of some 400,000 people in China each year.[10]

China’s economic development is a human disaster:
The Sichuan earthquake in the spring of 2008 took a far greater toll among China’s poor: shoddily built schools for the less affluent collapsed and many children died unnecessarily. Peasants must pay fees for medical services and schooling. A recent survey of the Chinese health system concluded. “The less well-off increasingly go without health care altogether.”[11]

In urban China, it is not unusual for low-paid wage laborers in the export sector to work 80-hour work weeks in factories with abominable health and safety conditions. In the West, we hear about the lead paint in toys produced in China, but not about the toxic fumes being inhaled, the injuries suffered, and limbs lost by the workers in those toy factories. According to one Chinese government survey, 72 percent of the country’s nearly 100 million migrant workers are owed unpaid wages—and this is an important source of capital accumulated by private and foreign firms.[12]

Significantly, China’s economic boom of 1990-2002 actually led to a decline in formal wage employment in the urban sector (that is, regular jobs with certain protections and standards), as the state sector sought to achieve greater efficiency and profitability. Much of the new job creation has been in the private sector and especially in what is called the informal sector: insecure and unregulated jobs, casual labor on the construction crews of China’s mega-projects (skyscrapers in the cities, infrastructure for the 2008 Olympics, dam construction in river areas), street trading, and illegal activities.[13]

One expression of these trends is China’s burgeoning “sex industry.” Some women’s groups estimate that China now has some 20 million sex workers, most of whom come from the rural areas to work in red-light districts in the sprawling new industrial and commercial centers.[14]

Rural women face new burdens, with husbands and sons migrating to cities. Their life opportunities are restricted. One of the saddest and least reported social developments in China’s countryside is that women—young women—are committing suicide in unprecedented numbers. This is a far cry from Maoist China, when the struggle against the oppression of women was a central focus of the continuing revolutionary transformation of society.[15]

III. China as Rising Economic Power with Strategic Goals

The rapid development of capitalism in China is cohering a China-centered regional grid of capitalist production in East Asia, in which Japanese imperialism plays a major organizing role. East Asia is the most dynamic manufacturing region in the world. China’s rulers are fostering greater economic-political linkages throughout East Asia. China is also building up its capacity to project military power in the region. And it is pushing outward into other parts of the world.

A. Growing Financial Leverage

China has become a major actor in world currency and financial markets. China holds $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves—a store of wealth that is also used as a means of international payments. Foreign exchange reserves come from export earnings as well as from other investment earnings. And China is an extraordinary export machine—the United States imports more goods from China than from any other country. China has now surpassed Japan as the world’s largest holder of foreign exchange reserves. Most of these reserves (for now) are kept in dollars—invested in U.S. treasury securities, U.S. government agency debt, and other financial instruments.

China’s dollar holdings are a source of considerable financial leverage in the world imperialist economy. The U.S. has huge government deficits (it spends more on its wars, social programs, interest payments, etc. than it collects in taxes). The U.S. has huge trade deficits (it imports more than it exports). It borrows huge amounts of capital to cover its international financial imbalances. And, critically, the U.S. depends on countries like China continuing to finance its debt.

In 2007-08, China’s “sovereign wealth funds”—these are vast pools of financial wealth managed by governments—were looked to by weakened Wall Street financial and brokerage firms, like Morgan Stanley, to provide them with much needed capital.

China is a huge importer of fuels and minerals, accounting for nearly 40 percent of world market growth for these goods since 1995. Because of China’s high-speed and globally oriented development on a less-developed technological foundation than exists in a country like Japan—China uses seven times as much energy for the same volume of production as does Japan (and three times as much as India).[16]

And China is seeking to secure access to raw materials to feed its industrial machine. In Latin America and Africa, China is investing in extractive industries and buying up firms. China’s foreign direct investment increased from $1.8 billion in 2003 to $16.1 billion in 2006. About half of this is in natural resource industries.[17]

A competitive scramble is beginning to take shape in Africa for control over oil and mineral supplies. U.S. oil companies have been stepping up their investments in countries like Angola, Nigeria, and Equatorial Guinea. In 2007, the U.S. military also established a new unified Africa Command, AFRICOM. (Prior to this, military deployments were coordinated by commands outside of Africa.) This is a major initiative by U.S. imperialism both to secure oil supplies and control over other natural resources and to incorporate more parts of Africa in America’s “war on terror.” As part of this, the U.S. has been stepping up arms transfers and military support agreements with various African governments.

Since the mid-1990s, China has been stepping up its activities in Africa. China is now Africa’s third largest trading partner. China’s state-owned oil company acquired a controlling share in Sudan’s leading oil company. It has become an investor in Algeria’s oil industry. And it has been making its own investment forays into the oil sectors of Angola and Nigeria. Africa now provides about 30 percent of China’s oil import requirements. Chinese mining firms in search of cobalt, uranium, copper, and other industrial minerals, supported by the Chinese state, have been investing in, extending financial assistance, and forging closer ties with the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.[18]

All this investment and maneuvering on China’s part is miniscule compared to the involvement of the U.S. and Europe in Africa. But there is intensifying rivalry in Africa, and a scramble increasingly involving China is underway.

China is utilizing political and diplomatic ties, weapons sales and training agreements, and low-interest loans to advance its interests. It is ideologically positioning itself in parts of the Third World by criticizing U.S. domination and some of the U.S. policies that squeeze Third World countries. And it is taking advantage of the fact that the U.S. is focused and tied down in the Middle East, where its wars for greater empire are now being waged.

U.S. imperialism has been increasingly targeting China as a strategic competitor. Since 2006, the U.S. Defense Department in its annual survey of China has put competition with China over resources on par with conflict over Taiwan as a potential spark for a U.S. war with China.[19]

It is in the context of China’s rise in the world economy and rivalry with China that we can begin to see U.S. demonization and scapegoating of China: for exporting unsafe foods and medicines, for intellectual property-rights infringements, for human rights violations, and for increasing its military spending.

B. Geopolitical Ambitions and the Russia-China Connection

China’s fast-paced, resource-scarce, and anarchic economic growth, under the dominance of imperialist capital, is objectively driving its emergence as a world power with geopolitical ambitions.

China’s military spending has increased three-fold in the past decade according to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2006, it surpassed Japan as the largest military spender in East Asia, and China now has the third largest military budget in the world.[20] China has been upgrading its naval capabilities, improving its ballistic missile arsenals, and entering high-tech arenas like militarization of space. China’s military spending is incredibly dwarfed by that of U.S. imperialism, but China’s military power is a growing factor in international relations, especially in East Asia.

Coming from a perspective of how to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism, two former U.S. government policy advisers reflect a certain aspect of reality in their depiction of the changing geopolitical situation confronting the United States in this critical region: “After 60 years of U.S. domination, the balance of power in Northeast Asia is shifting. The United States is in relative decline, China is on the rise, and Japan and South Korea are in flux. To maintain U.S. power in the region, Washington must identify the trends shaping this transition and embrace new tools and regimes that broaden the United States’ power base.”[21]

One of the features of the current situation is the growing convergence of interests of China and Russia in key arenas and the multiplication of Sino-Russian ties and cooperation. In 2006, China became the number one economic partner of Russia, and China has also been financing important Russian pipeline projects—which will be discussed in the next installment of this series.

Both China and Russia are providing arms to oil and gas producers in the Third World. Both are increasing their military capability in key energy producing regions. And both powers joined together in 2001 to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of Central Asian countries.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is a major development in world relations. China’s economic growth and rise in the world economy are increasingly finding expression in the geopolitical and military realms. The SCO is a regional energy alliance and a regional security alliance in Central Asia. Its core member states are China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The SCO is bringing together Chinese economic strength with Russian military capability and energy resources. In the summer of 2007, the SCO conducted its first military exercises. This was also the first time that Chinese airborne troops were deployed outside Chinese territory.[22]

The SCO is clearly aimed at reducing and countering U.S. influence in Central Asia and at concentrating certain strengths, and overcoming certain weaknesses, of Russia and China—and drawing others around them. This is a fledgling but significant vehicle of rivalry in a volatile, energy-rich region of the world.

C. Some New Questions

Some new questions are posed by China’s rapid ascent in the world economy.

Could China “decouple” (the phrase is used by financial as well as by geopolitical analysts) from its reliance on the U.S. export market and abandon its willingness to finance U.S. deficits?

In the short run, the answer seems to be a resounding no—given the huge shocks this could set off (China would stand to lose billions if it quickly bolted the dollar and caused the value of the dollar to plummet) and the fact that China’s dependent and distorted development requires export markets on a huge scale. It appears that China cannot easily switch to stimulating domestic demand as a substitute for Western export markets.

In the intermediate and longer term, the possibilities for “decoupling” look rather different, especially in connection with other world economic and geopolitical shifts.

China’s high rate of growth and the profitability it has afforded imperialist capital have been a vital stimulus to the world economy, including U.S. imperialism. At the same time, a more cohesive and competitive West European economic bloc, the European Union, is now playing a more major role in the world economy and world finance.

Still, as mentioned at the start of this analysis, the U.S. occupies the primary position in the imperialist world economy. And owing to China’s deep immersion in the imperialist world economy, if it suffers the full brunt of what might be an unfolding global economic downturn this could have huge and destabilizing feedback effects, both on China and on the world economy. How China and the U.S. respond to and come out of the 2008 financial crisis may have long-term, geopolitical ramifications.

China has been able to sustain high growth rates. But it is a capitalist economy. It is not immune to instability and crisis. It is estimated that 75 percent of China’s industries are plagued by overcapacity, that is, too much investment relative to markets.[23] Inflation is heating up in China. Social polarization is widening: strikes, protests and confrontations in the countryside over corruption, land takeovers, and environmental damage have multiplied in recent years.

The dynamics of China’s rise are complex. There is, however, a shaping contradiction: dependency and growing economic strength. China is dependent on foreign capital and foreign markets. But China has also emerged as a world economic power, a center of world manufacturing. It has accumulated vast foreign exchange reserves, and gained considerable financial leverage—increasingly over the dollar. And China is more aggressively seeking markets in the Third World and exporting capital beyond its borders.

Stepping back, what seems to be guiding the Chinese ruling class is a long-term, strategic, and competitive orientation: to diversify and fortify a domestically rooted industrial base, to extend international economic and financial reach, and to strengthen military capabilities but to do so without provoking direct showdowns with U.S. imperialism.

Could China evolve into an imperialist capital formation? It is a question that cannot be dismissed out of hand, though neither is it a straight-line, foregone conclusion. But it is a real possibility—China may be in a stage of transition to becoming an imperialist power. How likely is such a qualitative development, and by what pathways might it proceed? These are historically contingent matters that will turn on the interaction of the motion and development of Chinese capitalism; with the class struggle in China; with larger shifts, displacements, and eruptions in world economics…and with big and unexpected developments in world politics, including wars and other conflicts, as well as revolutionary struggles.

Next, Part 3: The European Union, Russia, Japan, and India

Footnotes:

1. Keith Bradsher, “Labor Costs Soar in China, So Its Neighbors Beckon,” New York Times, June 18, 2008; John C.K. Daly, “Feeding the Dragon: China’s Quest for African Minerals,” China Brief, January 31, 2008, jamestown.org; Energy Information Administration, Country Analysis Briefs: China, August 2006, eia.doe.gov.[back]

2. Wu Qi, “China Regulates Foreign Mergers for More Investment,” September 11, 2006, china-embassy.org.[back]

3. Wang Zile, “Foreign Acquisition in China: Threat or Security,” China Security, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 2007), p. 90.[back]

4. U.S.-China Business Council, Forecast 2008: Foreign Investment in China, p. 1.[back]

5. U.S.-China Business Council, Forecast 2008: Foreign Investment in China, p. 3; CIA, World Fact Book: China, cia.gov.[back]

6. Nicholas Lardy, “Trade Liberalization and Its Role in China’s Economic Growth,” imf.org.[back]

7. Charlemagne, “Winners and losers,” The Economist, March 1, 2008, p. 56.[back]

8. On the state sector, see Arthur Kroeber and Roselea Yao, “Large and in charge,” Financial Times, FT.com, July 14, 2008.[back]

9. Mobo Gao, The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto, 2008), pp. 160, 179; Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “Amid China’s Boom, No Helping Hand for Young Qingming, New York Times, August 1, 2004.[back]

10. Elizabeth Economy, “China vs. Earth,” The Nation, April 19, 2007; Jim Yardley, “China’s Turtles, Emblems of a Crisis,” New York Times, December 5, 2007; L. Alan Winters and Shahid Yusuf, eds., Dancing with Giants (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 2007), p. 14.[back]

11. Li Onesto, “The Capitalist Ground Shaken by the Earthquake in China,” Revolution #131, June 1, 2008, revcom.us; Sanjay Reddy, “Death in China: Market Reforms and Health,” New Left Review 45, May-June 2007.[back]

12. Anita Chan, “A `Race to the Bottom,’” China Perspectives, no. 46 (March-April 2003), p. 43; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 148.[back]

13. Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett “China, Capitalist Accumulation, and Labor,” Monthly Review, May 2007, pp. 28-29.[back]

14. Howard W. French, “The Sex Industry is Everywhere But Nowhere,” New York Times, December 14, 2006, cited in Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, p. 29. [back]

15. Robert Weil, “Were Revolutions in China Necessary,” Socialism and Democracy, Vol. 21, July 2007, pp. 20-22.[back]

16. Winters and Yusuf, Dancing with Giants, p. 14; Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, New York: Random House, 2008, p. 313fn.[back]

17. PPI, “Chinese Direct Investment Abroad Has Grown Twenty-Fold Since 2000,” October 21, 2007, ppionline.org. [back]

18. On great power competition for resources in Africa and China’s growing economic presence in Africa, see Michael T. Klare, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), Chapter 6; Jian-Ye Wang and Abdoulaye Bio-Tchane, “Africa’s Burgeoning Ties with China,” Finance and Development (IMF), March 2008, Vol. 45, No. 1; David H. Shinn, “Africa, China, The United States, and Oil,” Africa Policy Forum, forums.csis.org. [back]

19. Michael T. Klare, “The New Geopolitics of Energy,” The Nation, May 1, 2008, thenation.com.[back]

20. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Recent trends in military expenditure (Stockholm: 2008), sipri.org. [back]

21. Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney, “Washington’s Eastern Sunset: The Decline of U.S. Power in Northeast Asia,” Foreign Affairs, November-December 2007, online edition, summary, p. 1, foreignaffairs.org. [back]

22. On the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, see Bates Gill and Mathew Oresman, “China’s New Journey to the West” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2003), pp. 5-12; See also, Klare, “New Geopolitics of Energy.” [back]

by E. San Juan, Jr.

A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths of nearly a million Iraqis, over four thousand American soldiers, the cruelties of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and a severe economic recession.  Arroyo claims the distinction of having scored several thousand victims of paramilitary violence (903 extra-judicial killings and193 enforced disappearances, according to the Philippine human-rights monitor KARAPATAN), open bribery of officials by raiding the public treasury,  unscrupulous cheating in elections, and untold kickbacks from government transactions (such as the ZTE Broadband scandal, among many) — all with impunity.

Scourge of Human Rights

International groups, from Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the International Association of People’s Lawyers, have all concurred on the outrageous truth of the “killing fields” in the US neocolony.  An editorial of The Philippine Star (6 June 2007) noted that the country is one of the “least peaceful countries in the world, ranking 100th among 121 in the first-ever Global Peace Index drawn up by the Economic Intelligence Unit.”  United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston reported to the 8th session of the UN Human Rights Council that Arroyo’s “state security forces have been involved in many of the killings of left-wing activists, indigenous leaders, trade union and farm leaders and civil society organization members and that the military remains in a ’state of denial’ over these killings” (see E. San Juan, US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines, New York, 2007).  “Not a single soldier has been convicted,” Alston added, urging the Arroyo regime to end the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) policy of “systematically hunting down the leaders of [legal and open] leftist organizations” such as BAYAN MUNA and assassinating their members (see the Web site of UN Human Rights Council).

The Arroyo regime recently defied the UN’s Universal Periodic Review session by rejecting the recommendation to strengthen the Witness Protection Program and approve the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances.   In its comprehensive survey “Scared Silent: Impunity for Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines,”   Human Rights Watch observed that in spite of public-relation ploys such as the Melo Commission and Arroyo’s refrain that there is “no state policy of killing people,” not one case has been solved, not a single military officer or soldier prosecuted for the murders and disappearances of activists such as Jonas Burgos, Luisa Posa Dominado, Shirley Cadapan, Karen Empeno, and thousands more (Inquirer.net. 5 October 2007).

Last year the Permanent People’s Tribunal concluded its meticulous appraisal of massive evidence with the judgment that the Arroyo regime and its sponsor, the Bush administration, were guilty of “gross and systematic violation of human rights, economic plunder and transgression of the Filipino people’s sovereignty.”  The first session of the Tribunal on the Philippines in 1980 unequivocally condemned “the dominant economic and political role of the US in the Philippines and in the region through the implementation of an imperial policy” (PPT Verdict 2007).  Arroyo’s ritual obeisance to Washington may be cited as one more proof, falling in line with a tradition of subservience of the Filipino oligarchy since the time of Commonwealth president Manuel Quezon to the first president of the 1946 Philippine Republic Manuel Roxas up to presidents Ramon Magsaysay (sponsored by the CIA) and Diosdado Macapagal (Arroyo’s father) to the notorious Marcos dictatorship and its unconscionable successors.  No wonder both McCain and Obama parroted worn-out clichés about “Asia’s first democracy,” the Philippines as a faithful client regime during the Cold War and the current crusade against terrorists personified by politically informed combatants of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and  the New People’s Army.

Subaltern Medicancy Forever

Winding down as a tiresome fiasco and farcical boondoggle, Arroyo’s roadshow to the Empire’s heartland this June may have been cursed by the sinking of the Philippine ferry MV Princess of the Stars and the ravages of the deadly typhoon Frank.  Thousands of victims and their families await her sycophantic pilgrimage with cries of help and anger.  After wasting at least $1.5 million of public funds and getting a promised aid of $100,000 from State Dept. bureaucrat John Negroponte, infamous for organizing mass carnage in Central America, the Arroyo entourage is returning a the feckless attempt at fanfare.  One episode of de facto president Arroyo’s visit strikes this writer as particularly telling.  George W. Bush surpassed his father’s “I-love-your-democracy” apologia for the despot Marcos when he praised “the great talent” of “Philippine-Americans” whenever he dines at the White House — a nod to Filipina chef Chris Comerford.  Arroyo’s pathetic “thank you” sums up over a century of gruesomely asymmetrical “US-Philippines” relations so beloved by US experts on the Philippines and their Filipino acolytes.  Sadly hilarious but also infuriating to those out in Manila streets demonstrating against the brutality and injustice of Arroyo-US neoliberal privatization program.

Meanwhile, we learn that on June 17, retired Maj. General Antonio Taguba (not one of Bush’s talented ‘Philippine Americans”), in his testimony to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, accused Bush and his henchmen of committing war crimes by authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques.  Taguba headed the committee that investigated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Subsequent inquiries by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have revealed the scale and depth of the current administration’s violation of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of what the US calls “unlawful” enemy combatants, otherwise considered political prisoners.

Arroyo’s trip was ostensibly made to lobby for the passage of the Veterans Equity Bill — Senate Bill 1315, approved by the Senate but pending at the House.  This bill would set aside $350 million (out of $1 billion) for ten years to pay for the basic needs of thousands of Filipino veterans of World War II, most of whom are now dead, who were denied their rightful veterans’ back pay.  Without Arroyo’s help, local organizers (such as the National Federation of Filipino American Associations) have mobilized enough support for the passage of the bill in the Senate.  So Arroyo’s opportunistic appearance in Washington is clearly intended to prop up her severely damaged image after Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the US Senate sub-committee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and several congressmen chided her last year for her intolerable record of flagrant human-rights violations.

Just as Arroyo’s early trip in August 2005 was besieged with indignant protests, likewise her visit last week was met with numerous “lightning” demonstrations by outraged Filipino-Americans decrying her insensitivity to the plight of thousands of disaster victims, and the millions suffering from the rice shortage, fuel crisis, and unemployment brought about by the short-sighted neoliberal policies of the regime.  With over half of 90 million citizens subsisting on $2 a day, the Philippines exports daily 3,000 contract workers to 186 countries around the world, getting in return $10 to $12 billon in overseas remittances, enough to pay the heavy foreign debt.  In 2007 the US Congress allocated $30 million of citizens’ tax dollars for the beleaguered AFP on condition that Arroyo implements UN rapporteur’s Alston’s recommendations, a condition still unfulfilled in deeds up to now.  The aid rocketed by 1,111% when Bush declared the Philippines the “second front” in his war after 9/11 (IBON Media Release, 21 Sept 2006).  Between 2000 and 2003, US loans and grants to Arroyo increased by 1,176%, primarily funding for counter-terrorist schemes in addition to USAID spending for livelihood projects and infrastructure — activities that camouflage intelligence or special police operations in communities sheltering NPA or MILF partisans.

Pentagon to the Rescue

Less to pacify Arroyo’s entourage and more to threaten Myanmar’s junta, China, North Korea, and other recalcitrants — Al Qaeda supporters — in the Asia-Pacific region, Bush ordered the deployment of the strike group led by the nuclear-armed carrier USS Ronald Reagan to the Philippines.  The alleged task of this armada of aircraft carrier, cruiser, three destroyers, and a frigate is to assist in the rescue of the survivors of the capsized MV Princess of the Stars, now being attended to by the Philippine Coast Guard.  This may be the first time in military history that a nuclear-powered carrier has been assigned to perform distribution of relief goods in a situation far smaller in scope than the cyclone disaster in Myanmar or the earthquake destruction in China.  But again, it’s a war against those unruly subjects, impoverished peasants and workers, including the Moros and the Filipino communists, that justifies this illegitimate intrusion.

Senator Rodolfo Biazon questioned the utility of an aircraft carrier of that size (with 6,000 crew and numerous F-18 airplanes) designed mainly for combat and rescue of distressed airplanes.  As of this writing, the USS Ronald Reagan was moored near the coast of northwest Panay, clearly within Philippine territorial boundary (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 28 June 2008).  In addition, the US Embassy revealed that the USNS Stockham and US Navy P-3 planes are on standby to provide maritime surveillance and other security needs (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 26 June 2008).  This substantiates once more public suspicions of the sustained complicity of the US with the AFP campaigns against Moro insurgents, in particular the Moro Islamic Liberation Front  (MILF) — including the notorious bandit-group with ties to local military and politicians, the Abu Sayyaf — and the Communist Party-led New People’s Army (NPA) guerillas active in Panay and Negros, the two islands that suffered the most from the typhoon Frank.  This intrusion of the USS Ronald Reagan is an outright violation of the Philippine Constitution and bilateral treaties with the US

A local group, PAMALAKAYA (Fishermen’s Group of the Philippines), accused Arroyo of committing an impeachable crime: the Philippine Constitution expressly prohibits the entry of nuclear weapons into the country.  While Arroyo’s spokesmen claimed that the USS Ronald Reagan is only “nuclear-powered,” the US Embassy is silent on the presence of nuclear weapons in the possession of the task force group.  Fernando Hicap, PAMALAKAYA’s chair, charged that the presence of the US naval group is intended not only “to warn and provoke the local armed resistance groups [NPA, MILF] but also to score a psywar victory against China and North Korea that Washington is capable of shifting and redeploying US troops at any given situation or time” (GMANews.TV, 26 June 2008).  At present, the US stations over 100,000 troops in Asia and the Pacific under its Pacific Command, with 80,000 troops based in Japan and Korea, and several hundreds at any one time in the Philippines.

Terms of Mutual Endearment?

How did this happen?  The peculiarity of the presence of US combat troops in the Philippines may be explained by the leech-like stranglehold of the US on the Filipino ruling class and its military/paramilitary establishment.  A series of unequal bilateral treaties sealed this toxic partnership.  Obama correctly pointed to the 1954 Manila Pact that “formed a cornerstone of U.S policy in Southeast Asia during the Cold War.”  But that was only the beginning.

The real key to US control may be found in the Military Bases Agreement of March 14 and March 21, 1947 between the two governments.  The first allowed the US extensive military facilities in the Philippines for 99 years, chief of which were Clark Air Base (130,000 acres) and Subic Naval Base which housed nuclear-armed submarines for decades until both were scrapped in 1992.  Thereafter 14,000 US troops left the Philippines.  This agreement prohibited the Philippines from granting base rights to any other country.  It put no restrictions on the use of the bases or on the types of weapons the US could store or deploy in them.  Despite minor amendments, this agreement allowed the US to use the bases as springboards for unlimited US intervention in Asia, such as the aggression in Korea, Vietnam, and lately Afghanistan and Iraq (see Civil Liberties Union, A Question of National Security, Manila 1983).  The second agreement allowed the US to provide military aid to the Philippines on the condition that a US. military advisory group be assigned to supervise the AFP and that Filipino military personnel be sent to the US for training.  It also prohibited the Philippines from accepting military aid or advisers from any other nation without the consent of Washington.  In the context of the campaign against the Huks, communist-led peasants fighting for land and justice at the time, the weapons and advisors supplied by Washington were used to suppress and kill Filipino “subversives” and preserve oppressive oligarchic rule, as well as subsidize the Marcos dictatorship and its repressive sequels.  Under the framework of the RP-US Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951, the Joint RP-US Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) continues to this day to be one crucial agency in perpetuating the reactionary, anti-people orientation of the AFP and its cognate institutions, the state security personnel of every administration up to Arroyo (see the relevant documents conveniently catalogued in Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom, The Philippines Reader, Boston, 1987, including details of military aid to Marcos).  It may be added here that a JUSMAG/ CIA functionary, Col. Nick Rowe, was slain by rebel forces on April 21, 1989, while allegedly shadowing “Cuban” advisors helping the NPA in South-Central Luzon.

Although the bases were shut down in 1992, the US maintains its dominance through JUSMAG and the Philippines-US Mutual Defense Board (established in 1958), which operates as a “new bilateral defense consultative mechanism” to oversee military cooperation between the two countries.  These two mechanisms were reinforced by the Security Engagement Board (SEB) in 2006 designed to deal with nontraditional security threats such as terrorism, piracy, natural disasters (for example, the recent ferry sinking and typhoon), bird flu, and the like not falling under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty that calls for battling external security threats in either countries.  This was supplemented by the Mutual Logistics and Support Agreement (MLSA) signed in November 2002.

Very few know the details of this notorious MLSA.  Its salient provision is its mandating the Philippine government to supply all the logistical support and supplies needed by the Pentagon during its exercises and redeployment.  Pretty much a bargain compared to the costly Clark and Subic bases of the good old days.  Of course, the humanitarian services performed by the troops are only a pretext for the US to interfere in local civil wars in the region, labeling them “international terrorism.”  This agreement with the client regime thus insures a virtually un-evictable presence of the US military as police watchdog to promote and secure US economic and geopolitical interests — from profits in oil, energy, and mineral resources to safeguarding the Malacca Straits where 25 percent of all globally traded oil passes.

Immediately after 9/11, the US State Dept promptly labeled the NPA as terrorist organization so that Arroyo can call on US troops to help her counterinsurgency campaign, even though the Philippine Constitution (Art. II, sec. 3) prohibits foreign troops’ involvement in internal security matters.  Aside from infringing on Philippine sovereignty, the SEB allows the US (to quote IBON, 26 May 2006) “to maintain a prolonged military presence in the country which suits the US military’s current strategy of seeking temporary access to facilities in foreign countries that enable US forces to conduct training and exercises” rather than spending for permanent physical bases.  Moreover, the Philippines functions as an important link in the security chain of the US in the Western Pacific.  The SEB enhances the US’s limited infrastructure for refueling and logistics needed in its operations in the Arabian Gulf and Western Pacific areas.  Mindanao and Sulu islands have been considered strategic locations for monitoring developments in Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, etc. where there is a rising trend of “Islamic revivalism,” of which the MILF is an instance.

There are also numerous clandestine partnerships allowed by executive “understandings” and philanthropic channels.  But it is primarily the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) that legitimizes unrelenting US intervention in the Philippines.  Initiated by former president Fidel Ramos under the rubric of “Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement” drawn up by the Pentagon, the VFA was finally approved during the Estrada administration (Daniel B. Schirmer, Fidel Ramos: The Pentagon’s Philippine Friend, 1992-1997, Cambridge, MA, 1997).

Made fully operational after September 11, 2001, the VFA makes up for the loss of Subic and Clark in a much more efficient way.  It allows the Pentagon to land anywhere in the country without entailing the cost of maintaining physical structures and insuring environmental safety.  It also has no responsibility in whatever damage it can cause by its joint exercises with the host country.  While the MLSA (renewed for another 5 years) permits the US to use the Philippines as a launching pad for wars of aggression through the pre-positioning of war material in “virtual bases,” the VFA allows the unhampered entry of US troops for covert operations in the course of “Kapit-Bisig” war games and “Balikatan” joint exercises with its surrogate army, the AFP.  Sara Flounders’ sharp analysis of this new Pentagon concept of “Cooperative Security Locations” — 5,458 discrete military installations around the world — highlights its key features: facilities with rotational US presence, containing prepositioned equipment, rapidly scalable and expandable, offering bilateral and regional training.  One virtue is the overwhelming influence gained by the US on smaller and developing nations, verified by former US Pacific commander Admiral Thomas Fargo who explained in March 2003 that “relationships built through exercises and training are ‘our biggest guarantor of access in time of need’” (Sara Flounders, “Expansion of U.S. Bases Spurs Philippine Resistance,” International Action Center, 29 March 2008).

The virtually permanent presence of US troops in the Philippines can be accounted for by the VFA, MSLA, and other instrumentalities enforced by a subservient government parasitic on US military aid and political sponsorship.  The Arroyo regime easily fits the bill.  Because other countries in the region (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia; Myanmar has rebuffed US humanitarian offers) cannot tolerate US ships or troops stationed in its territory, the US has no alternative but to support authoritarian rulers like Marcos and Arroyo if it wants to curb Al Qaeda influence, check China’s expansion, and project its military might in the Asia-Pacific geopolitical sphere.  Surely, the splintered tiny Abu Sayyaf always used to rationalize US troops in the Philippines is no threat to US global hegemony.  US military basing in the Philippines can only be explained by the long-range global strategy of preserving US superpower status by preventing the rise of competitors such as China (Herbert Docena, “In the Dragon’s Lair,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 26 February 2008).

Carnage and Mayhem All Around

Immediately after 9/11, the Pentagon announced that it would be sending 3,000 troops to the Philippines for joint operations against the Abu Sayyaf.  Over 1,000 troops were eventually sent to participate in “Balikatan 2002″ that took place in the combat areas of Basilan and Zamboanga where guerillas of the MILF were operating.  This differed from previous exercises since it was now located in war zones, with soldiers using live ammunition, with no time constraints.

In July 2002, an International Solidarity Mission conducted a thorough fact-finding mission that led to three important conclusions: “1) American soldiers were directly involved in the raiding and shooting of an unarmed civilian in his house; 2) human rights abuses are continuing unabated under the Arroyo regime and are abetted by US military forces; and 3) the US military support operations that displace and violate the rights of Moro people and other Filipinos, including women and children” (Solidarity Mission Statement, July 2002).  Because of such incidents, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel accused the regime of “treason,” turning the country into a deadly laboratory for the testing of the effectiveness of US troops, tactics and weaponry against the so-called terrorists” (Ellen Nakashima, “Philippines Debates US Combat Role against Rebels,” Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2003).

Another involvement of US troops in counterinsurgency plots may be cited here.  In 2004, US troops made the University of Southeastern Mindanao as their temporary camp, an area claimed by the MILF as their territory.  The US in effect converted civilians into human shields, potential collateral damage, in the event of armed confrontation between known antagonists in the region.  This was part of the annual “Balikatan” exercise, this time in Carmen, North Cotabato.  The humanitarian medical missions, distribution of toys, and building of Gawad Kalinga homes all serve as cover for US military intelligence-gathering and other tactical operations.  In 2006, the “Balikatan” exercise from February to March was the biggest, involving 5,500 US troops and 2,800 Filipinos.  This took place in the hotly contested regions of Jolo, Maimbung, Patikul and Panamao, Sulu, and North Cotabato.

A recent incident reveals how deeply entangled the US is in local counterinsurgency programs of the neocolonial state.  In the town of Ipil, Sulu, last February 4, the AFP killed eight non-combatants (women and children), including a soldier on vacation.  The widow of the slain soldier testified that she saw four US soldiers in a Navy boat.  Subsequently, General Ruben Rafael, commander of Philippine troops in Jolo, stated in an interview that “a U.S. military spy plane circling high above the seaside village provided the intelligence that led to the February 4 assault” and that “the crew of the P-3 Orion turboprop, loaded with a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment pinpointed the village as a stronghold and arms depot for the radical Islamist Au Sayyaf movement” (Paul Watson, “U.S. Role in Philippine Raid Questioned,” Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2008).  This same P-3 Orion spy planes was mentioned by the US Embassy as ready to be used for the disaster relief in Panay and Negroes where the NPA guerillas are vigorously challenging AFP terrorism.  US embassy spokesperson Karen Schinnerer in Manila admitted that “an aerial reconnaissance vehicle” gathered intelligence over Sulu “at the request of Philippine forces.”

Heavy saturation bombings in Barangays Buansa and Cagay, a camp of the MILF in Indanan, Sulu, were carried out for five hours on April 30.  Early last year, US troops participated in attacks on the Moro resistance fighters in this region.  Witnesses of this latest genocidal foray attested to US-supplied “smart bombs” dropped by OV-10 airplanes, slaughtering many members of the 360 families who fled the area.  Based on the research of Alexander Martin Remollino, US troops in Sulu belong to the Joint Special Operations Task-Force-Philippines that employs US Special Forces, Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations personnel “to conduct deliberate intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in very focused areas, and based on collection plans, to perform tasks to prepare the environment and obtain critical information requirements” (Bulatlat, 4-10 May 2008).  In lay idiom, this means clearing the area of enemy forces by spying and utilizing all weapons and logistics necessary to “neutralize” hostile elements.  Although the AFP claims that those attacks were aimed at the Abu Sayyaf  and the Jemayah Islamiyah, an Indonesian-based group, the MILF has responded by declaring that the territory involved is theirs and that no other group is allowed to operate from within the premises.

What is happening in the southern Philippines is clearly a carefully designed war to occupy and sanitize a whole region rich in natural and human resources, as well as a potential strategic base for military adventures.  The problem is that it is inhabited by Moros, aboriginal peoples, and other Filipinos resisting US imperial conquest and oligarchic despotism.  Prodded by the International Monitoring Team headed by Malaysia that helped enforce a ceasefire, the MILF and the Arroyo government were close to signing an agreement last February on wealth-sharing and ancestral domain.  But the US-Arroyo attacks have worsened the displacement of 75,000 Moro civilians — the loss of property, farmland, and livelihood, not to speak of innocent lives — and permitted more extra-judicial killings, illegal detentions, and torture of Moro dissenters and ordinary citizens (Sandra R. Leavitt, “Pressure Brings Continued Progress in Mindanao Peace Negotiations,” Shigetsu Newsletter No. 912, 18 Feb. 2008).

Approaching the Endgame

What is the future for Arroyo’s brutal authoritarian rule?  Collaborating with the torture president in the White House and his deceptive “iron fist and hand of friendship” policy, Arroyo has dug herself a grave deeper than all her corruption and ruthless political maneuverings can.  If US troops succeed in building infrastructure — presumably better roads, schools, clinics, ports, which testifies to the failure of local governance — will that wipe out Moro separatists, local civilians who demand jobs, dignity, social services, and a measure of communal autonomy that are due them under Philippine laws and the UN Charter?  A BBC reporter displayed her ignorance of the fraught history of US colonial domination of the Philippines — its civic culture, social practices, and institutions — when she reduced the whole complex fabric into a question-begging dilemma: “If Philippine government bodies could manage their resources to shelter and assist their own people, maybe all those special forces [US troops] could go home” (“US Plays Quiet Role in the Philippines,” 28 March 2008).

But how can this moribund state apparatus controlled by US-loving oligarchs and their self-serving intelligentsia and bureaucrats manage to do that?  The economic crisis gripping the country seems irresolvable by Arroyo’s handouts and paltry rhetoric.  The undefeatable MILF is withdrawing from peace talks with the Arroyo regime, just as the National Democratic Front (together with its “terrorist” affiliate, the NPA) has postponed negotiations unless the US-decreed stigma of “terrorist” is repudiated and extra-judicial killings halted.  Surely, ninety million Filipinos, with their long tradition of fierce insurrections, will not allow the shameless puppetry of the Arroyo regime, with her generals and kowtowing officials, to continue for another hundred years.  As a UPI Asia Online forecast puts it, the decrepit Arroyo band-wagon faces “bigger, bolder insurgency” in the years to come, despite the super-power’s “humanitarian” schemes and grotesque patronage.
E. San Juan, Jr. was recently a visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.  His recent books are In the Wake of Terror (Lexington Books) and US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan).  He will be a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, in Spring 2009.

Forty two years ago, one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was committed in Indonesia.  On October 7, 1965, right-wing mobs ransacked the offices of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and its mass organizations in Djakarta, the capital city.  Executions of PKI members began. They were directed by General Suharto and other top commanders of the Indonesian army who had developed plans with the CIA and U.S. military for just such a campaign to crush the PKI.

A week later, in densely populated Central and East Java, army Special Forces units led the attack on the PKI.  Tens of thousands of PKI cadre and supporters were rounded up at night, detained, and executed.  Anti-communist youth groups were supplied with weapons by the army and sent out to murder communists in thousands of towns and villages. In one area of Central Java known as a stronghold of the PKI, one-third of the population died in the massacre. According to Time magazine:

Backlands army units are reported to have executed thousands of Communists after interrogation in remote jails…Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families and burying the bodies in shallow graves…The murder campaign became so brazen in part of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages. The killings have been on such a scale that the disposal of the corpses has created a serious sanitation problem in East Java and Northern Sumatra, where the humid air bears the reek of decayed flesh.  Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been seriously impeded.[1]

In order to justify this campaign of extermination, the army told people in the towns and villages that the PKI was about to go on a wild killing spree against all non-communists: PKI members were accused of digging mass graves, compiling lists of people to be executed, and stockpiling special instruments to gouge out eyeballs.[2]

The massacres, which were most intense on the islands of Java and Bali, spread to Aceh in northern Sumatra, Sulawesi (the Celebes), and Kalimantan (Borneo). In total, between 500,000 and 1 million people were slaughtered. The only recent massacre of this magnitude was the attempted genocide of the Tutsi people of Rwanda in 1994, which left 800,000 dead.

The U.S. Role in the Massacre

In the 1990s, the details of the U.S. hand in the massacre became known as several former State Department officials admitted their role publicly. Political officers at the U.S. embassy in Djakarta handed the Indonesian army lists of PKI leaders in unions, peasant and student organizations that it had compiled.  From this, Indonesian army intelligence was able to create a “shooting list” of 5,000 PKI leaders. In the weeks and months that followed, the U.S. embassy and the CIA’s intelligence directorate in Washington D.C. checked off the names as they were “eliminated.” [3] According to Robert Martens, a former member of the U.S. embassy’s political section who had spent two years compiling the lists:

It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at the decisive moment.[4]

As the anti-PKI bloodbath was just getting underway, the U.S. provided essential logistical equipment to General Suharto’s forces.  These included light aircraft, jeeps and most importantly, hundreds of the highest-powered mobile radios available at that time.  The radios were secretly flown into Indonesia at the last minute by U.S. planes based at Clark Field in the Philippines.  They plugged a major hole in army communications by enabling army units in Java and the outer islands to talk directly with Suharto’s command (KOSTRAD) in Djakarta. These radios were monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency throughout the massacre.[5]

In 1965 the U.S. imperialists were alarmed at the situation developing in Southeast Asia.  A high-level U.S. intelligence report prepared in early September 1965 predicted that the Indonesian government would become completely dominated by the PKI within two to three years.[6]  U.S. officials saw events in Indonesia and Vietnam as closely intertwined and believed that decisive action had to be taken in both countries.  In a 1965 speech in Asia, Richard Nixon argued in favor of bombing North Vietnam in order to protect Indonesia’s “immense mineral potential.” [7] According to William Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs:

By 1965 [Indonesia] was hostile to us, engaged in a sterile but dangerous military confrontation with Malaysia and Singapore, and headed very shortly for Communist control and an effective alliance with Communist China…. The situation in Vietnam in 1965, stood, alongside the trend in Indonesia, as the major dark spot in the area. And in early 1965, it became clear that unless the United States and other nations introduced major combat forces and took military action against the North, South Vietnam would be taken over by communist force.[8]

William Colby, the head of CIA operations in Southeast Asia from 1962-1966, not only welcomed the massacre in Indonesia, but applied its lessons as head of the infamous Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam.[9]   If Vietnam was the major post-World War II defeat for U.S. imperialism, the destruction of the PKI was its greatest single victory.

How Did This Happen?

In 1965, the PKI appeared to be a formidable organization.  It had 3.5 million members, and its allied organizations had a combined membership of nearly 20 million. It had ministers and staffers in governmental bodies from the national cabinet to local municipalities. The PKI was openly conducting political education classes in the armed forces.

However, since the early 1950s, the PKI had adopted a political line and strategy of a peaceful path to socialism. By building an alliance with the “progressive sectors” of the government, the PKI believed that Indonesia’s reactionary pro-imperialist forces, with their core in the army, could be prevented from making a decisive move to close off its gradual march to power.  Thus, the PKI and its followers were politically and militarily disarmed in 1965 and were easy prey for the army-led death squads.

At the decisive moment, the PKI expected President Sukarno and sympathetic military officers would come to their aid. While Sukarno called for “peace,” pro-American General Suharto ignored him and proceeded to gradually strip Sukarno of power. Suharto’s three decade-long military dictatorship turned Indonesia into a compliant U.S. ally in Southeast Asia.

The role of the CIA and the U.S. military in this bloody counter-revolution has become more visible over the years. However, its internal causes have not been examined closely enough outside academic circles.  This is not simply a question of setting the historical record straight.  A deeper analysis of these events provides some critical lessons for communist and anti-imperialist forces worldwide, especially concerning countries where peaceful, electoral paths to “socialism,” or some variant, are being pursued.  

The Japanese Occupation

The roots of this traumatic defeat for the PKI can be found during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia from 1942-1945 and the independence struggle against Dutch imperialism from 1945-1949.  During those years the main political forces in Indonesia began to take shape:  (1) Bourgeois nationalists grouped around Sukarno, the charismatic son of a Javanese teacher, who developed a hybrid form of nationalism, Islam and socialism to guide the independence struggle.  During World War II, Sukarno helped secure popular acceptance of Japanese rule and mobilized support for the Japanese war effort[10] (producing later charges that he had been a “fascist collaborator”). In Sukarno’s view, he was using the dismantling of Dutch control by the Japanese imperialists to advance the independence struggle[11]; (2) Muslim landlords, capitalists and other anti-communists who looked to the U.S. and Britain for assistance to break free from the Dutch; and (3) the PKI.

The PKI’s forces were divided politically and geographically. One group, carrying out the Popular Front line of the Comintern, worked with the U.S. and British imperialists in Australia during World War II.  A group of Indonesian intellectuals spent the war years working underground in the Netherlands with the Dutch CP.  A third group organized an “illegal PKI” clandestinely in the youth groups that had been set up by the Japanese.

Due to political and organizational weaknesses, none of these PKI groups developed a strategy of agrarian revolution and guerilla warfare against the Japanese imperialists.  Conditions were ripe for such a struggle against the Japanese occupation forces, which brutally oppressed the Indonesian people.  Forced labor (“romusha”) sent 250,000 Indonesian men as far away as Burma to build roads from which only 70,000 returned. Thousands of Indonesian women were forced into sexual slavery to service the Japanese troops. The Japanese confiscated food, clothing and other provisions, creating widespread hunger and suffering.

In 1943, the Japanese began to organize local “self-defense” forces attached to Japanese military units. By the end of the war, two million Indonesians served in these forces.  120,000 members of these forces on Java, the PETA, became the core of the new Indonesian army when the Republic of Indonesia was proclaimed in August 1945.

Communist Strategy in China and the Philippines

In contrast to the Indonesian experience, the Communist Party of China (CCP), under the leadership of Mao Zedong, was able to make great leaps in advancing the revolutionary struggle during World War II.

After repudiating the strategy of attempting to capture major cities in southern China without sufficient political and military power in the countryside, the CCP-led Workers and Peasants Army marched to northwest China in 1934-1935 on the famous Long March. From its new base in Yenan, the CCP was positioned to launch guerilla warfare against the Japanese imperialists, who were occupying north and central China with millions of troops.  From 1937-1945, the communist armies became the main force that engaged and defeated the Japanese forces on mainland Asia.

At the same time, the CCP forced the pro-American Guomindang dictatorship, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, to form an unstable, broad united front for the purpose of fighting the Japanese imperialists.  Though the GMD did little fighting against the Japanese and repeatedly attacked the communist forces during the war, the principled stand of the CCP won it widespread support in the cities and the countryside.

At the end of World War II, the CCP, its military forces and the multi-class political forces under its leadership were in a strong position to take to a new level the revolutionary struggle against the bureaucratic capitalists, the big feudal landlords and the U.S. imperialists, who threw their full force behind the GMD.  Four years later, the Chinese revolution won an historic victory, as Mao Zedong announced in Beijing, “the Chinese people have stood up.”

In the Philippines, still a colony of the U.S. during World War II, the Philippine Communist Party (PKP), faced a similar situation to that of the PKI in Indonesia. After the Japanese became the new imperialist occupiers of the Philippines in 1942, the PKP correctly aimed its struggle against the Japanese military. While bourgeois nationalist forces joined U.S.-led guerilla units, the PKP formed its own units in the countryside (the Anti-Japanese National Army, or Hukbalahap).  The Hukbalahap coordinated military action with the U.S.-led forces, but maintained its political and military independence.

The PKP, however, fell into serious errors when U.S. occupation forces, commanded by General MacArthur, returned to the Philippines in 1944. They were not prepared, politically or militarily, to continue the struggle against the U.S. imperialists. In some areas, PKP units gave up their arms in exchange for promises of legal participation in the neo-colonial government that the U.S. was getting ready to proclaim in 1946.  After facing violent suppression, the PKP veered to the “left,” calling for armed uprisings in 1949-1952 that would lead to a quick seizure of power. This military adventurism was easily crushed by the Philippine army, fortified with U.S. military aid and advisors.[12]

These errors were not rectified until the late 1960s, with the reconstitution of the Communist Party of the Philippines based on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and with the development of agrarian revolution and people’s war in the countryside as the main form of struggle.

The Independence Struggle: 1945-1949

The Indonesian independence struggle of 1945-1949 followed the Philippine experience much more closely than the revolutionary struggle in China. On August 17, 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender to the Allied imperialists, a Republic was declared by Sukarno and his anti-communist deputy Mohammed Hatta. They received assistance and some arms from the departing Japanese, who wanted to create problems for the incoming Western military forces.  Protecting imperialist interests in Southeast Asia, the British moved in troops under the pretext of “accepting the Japanese surrender.” Fighting immediately broke out between Indonesian nationalist forces, including PKI units, and the British at Surabaya in central Java in October 1945.  During this battle, 600 Indian troops defected from the British army and joined the Indonesians. Even with the use of air power and naval bombardment, it took the British three weeks to retake Surabaya.[13]

The Dutch imperialists soon took over from the British. They came to reclaim their profitable colony, much as the French colonialists did in Indochina after World War II.  The Dutch armed forces seized key ports and cities on Java and Sumatra.  The next four years were characterized by protracted negotiations as well as on-and-off fighting between the Indonesian Republic and the Dutch. The Linggajati talks in September 1946 produced a truce. In the summer of 1947, the Dutch launched attacks that shrank the areas of nationalist control to the central part of Java and Sumatra.

After five months of fighting, an agreement was signed on the U.S. carrier Renville. The Renville agreement set up a “United States of Indonesia” (federated with the Netherlands) and provided for elections to be held throughout the islands, including the Dutch areas.  A year later, the Dutch repudiated the agreement and launched a second major attack, occupying the main Republican controlled areas. As the Dutch resorted to scorched-earth policies in some areas, guerilla warfare heated up.

From 1945-1948, the PKI attached itself to the Sukarno-Hatta government. It supported the Linggajati and Renville agreements, thereby undercutting its ability to rally the most radical sections of the independence movement within the united front against the Dutch colonialists. Opportunities to develop politically independent military forces were missed by the PKI during this period, while rightist nationalist forces were building up their own army.  During these years, the Murba (Proletarian) Party, led by Tan Malaka, was able to outflank the PKI by opposing these agreements with the Dutch.[14]

During 1947 and 1948, the growth of the PKI began to alarm the Sukarno-Hatta forces and their military commanders.  They initiated a campaign to “rationalize” the widely dispersed Republican military units, numbering 800,000, into a national army under central control.  This included attempts to demobilize PKI-led militias and pro-communist military units within two divisions of the Republican army.[15]

The 1948 “Madiun Affair”

This political polarization within the Republic was magnified by developments in the international communist movement, especially the formation of the Cominform in 1947 and its reversal of the Popular Front line of the 1930s.  Support for revolutionary struggles in Indochina, Malaya, China and elsewhere was proclaimed as part of a worldwide battle between two camps—the capitalist camp led by the U.S., and the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.

This new orientation was brought back to Indonesia in August 1948 by Musso,[16] who had spent 12 years in the Soviet Union.  On his arrival in the Central Java Republican zone, Musso forcefully advocated that the Republic set up diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and denounced the agreements with the Dutch.  Within weeks, he reorganized the PKI, brought several other socialist parties into its ranks, and put it on track for confrontation with the Republican leadership.  Musso’s strategy was to launch a political offensive to take leadership of the Republic from Sukarno and Hatta; if this was unsuccessful, the PKI would take military action to do so.

In late August, Musso and his allies set out on a tour of PKI rural and urban strongholds. Meanwhile, there was growing friction between the Republican and PKI-led military forces in the cities of Solo and Madiun in East Java. After a series of kidnappings of PKI cadre carried out by the Tan Malaka forces in league with the Republican army, fighting broke out in Solo. Two days later in nearby Madiun, mid-level leaders of the PKI and its militia, fearing an attack by the right-wing Silangasi division from West Java, staged a revolt. They disarmed other groups and declared a regional Republic.[17]

This adventurist action was reinforced by the arrival of Musso, who declared a new all-Indonesian Republic and denounced Sukarno as a collaborator with the Japanese and the Dutch.  President Sukarno responded by making a speech calling for the forcible suppression of the revolt, which took just days.  The top PKI leaders, including Musso, were killed in action or executed.  35,000 PKI members and supporters were imprisoned; thousands more were killed.  This white terror only ended when the Dutch attacked the Republic in early 1949.[18]

This defeat of the PKI led to a dramatic shift in the attitude of the U.S. imperialists to the Indonesian Republic. From 1945-1948, the U.S. had backed the Dutch, as part of trying to rebuild and politically fortify Western Europe against the Soviet Union by means of the Marshall Plan.  However, the U.S. increasingly saw an opportunity to bring into being an “independent” Indonesia led by anti-communist forces under which the U.S. would replace the Dutch as the dominant imperialist power. This reflected the U.S.’ new post-war, post-European colonial strategy in Asia, i.e. a strategy of neo-colonialism.   

In the middle of the Dutch offensive in 1949, the U.S. intervened, through the United Nations, to force an end to the fighting and to the signing of another neo-colonial “independence” agreement.  The Hague Agreement called for federation with the Netherlands, payment of reparations to the Dutch for seized property, and a guarantee against further nationalizations. The Dutch kept the eastern province of West Irian.  China and the Soviet Union immediately denounced this agreement, and called the new Sukarno-Hatta government a “reactionary, neo-colonial regime.”

Thus, from 1945 to 1949, the PKI threw away favorable opportunities for developing guerilla warfare among the peasantry within a broad anti-imperialist, anti-feudal united front.[19]  Such a strategy, as practiced in China, had the potential of mobilizing the vast majority of the people against the Dutch, including the middle strata. It would have strengthened the PKI for a protracted political and military struggle against the post-1949 bourgeois state and its imperialist backers.  The “Madiun affair,” which like all military putschs seeks a quick path to power,[20] led to an enormous setback for the PKI’s forces, and gave Sukarno and Hatta ammunition to denounce the PKI as traitors to the independence struggle.

Wrong Lessons

What lessons did the PKI draw from the 1945-1949 period?  Unfortunately it learned the wrong ones. Under the leadership of D.N. Aidit, returning from exile in 1951, the PKI announced its intention to support Sukarno, rebuild the PKI by renouncing armed revolutionary struggle, and find a peaceful path to a “people’s democratic government.”

While giving lip service to criticism of the rightist errors of the PKI during the independence struggle, the Aidit leadership again placed itself under the wings of the Sukarno-Hatta Republican forces. According to Rex Mortimer in Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno, “The PKI sought a peaceful road to power in Indonesia…. This was an aim from which the Aidit leadership never deviated… The party resolved to stick like a leech to Sukarno and, by a combination of ingratiation and carefully staged pressure, to insert itself into his power structure.”[21]

The PKI hailed Sukarno as the leader of the revolution, and claimed that its ideology and Sukarno’s were essentially the same. For more than ten years, the Aidit leadership promoted Sukarno’s ideology of “Nasakom,” an acronym for Nationalisme, Agama (religion) and Komunisme, and “Pantjasila,” Sukarno’s five principles for the Indonesian state: belief in God, nationalism, humanism, social justice and people’s sovereignty.[22] Sukarno, for his part, came to view the PKI as the most consistent and hard working supporter of his nationalist foreign policy and episodic progressive domestic initiatives, such as the repudiation of 85% of Indonesia’s debt to the Netherlands in the mid-1950s.

The Bandung Conference

President Sukarno’s assertion of Indonesia’s leadership among the “non-aligned nations” took shape in his hosting of the Bandung Conference in 1955. Held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, this conference was a meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent and had conflicts with one or another imperialist power.  It included countries such as Egypt, India and Indonesia, as well as the socialist People’s Republic of China.[23]

Even though Sukarno’s nationalism was not firmly anti-imperialist, it was seen as a threat by the U.S., which was attempting to build a wall of reactionary states around the Soviet Union and China.  Thus, the U.S. supported a series of unsuccessful revolts by reactionary Islamic forces in Indonesia’s outer islands during 1957-58 in an attempt to dismember Indonesia. Two attempts were made on Sukarno’s life.

Sukarno took the opportunity to declare martial  law in 1957, and shortly thereafter introduced a system of “guided democracy.”  Sukarno ruled by  decree with the aid of a hand-picked National Assembly, which brought military officers into the government for the first time.  After the seizure of Dutch properties by PKI-led workers in 1957, Sukarno authorised the military to take over control and management of the companies. While Sukarno was thumbing his nose at the U.S. politically, Permina was built as a state oil company by American and Japanese multinationals. A typical Sukarno speech railed at “colonialism and imperialism,”[24]  but during these years Sukarno forged an alliance with the armed forces, which was a major and ultimately decisive component of the continuing imperialist domination of Indonesia.

The PKI Advances along a Peaceful Path

During this period, the PKI made significant advances along the peaceful path to power it had mapped out.  By 1957, it was the largest political party on the most densely populated island, Java. It was able to operate freely by not challenging Sukarno’s “guided democracy.” In the late 1950s, the governor of Bali brought PKI members into the civil service.  Aidit and Political Bureau member Njoto were appointed as advisory ministers to Sukarno in 1962, and Njoto became a member of an enlarged cabinet in 1964.[25]

The PKI burnished its nationalist credentials by supporting Sukarno’s campaigns to West Irian (Papua) from Dutch colonialism in 1962, to oppose the formation of a neo-colonial Malaysia in 1963-64, and to pull Indonesia out of the United Nations in 1965 after Malaysia was admitted.  During these years, the PKI stressed the importance of national struggle against imperialism over class struggle. This posture allowed the PKI to avoid sharp conflicts with the forces of internal reaction, strengthen the party’s relationship with the president, and enable it to grow rapidly during the early 1960s.

Sukarno addressed the PKI’s Sixth Congress in 1959, where he stated that he was “very pleased with the PKI…because the PKI clearly states that it is indispensable to have national unity.”[26]  Sukarno increasingly defined himself as a visionary exponent of “Indonesian socialism,” and even announced in 1965 that Indonesia was entering the stage of socialism. Sukarno also peppered his speeches with overheated references to “revolution” (e.g., “the world today is a revolutionary ammunition dump” and “our revolution is a summing up of many revolutions in one generation”) with no hint of any of the specific changes he wanted to make in Indonesia or how to realize them.[27]  All of this verbiage amounted to rhetorical calls for more social justice in a neo-colonial country in which the critical levers of power were held by big landlords and bureaucrat capitalists and, most importantly, by the army.

In relation to the armed forces, the PKI’s strategy was to avoid a confrontation at all costs. Instead, it relied on Sukarno and “progressive forces” within the government and military to keep the “reactionary forces” in check, while the PKI worked to insert its cadre as government personnel and shift the balance of forces in its favor.  Partly as a result of the West Irian and Malaysia campaigns, the PKI had developed an extensive network of supporters in the armed forces. It was more influential in the air force and navy than the more right-wing and much larger 300,000 strong army.

Party cadre provided political education to junior officers and enlisted men, and recruited among all three services. In a lecture to the army staff and command school in 1963, Aidit stressed that the armed forces were an instrument of the people, and their function was to implement Sukarno’s policies. In another lecture at the Naval Academy in 1964, Aidit called for the armed forces to “serve the struggle of the Indonesian people” and advocated “the doctrine of the oneness between the armed forces and the people.”[28] These efforts, of course, attracted the attention of the Indonesian generals and the military attaches and CIA agents operating out of the American embassy.

Aidit’s Theory of a “State with Two Aspects”

In early 1963, Aidit announced the new theory that the Indonesian state had a “pro-people’s aspect” and an “anti-people’s aspect.”  The first aspect was composed of the “progressive stands and policies of President Sukarno supported by the PKI and other groups of the people….The second aspect represents the enemies of the people manifested by the stands and policies of the right-wing forces and die-hards. The people’s aspect has now become the main aspect and takes the leading role in the Republic.”[29] In a series of speeches at the army staff school in 1964, Aidit elaborated, “The important problem in Indonesia now is not to smash the state power as in the case in many other states, but to strengthen and consolidate the pro-people’s aspect…and to eliminate the anti-people’s aspect.”[30]

This peaceful transformation would take place by “revolutionary action from above and below.”  By “revolution from above” the PKI meant that it would “encourage the state power to take revolutionary steps aimed at making the desired changes in the personnel and in the state organs.”  By means of  ‘revolution from below,” the PKI would “arouse, organize and mobilize the people to achieve the same changes.” [31]

This theory of “a state with two aspects” revised and directly opposed the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the nature of the capitalist state. The state can be an instrument in the hands of either the exploiting classes or the proletariat, but it cannot serve the interests of both these bitterly contending classes. The bourgeoisie will not hesitate to use its state to violently suppress any serious challenge to its rule. Thus no basic change in the social system can be brought about without overthrowing this reactionary state machine, especially its armed forces.

The PKI and the International Communist Movement

The theory that the Indonesian state had “two aspects” was adopted by the PKI even as it publicly sided with the CCP against the CPSU in the early 1960s.  As polemics raged, the PKI leaders took whatever fit their own political strategy from the Soviet and Chinese parties.

In the late 1950s, the PKI leadership was squarely in line with the CPSU: Maintaining world peace, and promoting peaceful competition and peaceful coexistence with imperialism and the peaceful transition to socialism (the “three peacefuls”) were the foremost tasks of Communist Parties.[32] After the 81 Parties meeting in Moscow in 1960, the PKI took an intermediate position. It endorsed most Soviet positions but backed the Chinese on the need for more militant anti-imperialist struggle and a focus on the peasantry.  However, the PKI was not interested in the CCP’s views on the necessity for armed struggle and the importance of struggling for communist leadership in nationalist movements.

So when the PKI finally came down on the side of the CCP, “for all practical purposes the PKI came to endorse the road of armed struggle as applicable to everyone but itself.” Mortimer recollects that in talks with PKI leaders in November 1964, he was struck by “their ability in the same breath to insist on the necessity of armed struggle and to justify their own peaceful strategy.”[33]

Overall, the Chinese Communist Party had a revolutionary foreign policy during the 1960s. It supported the struggle of the Vietnamese people politically and militarily, provided arms and training to national liberation struggles in Africa and the Middle East, and promoted a general line of revolutionary struggle against U.S. imperialism and reactionary regimes all over the world.

However, in its relations with the PKI, the CCP, or at least a portion of its leadership, did not follow this general line during the critical years from 1963 to 1965. In 1963, PKI Chairman Aidit traveled to Beijing for several months. During this trip, he made several speeches at the Higher Party School of the CCP Central Committee in Beijing which included his theory of a “state with two aspects.” At the same time, Aidit was hailed as “a brilliant Marxist-Leninist theoretician” and firm opponent of Soviet revisionism by Peng Zhen, the Beijing mayor and the main liaison between the CCP and the PKI. On May 20, Red Flag, the CCP’s leading ideological journal, published a major article praising the PKI. On a visit to Indonesia in May 1965, Peng praised the “creativity” and the “correct line and policies” of the PKI.  Foreign Languages Press in Beijing also honored Aidit by publishing his Selected Works in 1963.[34]

The CCP’s support for the PKI was the result of two interrelated factors. First, in the early 1960s, there were powerful revisionist forces lodged at the top levels of the CCP.  Peng Zhen had more in common with Aidit than he did with Mao, as he was one of the first high-ranking revisionist leaders to be knocked down during the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966.

In addition, the “Bandung line” of the late 1950s continued to have an influence on Chinese foreign policy during the early 1960s.  On the level of state-to-state diplomacy, socialist China was able to work within the Non-Aligned Movement that emerged from the Bandung Conference to break out of international isolation and frustrate the U.S.’s containment strategy.  However, as a strategic political line for Marxist-Leninists in countries oppressed by colonialism and neo-colonialism, the Bandung line took a heavy toll in diminishing and denying the independence and initiative of communists within the united front against imperialism.  It subordinated the struggle for new democratic revolution and socialism to support for bourgeois nationalist governments such as Sukarno’s.[35]

In the early 1960s, the Chinese government had strong political and economic ties with the Sukarno government. But the CCP was apparently not willing to jeopardize these relationships by placing strong pressure on the PKI to abandon its peaceful path to power and to initiate agrarian revolution and armed struggle in the Indonesian countryside.[36] The content of private discussions between PKI and CCP leaders are not known, but the Chinese Communist Party did not publicly criticize the revisionist strategy of the PKI until after the right-wing coup in 1965.

Sukarno, the National Bourgeoisie and the PKI

During the 1962 West Irian struggle, the PKI provided the foot soldiers for Sukarno’s agitational campaign, which involved more noise than military action.  Sukarno was also relying on U.S. mediation efforts to get the Dutch to leave.[37] At the same time, the U.S. made an offer of over $200 million in economic aid, linked to an austerity plan of the International Monetary Fund. Sukarno and his advisers were leaning towards this solution to deep economic trouble. [38] This was emblematic of Sukarno’s and the national bourgeoisie’s tendencies to conciliate with U.S. imperialism, and their inability to implement a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist, anti-feudal program throughout the 1945-1965 period.

As it turned out, the confrontation with the British over Malaysia scuttled the U.S.-IMF plan and allowed the PKI to ride a wave of nationalism. This led to takeovers of some British companies (but not oil installations)[39] and the burning of the British embassy in Djakarta. Senior military officers again benefited from this popular upsurge, since they took over management and the profits from these newly nationalized enterprises. During this period, the Indonesian army developed into a powerful bureaucratic section of the capitalist class with close ties to U.S. imperialism.

During the confrontation over Malaysia, Sukarno issued a call for millions of  “volunteers” to fight the British.  The PKI led the movement, hoping that its members and supporters would receive military training and arms.  Very few did, and the army kept close tabs on the rifles handed out at parades of volunteers.[40]

Up to 1964, even in a situation where real wages were rapidly declining and living conditions for the workers and peasants were becoming more desperate, the PKI avoided mass agitation and struggle that might have antagonized Sukarno—and the military.  Instead, they placed greater emphasis on development programs for self-reliant economic development. Furthermore, the PKI concentrated its educational work on preparing intellectuals to serve the needs of the work with the national bourgeoisie, and to supply cadres for various positions in the government:

To raise the prestige of the PKI in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, and to make it respected as the party of intellectuals, the four-year plan stipulated that all cadres of the higher ranks must obtain academic education, cadres of the middle ranks high school education, and cadres of the lower ranks lower middle school education. For this purpose, the party set up a great number of academies, schools and courses. So deeply-rooted was the intellectualism gripping the party leadership that all party leaders and prominent figures of the popular movements were obliged to write four theses in order to obtain the degree of “Marxist Scientists.”[41]

U.S.  Imperialism Regroups

From a position of support for the anti-communist Sukarto-Hatta governments in the early 1950s, the U.S. government grew increasingly concerned about Sukarno’s independent foreign policy and about the rebirth and rapid growth of the PKI.  The Cold War was at its height, and the U.S. imperialists did not want a large gap in the ring of reactionary states surrounding the People’s Republic of China.

From U.S. bases in the Philippines, the U.S. supported the 1957-1958 rebellions in the outer islands, which were aimed at dismembering Indonesia. After these revolts failed, the U.S. regrouped and mapped out a long range neo-colonial strategy of identifying, funding, advising and supplying the internal forces needed to prevail in a showdown with the PKI.

The first step was to begin an upgraded military assistance program to the Indonesian army to counter the PKI, in the order of $20 million annually.  Beginning in the late 1950s, two pro-American generals, Nasution and Suwarto, developed a new strategic doctrine for the Indonesian army which gave priority to counter-insurgency. An important part of this was the army’s organization of its own political infrastructure down to the village level in the guise of “civic action” programs.[42]

The Kennedy administration set up a U.S. military training group (MILTAG) in 1962 to assist in this effort.  Published U.S. accounts of these programs described them as benevolent civic projects–building roads and draining swampland to create new rice paddies. However, a 1964 memo to President Johnson from Secretary of State Dean Rusk made it clear that the chief importance of MILTAG was its contact with anti-communist elements in the Indonesian army and political groups: “Our aid to Indonesia…we are satisfied…is not helping Indonesia militarily. It is, however, permitting us to maintain some contact with key elements in Indonesia which are interested in and capable of resisting a Communist takeover.  We think this is of vital importance to the entire Free World.”[43]

In total, 2,800 Indonesian military officers trained in the U.S. between 1955 and 1965, nearly 25% of the officer corps.[44] The U.S. military had identified a rising colonel by the name of Suharto and started to groom him for his future role.  Students in all of Indonesia’s elite universities were given paramilitary training by the Army in a program advised by a U.S. colonel in the Reserve Officer Training Corps.  Brigadier General Thajeb brought student leaders together to create the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI), which led the first assaults on PKI offices in Djakarta in October 1965.[45]

On another regime-change track, the U.S. was making contact with leading intellectuals in the Masjumi Party, a vehicle of big commercial and landowning Muslims, and the nominally “socialist” Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI).  They were brought to the U.S. to study for advanced degrees in economics and administration at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and Cornell with funds supplied by the Ford Foundation.  When they returned to Indonesia, these newly minted professors became the Army’s high-level civilian advisors.  These U.S. graduates made up a majority of the General Suharto’s first cabinet after he consolidated power in 1966.[46]

The army also began to develop as a state-within-a-state that could compete with the PKI politically, as well as prepare itself to take power in the future. It had its own party-type organization (Golkar), a trade union, newspapers and sympathetic cultural figures. The army also entered the economy in a big way after the nationalization of Dutch enterprises in 1957. Top army commanders became big businessmen and accumulated funds for their political wings and front groups. [47]

The PKI’s Work in the Countryside

In the Indonesian countryside, less than half the peasants owned the land they worked, and of these the average landholding was 0.65 hectares.[48]  In the late 1950s, the PKI’s strategy hardly threatened the power of the landlords. It called for the formation of peasant cooperatives, and for increases in production through improved farming methods. These campaigns paralleled Sukarno’s exhortations for the Indonesian people to work harder and make more sacrifices for the nation.

In 1959, in order to create more organized connections with the villages, the PKI organized a “Go Down” campaign modeled on China’s land reform movement in the 1950s.[49]  This campaign was based on implementing the Basic Agrarian Law proclaimed by Sukarno in 1959.  Over the next few years, the PKI-led peasant organization (BTI) made some progress in gaining rent reductions and increasing peasants’ shares of their crops.  However, land redistribution was much slower due to landlord resistance, official corruption, and gaping holes in the land reform law.  By the end of the first stage of the government’s land reform in late 1963, just 1% of the landlords’ surplus land had actually reached the peasants.[50]  When landlords failed to respect the law, the BTI chairman advised its peasant members to go to the police or the public prosecutor for assistance.[51]  In a 1963 speech, Aidit reported that the PKI was raising the slogan, “For the maintenance of civil order, help the police.”[52]

By 1964, the PKI felt strong enough (the membership of the BTI had grown to  seven million) to launch more militant struggle in the countryside. The PKI hoped this would build up its mass base and secure for itself a more prominent place in Sukarno’s administration. As peasant upheaval in mid-1964 developed outside the scope of the land reform laws (so-called “unilateral actions), it ran into heavy resistance from landlords and right-wing Islamic forces in Java and Bali, many of which were funded by the army and U.S. civic action teams. Armed clashes resulted, with the local authorities usually intervening on the side of the landlords and anti-communists.

As the BTI began to take losses, the PKI leadership grew alarmed, and appealed to Sukarno to intervene. BTI leader Asmu warned that “terror must not be opposed by terror, but with mass actions uniting the people together with the army and other patriotic forces.”[53] In the fall of 1964, the PKI retreated and began to place greater emphasis on social welfare and cultural work in the countryside.  Rex Mortimer contrasts the PKI’s peasant strategy to that of the CCP:

In a sense, Aidit had arrived at a peaceful version of Mao Tsetung’s strategy in the Chinese revolution.  Mao too advocated an alliance with the national bourgeoisie and was prepared to cooperate with the Chiang Kai-shek government at various times, but never at the price of surrendering exclusive control over his peasant bases and peasant armies. Apart from the question of armed struggle, however, there was another crucial difference between the Chinese and Indonesian cases: Mao had the immense advantage that the consolidation of his control over extensive peasant areas preceded his overtures to the KMT [GMD] and did not, as was the case with the PKI, have to be built up within the confines of a top-level alliance.[54]

1965: The Year of Decision

In spite of the reverses it had suffered in the countryside, by 1965 the PKI leaders believed it was in a better position than ever—with a membership of 3.5 million, leadership over mass organizations with 20 million members, and strong ties to Sukarno—to press its campaign for inclusion in the national government. The PKI’s estimate of the balance of forces was that:

The strength of the pro-people’s aspect [of state power] is already becoming steadily greater and holds the initiative and the offensive, while the anti-people’s aspect, although moderately strong, is being relentlessly pressed into a tight corner. The PKI is struggling so that the pro-people’s aspect will become still more powerful and finally dominate, and the anti-people’s aspect will be driven out of state power. … The struggle of the revolutionary Indonesian people is carried out by combining people’s revolutionary mass actions from below with revolutionary actions by the bodies of the state power from above.[55]

The PKI opened 1965 with a propaganda offensive against bureaucratic capitalists, corrupt officials and U.S. neo-colonialism. PKI-led demonstrations forced the U.S. to close down its consulates outside Djakarta and withdraw the Peace Corps. The PKI singled out the army leadership for attack.  Aidit thought the party could neutralize the anti-communists in the army by wooing pro-Sukarno officers in the air force, navy and police. The PKI spoke approvingly of Sukarno’s pronouncement, “The Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia will form an invincible power if they unite with the people like fish in water.”[56]

Another element was added in 1965. The PKI proposed the establishment of a “fifth force,” a large militia independent of the armed forces.[57]  It also advocated the attachment of “political advisers” from the three ideological streams of Nasakom (nationalists, Islamic groups and communists) at all levels of the military. The air force commander came out in support of the “fifth force” and announced that Marxism would be taught in the air force command and staff school. In the summer of 1965, several thousand volunteers, mainly from PKI-led youth organizations, received weapons training at Halim air force base near Djakarta as part of Sukarno’s campaign against Britain’s decision to create Malaysia as a neo-colonial state.[58]

The PKI was acutely aware that it lacked a military force, and sought to build it  among the “progressive sections” of the armed forces. This strategy was bound to fail. There could be no last-minute solution to the fact that the PKI had not developed the agrarian revolution and a people’s army with mass support in the countryside, which was the only way the revolutionary movement could stand up to military suppression, and advance towards the conquest of political power.[59]

The army generals and the U.S. embassy monitored the PKI’s maneuvers closely.  Declassified U.S. government documents reveal that the army high command and the U.S. had reached a decision by the beginning of 1965 to suppress the PKI by armed force.  They formed a working group that was later referred to as a “council of generals.” According to the CIA’s published analysis of this period, Army commander Achmad Yani and four other right-wing generals began meeting in January 1965 “to discuss the deteriorating political situation and what the Army should do about it.”

Around this time, Yani told a U.S. military adviser that “We have the guns, and we have kept the guns out of their [the Communists’] hands. So if there’s a clash we’ll wipe them out.” At a meeting of State Department officials in the Philippines in March 1965, Ambassador Harold Jones indicated what advice the U.S. was providing to Yani and his council of generals: “From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.”[60]

These generals and the U.S. developed a strategic plan for a “rolling coup d’etat”: The first stage was to suppress the PKI; the second was to remove Sukarno and his supporters from power. There were two major obstacles to this plan. Sukarno was too popular to attack directly, and there was a danger that an unprovoked attack on the PKI would be denounced by Sukarno, who had a history of protecting the PKI from itical elimination.  In order to carry out this operation, the U.S.-backed generals needed a pretext to justify suppressing the PKI and eventually removing Sukarno from power.

Exactly how this pretext was created has been a long-standing issue and subject of debate among scholars and political activists. From our analysis of the available evidence, it appears that the PKI leadership, in the person of Chairman Aidit, fell into a trap set by the U.S. and the right-wing generals. (See Appendix A for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)

Army psychological operations specialists spread a stream of rumors that a “council of generals” was preparing a coup to overthrow Sukarno and suppress the PKI, and that the PKI had received arms from China. The price of rice quadrupled between June 30 and October 1, and the black market price of the dollar skyrocketed.[61] In a further effort to create an atmosphere of crisis, clashes broke out in the provinces in late September between the PKI and anti-communist Muslims.  On September 27, General Yani came out publicly against the fifth force and the Nasakomisation of the armed forces.  Through these actions, the right-wing generals and the U.S. hoped to provoke the PKI to make the first move in order to justify decisive action by the army.

Based on reports by the PKI’s Special Bureau—a secret unit responsible for developing contacts within the armed forces—the PKI Political Bureau was convinced that a right-wing army coup was close at hand.  It gave Chairman Aidit the power to prepare the party’s response without supervision by the rest of the leadership. Aidit worked closely with the head of the Special Bureau to form a movement of pro-PKI junior officers that would mobilize a sufficient force to arrest the “generals’ council,” gain Sukarno’s approval of their pre-emptive action, and organize popular support for their action to “safeguard Sukarno and his revolutionary policies.”

This was not a plan for a left-wing coup d’etat.  The September 30 Movement, as it called itself, had the more limited goals of removing the right-wing generals, bringing the PKI into the Sukarno government based on the Nasokom model (with an emphasis on the “kom”), and creating new political space for the PKI to make use of in its peaceful road to power.  Thus, this pre-emptive action was in accord with Aidit’s revisionist strategy of strengthening the “pro-people aspect” and weakening the “anti-people’s aspect” of the Indonesian state.

These plans failed on all levels.  On October 1, the hastily formed units from Halim air force base that were sent to kidnap the generals instead killed three who resisted and executed three others after they were captured.[62]  Sukarno refused to endorse the Movement, throwing the officers and Aidit (who was working with them at Halim) into disarray.   Two battalions of rebel troops sent to the main government buildings at Merdeka Square milled around for a day without orders or food.  The rebels occupied the government’s radio station and announced the formation of a “Revolution Council” without a coherent political program or function. Two thousand members of a PKI youth group who had been mobilized to support the Movement were never brought into action.

While the Movement floundered, General Suharto, the commander of KOSTRAD, the army reserve force, took stock of the situation and implemented the contingency plans that were already in place.  Suharto declared himself the new army commander, replacing the murdered Yani, and united the key military commanders in Djakarta behind his leadership.  Suharto then mobilized Special Forces (RPKAD) units to take the rebels’ base.  The Movement’s leadership decided not to put up a fight and fled. The September 30 Movement had lasted for all of 12 hours.  

The PKI leadership spent the week following the events of October 1 reassuring party members and its popular base, urging them to refrain from provoking the army and anti-communist groups.[63] The PKI Central Committee issued a declaration that they would fully abide by Sukarno’s orders. Then on October 7, right-wing mobs in Djakarta began to destroy and burn PKI offices and houses. The army banned PKI activities and initiated large-scale roundups of party leaders and suspected members. The PKI leadership went into hiding, expecting that President Sukarno would intervene and come to their rescue.

A vivid illustration of the paralysis that gripped the party cadre is provided in this account by a PKI member and wife of a Central Committee member:

After September 30, we went on with our work for some days in the normal manner, but no one with whom we came in contact was able to inform us as to what had happened or what we were expected to do. As the atmosphere in Djakarta grew worse, we just sat at home and waited for instructions. My husband had been given no guidance about what to do in such an eventuality. We did not expect things to turn out so badly; we thought there would be a setback for the party but that eventually it would be sorted out by Sukarno. That is why the party disintegrated so rapidly.[64]

In the face of this crisis, Sukarno insisted on a political solution and forbade punitive actions. However, the army, with U.S. backing, simply ignored the president.  On October 17, army commando units were ordered into Central Java to sikat (“sweep” or “clean out”) the PKI and its supporters in the province. A ruthless campaign of extermination was set in motion. The death tolls were highest in Central and East Java and in Bali, which had been the sites of violent clashes over land reform the previous year. The massacres continued well into 1966.

Aidit was arrested and executed by the army in Central Java in late November. By the end of 1966 all members of the PKI Political Bureau had been executed or taken prisoner except Jusef Adjitorop, who was in China at the time.

Stage two of the “rolling coup d’etat” was aimed at President Sukarno. General Suharto left Sukarno in place in order to legitimize the new regime.  On October 16, Sukarno was forced to appoint Suharto army commander.  In March 1966, Suharto took over the authority to appoint and dismiss cabinet ministers, while maintaining Sukarno as a figurehead president until the following year.

1966 Self-Criticism of the PKI Leadership

In the wake of the bloodbath, two PKI groups emerged which repudiated the line of the PKI under Aidit’s leadership.  The underground “Political Committee of the PKI” was based in Central Java and was under the leadership of Sudisman until his capture in December 1966.  It issued a statement criticizing Aidit’s concept of a state with “two aspects” and pointed to the bourgeoisification of party leaders and cadre due to their positions in the Sukarno government.[65]

From September 1966 on, the Beijing-based expatriates led by Adjitorop and the underground organization in Indonesia made a more extensive critique of  “Aiditism” as an Indonesian variant of modern revisionism, and called for a Maoist line of agrarian revolution and armed struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed Suharto regime.  A statement by the underground, published in Beijing in early 1967, criticized Aidit’s political line and strategy as based on parliamentarianism, capitulation to Sukarno and the national bourgeoisie, denial of class struggle, and adoption of a peaceful road to socialism.

The reorganized Political Bureau of the PKI, based in Beijing, called for the ideological, political and organizational rectification of the party, and for a renewed effort to build a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, armed people’s struggle, and a revolutionary united front of all classes opposed to imperialism and feudalism.  In all of this work, the Political Bureau emphasized work in the countryside.

In rebuilding the Party, the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists must devote their attention to the creation of the conditions to lead the armed agrarian revolution of the peasants that will become the main form of struggle to win victory for the people’s democratic revolution in Indonesia. This means that the greatest attention should be paid to the rebuilding of Party organizations in the rural areas. The greatest attention must be paid to the solution of the problem of arousing, organizing and mobilizing the peasants in an anti-feudal agrarian revolution….

The tasks faced by the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists are very arduous. They have to work under the most savage and barbarous terror and persecution which have no parallel in history. However, the Indonesian Marxist-Leninists do not have the slightest doubt that, by correcting the mistakes made by the Party in the past, they are now marching along the correct road, the road of people’s democratic revolution. No matter how protracted, tortuous and full of difficulties, this is the only road leading to a free and democratic New Indonesia, an Indonesia that will really belong to the Indonesian people. For this noble cause, we must have the courage to traverse the long road.[66]

Similar Defeats in China (1927-1930) and Chile (1973)

The situation faced by the PKI in the 1950s and early 1960s was not unique historically. Only three decades earlier, the newly formed CCP operated in very similar political conditions, with similar results.  In the 1920s, as the CCP built a united front with the GMD, it became GMD members and military instructors in the GMD army, and opposed the development of CCP-led militias in the countryside. By not maintaining its own political and military independence in the united front with the GMD, the CCP set itself up for successive bloodbaths in 1927 and the early 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek, with U.S. and British backing, turned on them. Only in the wake of these defeats, and a repudiation of a “left” line of prematurely attempting to storm the cities from the countryside, did Mao’s strategy of protracted people’s war based in the countryside win out.

The promotion of bourgeois nationalist governments over mass based revolutionary struggle led in Chile to a repeat of the disastrous experience in Indonesia. In 1973, a CIA-backed coup of right-wing generals headed  by Pinochet  overthrew  President Allende,  leading to the massacre of more than 30,000  revolutionary activists and supporters.

As the U.S. moved to undermine Chile’s “socialist” President, Salvador Allende, it received indispensable assistance from the pro-Soviet Chilean Communist Party. The CP, the largest left organization in Chile, told its working class base to turn in their weapons in order to assure the army of their peaceful intentions. The CP claimed that Chile’s “constitutionalist generals” would uphold democracy, and it toed Moscow’s line about working for a peaceful transition to socialism in Chile. These actions directly played into the hands of the fascists and the U.S. imperialists, who were able to unleash a coup and a bloody massacre against a movement that had been disarmed politically and militarily.[67]

Some Lessons for Today

There are a number of countries whose political conditions are similar in some ways to the Sukarno government between 1949-1965, or to the Allende government from 1970-1973.  This is particularly true of Venezuela and Bolivia, where a combination of mass struggle, political ferment among junior military officers, and electoral campaigns has brought social-democratic, nationalist governments to power. With large oil reserves and high oil prices on the international market, Venezuela has been able to implement some progressive reforms, especially in the areas of education and medicine.  However, these countries are still caught in the web of imperialist and capitalist economic relations. According to James Petras:

Venezuela, Bolivia and the entire spectrum of social movements, trade union confederations, parties and fractions of parties do not call for the abolition of capitalism, the repudiation of the debt, the complete expropriation of US or EEC banks or multinational corporations, or any rupture in relations with the US.  For example, in Venezuela, private national and foreign banks earned over 30% rate of return in 2005-2006, foreign-owned oil companies reaped record profits between 2004-2006 and less than 1% of the biggest landed estates were fully expropriated and titles turned over to landless peasants. Capital-labor relations still operate in a framework heavily weighted on behalf of business and labor contractors who rely on subcontractors who continue to dominate hiring and firing in more than one half of the large enterprises. The Venezuelan military and police continue to arrest suspected Colombian guerrillas and turn them over to the Colombian police. Venezuela and US-client President Uribe of Colombia have signed several high-level security and economic co-operation agreements.[68] 

Ever since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has had sharp political and economic conflicts with U.S. imperialism.  But this hasn’t removed Iran from the imperialist system.  The Iranian government has instead formed a network of relationships with the European Union and especially the Russian imperialists to replace its dependence on U.S. imperialism. Vis-à-vis the masses of the Iranian people, it is a thoroughly reactionary regime.  Workers and peasants are exploited by a new bourgeoisie dominated by high-ranking religious leaders, and the Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, and Baluchi minority nationalities face oppression in all areas of life.  Iran’s theocrats have implemented some of the most backward and reactionary restrictions on the lives of women in the world today. And the regime violently crushes any outbreaks of struggle among workers,[69] women, students and the minority nationalities.  Nevertheless, some forces call this reactionary regime “anti-imperialist” and “progressive.” [70]

In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe and ZANU led the struggle against Rhodesia’s white settler regime. But its victory in 1980 did not break the chains of imperialism, nor did it redistribute the large white-owned farms to landless peasants.  Repeating the same experience as in dozens of other countries in Africa, neo-colonial structures of exploitation and domination replaced European colonialism.  Today, Mugabe rules by a combination of naked force and populism.  His recent declarations that the government will expropriate (with compensation) larger parcels of land and distribute them to ZANU supporters are a demagogic attempt to shore up popular support for his regime, not the beginning of  radical land reform and peasant empowerment.  The most glaring example of the repressive nature of the Mugabe government was its forcible destruction of shanty towns in Zimbabwe’s major cities in 2005.  “Operation Clean Up” left hundreds of thousands homeless.  While trade sections by the U.S. and European Union have worsened conditions for the masses of Zimbabweans, the bulk of the damage has been done by the Mugabe regime and its reactionary policies.

In all of the bourgeois nationalist countries, the workings of imperialism and the continuing strength of the internal forces of reaction create a broad section of allies and potential allies for revolutionary forces who base themselves principally among, and represent the interests of, the workers and peasants/farm workers.  As mass-based struggle for a full rupture with imperialism and for revolutionary social transformations come to the fore, a new and more favorable political polarization takes place.  It then becomes possible to win many of the social forces currently represented by Chavez, Morales, Mugabe and Ahmadinejad to the struggle for new democratic revolution and socialism. But this can only happen if the political independence and initiative of the masses of people are developed for revolutionary struggle, not as a pressure group or a cheering squad for bourgeois nationalist governments.

At the same time, anti-imperialists and revolutionary communists must defend these countries against overt and covert attacks by the U.S. or other imperialists and surrogates. It is critical to have a working understanding of the strategies employed by the U.S. in particular to deal with regimes with varying degrees of conflict with imperialism. In Latin America these strategies have included: Cooptation (Brazil model), using economic and military means to undermine (1980s Nicaragua model), overthrowing populist governments from within (1991 Haiti, 1954 Guatemala and 1973 Chile models), and direct military intervention (1989 Panama and 1984 Grenada models).[71]  In Iran, the U.S. resorted to an internal coup in 1953 to overthrow the nationalist Mossadegh government. Since 1979, the U.S. has sought to undermine and isolate the Islamic Republic by economic and political means, and in 1980 armed and prodded Saddam Hussein to launch a proxy war against Iran.

High profile political clashes between these countries and the U.S. imperialists in recent years have led some to the position that struggles for national sovereignty, not people’s movements, are the most important challenge to imperialism today.   This is cause for some forces to deny support to people’s movements within these countries.  This is a particularly sharp question around Iran today.  Some argue that in order to oppose the U.S. imperialists’ threats to launch a military attack on Iran, it is essential to defend the Iranian government.  Instead, while we must build opposition to a U.S. attack on Iran, it is necessary to extend our solidarity to the Iranian people and the revolutionary forces who are reorganizing and gaining strength.  Their struggle will not only remove the reactionary theocrats from power, but will pursue a thoroughgoing anti-imperialist political program.

Indonesia Today

After two decades of military dictatorship and a return to “democracy” in 1998, Indonesia remains a neo-colony of the U.S. and other Western powers.  Bureaucrat capitalists allied with imperialism have opened up the country to exploitation by multinational oil, mining and logging corporations and low-wage assembly plants.  Big landlords, who also run export-oriented plantations, dominate the countryside. While waves of small farmers have been driven into the cities, the majority of the people still live in the countryside.

The vast majority of the 180 million people of Indonesia have suffered from a succession of U.S. and IMF-imposed austerity plans. The Indonesian military, hardened by counter-insurgency campaigns in East Timor, Aceh (on the northern tip of Sumatra) and other islands, still holds the key reins of power. These conditions have not changed substantially since Indonesia achieved formal independence in 1949.

In a 1999 statement, Armando Liwanag, Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, described the favorable physical, historical and social conditions for the development of a revolutionary movement and people’s war in Indonesia today. In this statement, Liwanag points to the many similarities between the Philippines and Indonesia as archipelagos under the sway of U.S. imperialism, and analyses the experience of developing protracted people’s war based in the Philippine countryside.  Liwanag concludes, “The people’s war in the Philippines was launched in 1969 to serve the Filipino people and to extend support to the Indonesian people and to the people of the rest of the world. It will certainly become stronger when the PKI launches people’s war. In this regard, the Filipino and Indonesian peoples can engage in mutual support and make a significant contribution to the resurgence of the anti-imperialist and socialist movement on a global scale.”[72]

Maoist parties are also leading powerful revolutionary movements and armed struggle in India, Turkey, Nepal[73] and other countries, and are making new breakthroughs in the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism that will be of great assistance to today’s young and veteran revolutionaries in Indonesia.

Bibliography

D.N. Aidit, “Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Forward, No Retreat!” Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, December 1963

J.D. Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine, 1977

Arnold Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, 1969. Virulently anti-communist and  anti-Sukarno.

Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990. www.namebase.org/kadane

J.D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, 1972

Armando Liwanag, Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, “On the Indonesian Revolutionary Struggle,” August 17, 1999

Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965, 1974. Recently reprinted, this is the best book available in English on the political thinking and practice of the PKI in the early 1960s. Mortimer was a leading member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Communist Party of Australia, and during the early 1960s he was the principal liaison between the CPA and the PKI. While critical of the PKI’s strategy, Mortimer believes that it was not realistic for the PKI to take the road of armed struggle.

David Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967, 1976

James Petras, “U.S.-Latin American Relations: Measuring the Rise or Fall of U.S. Power,” November 1, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15464.htm, In the second half of this article, Petras discusses Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.

David Ransom, “Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia,” reprinted in The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, ed. Steve Weissman, 1975. www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo

John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia, 2006. Roosa’s book is an invaluable source of information about these events. He provides a detailed analysis of the origins and actions of the September 30 Movement, which provided Suharto and the U.S. with the pretext to move decisively against the PKI.

Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985. www.namebase.org/scott

Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, 1975,

“Self-Criticism of the Political Bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party,” August 17, 1966 and September 1966, Red Flag (Beijing), No. 11, 1967 www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit

Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Werning, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View, 1989

Ann Swift, The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph Series, 1989

W.F. Wertheim, “Suharto and the Untung Coup—The Missing Link,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 1, No. 1 (1970); and “Whose Plot?—New Light on the 1965 Events,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 9, No. 2 (1979)

“Evaluating the Cultural Revolution and its Legacy for the Future,” March 2007 (85 pp.)

“Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today,” Feb. 2007 (40 pp.)

“Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century,” January 2007 (17 pp.)

“The Political, Military and Negotiating Strategies of the Chinese Communist Party (1937-1946) and Recent Developments in Nepal,” February 2007 (20 pp.) 

————–

[1] Time, December 17, 1965. Cited in David Ransom, “Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia,” reprinted in The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, ed. Steve Weissman, 1975. www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo

 [2] John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia, 2006, p. 26. Roosa’s book is an invaluable source of information about these events. He provides a detailed analysis of the origins and actions of the September 30 Movement, which provided Suharto and the U.S. with the pretext to move decisively against the PKI.

[3] Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents say CIA compiled death lists for Indonesians,” San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990. www.namebase.org/kadane.html

[4] Ibid.

[5] Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” Pacific Affairs, 58, Summer 1985, pp. 7-8.  Citations are from the internet version at www.namebase.org/scott.html

[6] Roosa, p. 14.

[7] Quoted in Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” in Malcolm Caldwell (ed.), Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, 1975, p., 241.

[8] Department of State Bulletin, May 22, 1967. The reactionary actor John Wayne stated more bluntly: “We went into Vietnam, and Indonesia got enough guts to throw the Communists out of Indonesia.” New York Times, December 24, 1967. Both quotes are from Arnold Brackman, The Communist Collapse in Indonesia, 1969, pp. 190, 202-203. Brackman’s book is one of the most virulently anti-communist and anti-Sukarno books on this period.

[9] Operation Phoenix was a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese program set up by the CIA in 1967 to uproot the political infrastructure of the National Liberation Front by assassinations of its cadres and supporters. It was modeled after and planned by the same CIA operatives who oversaw the destruction of the PKI in 1965-66.

[10] J.D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, 1972, pp. 149-180.

[11] Sukarno often concluded his speeches with “Long Live Japan!” followed by “Long Live the Land and the People of Indonesia!”  Ibid., p. 163.

[12] Jose Maria Sison with Rainer Werning, The Philippine Revolution: The Leader’s View, 1989. pp. 41-44.

[13] Legge, p. 216.

[14]  Ann Swift, “The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948,” Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph Series, 1989, p. 11; Legge, pp. 220-221.

[15] Swift, p. 44.

[16] Many Indonesians use one name.

[17] Ibid, pp. 67-74.

[18] Ibid., p. 90.

[19] A self-criticism by the PKI Political Bureau after the 1965 right-wing coup summarized the political weaknesses of the party during this period: “The P.K.I. entered the 1945 August Revolution without adequate preparations. Its serious shortcoming in theory and its lack of understanding of the concrete conditions of Indonesian society had resulted in its inability to formulate the nature of the revolution, its tasks, its programme, tactics and slogans, as well as the correct principles and forms of organization….. The P.K.I. was unable to make use of this highly favourable opportunity given by the August Revolution of 1945 to overcome its shortcomings. The P.K.I. did not consistently lead the armed struggle against Dutch imperialism, did not develop guerrilla warfare that was integrated with the democratic movement of the peasants, thus winning their full support, as the only way to defeat the war of aggression launched by the Dutch imperialists. On the contrary, the P.K.I. even approved of and itself followed the policy of reactionary compromises of Sjahrir’s right-wing socialists. The P.K.I. did not establish the alliance of the working class and the peasantry by leading the anti-feudal struggle in the countryside, and did not establish, on the basis of such a worker-peasant alliance, a united front with all other democratic forces. The P.K.I. did not consolidate its strength, on the contrary, it even relegated to the background its own role.” “Statement of the Political Bureau of the Indonesian Communist Party,” August 17, 1966, www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit p. 8.

[20]  As a political strategy aiming at a shortcut to liberation, putschism shares much in common with armed revisionism. As practiced by pro-Soviet parties in the 1970s and 1980s, armed struggle became a form of pressure—a bargaining chip—to gain a share of political power in reactionary states. In South Africa and El Salvador, the practice of armed revisionism by the SACP and the FMLN, respectively, parlayed the sacrifices of countless revolutionaries into careerist agreements to dissolve the people’s revolutionary movements and establish and administer new structures of neo-colonialism. This strategy, as well as focoism (which claims that the initiation of armed struggle by small groups of guerillas would by their example bring forward the masses of the peasantry), arose in opposition to the line of protracted people’s war, which is based on the development of a mass popular base before the initiation, and throughout the period, of revolutionary warfare.

[21] Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959-1965, 1974, p. 393. Recently reprinted, this is the best book available in English on the political thinking and practice of the PKI in the early 1960s. Mortimer was a leading member of the pro-Soviet revisionist Communist Party of Australia, and during the early 60s he was the principal liaison between the CPA and the PKI. While critical of the PKI’s strategy, Mortimer believes that it was not realistic for the PKI to take the road of armed struggle, and he gives short shrift to the self-criticism of the remaining PKI leadership in 1966.

[22] Some scholars have characterized Sukarno’s method of governance as a long-running “theatre state,” reflecting an effort “to focus attention on what the government was rather than on what it was doing.”  Legge, p. 334.

[23] The political line that developed out of the Bandung Conference, the “Bandung line,” developed in the context of and was framed by the struggles for independence against old-style direct-rule European colonialism. As such, it failed to comprehend and challenge a dramatic change: Under the banner of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the United States was applying the more disguised and comprehensive controls characteristic of neo-colonialism.  One of these mechanisms was that the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement were being actively, and for the most part successfully,  cultivated and recruited into the U.S. neo-colonial  empire.  Some resisted, such as Sukarno, Nkrumah of Ghana, Mossadegh in Iran, and Arbenz of Guatemala, and were overthrown by military coups engineered by the U.S.

The “Bandung line” also incorrectly understood the class character of these newly independent states and the neo-colonial relations developing within them.  On the one hand, most of them were ruled by the national bourgeoisie (represented, for example, by Sukarno in Indonesia and Nkrumah in Ghana) with varying degrees of popular support from the petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. On the other and, comprador bourgeois and feudal elements held strong points of economic and political power, backed up by the European and U.S. imperialists. Thus, these countries had not broken out of the Western economic orbit, and their political independence rested on shaky ground.

[24] “Colonialism and imperialism are living realities in our world. Their sentiment of superiority, of arrogance towards us who were once their colonial subjects is thrust down our throats by their press, by their politicians, by their very tourists who only reflect attitudes inculcated in them by the forces in their own societies. Their political, economic or military interference is always with us, sometimes subtly, often insultingly.”  Legge, p. 344.

[25] Mortimer, p. 126. Njoto also served as a principal speechwriter for Sukarno and largely wrote his 1965 Independence Day speech.  Brackman, p. 34.

[26] Mortimer, p. 84.

[27] Legge, p. 351.

[28] Mortimer, p. 115.

[29]  “Self-Criticism by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Indonesian Communist Party,” September 1966, www.massline.info/Indonesia/PKIscrit p. 18.

[30] Mortimer, p. 135.

[31] PKI Self-Criticism, p. 19.  

[32] Ibid., p. 15.

In 1956, the PKI echoed the revisionist theses of the 20th Congress of the CPSU by adopting the line of “achieving socialism peacefully through parliamentary means.” The 1959 PKI constitution stated, “There is a possibility that a people’s democratic system as a transitional stage to socialism in Indonesia can be achieved by peaceful means, in a parliamentary way. The PKI persistently strives to transform this possibility into a reality.” In order to cover its tracks and distinguish itself from the revisionist line of the CPSU, the PKI leadership often spoke of “two possibilities”—the possibility of a peaceful road and the possibility of a non-peaceful road.

[33]  Mortimer, pp. 351, 352.

[34] Ibid., pp. 133-134.  See also David Mozingo, Chinese Policy Toward Indonesia, 1949-1967, 1976, pp. 217, 228; J.D. Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine, 1977, pp. 142-144.

[35] For further discussion of the Bandung line, see “Chinese Foreign Policy during the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today,” pp. 7-11, by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group, February 2007.  Available at www.mlmrsg.com

[36] The desire of the CCP to win the PKI from the Soviet revisionists during the sharp polemics between the CCP and CPSU may have also played a role. This again points to the ongoing tension between China’s national interests as reflected in power-bloc maneuvering and the revolutionary internationalist stance and policies promoted during the Cultural Revolution.

[37] Mortimer, p. 191. Robert Kennedy and Ellsworth Bunker represented the U.S. in these negotiations.

[38] Ibid., p. 206.

[39] In 1963, Sukarno granted a 20 year guarantee to British and American oil companies operating in Indonesia. Armstrong, p. 123.

[40] Mortimer, p. 243.

[41] PKI Self-Criticism, p. 22.

[42]  Scott, pp. 4-5.  Citations are from the internet version at www.namebase.org/scott.html

[43]  Ibid,, p. 16, footnote 46. A document by the National Security Council in 1959 outlines the U.S.’ consistent orientation from that time forward: The U.S. should prioritize “requests for assistance [from the Indonesian military] in programs and projects which offer opportunities to isolate the PKI, drive it into positions of open opposition to the Indonesian Government, thereby creating grounds for repressive measures politically justifiable in terms of Indonesian self-interest.”: Roosa, p. 182.

[44] Ibid., p. 183.

[45] Ransom, pp. 10, 11.

[46]  Ibid., pp. 7-8.

[47] Roosa, pp. 184-185. According to Ransom, “The generals controlled plantations, small industry, state-owned oil and tin, and the state-run export-import companies, which by  965 monopolized government purchasing and had branched out into sugar milling, shipping and distribution.”

[48]  Mortimer, p. 287.

[49] Ibid., p. 278. But note that the CCP, as opposed to the PKI, had already uprooted the power of the landlords with the victory of the revolution in 1949.

[50] D.N. Aidit, “Set Afire the Banteng Spirit! Ever Forward, No Retreat!” Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, December 1963, p. 25. A banteng is a wild bull.

[51]  Mortimer, p. 295.

[52] Aidit, pp. 7-8.

[53] Mortimer, p. 322.

[54] Ibid., p. 299.

[55]  Ibid,, p. 380.

[56]  Mortimer, p. 384.

[57] Sukarno later stated that the idea of a “fifth force” had been suggested to him by Zhou Enlai on one of his trips to Beijing, and there were rumors, probably spread by the CIA and Indonesian army intelligence, that the Chinese had shipped small arms to the PKI.  Ibid., p. 381; Scott, p. 11.

[58]  Mortimer, pp. 382-383.

[59] The question of where Sukarno and the nationalist sections of the bourgeoisie that he represented would have ended up politically if the PKI had held and implemented a revolutionary line during these years needs further analysis and discussion. One thing is certain: A process of polarization between the forces of the armed revolution and those of the armed counter-revolution would have developed, compelling the Sukarno forces to choose sides at some point.

[60] Roosa, pp. 189, 190.

[61] Mortimer, p. 385-86. Through currency speculation and other actions, the CIA may have been attempting to destabilize the Indonesian economy, just as it did in the months prior to the right-wing generals coup in Chile in 1973.

[62] In short order, army psy-ops specialists issued claims that PKI members had tortured, mutilated and castrated the captured generals. According to one story in the newspapers, 100 women of the pro-PKI Indonesian Women’s Movement had used razors to slice up the genitals of the generals. The Suharto regime set up a “Museum of PKI Terror” at the site where the generals’ bodies were buried.  The claim that the murder of the generals was the start of a massive, ruthless campaign by the PKI against all non-communist forces was a key part of the legitimizing ideology for the 23 year long Suharto dictatorship. Roosa, pp. 7-10, 198.

[63] Mortimer, p. 388. According to another scholar, Aidit flew to Yogyakarta in Central Java, where he attempted to prevent a PKI uprising. Legge, p. 390.

[64] Mortimer, p. 391.

[65] Ibid., p. 397.

[66] PKI Self-Criticism, pp. 25, 26.

[67] See Jorge Palacios, Chile, An Attempt at “Historic Compromise”: The Real Story of the Allende Years, 1979, pp. 329-349.

[68] See James Petras, “US-Latin American Relations: Measuring the Rise or Fall of US Power,” November 1, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15464.htm, In the second half of this article, Petras discusses Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a somewhat different question due to its particular history and claims to be a socialist state. The DPRK, too, is increasingly dependent on nearby capitalist countries, South Korea and China, for food and energy assistance, and by means of investment in maquiladora-like economic zones similar to those in China.

[69] The suppression of the bus drivers’ union in Teheran and the arrest of its leaders is but one recent example.

[70] In the U.S., this viewpoint has been argued most strongly by the Workers World Party and its affiliate, the International Action Center. See www.workers.org/2007/world/iran-0510/index.html It took the same position in support of Saddam Hussein’s reactionary regime prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

[71] The U.S. uses military aid and training agreements to keep both individual countries and all of Latin America under imperialist domination. This strategic investment allows the U.S. to develop a political base in the officer corps of these countries for future contingencies. An interesting example of this strategy came to light at a recent conference to build opposition to U.S. military bases worldwide that was held in Ecuador, one of the Latin America countries that claims to provide a “democratic alternative” to neo-liberalism. At this conference, Ecuador’s Defense Minister supported the removal of U.S. bases from Latin America, but insisted that the Ecuadorean military would continue to send its officers for training at the infamous School of the Americas (renamed WHISC) at Ft. Benning in the U.S.

[72] Liwanag, “On the Indonesian Revolutionary Struggle,” August 17, 1999.

[73] After liberating 4/5ths of the country through ten years of people’s war, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has joined an interim government with seven parties representing the interests of Nepal’s bureaucratic capitalists and big landlords, who have close ties to India and the U.S.  In order to reach this agreement, the CPN(M) has dissolved its liberated areas, sequestered its troops and arms under UN supervision, and agreed to merge the People’s Liberation Army with the Nepalese Army, the renamed Royal Nepalese Army. Serious investigation and debate concerning this question has already begun among revolutionaries around the world. One useful study guide is a bibliography compiled by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group, titled “Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal: A Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century.”  This includes two statements by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that are critical of the new strategy of the Nepalese comrades. The MLM Revolutionary Study Group has also written an article on the political, military and negotiating strategy of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1946, and its relevance to the situation in Nepal today.

Our starting point is that the struggle for socialism and communism are part of a worldwide revolutionary process that develops in an uneven manner.  Revolutions are fought and new socialist states are established country by country.  These states must defend themselves; socialist countries have had to devote significant resources to defending themselves from political isolation, economic strangulation and military attack.  And they must stay on the socialist road by reinvigorating the revolutionary process and unleashing the political initiative of the masses of working people in all areas of society.[1]

However, socialist countries cannot be seen as ends in and of themselves.  They are not secure as long as imperialism and capitalism exist anywhere in the world.  Moreover, the transition to communism can only occur with the victory of socialist revolutions worldwide, and when the social, economic and cultural inequalities that exist in socialist society have been eliminated and the socialist states of all nations begin to wither away. Thus, socialist countries must both await and hasten the establishment of socialist states elsewhere in the world.  From this vantage point, it is a strategic necessity for a socialist state to exert every effort – politically, morally and where possible militarily– to support and accelerate the struggle for revolution and socialism worldwide.

This situation creates a continuing, and at times acute, contradiction between the necessity of defending socialist countries–including through state-to-state diplomacy with imperialist and reactionary states–and the goal of promoting and supporting the world revolution.

The foreign policy of the People’s Republic of China during the Maoist era attempted to pursue both goals by building a broad united front of all forces that could be directed against the principal enemy or enemies of the people of the world.[2]  The basic component of this united front (outside the socialist countries themselves) was the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples of all countries. At various times the united front also included some of the imperialist powers, as well as bourgeois nationalist and reactionary governments in the “third world” that had conflicts to varying degrees with one or another of the imperialist powers. Thus, there were sharp class contradictions built into such a broad united front.

In this paper, we will examine how these contradictions were handled in the formulation and conduct of China’s foreign policy during the Maoist era, and we will attempt to draw lessons that can be applied by revolutionaries in the 21st century.

China’s foreign policy between 1949 to 1976 can be divided into four periods:

 (1) From 1949-1953, the U.S. imperialists attempted to contain and even roll back the Chinese revolution, and tried to suppress the advance of revolutionary movements in Asia.

The response of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to battle the U.S. military in Korea and support revolutionary struggles in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

(2) During the “Bandung Period”—1954 to the early 1960s—U.S. efforts at containing China were complemented by the aggressive replacement of the European direct colonial empires with U.S.-dominated neo-colonial states.  Chinese foreign policy, reflecting the influence of Zhou Enlai, sought to set up an alliance of socialist states and formerly colonial countries under an anti-imperialist banner.  In practice, this policy placed primary emphasis on supporting bourgeois nationalist regimes such as Indonesia and India, and downplayed support for revolutionary struggles.

(3) Some of the most notable features of the 1960s period were the explosive growth of national liberation movements, concentrated in Vietnam, the rebirth of revolutionary struggle in the imperialist countries, and the initiation of the Cultural Revolution, an unprecedented revolution within a socialist society.   These factors strengthened the revolutionary internationalist orientation that defined Chinese foreign policy during those years. At the same time, there was sharp struggle in the CCP over foreign policy, which was closely linked to the polemics against Soviet revisionism and the struggle against Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and other leading “capitalist roaders” in the Chinese party.

(4) From 1969 into the 1970s, socialist China was faced with new conditions.  A serious military threat developed on its northern border from the Soviet Union, and Defense Minister Lin Biao defected from the revolutionary camp. These adverse developments put the brakes on the Cultural Revolution and brought back Deng Xiaoping and other high-ranking officials who had been overthrown or demoted only a few years earlier.  This also led to the emergence of the Three Worlds Theory, which advocated a strategic alliance with the Western imperialists for China, and assumed a dominant position in Chinese foreign policy from 1973 to Mao’s death in 1976.

During this period, the revolutionary thrust of Mao’s and his supporters’ foreign policy was blunted by their advocacy of a “three worlds perspective” that did not keep in sharp focus the reactionary nature of the West European imperialists and the neo-colonial states dominated by imperialism. Nevertheless, Mao and his allies in the CCP fought to continue political and military support for the emerging anti-revisionist and revolutionary forces in other countries.

All in all, Mao’s revolutionary and internationalist orientation was the primary determinant of Chinese foreign policy from 1949 to 1976.  However, there was a significant bourgeois nationalist opposition to this orientation within the CCP, and at times it held the upper hand.  It is important to closely examine both aspects of Chinese foreign policy in order to draw lessons for the future.

A.  The Chinese Revolution and its Internationalist Practice

The foreign policy of the first few years of the People’s Republic developed from a complex mix of new conditions in the world after World War II:

–The development of national liberation movements in the vacuum created by the breakdown and collapse of the old European and Japanese colonial empires; in East Asia, communist-led revolutionary struggles arose in Vietnam, Korea and Indonesia.

–The new forms of imperialist domination (neo-colonialism) throughout Asia, Latin America and Asia led and created by the United States, which disguised itself in clever anti-imperialist and anti-colonial pretense and rhetoric; and

–The extension of the socialist bloc into Eastern Europe on the basis, not of revolutionary upsurge, but from the defeat of Germany by the victorious Soviet armies; the theoretical development of people’s democracies as “states of the whole people” to justify the East European countries’ entrance into the “socialist bloc”; and this bloc’s  failure  to keep pace with and support the rising revolutionary movements in the colonial world;

After World War 2, the Soviet Union, concentrated as it was on the tasks of post-war reconstruction and bloc integration, had actively discouraged the revolutionary movements in China, Greece, Iran, and elsewhere from seizing power,[3] risking confrontation with U.S imperialism, and “over-extending” the reach of the socialist bloc.  Mao and the CCP did not heed Stalin’s advice, and in 1949 won nationwide victory.

After establishing the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949, the Chinese party and people were confronted with the daunting task of rebuilding a country devastated by 30 years of civil war and thousands of years of feudalism.  They were consolidating nationwide political power, and land reform was just getting underway.  Still, they shouldered the internationalist responsibility of supporting revolutionary struggles and liberation movements beyond their borders, beginning with major sacrifices during the Korean War. In this case, there was a direct and immediate convergence between the necessity of defending China and supporting the revolutionary struggle in a neighboring country.

Support for the Korean People

In late 1950, the U.S. military drove deep into northern Korea and towards the Chinese border, committing dozens of civilian massacres and leveling entire cities.  A major campaign was launched all over China to “Resist America and Aid Korea.”  In the Northeast, factories drew up  “anti-American aggression emulation targets,” and popularized the slogan “Our factory is our battlefield and our machines are our weapons.” [4]  In 1950, more than 30% of China’s national budget was dedicated to support the war to resist U.S. aggression in Korea.[5]

The Chinese government insisted that their forces fighting in Korea were highly motivated volunteers in order to deflect U.S. charges of “Chinese communist aggression.”

Politics was in command of military recruitment.   In the course of the government ’s political mobilization known as the “Volunteer Movement,” significant numbers of worker, peasant and student volunteers, infused with the same consciousness that allowed them to triumph over the Guomindang, joined the Chinese People’s Volunteers to fight in Korea. [6]

In October and November 1950, 300,000 Chinese soldiers crossed the Yalu River.[7] The devastating attacks of the CPV on the U.S. Army in close cooperation with the Korean liberation fighters fought U.S. imperialism to a stalemate.  Only a year after the victory of the revolution, China’s willingness to go head to head with the most powerful military machine in history inspired and riveted the attention of revolutionaries and the oppressed in many countries.

Support for the Vietnamese People

Even while civil war raged in China after World War 2, the Vietminh and Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units were coordinating military operations against French colonialism in Indochina.  As early as 1946, a joint Vietnamese-Chinese unit (the Doc Lap, or Independence, Regiment) was created to engage in guerilla warfare against the French in the border area. As the CCP’s forces advanced rapidly in northern China in 1948, the PLA became more active along the border with Vietnam and increasingly took part in operations with Vietminh units.

In December 1949, two months after the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, Ho Chi Minh traveled to Beijing to meet with CCP leaders concerning questions of political and military strategy.  In 1950, the PLA equipped and trained 20,000 Vietminh soldiers in China’s Yunnan province, and continued to ship weapons and munitions to the Vietminh while Chinese forces were fighting U.S. aggression in Korea.[8]  Chinese military advisers worked closely with Vietminh officers, and a campaign was launched in the Vietminh in 1950 to study the CCP’s experience in the wars against Japan and the U.S.-backed Guomindang. [9] After the armistice in Korea was signed, the PLA sent large quantities of weapons to North Vietnam, providing important support for the Vietminh’s historic victory over the French army at Dienbienphu in 1954.  The CCP also supported the efforts of communist forces in Laos, Malaya, Burma and Thailand to initiate armed struggle against reactionary governments allied with the U.S., French and British imperialists.

B.  The Development of Neocolonialism and the Bandung Period

In the 1950s, as many of the countries that had emerged from colonialism sought to defend their independence, they developed conflicts of varying degrees with the remaining colonial European empires and with U.S. imperialism.  China sought to unite with these countries with a program of developing mutual support and a common shield against imperialism.[10]  This diplomatic strategy culminated in the Bandung, Conference, and later in the formation of the Non-Aligned countries group.[11]

 The Bandung Conference was a meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly independent, organized by China, Egypt, Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, and Pakistan. The conference’s stated aims were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by the U.S. or any other imperialist nation. The conference met from April 18-April 24, 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia.

It is not well known that pro-Western, anti-communist governments had a significant presence at the Bandung Conference. During the conference, leaders from Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Prince of Thailand assailed communism and China as “colonialism of a new type.”  Zhou Enlai responded that China had its hands full with national reconstruction, and wanted to create a peaceful international environment. In the wake of Bandung, Zhou led a “goodwill mission” in late 1956 to Cambodia, India, Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon. In his discussions with the leaders of these countries, he held out the “five principles of peaceful coexistence”–which included the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries–to reassure them that China would not support revolutionary movements in their countries.[12]

The Chinese advocacy of the “Bandung line” as a diplomatic initiative, principally shaped by Zhou, did help to break socialist China out of international isolation.  However, the Bandung line came to define China’s foreign policy as a whole during this period.  The leaders of the newly independent countries were seen as the most basic alliance of the united front against the Western imperialist powers.

As a strategic political line for Marxist-Leninists, the Bandung line took a heavy toll in diminishing and denying the independence and initiative of communists within the united front against imperialism.  It replaced the internationalist line of support for people’s liberation struggles and for the strategy of protracted people’s war, with a line of support for bourgeois nationalist governments who were, it was claimed, the defining characteristic of the “post-colonial period.”

 The Bandung line incorrectly understood the class character of these newly independent states and the neo-colonial relations developing within them.  On the one hand, most of them were ruled by the national bourgeoisie with varying degrees of popular support from the petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. On the other hand, comprador bourgeois and feudal elements held strong points of economic and political power, backed up by the European and U.S. imperialists. Thus, these countries had not broken out of the Western economic orbit, and their  political independence  rested on shaky ground.

One of the defining characteristics of the Bandung line was its failure to comprehend and challenge the dramatic change which the United States, as it occupied the shoes of the old European empires, had brought to both the appearance and the mechanisms of colonialism.  Under the banner of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, the U.S. was replacing direct-rule colonialism with the disguised yet more comprehensive controls of neo-colonialism.[13] In the Bandung period, the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement were being actively, and for the most part successfully, cultivated and recruited into the U.S.’ neo-colonial empire.  Some resisted, such as Sukarno, Lumumba and Nkrumah, and were overthrown by CIA-orchestrated military coups.

The failure to recognise this neo-colonialist strategy and the developing role of the nationalist bourgeoisies within it, became the focus of one of the sharpest struggles over foreign policy in the People’s Republic to that time.  In March 1958,  it led to a comprehensive self-criticism by Foreign Minister Zhou, which described his  “conservative and rightist tendency” in handling the PRC’s foreign relations.  “He admitted that the Foreign  Ministry’s work under his direction had neglected the necessary struggle in dealing with nationalist countries, had maintained a kind of wishful thinking concerning imperialism (especially toward Japan and the United States) and had failed to conduct necessary criticism of the revisionist policies of other socialist countries.”[14]  While he remained as Premier, Zhou was replaced as Foreign Minister by Chen Yi.

The Bandung line served to undercut China’s support for liberation movements and revolutionary struggles.  China had gained a prominent place at the meetings of independent countries by, among other things, promising to limit or deny support for revolutionary groups in those countries.  For example, in 1962, the resolution of a border dispute and the announcement of Burmese “neutrality” led China to cut off  support for the Burmese communist movement.[15]

In Indonesia, the impact was particularly dramatic—and disastrous.   The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), the largest non-governing Communist Party in the world,  had strong relations with both the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the CCP in the 1950s. Though its political program was  more similar to that of the CPSU, the PKI sided with the Chinese party when polemics between them broke out in the early 1960s.  Finding support in the Bandung line, the PKI subordinated itself to the national bourgeois program of President Sukarno and advocated an illusory peaceful transition to socialism.   Of great importance, the PKI failed to develop rural base areas and to arm its mass base [16]

Many people’s movements were blindsided by the events which led, in just ten years from the Bandung Conference, to the coup by General Suharto against the Sukarno government.  Beginning  in early October 1965,  U.S.-backed generals  mobilized military units and rightist Muslims against  the politically and militarily disarmed PKI and its mass base.  This resulted in the death over one million communists and supporters—one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century.  The PKI was destroyed,  and the revolutionary movement in Indonesia has still not recovered 40 years later.

While by the end of the 1950s the CCP was taking a more aggressive policy of supporting national liberation movements in some countries, sharp differences between revolutionary internationalist and bourgeois nationalist orientations remained.

In 1962,  Wang Jiaxiang, director of the Party’s International Liaison Department (which was responsible for relations with communist parties and organizations in other countries),

argued  in several reports that the strategic goal of China’s foreign policy should be the maintenance of world peace, so that it would be able to focus on socialist construction at home.  According to Wang, China should reconcile with the Soviet Union before the polemics escalated, adhere to the principle of peaceful coexistence with imperialism, and forestall a  Korea-style war in Indochina.  Wang was especially worried about the effect of the sharp increase in foreign aid since 1960 (one-third of which went to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) on the Chinese economy.  Wang was able to convince Zhou and Liu Shaoqi, who directed the Party’s daily work, to support a peaceful settlement of the Laotian people’s struggle at the ongoing Geneva Conference.[17]  

 Mao, on the other hand, lit into Wang.  At a Central Committee meeting in September 1962, Mao explicitly connected the domestic class struggle, including the danger of capitalist restoration, to support for national liberation struggles. On Indochina, Mao insisted that China must support the armed struggles in South Vietnam and Laos without conditions because they were “excellent armed struggles”:

The CCP Chairman characterized Wang’s ideas as an attempt to be conciliatory toward imperialists, revisionists, and international reactionaries, and to reduce support to those countries and peoples fighting against the imperialists.  Mao stressed that this policy of ‘three reconciliations and one reduction” came at a time when some leading CCP members (as it turned out, he had Liu and Deng in mind) had been frightened by the international reactionaries and were inclined to adopt a “pro-revisionist” policy line at home.  He emphasized that his policy, by contrast, was to fight against the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries in all countries and, at the same time, to promote revolutionary developments at home and abroad.[18]  

It is significant that Mao took this internationalist stand shortly after the Great Leap Forward, and at the time that he was preparing to launch the Socialist Education Movement, a direct precursor to the Cultural Revolution.  At this and other decisive points, Mao’s promotion of revolutionary social transformations in China was closely connected to his support for the world revolution.

C.  Mao and the Chinese Communist Party Launch the Struggle against Soviet Revisionism

As the 1950s progressed, and especially with Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power, the Soviet Union withdrew its support for revolutionary struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  During the Algerian people’s war of national liberation, the leaders of the CPSU withheld all forms of aid in the name of “non-interference in the internal affairs of other states”—that is, French colonialism.  The French Communist Party even took the position that Algeria was part of France.  For actions such as this, the Chinese described the CPSU and parties that took similar positions as “apologists of neo-colonialism.”[19]  In contrast, China gave full support to the war of resistance of the Algerian people, and refused to establish diplomatic relations with France until well after the end of the war.

For the CPSU, national liberation struggles became bargaining chips and were expendable

in order to negotiate  arms control and détente with the U.S.  According to CPSU General Secretary Khrushchev, “even a tiny spark could lead to a world conflagration.”  “Local wars in our time are very dangerous…  We will work hard to put out the sparks that may set off the flames of war.”[20]

At this time, the Soviet Union under Khrushchev promoted the “three peacefuls”:  Peaceful coexistence with U.S. imperialism, peaceful competition between the capitalist and socialist camps, and a peaceful transition to socialism.  According to Khrushchev, peaceful coexistence with the imperialist countries was the general line for the foreign policy of CPSU and other communist parties.

In 1963, the Chinese party publicly issued A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement, followed by nine other documents.[21] These polemics were written by Mao Zedong or under his direction.  This electrified the ranks of revolutionaries and genuine communists all over the world.  In these documents, the CCP attacked Khrushchev’s distortion of the principle of peaceful coexistence between countries with different social systems to justify the Soviet Union’s collusion with U.S. imperialism and its withdrawal of support from revolutionary struggles worldwide. These polemics also identified Khrushchev and the other top leaders of the CPSU as revisionists–bourgeois forces in the party who had betrayed revolution.[22]

Beginning with the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, Khrushchev put forward “the transition to socialism by the parliamentary road,” claiming that for the working class to win a majority in parliament is tantamount to “setting up a new proletarian state in parliamentary form.”  In response, the CCP argued that only revolutionary violence can overthrow the bourgeoisie, smash the old state apparatus and achieve socialism:

The proletariat would, of course, prefer to gain power by peaceful means. But abundant historical evidence indicates that the reactionary classes never give up power voluntarily and that they are always the first to use violence to repress the revolutionary mass movement and to provoke civil war, thus placing armed struggle on the agenda.[23]

As part of promoting a peaceful transition to socialism as a “new development” of Marxism-Leninism, Khrushchev claimed that the development of nuclear weapons and their possession by the U.S. and other imperialist countries made the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism too dangerous, and therefore impossible. While it noted that the destructive potential of nuclear weapons is immense, the CCP argued that these weapons do not change the nature of capitalism, which never exits peacefully from the stage of history.   The Chinese stated bluntly that imperialism is a paper tiger, ferocious in appearance but weak internally.

These polemics with the CPSU addressed other issues as well, such as the abrupt withdrawal of thousands of Soviet experts from China in 1960. The Chinese party understood this as a high-handed attempt to disrupt China’s economic and military development, and to make China toe the Soviet line.[24]  It was also in these years that the Soviet Union started to consolidate imperialist relations within the socialist camp.  Now the Soviet Union would serve as the “center of the socialist camp” while Eastern Europe and other countries would serve as the periphery, with “limited sovereignty.”

According to many U.S. leftists at the time, the “Sino-Soviet split” was a disaster for the entire global alignment against Western imperialism, and it divided the “socialist camp.”[25]  In actuality, it was the Soviet Union and its vassal states in Eastern Europe that launched a process in the 1950s and 1960s of full-scale capitalist restoration and abandonment of revolutionary internationalism.  It was the Soviet Union’s betrayal of revolution that broke apart the socialist camp, not China’s criticism of that betrayal.
 
The Rise of Brezhnev and Armed Revisionism

In 1964, Khrushchev was removed from office and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, under whose leadership the Soviet Union sought to expand its “spheres of influence” and directly challenge US imperialism.  This new approach required assistance to countries and national liberation struggles opposed to the U.S.  Thus, in the mid-60s, the Soviet Union began to ship large amounts of weaponry to Cuba, North Vietnam and some of the African liberation movements.

In Vietnam, the increase in Soviet military aid was accompanied by pressure on the leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to accept a negotiated settlement short of defeat of the U.S.-puppet regime and complete national reunification.  Soviet policy was also reflected in the reformist stance of the Communist Party USA. The anti-war coalition led by the CPUSA opposed the call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, opposed the anti-imperialist forces that called for support for the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and supported the presidential candidates of the imperialist Democratic Party during the 1960s.

 Another reason for the change in Soviet policy is that the CPSU needed to shore up its position in the international communist movement. Due to the polemics launched publicly by the CCP in 1963, the Soviet leaders needed to reassert tighter political control over the network of communist parties around the world. The Soviets were aiming to win leadership over the “socialist bloc,” and this included Cuba, which had won power in a militant, though “foco-ist” way.  The Vietnamese were facing a more massive and aggressive onslaught from the U.S., and for that, a “peaceful transition” line would not do. Armed revisionism joined the peaceful road to socialism in the Soviet toolbox. An apparent militant stance became the order of the day.

Some were taken in by this change.  What required explanation is how armed struggle can become, in  revisionist hands, a form of  pressure–a bargaining  chip–to gain  a share of political  power.  This is qualitatively different from a strategy of mass-based people’s war  aimed  at  overthrowing   imperialism  and its domestic props,  and building a new  revolutionary state and society.

The illusory peaceful road line still held sway with disastrous consequences in Indonesia in 1965, and later, in Chile in 1973.[26]  In South Africa and El Salvador, the practice of armed revisionism by the SACP and FMLN, respectively, parlayed the sacrifices of countless revolutionaries into careerist agreements to dissolve the people’s movements and establish and administer new structures of neo-colonialism.

From the practice of disarmed revisionism to the implementation of armed revisionism,  the CPSU and its allied  parties  showed  a  great  deal  of flexibility  in  building  and supporting movements  that were  not aimed  at  driving  out  imperialism,  overthrowing   reactionary regimes  and building  socialism.   All of these strategies were aimed at contending with U.S. imperialism and furthering the expansionist aims of Soviet social-imperialism.

Many have attacked or questioned the Chinese “thesis” that capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union and that it developed into an imperialist power.   A substantial body of works has explored the mechanisms by which capitalism can be restored in a formerly socialist state, with a new bourgeoisie composed of high party leaders presiding over a highly centralized state-owned economy.[27]

            The expansionist policies of the Soviet Union arose directly out of the restoration of capitalism within the USSR in the 1950s and 60s.  When the CP in Czechoslovakia attempted to break out of the Soviet orbit in 1968, Brezhnev sent in the Soviet army to crush the  revolt.[28]  This pointed to the development of a fully imperialist Soviet Union determined to enforce subservience of the countries in its bloc.  The Chinese aptly named this Soviet social-imperialism—“socialism in words, imperialism in deeds.”  

The real nature of Soviet foreign policy was further demonstrated with the dispatch of thousands of troops to Ethiopia during the 1970s to shore up a self-proclaimed “socialist” military junta,[29] the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.

D.  Maoist Revolutionaries Break with Soviet Revisionism

 The CPSU’s reformism, its dread of U.S. imperialism and its own imperialist adventures impelled large numbers of young cadre in Communist Parties around the world to form new communist parties based on Marxism-Leninism and to rekindle the fires of revolutionary struggle.

In the 1960s, these young revolutionaries were inspired by the momentous strides in socialist construction in China, the Vietnamese people’s struggle for national liberation, and anti-colonial struggles raging in Africa, including within the white settler state of South Africa.  Only 90 miles from the U.S. mainland was the Cuban revolution, the first successful breach in U.S. imperialism’s stranglehold on the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America.

As the CCP opened the polemics against revisionism in the international communist movement in 1960-1964, revolutionaries who had been politically restrained by the pro-Soviet leadership of parties in many countries joined the battle against the dead hand of revisionism.  This was not only an ideological battle, it was a political, life-and-death struggle.   In China, it took the form of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966.  Elsewhere, revolutionaries raised the mass struggle to new heights and built new anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organizations and parties.  In a number of countries they adopted the strategy of people’s war.

The stage was set for this break with revisionism in 1965, as the Vietnamese revolutionaries engaged hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat forces.  In addition, the revisionist peaceful transition to socialism line was more discredited than ever due to the destruction of the PKI in Indonesia in 1965.

 
India

In India, the reformist pro-Soviet Communist Party was a serious obstacle to the development of a revolutionary movement. However, its hold on the people’s movements was broken with the historic uprising of Naxalbari in 1967, and as young activists such as Charu Mazumdar and Kanai Chatterjee led the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in 1969.  

Decades later, that breakthrough has led the two main streams of the revolutionary movement, represented by the CPI (ML) (People’s War) and the MCCI, to merge and form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).  The CPI (Maoist) has united the great majority of Indian Maoists in one organization, and its armed forces now operate in 15 states. With 70% of the population of India still living in rural areas, the CPI (Maoist)’s primary social base is among millions of Adivasis (indigenous peoples), poor and landless farmers, and Dalits (outcasts in India’s caste system). (www.peoplesmarchgooglepages.com)
 
The Philippines

In the 1960s, Jose Maria Sison and others in the Philippines broke with the revisionist Communist Party, which had swung from left adventurism to a renunciation of armed struggle in the 1950s. They reconstituted the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968.  After a decisive break with Soviet revisionism, the CPP applied Mao’s theory of people’s war, and further developed it in the concrete conditions of the Philippines.

Today, the CPP’s military arm, the New People’s Army, operates in over 100 guerrilla fronts on all major 11 islands of the archipelago.  The underground National Democratic Front has established revolutionary organizations and new institutions of political power in these areas, and the legal national democratic movement, based in the cities, has a mass base in the millions. (www.philippinesrevolution.net )

Turkey

Similar developments took place in Turkey, where revisionist parties had long considered Kemalism[30] as progressive bourgeois nationalism.  But the rise of the worldwide anti-imperialist movement in the mid to late 1960s, and the Cultural Revolution in China, deeply affected a new generation of Turkish and Kurdish revolutionaries.  Mass student actions against the Sixth Fleet of the U.S. Navy soon spread to sections of workers and peasants, and an upsurge against the U.S.-backed Kemalist regime reached new heights in 1970, which broke with the pacifist trend of the revisionists.  This soon led to the formation of new organizations–most significantly, the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) in 1972.  Formed at a time of martial law under the leadership of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya (who was captured and killed in 1973), the TKP/ML blazed a new path based on Marxism-Leninism and the teachings of Mao Zedong.  It called out the Kemalist regime as fascist and comprador, and upheld the right of self-determination for the Kurdish nation.  

Today, the TKP/ML is in the forefront of people’s movements against imperialist domination and state terror.  Guided by Maoist principles of people’s war, its guerilla forces are active in the Black Sea region and in Kurdistan.[31]

Nepal

The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) developed out of splits with revisionist parties between 1970 and 1990, and consolidated itself under the leadership of Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai.  In 10 years of people’s war, the CPN(Maoist) liberated  80% of the countryside— empowering women and national minorities, building schools, medical clinics, and  new organs of  political power in the areas it controls.

However, the CPN(M) has recently adopted another path that doesn’t require overthrowing the old reactionary state and defeating its army.  In 2006, it negotiated a peace agreement with seven parliamentary parties that represent the interests of the landlord and bureaucratic capitalists in Nepal, setting up a Western-style parliamentary system based on elections to a Constituent Assembly in the summer of 2007.  In order to reach this agreement, the CPN(M) dissolved its liberated areas, sequestered its troops and arms under UN supervision, and agreed to merge the People’s Liberation Army with the former Royal Nepalese Army.[32]

Latin America

            In Latin America, the Chinese polemics assisted many revolutionaries in breaking away from the old, reformist politics that had long dominated communist parties in many countries.    One important result was the emergence of a revolutionary people’s war launched by the Peruvian Communist Party (better known in the media as the Shining Path) in 1980. [33] Significant Maoist forces emerged in Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay and elsewhere in Latin America.

The period since the early 1960s has also seen a marked decline in both the presence and credibility of pro-Soviet parties in many countries, such as India, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Greece, Brazil, Chile and South Africa.   In some cases they have faced direct political challenges and exposure by revolutionary Maoist forces; in others, specious claims to revolutionary authority have been lost in their pursuit of electoralism, reformism and class collaboration.

The restoration of capitalism in China, led by Deng Xiaoping, had a disorienting and discouraging effect on the world revolutionary movement—similar to the effect of the earlier reversal in the Soviet Union. All over the world, revisionists and opportunists launched attacks on Mao and Maoism.  While this was a difficult period for many parties, groups and movements, significant struggles were waged to sum up the reversal in China. [34]

Important sections of the international communist movement, including the Maoist parties mentioned above, were able to retain their anti-revisionist outlook and revolutionary bearings. In many places people’s struggles developed a new level of revolutionary leadership and organization.  The most thorough advances were imbued with a strong mass and class orientation, and with strategic and tactical clarity on the key tools of  the united front, the party and the armed struggle in reaching for the revolutionary seizure of power.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) has regrouped some of the Maoist forces internationally. However, among other problems, RIM’s assertion of democratic centralist authority on a world scale has precluded wide-ranging political investigation and discussion.  Based on a partial understanding of conditions in particular countries and internationally, RIM has created an obstacle to the process of uniting all genuine revolutionary forces on a higher level.

 The U.S.

The picture is incomplete unless we relate the impact of Maoism in one of the heartlands of industrial and finance capital, the U.S.   Traditional Marxism-Leninism had viewed these capitalist/imperialist countries as the “metropole,” as the center of the worldwide class struggle and revolutionary process.   The struggles in the colonial world–semi-feudal, overwhelmingly peasant economies–were viewed as the “periphery,” secondary to, but important potential allies of, the revolutionary proletariat in the metropole.

Over the course of the 20th century, this traditional picture had grown seriously out of sync with reality.  The gathering storms in the periphery had developed unprecedented and unexpected strength, while the class struggle in the metropole had lost its bearings and its revolutionary spirit.  Not only had the periphery moved to the center of the world’s revolutionary process, but whether the struggle in the metropole would be allied with those anti-colonial and socialist struggles was a big question.

The U.S.’s imperialist plunder had fostered privilege, corruption, and widespread populist and xenophobic illusions of its democracy, its global benevolence toward others, and its national superiority over all.  Its culture was imbued with white supremacy both toward oppressed and subject peoples within the US and throughout the world.

The CPUSA, which had developed a mass membership and broad influence prior to  World War 2, had come to focus overwhelmingly on trade union issues, the expansion of democratic reforms, and support for the Soviet Union.  It did not promote a revolutionary perspective or strategy, and it did little to challenge white supremacy and the drive for U.S. global hegemony.

The challenge came, instead, from other sources–from the growing movement in the early 1960s against white power and privilege, and from the national liberation struggles challenging U.S. imperialism.  It became a time when, as the song goes, “the truth is found to be lies.”  Black liberation and Vietnamese liberation opened the eyes of millions in the U.S. to a suppressed reality.  That the Cultural Revolution occurred simultaneously was timely in raising the credibility of revolutionary Marxism out of the ruins of self-discredited revisionism.

The revolutionary communist road increasingly grew among a new generation of revolutionaries to be appreciated for its viability and vitality.

The prospect of returning revolution to the metropole was both exhilarating and problematic.  Many questions were pushed to the fore by the events of the 1960s, especially the year 1968.  The Tet Offensive raised the prospect of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam.  For many, the uprising in Prague shattered the chains of Soviet rule in a most dramatic way.

The uprising in Paris hammered the point that the capitalist crisis was indeed global.

The startling rise of the revolutionary Black Panther Party from the streets of Oakland, California, and the eruptions of well over a hundred cities when civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, highlighted the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy and the significance of the advance from civil rights to Black liberation.   Out of the ashes of Detroit’s rebellion of 1967 came Revolutionary Union Movements at Chrysler and Ford plants, which coalesced into the League of Revolutionary Black Workers.  Revolutionaries played a key role in organizing these autoworkers to shut down their factories to fight raw racial discrimination and brutal working conditions.

The declining credibility of, and the rising challenge to, democratic (and Democratic Party) illusions were emphasized in the massive protests against the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer of 1968.  Revolution was in the air and on the minds of millions.

No one could ignore it.

1968 was also the year revolutionaries in the U.S. moved to provide communist leadership, direction and answers to those questions.  A significant section of the student movement formed organizations and networks to explicitly take revolutionary politics to the working class–to take it home, at long last.  Out of this process, many collectives were formed to exchange views and experiences.  The most prominent network among these was the Revolutionary Union.

In general terms, these Marxist-Leninist collectives agreed on the need to unite the Black struggle against white power with the struggle of all working people against capitalism into a broad united front against imperialism–to base this new revolutionary movement upon unleashing the power of the people, and to turn every effort to raising the political consciousness and struggle of the masses in pursuit of this goal.

In April 1968, just days after the murder of Martin Luther King, Mao issued a statement that had a tremendous effect on the new communist movement in the U.S. :

The Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States…. It is a tremendous support and inspiration to the struggle of the people throughout the world against U.S. imperialism and to the struggle of the Vietnamese people against U.S. imperialism…. I call on the workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals of every country and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States!

Mao Zedong’s Red Book was an introduction to revolutionary, anti-revisionist thought for many.  In the early 1970s, leading members of the Black Panther Party and newly formed Maoist groups sent delegations to visit the People’s Republic.   The Panthers turned Mao’s “Seize the Day, Seize the Hour” into “Seize the Time.”  “Serve the People,” the title of an article widely read in China in the 1960s, became an idea around which 60s radicals reoriented their lives.[35]  Socialist China’s statement that “women hold up half the sky” resonated with the growing understanding of the new communist groups about the importance of the struggle against  male supremacy and patriarchy in U.S. society and within their own groups.

At the same time, significant other sections of the mass movements in U.S. were coalescing around views which shunned a mass orientation and reflected the petty-bourgeois character of these movements. The best known group was the Weatherpeople, which developed out of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Similar to developments in Western Europe, these forces formed small, clandestine urban guerilla groups, often inspired by foco-ist theory.[36] In many capitalist countries, such groups exemplified, for many, the meaning of revolution.  But in the U.S. this path was struggled against by the Revolutionary Union (RU) and others who promoted a revolution of the masses–and the crucial process of winning a significant section of the working class and the oppressed nationalities to that program.

Many of the organizations of that time were either battered and destroyed by state repression, or they developed into the parties of the New Communist Movement.   The Revolutionary Communist Party was formed from the RU in 1975[37] and made a number of theoretical contributions in applying Maoism to the world situation and the problems of developing revolutionary work in non-revolutionary times.   It also did important work analyzing the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the reversal led by Deng Xiaoping in China.  At a crucial time in the development of mass political organizing, the RCP confronted an economist-revisionist faction that also supported the revisionist coup in China.

In the ensuing split, the RCP “threw out the baby with the bath water” and abandoned its mass base building in proletarian workplaces and communities. In the 1980s, the RCP leadership consolidated around an increasingly subjective idealist and voluntarist line based on slogans such as “Revolution in the 80s, Go for It!”  Other Marxist-Leninist groups continued to do such organizing on a very limited scale and with an overwhelmingly economist and reformist perspective.

As a result, the work of building a base for anti-imperialist and class conscious politics  among a significant section of the working class and oppressed nationalities in the U.S. remains to be done. A small but growing number of new-generation revolutionaries are looking at the task and considering the kind of organization that effort will require.

E.  Chinese Support for National Liberation Movements in Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the 1960s

 Chinese foreign policy during the 1960s had a revolutionary internationalist thrust, as seen most clearly in China’s staunch support for the Vietnamese war of liberation, African liberation movements, and the Palestinian liberation struggle.   This was a direct result of the CCP’s exposure of the Soviet Union’s betrayal of revolutionary struggles worldwide, and the initiation of the Cultural Revolution.

In a series of talks in 1959 and 1960 with visitors from Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and twelve African countries, Mao set the tone for China’s revolutionary foreign policy in the 1960s:  “What imperialism fears most is the awakening of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples, the awakening of the peoples of all countries. We should unite and drive U.S. imperialism from Asia, Africa and Latin America back to where it came from.”[38]

In its 1963 Proposal for the General Line of the International Communist Movement, the CCP set out a general approach to revolutionary work in the neo-colonial and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America:

On the basis of the worker-peasant alliance, the proletariat and its party must unite all the strata that can be united and organize a broad united front against imperialism and its lackeys. In order to consolidate and expand this united front, it is necessary that the proletarian party should maintain its ideological, political and organizational independence and insist on the leadership of the revolution. The proletarian party and the revolutionary people must learn to master all forms of struggle, including armed struggle. They must defeat counter-revolutionary armed force with revolutionary armed force whenever imperialism and its lackeys resort to armed suppression.[39]

In the fall of 1965, an influential document, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” by Defense Minister Lin Biao, was issued.  Lin’s text outlined a strategy of developing the struggle to split up and destroy the increasingly over-extended American military by means of revolutionary struggle in Asia, Africa and Latin America.   This was to be achieved through self-reliant struggle:

It is imperative to adhere to the policy of self-reliance, rely on the strength of the masses in one’s own country, and prepare to carry on the fight independently even when all material aid from the outside is cut off. If one does not operate by one’s own efforts, does not independently ponder and solve the problems of the revolution in one’s own country…but leans on foreign aid—even though this be aid from socialist countries which persist in revolution—no victory can be won, or be consolidated if it is won.[40]

While Lin’s statement focused exclusively on the U.S. as the target of revolutionary struggle, to the exclusion of the other Western imperialist powers, and downplayed the possibilities for revolutionary struggle in the imperialist countries, it had a powerful revolutionary thrust.[41]

In July 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, some remarks by Mao on China’s role in the world were “published” in the streets of Beijing in the form of dazibaos—big character posters. They were disseminated around the country as pamphlets and handbills two months later.  In “China Must Become the Arsenal of the World Revolution,” Mao stated:

A lot of places are anti-China at the moment, which makes it look as though we are isolated. In fact, they are anti-China because they are afraid of the influence of China, of the thought of Mao Tse-tung, and of the great Cultural Revolution. They oppose China to keep the people in their own countries down and to divert popular dissatisfaction with their rule. This opposition to China is jointly planned by U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism.  This shows not that we are isolated, but that our influence throughout the world has greatly increased.  The more they oppose

China, the more they spur on popular revolution; the people of these countries realize that the Chinese road is the road to liberation. China should not only be the political center of the world revolution. It must also become the military and technical center of the world revolution.[42]

Vietnam

During the Vietnamese war of liberation, China provided the largest amount of military and economic aid of any country and advocated a strategy of people’s war. In 1959, Mao supported the decision of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to restart guerilla warfare in South Vietnam, and the CCP offered to provide enough weapons to outfit 230 battalions of the People’s Army of Vietnam. This included 270,000 guns, over 10,000 pieces of artillery, 5,000 radio transmitters and 1,000 trucks.[43]  In the mid-1960s, the Chinese army sent 320,000 troops to the DRV to operate anti-aircraft artillery and perform logistical work that freed many regiments of the PAVN to engage U.S. forces in the South.[44] North Vietnamese planes flew out of Chinese airfields and engaged U.S. Navy jets.

After the U.S. started bombing North Vietnam in early August 1964, the Chinese government immediately issued a powerful statement, announcing that “America’s aggression against the DRV was also aggression against China, and that China would never fail to come to the aid of the Vietnamese.” The Chinese assured the Vietnamese leadership that if U.S. troops attacked the DRV, China would dispatch its troops—”If the United States takes one step, China will respond with one step.” [45]   From August 7 to 11, over 20 million people, according to Xinhua News Agency, took part in rallies and demonstrations all over China to show solidarity with the Vietnamese people.  Pictures of Mao and Ho Chi Minh together were common. Through many such rallies and other activities, the call to “resist America and assist Vietnam” penetrated into every cell of Chinese society.[46]

Africa

In Africa, China gave military aid and training to revolutionary movementsthroughout the continent. In camps in Tanzania and Algeria, the Chinese armed and trained guerillas from FRELIMO in Mozambique, the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, ZANU in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania and the ANC in South Africa.

In 1963, the Chinese sent military supplies from Tanzania and Congo-Brazzaville to guerillas in the eastern Congo led by a former education minister in Lumumba’s cabinet.  

Also, in a secret military camp in Ghana, Chinese military instructors trained cadre for  revolutionary movements in  French  neo-colonies such as Dahomey (Benin),  Ivory Coast,  Cameroon and Mali.[47]

An essential part of Chinese military aid was political training of the officers and soldiers of the revolutionary armed forces.  Chinese instructors stressed that outside military aid, while important,  was secondary, and  that self-reliant  revolutionary struggle was of  primary  importance.   Chinese statements in the 1960s about Africa stated that the strategy of protracted  people’s  war,  including surrounding the cities by the countryside,  was  broadly  applicable  in mainly  peasant,  rural African countries. The understanding of a revolutionary-led united front  is found in a Chinese People’s Liberation Army document from 1961:

We must tell [the Africans] about the Chinese revolutionary experience in order to reveal the true nature of both old and new colonialism….The important part of [their] activities lies in the national revolution and in making the united front spread everywhere on the continent. According to the analysis of Marxism, it is to be confirmed that the embryo of national revolution in these countries will become a genuine people’s revolution, give rise to Marxists, form political parties of proletarians, and go towards the Socialist Revolution.[48]

At the same time, China placed great emphasis on developing relations with the African countries that had recently emerged from colonialism and sought to defend their new-found independence from the Western imperialist powers.  This led to focused united front diplomacy with countries such as Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania.  Trade agreements were signed, African and Chinese delegations exchanged visits, and unity was reached in opposing the remaining colonial powers in Africa. The largest single commitment of Chinese foreign aid to Africa during the 1960s was financing and building the Tan-Zam railway between landlocked Zambia and the coast of Tanzania.

In a visit to 10 African countries in December 1963-January 1964, Zhou Enlai expressed the rationale for this diplomatic approach.  He stressed that political independence was only the first step in the struggle against imperialism; it could only be consolidated by the policy of economic self-reliance.[49]

Zhou’s position did not recognize the class character of these newly independent states and the neo-colonial relations still developing within them.  On the one hand, they were ruled by the national bourgeoisie—Nkrumah, Toure, Keita and Nyerere– with varying degrees of popular support from the petty bourgeoisie, workers and peasants. On the other hand, comprador bourgeois and tribal-feudal elements tied to the European and U.S. imperialists continued to have significant economic and political power. The political independence of these countries rested on shaky ground.  In fact, most of these anti-colonialist leaders were overthrown by reactionary forces linked to imperialism by the end of the 1960s.  Nkrumah, for example, was removed from power by a CIA-backed coup while he was visiting China in 1966.

Furthermore, none of these countries had broken out of their dependence on the imperialist economic system.  Their trade was still predominantly with the former colonial powers, and they were dependent on Western investments in key areas of their economies. Thus, any talk of economic “self-reliance” without revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle was illusory.  In Tanzania, Chinese diplomats even claimed that it was developing peacefully towards socialism.[50]

By blurring the distinction between the class forces in the newly independent countries, Zhou’s approach could only disorient revolutionaries who were battling against neocolonialism and domestic reactionaries in the African countries.  

The Middle East

During the 1960s, the Chinese gave substantial support to liberation movements in the Middle East.  Beginning in 1965, China provided light arms, mortars, explosives and medical supplies to the PLO, which was operating out of bases in Jordan and Lebanon.  Contingents of PLO youth traveled to China for military training. [51] Large quantities of Chinese weapons flowed into Lebanon’s “Fatahland” during the 1970s, and leaders of the PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine  (PFLP) visited China. [52] While the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1967 war, the PRC under Mao did not recognize Israel, and did not have diplomatic ties with the Zionist state.

The Chinese also supplied military aid to the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) in the Dhofar province of Oman, and to Marxist-Leninist forces in southern Yemen.  In North Africa, the Chinese gave military and economic assistance to the Eritrean liberation forces and to Algerian anti-imperialist forces before and after victory over French colonialism. [53]

China’s support for these revolutionary movements openly antagonized neo-colonial Arab states.  While pledging eternal support for the “Palestinian cause,” the rulers of these states were extremely nervous about the effect of a radicalized, armed Palestinian movement on their own restive populations.  In the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the emirates were alarmed by Chinese support for the PFLOAG. At one point, the Chinese denounced “Egyptian imperialism” when the Egyptian army intervened in Yemen’s civil war on the side of royalist forces.

 In the area of state-to-state relations, after the Bandung conference China set out to form a diplomatic united front against the Western imperialists and Israel with as many of the Arab states as possible.  It gave special attention to Nasser of Egypt (the first Arab state to recognize the PRC) and to Kassem of Iraq, who came to power in a popular revolution in 1958.  Chinese denunciations of the Egyptian-French intervention in the Suez Canal in 1956, the landing of U.S. marines in Lebanon in 1958, and the 1967 attack by Israel on the Palestinians and neighboring states solidified China’s ties with many of the Arab countries. However, China’s approach to even the most strongly nationalist of the Arab countries suffered from weaknesses in class analysis and understanding of the development of neo-colonialist relations within these states.

China also came face to face with a new form of neo-colonialism in which the Soviet Union attempted to step into the shoes of the Western imperialists.  Socialist China was in no position to compete with the Soviet Union’s offers of large amounts of military and economic aid to Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries. The same was true of most of the liberation movements in the region, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

In contrast to the Soviet Union, China’s military aid was provided free of charge.  In 1971, a leading Chinese party member told a delegation of members of the Revolutionary Union from the U.S.: “We give all military aid free, and we only give it to people resisting aggression and fighting imperialism. If they are resisting aggression and fighting imperialism, why charge them?  If they are not resisting aggression and fighting imperialism, why give it to them?”

 The Internationalism of the Cultural Revolution

The political salvoes of the Cultural Revolution—in the form of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung and other Marxist-Leninist works—brought Marxism for the first time to hundreds of millions of the oppressed worldwide.  In addition, mass expressions of revolutionary support for the struggles of the people of the world were a striking feature of the early years of the Cultural Revolution. David and Nancy Dall Milton, two American teachers living in China, attended an indoor rally of 16,000 at Beijing Workers Stadium in March 1966.  Held in conjunction with a series of mass meetings and demonstrations in the U.S.’s Spring Mobilization against the war,

It was one of those rare and moving moments when the sentiments of international feeling, so often verbalized, became realized in the bodies and solemn faces of the ‘distant’ Chinese filling the bleachers and seated on the floor of an arena like those similarly filled in Berkeley or Cambridge.[54]

In addition to massive demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese people and in opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, millions took to the streets in support of mass uprisings in France and the U.S. in 1968.  In Asia, the Chinese press expressed support for the Naxalbari peasant rebellion in West Bengal as a prelude to revolution throughout India.

In the summer of 1967, Kang Sheng, a leading member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group[55] charged that State Chairman Liu Shaoqi had continued to advocate policies that Mao had criticized in 1962—that of surrendering to the imperialists, the Soviet revisionists and foreign reactionaries, and eliminating the revolutionary struggle of the suppressed people of the  world. [56] Liu was specifically charged with denying support to the Burmese communist movement and currying favor with the Ne Win government.[57]

In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, Foreign Minister Chen Yi and Premier Zhou Enlai argued that it should not be carried out inside the Foreign Ministry and that foreign policy generally should be dissociated from the Cultural Revolution. This position proved impossible to maintain as the Cultural Revolution picked up momentum. Chen Yi came under attack for revisionist tendencies in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy, as well as his involvement in the February Adverse Current that attempted to defend Liu and Deng in early 1967.[58]  Chen Yi was also vociferously opposed to the distribution of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung and other Marxist-Leninist works at Chinese embassies abroad.[59]  He was stripped of power in 1967, and a rightist attempt to restore him to his former position failed in 1969.

Amid reports that Chinese diplomats abroad were living a bourgeois style of life, all of China’s ambassadors and most of their staff were called back to participate in the Cultural Revolution.  By 1969, two-thirds of the staff of the Foreign Ministry was participating in the May 7 Cadre Schools, which were established in the countryside for party cadre to work on collective farms and engage in intensive theoretical study.

In the midst of this struggle against rightism in the Foreign Ministry, ultra-leftism became a serious problem. A faction led by Wang Li argued that the whole leadership of the Foreign Ministry was revisionist and should be overthrown, and supported the burning of the British embassy in Beijing in 1967.  This faction was part of the “May 16th group,” which set out to overthrow all leading state personnel, and it was denounced and disbanded by the CCRG.

In the CCP’s International Liaison Department, Director Wang Jiaxiang came under attack for revisionism and was removed from his position.[60]  In 1962, Wang had advocated a reduction in support to the Vietnamese liberation struggle, which had elicited a sharp criticism by Mao. Even during the late 1960s, there was a sharp struggle between revolution and revisionism in Chinese foreign policy.

F.  Chinese Foreign Policy in the 1970s

China’s foreign policy in the 1970s had important historical antecedents.  On many occasions during the 20th century, the world revolutionary movement did not handle the contradiction between the defense of the socialist state and the promotion of revolution correctly.  After World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, as revolutionary struggles in many countries were defeated and the worldwide struggle for socialism became confined to one country, the Soviet Union, the CPSU became overly cautious in its promotion of and support for bold revolutionary moves throughout the world.   Beginning in the 1930s, overestimating bourgeois nationalist forces, and underestimating revolutionary communist forces—peasant and proletarian—became the norm, and defense of Soviet socialism trumped the advance of the world revolution for decades to come.[61]

The CCP had extensive experience with the Soviet Union’s incorrect handling of these questions. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Stalin and the Comintern discounted the revolutionary potential in China and viewed Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang (GMD) as the best bet for securing what the Soviet Union considered a crucial goal—a stable and friendly government in China.  Thus, Soviet and Communist International (Comintern) representatives in China pushed, and imposed where possible, a political line of preserving an alliance between the CCP and GMD at all costs.

Between 1927 and 1930, this line required the communists to restrain mass uprisings that threatened the GMD’s social and political base, and it eventually led to the slaughter by the GMD and its allies of hundreds of thousands of communists and radicalized workers, peasants, and students, as well as the near destruction of the CCP. [62]  Similarly, in the mid-1940s Stalin did not believe that the CCP could defeat the U.S.-backed GMD, and tried to pressure the Chinese communists to enter into a coalition government with the GMD, including giving up control over its army and base areas. [63]

Despite the CCP’s first-hand disastrous experience with a line in which advancing the world revolution was subordinated to defense of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1970s the Chinese party adopted a line in which the defense of China displaced revolutionary internationalism.    The key turning point was the rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping in 1973 and the ascendancy of his version of the Three Worlds Theory, which was founded on a strategic alliance with the U.S. and other Western imperialist powers.

At the end of the 1960s, China’s foreign policy drew strength from the revolutionary upsurge of the Cultural Revolution and China’s support for national liberation movements throughout the 1960s.   The 9th National Congress of the CCP, held in April 1969, proclaimed support for the revolutionary struggles of the people of all countries, the five principles for peaceful coexistence with countries with different social systems, and called for the formation of a broad united front of peoples and countries against U.S. imperialism and Soviet revisionism. [64]

However, the CCP’s   approach to the U.S. and Soviet Union was already beginning to shift.  In early 1969, the Soviet Union had massed a million troops along China’s northern border, and launched several attacks to reclaim parts of the former Tsarist empire.  In March 1969, on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River, two battles were fought between Soviet and Chinese forces, leaving hundreds of casualties.  According to U.S. satellite photos, “the Chinese side of the river was so pockmarked by Soviet artillery that it looked like a moonscape.”[65]

According to Henry Kissinger, in August 1969 a State Department specialist in Soviet affairs was asked by a Soviet Embassy official what the U.S. reaction would be to a Soviet attack on China’s nuclear facilities. Soviet diplomats were also raising the issue of a nuclear strike on China with European and Asian diplomats.  Even more ominously, the Soviets had flown in bomber units to bases in Mongolia and Siberia, where they carried out mock attacks on simulated nuclear facilities.[66]

The PLA was placed on a war footing.  The plans to relocate key military industries to a “third line” of defense in the interior of the country were accelerated, and networks of underground tunnels and shelters were built in major cities.  In a top-secret study commissioned by Mao, four marshals of the PLA stated that  even though the Soviets’ main forces were still concentrated  in Europe,  they were preparing for an attack on China.  This study concluded that the key element holding the Soviets back was the attitude of the U.S., which did not want  to see the Soviet Union’s global position strengthened by a successful attack on China.

 This assessment buttressed the decision of the majority of the Chinese leadership to initiate an “opening to the West.”  This strategy enabled China to avoid fighting on two fronts by exploiting the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and Soviet Union.  This policy had the best chance of heading off a Soviet attack.  Another part of the CCP’s calculations was that the U.S. was headed to defeat in Vietnam and no longer posed as serious a military threat to China.

This shift in strategic thinking led to a major test of strength in 1970-1971 between Mao, Zhou and the so-called “gang of four” (the Four)[67] on the one hand, and Lin Biao and a number of high-ranking generals, on the other.  Lin opposed the opening to the West and was building up a factional network in the army to strengthen his hand. Mao responded by launching a campaign to undercut Lin’s number two position in the party and to win over the regional military commanders.   Facing political defeat, Lin attempted to stage a coup in September 1971  and died in a plane crash in Mongolia.

 The “Lin Biao affair” had a devastating impact on the course of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese foreign policy.  Lin and his allies in the army and party had been a key component of the “Left Alliance” during the mass upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, and their downfall  created a power vacuum in both foreign policy and internal affairs.

 Under the sponsorship of Zhou Enlai, large numbers of high-ranking party leaders and government officials who had been overthrown during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated after making pro-forma “self-criticisms.” This process culminated in the 1973 return of Deng Xiaoping, the “No. 2 capitalist roader,” to serve as Deputy Premier whose area of responsibility included foreign policy [68]

The years 1969 to 1973 were a transitional period.  Mao and Zhou, the two chief architects of Chinese foreign policy, were in basic agreement on the opening to the West. One element of this shift was that the People’s Republic pursued a strategy of normalization of relations with over 100 countries that resulted in its admission to the UN as the sole representative of China in October 1971.  At the same time, Mao continued to stress that revolution was the main trend in the world and that support for revolutionary struggles in other countries should not be cut back.

In order to keep the Soviet Union off balance, the U.S. ping-pong team visit and Henry Kissinger’s trips in 1971 were followed by President Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao in February 1972.  This meeting did not result in any reduction in Chinese support for the Vietnamese liberation struggle. In Mao’s view, fundamental revolutionary principles should not be compromised in the course of playing the “American card.”  In 1971-72, Mao and Zhou also told Kissinger and Nixon that full normalization of relations could not take place unless the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam and ended its military support for the Chinese province of Taiwan.

During this period, the basic orientation of the party leadership was summarized in an internal report on the international situation in December 1971: “The general strategy of our nation for the present is to push forward preparations against war and promote revolution.”

In a world divided into “three parts”—the U.S., Soviet Union and the Third World—China was “resolutely on the side of the Third World” in opposing the two main enemies.  The report called for exploiting contradictions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and between the U.S. and the “second intermediate zone”—Western Europe, Japan, Canada and Oceania. [69]

The report also called for continued military support for Vietnam and other revolutionary struggles in Southeast Asia, and for backing national liberation movements in Africa and Latin America, chiefly with political and moral support.   In regards to the U.S., it stated, “As the people’s revolution in the U.S. gradually gains momentum, we have to do more work,” and noted that normalization of relations with the U.S. would make it easier to carry out this work.

The case of the Philippines is instructive.  Even as China was normalizing political and trade relations with the Philippines, the CCP stepped up its support for the Communist Party of the Philippines, which was refounded in 1968.  CPP members visited and received training in

China, and in 1971, the Chinese provided 1,400 M-14 rifles and 8,000 rounds of ammunition in a ship sent from the Philippines by the CPP-led New People’s Army. [70]

The “Three Worlds Perspective”

Even during the 1970-1973 period, the CCP’s view of the international situation had serious problems. Its position was that the two superpowers (the U.S. and the Soviet Union—“the first world”) were the principal enemies on a world scale; the Western imperialists and Japan (the “second world”) were part of an international united front against the superpowers; and the “peoples and countries of the third world” were the most reliable revolutionary force in opposing the superpowers.

As a perspective for the world’s revolutionary movement, this analysis was flawed.

It detached the U.S. and Soviet Union from the imperialist system as a whole; it downplayed the reactionary nature of the other imperialist countries in Western Europe, Japan[71], Canada and Oceania; and it advanced a classless conception of nationalism by lumping together the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America with their rulers, who had limited contradictions, if at all, with one or another imperialist power.

Some of the problems with the “three worlds perspective” were reflected in a widely quoted statement attributed to Mao, “Countries want independence, nations want liberation, and the people want revolution.”  Mao’s eclectic statement, which tended to place struggles of Third World countries for national independence on a par with revolutionary movements, shared some aspects of the Bandung line associated with Zhou in the 1950s and 1960s.

Thus, even during the 1970-1973 period, China’s overestimation of the contradictions that the reactionary rulers of a number of Third World countries had with imperialism led the Chinese to send representatives to the Shah of Iran’s celebration of 2500 years of monarchical rule, and to continue to send economic and military support to the government of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) when it was faced by a Trotskyite-led rebellion in 1971.  Elsewhere in South Asia, China correctly opposed India’s invasion of East Pakistan in 1971, but it also denounced the formation of Bangladesh as a puppet state of India and the Soviet Union.  These positions objectively lent support to the comprador regimes of Iran, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, and undermined the work of genuine revolutionary and Maoist forces in these countries.

The “Three Worlds”– From Perspective to Comprehensive Strategy

It is difficult to ascertain Mao’s views on foreign policy after he suffered a stroke in 1972. He also suffered from Lou Gehrig’s Disease,[72] heart disease and anoxia (shortage of oxygen).  Mao was nearly blind, making it impossible for him to read and write documents without assistance, and he did not issue any major statements on foreign policy until his death.

Still, there is strong evidence that his views diverged sharply with Deng and Zhou after 1973.  Mao on the one hand, and Deng and Zhou, on the other, drew different conclusions on how to apply the “three worlds” to the international situation.   While Mao advocated tactical  unity in some areas with the U.S. in order to deal with the Soviet threat to China,  after 1973 Deng and Zhou sought to implement  a strategic alliance and political understanding with U.S. imperialism. This took the form of the fully developed “Three Worlds Theory.”

Important aspects of the Three Worlds Theory were presented in an address to the UN in 1974 by Deng Xiaoping.   In this speech, Deng argued that  “underdeveloped” Third World countries should sell their natural resources to obtain advanced technology, which was strikingly similar to the “Four Modernizations” program that he was aggressively pursuing in China along with Zhou.

In addition, after 1973 Deng and the forces grouped around him asserted that the Soviet Union had become the main danger not only to China, but to the countries and people of the world.  With the U.S. imperialists still the dominant power in most of the world, this was a serious error and had a deeply disorienting effect on many Maoist forces around the world.[73]

By 1973, Mao had come into sharper conflict with Premier Zhou in both domestic and foreign affairs.  Zhou had steered the national campaign to repudiate Lin Biao into a campaign against “ultra-leftism.”  Mao saw this as a backhanded attack on the Cultural Revolution and moved to quash this direction.[74] At the same time, Mao and the Four started to criticize Deng’s “General Program of Work for the Whole Party and the Whole Nation” as a program for capitalist, not socialist, development.

In July 1973, Mao spoke to Politburo members Zhang Chunqiao and Wang Hongwen about the Foreign Ministry’s view of the world situation:

In an internal paper, the Ministry had held the view that the current world situation was     characterized by the collaboration between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in an attempt to dominate the world. Mao was convinced that this was an unrealistic assessment which also       departed from his perception of the world as being characterized by “san da yi shen” (three bigs and one deepening), that was “big upheaval, big splitting, big reorganization and the deepening of    the revolutionary struggle.” Mao called the Foreign Ministry’s memoranda “shit papers,” and   ordered Wang and Zhang to learn some foreign languages so they would be able to judge matters    for themselves. “If it goes on like this,” Mao added, “the Ministry will surely become   revisionist.”[75]

Mao also refused to read the Premier’s speeches on foreign affairs. Zhou responded to Mao’s criticisms by declaring that he was responsible for the Ministry’s errors and that these mistakes “have to do with my political thinking and my style of work.”[76] In November 1973, Mao took issue with Zhou’s statement to Henry Kissinger on the issue of Taiwan—that it could be solved either by force or by peaceful means. Mao’s view was that there was only one possibility, and that was to fight. Mao accused Zhou of being afraid of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and convened a session of the Politburo to criticize Zhou.[77]

As Zhou came under sharp criticism, a leftist group came to prominence in the Foreign Ministry, led by five young women.  Mao made two of them, Nancy Tang and his niece Wang Hairong, his principal liaisons with the Foreign Ministry.[78]  They succeeded in removing Chen Yi’s successor, an ally of Zhou, as Foreign Minister.

 There were other indications of sharp struggle in the CCP over foreign policy. At a Politburo meeting in October 1973, Jiang Qing and Deng locked horns over the policy of buying ships from the imperialist countries for China’s merchant fleet. Jiang criticized this as an example of a “slavish comprador philosophy,” and pointed to the Fang Qing, the first ocean-going cargo ship designed and built in China, as a symbol of Mao’s policy of self-reliance and national independence.[79]  There was also an important difference between Zhou’s political report and Wang Hongwen’s report on the revision of the party constitution at the 10th National Party Congress in 1973. When referring to the danger of war, Zhou warned of the danger of a surprise attack by the Soviet social-imperialists, whereas Wang warned against surprise attacks by both the U.S. and Soviet imperialists.[80]

When Wang spoke to a visiting Cambodian delegation in 1974, shortly before Deng’s speech to the UN, he called for continued support for revolutionary struggles and said that Mao had “recently” reminded them: “We are communists, and we must help the people; not to help the people would be to betray Marxism.”[81]  That year, articles in Peking Review and the theoretical journal Red Flag called attention to the revisionist line of “the liquidation of struggle against the imperialists, reactionaries and modern revisionists, and the reduction of assistance and support to the revolutionary struggles of the people of various countries.”[82]

During this period, Mao’s health declined rapidly, The mass campaigns that he had a hand in launching from 1973-1976 were focused on consolidating what had been won during the Cultural Revolution—and preparing the ground for future struggles to defeat revisionism and stay on the socialist road. Significantly, it was only after Mao died in 1976, and his supporters were suppressed, that the revisionist leaders of China were able to attribute the Three Worlds Theory to him.[83]  

Thus, there was a back and forth struggle over the conduct of foreign affairs in the CCP in the years before Mao’s death, but it rarely came out into the open. For reasons that are not clear, Mao and his supporters did not launch a mass political campaign that explicitly opposed the direction that Deng and Zhou were taking foreign policy from 1973 to 1976.[84]

As a result of the dominant position achieved by the revisionist forces after 1973,  China began to withdrew support for revolutionary movements in the Third World.  A parade of U.S. puppets were honored in Beijing for their contributions to “the struggle against Soviet hegemonism.”  In 1975, the Chinese government supported the U.S. and South African-backed  UNITA in  the Angolan  civil war—in the name of defeating the Soviet Union’s attempts to gain a  strategic foothold in Africa through its support for the MPLA.

In the Middle East, China’s prior support for revolutionary movements was reversed.  Chinese aid to revolutionary forces in the Gulf States was dropped in favor of diplomatic ties with Oman. Another sign of this reversal of Chinese foreign policy was a speech by Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua in 1975 in which he said that China was reconciled to the existence of Israel as a “fait accompli.” [85]

After a U.S.-led military coup in Chile in September 1973, the Chinese Foreign Ministry recognized the Pinochet regime. While pro-Soviet forces in the U.S. are quick to jump on China, they don’t tell a much more important part of the story.

As the U.S. moved to undermine Chile’s “socialist” President, Salvador Allende, it received indispensable assistance from the pro-Soviet Chilean Communist Party. The CP, the largest left organization in Chile, told its working class base to turn in their weapons in order to assure the army of their peaceful intentions. The CP claimed that Chile’s “constitutionalist generals” would uphold democracy, and it toed Moscow’s line about working for a peaceful transition to socialism in Chile. These actions directly played into the hands of the fascists and U.S. imperialism, whose coup against the Allende government resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of revolutionaries and political activists.  Revisionism, whether shaped and carried out by Soviet or Chinese hands, revealed its betrayal of the people.

Thus, the counter-revolutionary developments in Chinese foreign policy in the mid-1970s were a direct outgrowth of the Three Worlds Theory and the revisionists in the CCP who spawned it.  This threw many Maoist parties and organizations around the world into a tailspin, from which most never recovered.

G.  The Response of the New Communist Movement in the U.S.

In the New Communist Movement (NCM) generally, Nixon’s visit to China in 1971 was seen as a victory for the PRC and a defeat for the U.S.  The “three worlds perspective” of the CCP was adopted uncritically by all of the NCM groups. At that time it was difficult to discern the terms of struggle at the top levels of the Chinese party between those who advocated a strategic alliance with U.S. imperialism to counter the Soviet threat, and those, like Mao, who supported détente with the U.S. as a tactic, and advocated continued support for revolutionary struggles against imperialism.

The key step backward for most of the NCM groups took place in the period between 1973 and 1976, when they embraced Deng’s Three Worlds Theory, although this was a clear reversal of the revolutionary thrust of Chinese foreign policy since 1949.  The Revolutionary Union (which became the RCP in 1975) deserves credit for its efforts to oppose this trend.[86]

It politically exposed the support of the “Maoist” October League (OL) for U.S. imperialism and its puppet regimes, and did not rely on Peking Review for finding its compass on international events.[87]

In contrast, the OL and other groups were especially uncritical in echoing Chinese foreign policy statements.  The OL went so far as to support large-scale U.S. military aid to the Shah of Iran in the name of building a global united front against the Soviet Union.  For several years, even the highly respected Chair of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association, William Hinton, who did so much to popularize the accomplishments of the Chinese revolution in the U.S., supported the incorrect position that the Soviet Union had become the main danger to the peoples of the world.

 The question is then posed, who is responsible for the adoption of the CCP’s view of the “three worlds” perspective by all of the NCM groups, and for uncritical support for Deng’s Three Worlds Theory by the October League and many others.  Here it is useful to consider Mao’s comments on Stalin’s disastrous approach to the Chinese revolution from the 1920s to the 1940s:

Long ago the Chinese Communists had first-hand experience of some of his [Stalin’s] mistakes. Of the erroneous….opportunist lines which emerged in the Chinese Communist Party at one time or another, some arose under the influence of certain mistakes of Stalin’s, in so far as their international sources were concerned…. But since some of the wrong ideas put forward by Stalin were accepted and applied by certain Chinese comrades, we Chinese should bear the responsibility. In its struggle against “Left” and Right opportunism, therefore, our Party criticized only its own erring comrades and never put the blame on Stalin.[88]

Mao was saying that, yes, Stalin gave bad advice, but the responsibility for following it rests on those leaders within the CCP for accepting this advice.  Similar reasoning applies to the NCM groups. In many ways they are more blameworthy than the leaders of CCP who followed Stalin’s advice.  In the 1920s, the CCP was dealing with a Comintern that, drawing on the authority of the world’s first successful socialist revolution, viewed itself as the general staff of the world revolutionary movement with ample authority to make communists around the world toe the Comintern line.

Nearly fifty years later, the situation was very different.  The Chinese made no attempt to form a Comintern that would similarly try to whip parties around the world into line. Why then did the NCM so largely adhere to the CCP line in the 1970s?  Part of the answer is, of course, the immense prestige of the Chinese Communist Party in the New Communist Movement.  Accompanying that prestige was the prospect of recognition by the CCP, and one which the OL was the least able to resist.[89]  Similarly, the prestige of the USSR led to reflexive support among communists in the 1930s and 40s for Soviet foreign policy.

But there is more to the answer than just the NCM’s political culture of uncritically accepting the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. Practicing revolutionary internationalism in an imperialist country is a hard and bumpy road on which to travel.  At a minimum it involves doing revolutionary work against your own bourgeoisie even in non-revolutionary conditions, supporting liberation struggles in countries oppressed by imperialism, and defending socialist countries. Of these three, perhaps the easiest is to defend a socialist country, to assume that you should advocate whatever a socialist country says is in its best interest.

Following the path of least resistance in practicing what you think is revolutionary internationalism is especially easy when you are following the same low road in other aspects of your practice.  In the NCM’s work in the working class during the 1970s, here too it frequently took the path of least resistance in the form of economism and becoming trade union secretaries rather than tribunes of the people.

Unfortunately, most of the groups in the NCM did not reflect deeply enough on the Chinese experience in the 1920s, nor did they understand  Mao’s writings on the subject.  In a 1946 statement about the international situation, Mao indicated that in the aftermath of World War 2, the Soviet Union might make various agreements and compromises with the imperialist countries.  But he said:

Such compromise does not require the people in the countries of the capitalist world to follow suit and make compromises at home.  The people in those countries will continue to wage different struggles in accordance with their different conditions.[90]

H.  Some Lessons for Today

1.  There is much from which new generations of political activists who have grown to political maturity in the past three decades can learn about the historic achievements of China’s foreign policy during the Maoist era.  China’s political and military aid to revolutionary struggles in Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Palestine and many African countries; the millions throughout China who demonstrated in solidarity with the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. and France’s May 1968 revolt; the boxes of Red Books that brought socialism and Mao Zedong Thought to revolutionaries and anti-imperialists in dozens of countries; how the Cultural Revolution, the unprecedented political movement that Mao led to keep China on the socialist road, promoted support for world revolution —these are historic achievements that will provide inspiration and an essential foundation for the revolutionary conduct of foreign policy by socialist states in the future.

2. Though defense of socialism may require tactical maneuvering  (as when a serious Soviet threat to China arose in 1969), strategically a socialist state must promote and support revolution throughout the world.  One of the important lessons of the 20th century is that socialism in one or a few states, even the most populous country in the world, cannot survive indefinitely as islands in a sea of capitalism.   Only the advance of the world revolution—with socialist countries serving as political, and where possible, military base areas—can forge a path to communism.  

3. The experience of the 20th century in the Soviet Union and China demonstrates that the internal threat to socialism is as great as, and at times is greater than, the external threat from imperialism. The danger of capitalist restoration can only be confronted successfully by the masses of working people, with a communist party that remains revolutionary in the lead.  They must embark on and stay on a socialist road that requires intense class struggle against newly arisen bourgeois elements, particularly in the party itself.  This new bourgeoisie and their social base will not only pull a society off the socialist road; they will oppose support and aid to revolutionary movements in other countries as unnecessary and as a threat to their internal policies and to their hopes of reaching understandings with the imperialists and other reactionary countries.

Thus, while socialist states must defend themselves against imperialism, they must continue to undergo revolutionary transformations so they stay socialist and maintain an internationalist orientation.  If they are able to do so, socialist states can maximize their support for the world revolution.  Providing political support and nourishment for revolutionary movements can play a crucial role in these movements’ growth and in developing a correct line and program for revolution in their own countries.

4. China’s revolutionary line on foreign affairs in the 1960s strengthened the position of the forces led by Mao in fierce political battles with pro-Soviet revisionists in the CCP over the course of the Chinese revolution.  Conversely, when a revolutionary foreign policy was not followed, it breathed new life into the revisionist forces in China grouped around Deng Xiaoping, whose program for capitalist modernization led to a strategic alliance with U.S. imperialism and the liquidation of support for revolutionary struggles.

    Revolutionary lines on domestic and foreign policy issues reinforced each other  during the Maoist era,  but they did not automatically converge.  Caretaking the needs of state power, defending against outside aggression, continuing to revolutionize and transform all areas of socialist society and developing production on this basis, are a different process than nurturing and promoting revolutionary struggle throughout the world. How revolutionary leadership in both processes can be developed, and how to handle the contradictions between them, are questions that require deeper summation and analysis than we have been able to do here.   

5. An important weakness of the “three worlds perspective” was that it did not make a correct analysis of the imperialist system as a whole.  This theoretical framework sowed confusion about the nature of the “Second World”— the other Western imperialist powers –

and exaggerated their conflicts with the U.S.  This perspective was reshaped by Deng and other revisionists into the Three Worlds Theory, which asserted that the West European and Asian imperialist powers played a progressive role in the world by defending their national independence against the Soviet Union, the “most dangerous” imperialist superpower.   This essentially called on revolutionary and Maoist forces, especially in Western Europe, to support, or stop opposing, their own bourgeoisies and various oppressor regimes which  opposed the Soviet Union.

Why does this matter now? In today’s world, the U.S. is the dominant imperialist power, especially in military terms.  However, it is not the only enemy of the world’s peoples on a global scale.  The European Union, Russia, Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all contend with and collude with the U.S. as imperialist powers in their own right.  Underestimation of their far-flung imperialist interests and reactionary nature has in the past, and will again and again, throw revolutionary movements in these countries off course.

6. In addition, the “three worlds perspective”—as well as the Bandung line that preceded it — created confusion about the nature of bourgeois nationalist regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  Emphasis on economic development in these countries and their disputes with the U.S. obscured the neo-colonial relations that persisted.  Today, similar sentiments are heard about the central importance of national independence struggles against imperialism— referring to Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Zimbabwe, or any number of other countries.

The issues raised by the Three Worlds Theory remain crucial today. Similar sentiments are heard about the central importance of struggles for national sovereignty— referring to Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran, Zimbabwe and a number of other countries. They should be defended against attacks by the U.S. or by other imperialist partners, surrogates, or emerging blocs.  However, it is important to understand that these countries—even if led by social-democrats like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales—are still neo-colonies, caught in the web of imperialist economic relations. According to James Petras:  

Venezuela, Bolivia and the entire spectrum of social movements, trade union confederations, parties and fractions of parties do not call for the abolition of capitalism, the repudiation of the debt, the complete expropriation of US or EEC banks or multinational corporations, or any rupture in relations with the US.  For example, in Venezuela, private national and foreign banks earned over 30% rate of return in 2005-2006, foreign-owned oil companies reaped record profits between 2004-2006 and less than 1% of the biggest landed estates were fully expropriated and titles turned over to landless peasants. Capital-labor relations still operate in a framework heavily weighted on behalf of business and labor contractors who rely on subcontractors who continue to dominate hiring and firing in more than one half of the large enterprises. The Venezuelan military and police continue to arrest suspected Colombian guerrillas and turn them over to the Colombian police. Venezuela and US-client President Uribe of Colombia have singed several high-level security and economic co-operation agreements.[91]

While these countries may implement progressive reforms–and even some features of a social welfare state with enough oil revenues– this is not a substitute for the development of  a mass-based revolutionary movement, which as history shows, is the only pathway to socialism.

Putting aside the relative strength and thoroughness of the various bourgeois nationalist opponents of U.S. imperialism today, there is a widely held view that nationalist governments and their leaders, not people’s movements, are the most important challenge to imperialism.   This is cause for some forces to deny support for people’s movements within these countries, such as Iran, Zimbabwe and Brasil.  With the U.S. imperialists threatening to launch a military attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is essential to extend our solidarity to the Iranian people, not to the reactionary mullahs.

The fixation with great nationalist leaders is, for anti-imperialists, myopic and invites disaster. The way such leaders have been cut down by imperialism in the past is rarely discussed, though such examples are many and the parallels cogent—Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, Lumumba in the Congo, Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, and Allende in Chile. And turning a blind eye to Maoist-led people’s wars and liberation movements is to deny, or fail to recognize, the very forces that stand the best chance to open a new revolutionary dynamic in the 21st century.

7. At certain times, socialist states may have to make tactical maneuvers to avoid being crushed by one or more imperialist power or by neighboring reactionary countries.   Mao and the Chinese leadership had to do so in the face of the very real threat of a Soviet attack and invasion.   In 1918, when German forces were threatening St. Petersburg, Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership agreed, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, to give up substantial territory in order to buy time to consolidate Soviet power. In the years ahead, socialist states will face similar contradictions.

One of the most important lessons from China during the Maoist era (and the Soviet Union when it was socialist) is that revolutionary forces in other countries must not make the same compromises that socialist states may have to make when threats to their very survival arise.   In the U.S, lack of clarity on this question undercut the ability of much of the New Communist Movement to take a firm stand against U.S. imperialism, the Western imperialist powers, and neo-colonial regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  This was an important cause of their political and organizational demise.

8. Last but by no means least, the experience of socialist China and the Soviet Union demonstrates that support for the world revolution must become a mass question.  It cannot be left to foreign affairs experts and official communiqués.  This is a particularly important question for revolutionary forces in the communist party.  Mass campaigns in support of revolutionary struggles in other countries and in opposition to imperialist war and plunder build up a critical social base for the foreign policy of a socialist state in which support for revolution is not subordinated to the needs of state-to-state diplomacy.

This spirit of internationalism must be turned into a powerful material force prior to the seizure of power and establishment of socialism.  Only if internationalism is woven into the fabric of revolutionary struggle against imperialist and reactionary regimes on a continuing basis will the working class and oppressed people of all countries be able to fully contribute to the struggle for socialism all over the world and the achievement of communism.

Revolutionary forces in many countries, including Maoist parties and organizations are discussing these and related questions, and  are developing new, more thorough and daring analyses to shape the course of struggle today and for the years ahead.   We hope this paper will be a contribution to this process.

  [1] What defines socialism most clearly is the road on which it is traveling. Is it in fact on the road to communism? Is society expanding or restricting economic, social and political inequalities to the greatest degree possible?  Is it promoting mass participation and debate, or political passivity, in factories, farms, schools and governmental institutions? Is it combating “me first” capitalist ideology with struggle for the collective interest?  Is it challenging national oppression and male supremacy? Is it promoting internationalism and leading mass campaigns to support revolution in other countries? And of critical importance, what political line is the working class’ political leadership in the communist party and state organs pursuing in all of these areas?

[2] This strategic perspective was based on the experience of the Chinese Communist Party, whose eventual victory depended on the identification of the principal enemy at each stage of the revolution and the formation of a broad united front against the principal target of the revolution (the Guomindang from 1927-1937 and 1945-1949 and the Japanese imperialists from 1937-1945).  Within this united front, Mao consistently fought for the CCP and the army it led to maintain their political independence and initiative so the greatest possible revolutionary advances could be made at each point.

[3]  Stalin did not think the CCP could defeat the U.S.-backed Guomindang and repeatedly told Mao that the CCP should form a coalition government with the GMD and end the civil war.  In 1948, Stalin admitted that he was wrong: “After the war we invited Chinese comrades to come to Moscow and we discussed the situation in China. We told them bluntly that we considered the development of the uprising in China had no prospect, and that the Chinese comrades should seek a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek, that they should join the Chiang Kai-shek government and dissolve their army. The Chinese comrades agreed here with the views of the Soviet comrades, but went back to China and acted otherwise. They mustered their forces, organized their armies, and now, as we see, they are beating the Chiang Kai-shek army. Now, in the case of China, we admit we were wrong. It proved that the Chinese comrades and not the Soviet comrades were right.” Robert North, Moscow and Chinese Communists, 1953, p. 233, quoting Tito by Vladimir Dedijer, 1953. See also Dedijer, The Battle that Stalin Lost: Memories of Yugoslavia: 1948-1953, 1971, p. 68.

[4] John Gittings, The Role of the Chinese Army, 1967, p. 87.

[5] Yang Kuisong, “Changes in Mao’s Attitude Toward the Indochina War, 1949-1973,” p. 25.

[6] In Gittings’ oft-cited work, he describes the workings of the Volunteer Movement:  The call for volunteers for the CPV [Chinese People's Volunteers], whether from the militia or from the civilian population, was organized at the local level by the Volunteer Movement Committee, set up by the Military District and party authorities. Volunteers were called for at agitation meetings, and emulation contests were organized both on an individual and on a village basis.…. This is illustrated by one account of a recruitment meeting of a trade union branch in Peking: “The secretary of the branch spoke about the danger of American attacks towards the Manchuria border; the Americans were professing peaceful intentions while ‘aiming a gun at our heart and preparing to pull the trigger.’  Any Chinese volunteering was a true patriot…Suddenly someone shouted that he wanted to go to Korea… thereupon many other people rose to their feet…After two hours had passed the trade union secretary said that it appeared to him that everyone wished to volunteer. This was ‘magnificent but not practical.’ … [He suggested that the party branch would allow everybody to]  ‘have a chance.’  (84-85)

[7] In Korea, the Soviet leadership let the Chinese army do the fighting against the technologically superior US armed forces. While the Soviet Union provided significant military aid to the Chinese forces, it required full payment for these arms. In early 1950, Stalin promised to provide air cover for the Chinese and North Korean ground forces, but this support only covered supply lines in the northern part of North Korea, and did not arrive until January1951.  By then, the decisive battles of the war had been fought. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 2001, pp. 60-61; Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life, 2006, p. 149.

[8] Yang, pp. 3-5.

[9] William Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, 2000, pp. 426-428.

[10] The CCP leadership defined these states as an “intermediate zone” between the Western imperialists and the socialist camp, a concept that reappeared in the “three worlds perspective” of the early 1970s.

[11] “Non-Alignment” was the term orignially coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai. They agreed upon five pillars to be used for Sino–Indian relations. The five principles were:  Respect for territorial integrity; Mutual non-aggression; Mutual non-interference in domestic affairs; Equality and mutual benefit; and Peaceful co-existence.  Called Panchsheel, these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).  Bandung marked a significant milestone for the development of the NAM as a political movement.  During the Cold War, it grew into an international organization of over 100 states which considered themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc.  (Wikipidea Encyclopedia)

[12] Barnouin and Yu, pp. 158-159.  According to another biography of Zhou, “Bandung was a great personal triumph for Zhou Enlai and an international breakthrough for China.  Back in Beijing, however, he found himself criticized by some of his colleagues [for] accepting peace with imperialism.” Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, p. 247.

[13] During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt stated:  “We Americans may have some disagreements among ourselves as to what we are fighting for, but one thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together.”  In drafting the act that was to guarantee the Philippines’ independence by 1946, he said: “Our nation covets no territory; it desires to hold no people against their will over whom it has gained sovereignty through war or by any other means.”  The last statement was a direct attack on the concept of empire, including the British Empire.

From the closing days of World War II to its neo-colonial empire today (with $5 Trillion in external capital investments), the United States is the largest imperialist empire in history, exercising hegemony over peoples and countries on an unparalleled scale.  The mechanisms of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, NATO and ASEAN, all dominated by the U.S, have proven instrumental to this hegemony and power.  These mechanisms have also been useful to other countries–whether traditional European and Japanese “junior partner” imperialists, or newly emerging imperialist powers such as the Soviet Union—who have both shared and contended for power with the dominant U.S. imperialists.

[14] Chen Jian, p. 73.

[15] Joseph Camilleri, Chinese Foreign Policy: The Mao Era and its Aftermath, 1992, p. 91.

[16] “The PKI sought a peaceful road to power in Indonesia…. This was an aim from which the Aidit leadership never deviated…the party resolved to stick like a leech to Sukarno and, by a combination of ingratiation and carefully staged pressure, to insert itself into his power structure.” Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno, 1974, p. 393.

This point is further emphasized in a statement issued in Central Java by an underground section of the PKI after the coup:  Referring to PKI Chairman D.N. Aidit’s concept of the state:  “According to this ‘two-aspect theory’ a miracle could happen in Indonesia.  Namely, the state could cease to be an instrument of the ruling oppressor classes to subjugate other classes, but could be made the instrument shared by both the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes.  And the fundamental change in state power, that is to say, the birth of a people’s power, could be peacefully accomplished by developing the ‘pro-people’ aspect and gradually liquidating the ‘anti-people aspect.” Mortimer, p. 397.  The PKI’s revisionist strategy, going back to the post-WW 2 independence movement, will be the subject of an upcoming paper by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group.

[17] Yang, pp. 21-22

[18] Chen Jian, p. 83

[19] “Apologists of Neo-Colonialism,” The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, FLP, 1965, p. 199. http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/ANC63.html

[20] Ibid,, p. 195.

[21] www.marx2mao.com/Other/Index.html#CPC

[22] The tern revisionist is applied to people who or organizations which see themselves as upholding Marxist principles and/or creatively adapting them, but in fact put forward an ideology and position that guts Marxism of its revolutionary essence. In capitalist society, a revisionist political line (1) makes reforms ends in themselves rather than connecting the people’s resistance and struggle for reforms to a revolutionary rupture with existing property and political relations and (2) denies—often based on wishful thinking—the ferocity with which the ruling class(es) will try to retain state power. More generally revisionism denies that the state is an instrument of class rule. This leads to the view that a peaceful transition to socialism is possible and that durable international peace is possible in this, the era of imperialism.

[23] “The Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s Revisionism,” March 31, 1964 http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PRKR64.html

[24]  According to Soviet chemist Mikhail Klochko, the Soviet specialists he knew in China were extremely upset at being recalled before the end of their contracts: “[We] had difficulty hiding [our] amazement when told by Soviet representatives in Peking that dissatisfaction with our living and working conditions was an important reason for our recall.  In fact few of us had ever lived better in our lives than we did in China.” Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 3nd ed., 1999, p. 236.

[25] See Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, 2002.

[26]  See page 34 for discussion of the CIA-backed coup in Chile and the role of the pro-Soviet Chilean Communist Party.

[27] Red Papers 7 by the Revolutionary Union, 1974; The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social-Imperialist? two volumes, RCP Publications, 1983; and Charles Bettelheim., Class Struggles in the USSR.

[28] Under considerable pressure, revisionist parties around the world rose to defend the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, including most notably Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party.

[29] In Ethiopia, the Soviet Union supported a military junta, the Dergue, that the Soviets claimed was on the path to socialism. After it seized power from Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, the Dergue was supported by thousands of Soviet and Cuban soldiers and advisers.  From 1977-1990, this brutal regime received $13 billion in military aid from the Soviet Union.  The Dergue carried out repeated massacres of revolutionary students and workers, and suppressed the just struggles of the Eritrean, Oromo and other oppressed nations within Ethiopia.

[30] A demagogic, quasi-populist regime based on the political ideology of Kemal Ataturk, the first president of the Turkish Republic.

[31] A detailed history of the communist movement in Turkey is available at http://www.peoplesmarch.com/archives/2001/apr2k1/History.htm

[32] The June-July 2006 issue of People’s March contains an interview with the spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which makes a detailed criticism of the CPN(M)’s political direction. (www.peoplesmarch.googlepages,com) A historical bibliography has been developed which may be useful in sorting out the various questions:  Assessing Recent Developments in Nepal:  Bibliography on the State, a Peaceful Transition to Socialism, Democracy and Dictatorship, Negotiations and Their Relevance to the International Communist Movement in the 21st Century — by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (January 3, 2007) Write mlm.rsg@gmail.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to request a copy.

[33] For a summation of the advances made by the PCP in the 1980s and its defeat after the capture of its top leadership in 1992, see A World To Win magazine, # 32, 2006.

[34]  An important work utilized by the revolutionary movement in India describes this period: “In the years immediately after the death of Mao, there was a considerable amount of confusion in the international communist movement, with the Deng revisionists, through Hua Guofeng, attempting to project themselves as upholders of Maoism.  In particular they falsely peddled the revisionist Three World Theory as Mao’s general line for the international proletariat.  Many revolutionary sections accepted these positions and it was only after the very openly revisionist History Resolution of the CCP in 1981 and the Twelfth Congress in 1982 that most revolutionary forces throughout the world started coming out openly against Deng revisionism.  However some sections continued to follow the Dengist revisionist line and abandoned Mao’s revolutionary teachings…. Those that resolutely opposed Deng revisionism and upheld Maoism in practice could however make considerable advances.  Today these forces form the core of the revolutionary international proletariat.  They are leading armed struggles in Peru, Philippines, Turkey, India, Nepal.” From History of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: A Study Guide, New Vista Publications, New Delhi, April 2002.

[35] See Robert Weil’s 1996 speech, “The Historical Meaning of the Cultural Revolution and Its Impact on the U.S.” www. chinastudygroup.org under “articles.”

[36]  The focoists asserted the initiation of armed struggle by small groups of guerillas in the countryside of Latin America and other “third world” countries (focos) would by their example bring forward the masses of the peasantry.  This strategy arose in opposition to the line of protracted people’s war, which is based on the development of a mass base before the initiation, and throughout the period, of revolutionary warfare.  The best known application of focoist strategy was Che Guevara’s ill-fated attempt to initiate armed struggle in the Bolivian countryside.

[37] The “race” to form a new party by the new communist groups was problematic. It took place at a time when the summation of experience, theoretical development and the sinking of deep roots in the working class and oppressed nationalities had just begun.  The rush to form a new party also short-circuited the process of forging unity between oppressed nationality and white activists, a central question in a country in which white supremacy permeates every aspect of society.

[38]  www. marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_52.htm

[39]  The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, pp. 15-16. http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/mao/polemics/letter.html

[40] www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lin-biao/1965/09/peoples_war/index.htm

[41]  “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” was also a rejection of the view that the struggle against U.S. imperialism required close political and military cooperation with the Soviet Union. This position, which would have entailed the creation of Soviet military bases on Chinese soil and an end to the polemics against Soviet revisionism, led to the downfall of Defense Minister Peng Te-huai in 1959 and PLA Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching in 1965.

[42] Jean Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1971, p. 313.  Daubier writes that the posters he saw suggested that Mao was addressing a foreign delegation when he made these remarks.

[43] Chen Jian, p. 207.

[44] While these troops were withdrawn by 1970 once the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was apparent, China continued to supply large amounts of military aid until 1975.

[45] Chen Jian, p. 209. In April 1966, as the US increased its troop strength to over 500,000, Premier Zhou Enlai responded forcefully to the growing threat to China. In an interview with a Pakistani correspondent, Zhou stated that China would not provoke a war with the U.S., but was prepared to resist and fight to the end no matter how many troops the US might send to China and whether it used conventional or nuclear weapons. David and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside: Years  in Revolutionary China, 1976, p. 121.

[46] Chen Jian, “China and the Vietnam Wars,” included in Peter Lowe, The Vietnam War, 1998, p. 167.

[47] lan Hutchinson, China’s African Revolution, 1975, pp. 111, 124, 247.

[48] J.D. Armstrong, Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine, 1977, pp. 215-16.

[49] Camilleri, p. 99.

[50] Armstrong, p. 231.

[51] The International Relations of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ed. Norton and Greenberg, 1989, pp. 145-46.

[52] Ibid., p. 150, 152.  Due to its rivalry with the Soviets and its desire to maintain commercial dealings with the Arab world, Deng’s regime continued to send military aid to the PLO into the 1980s.  China and Israel finally established official diplomatic relations in 1992. This has paved the way for the Chinese revisionists to provide sophisticated military technology to the Zionist state, which continues to the present.

[53] Lillian Harris, “The PRC and the Arab Middle East,” in China and Israel, 1948-1998, ed. Goldstein, 1999, p. 50.

[54] Miltons, p. 121.

[55] Lin Biao, Chen Boda, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Jiang Qing were other prominent members of the CCRG.  CCP Chairman Mao Zedong, the CCRG, and Party and government officials grouped around Premier Zhou Enlai constituted the “Left Alliance” that took shape in the early years of the Cultural Revolution.

[56] Barnouin and Yu, Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution, 1998, pp. 58-61.

[57] “Along the Socialist or Capitalist Road?” Peking Review, 1967, No. 34.

[58] Camilleri, p. 109.

[59] Barnouin and Yu, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life, p. 254.

[60] Roderick MacFarquhar  and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 2006,  p. 97.

[61]  Soviet policy towards Greece during World War 2 provides a graphic example. As the war was nearing an end, Stalin made a deal with Churchill to integrate Romania into its sphere-of-influence in exchange for giving Britain a free hand in Greece. When the German army withdrew in the fall of 1944, the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the KKE-led army of 50,000 were in a position to establish a new government in which they would play the leading role.  At this crucial juncture, the Soviet Union advised the KKE to hold off on military action and instead join a “government of national unity” with the British-backed monarchist government-in-exile based in Cairo. As the KKE hesitated under Soviet pressure, the British transported the reactionary Greek army in Egypt back to Greece and reinforced their forces based in Greece under the command of General Ronald Scobie. By the time the KKE decided to launch an uprising in Athens in December 1944 (which was unsuccessful), the decisive moment to strike had passed.  Peter Stavrakis, Moscow and Greek Communism: 1944-1949, 1989, pp. 11-35; Andre Gerolymatos, Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of Soviet-American Rivalry, 2004, pp. 94-147.

[62] Meisner, pp. 316, 317.

[63] See “The Political, Military and Negotiating Strategies of the Chinese Communist Party (1937-1946) and Recent Developments in Nepal,” March 2007, pp. 4-9, by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group.

[64] Report to the 9th Congress, pp. 94-99.

[65] MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 309.

[66] “The Soviet-Chinese Conflict of 1969,” Igor Sutyagin, http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/sutyagin/02-03.htm

[67] The Four had risen to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were from Shanghai, and Jiang Qing was Mao’s wife. They were generally allied with Mao in defending the Cultural Revolution during the early 1970s, and were arrested and jailed for long terms after a rightist military coup in 1976.

[68] MacFarquhar and Schoenthals, p. 359. According to most researchers, Mao agreed to the rehabilitation of Deng in 1973. Mao may have thought that this was necessary to restore civilian control over the PLA in the wake of the Lin Biao affair. Mao may have later regretted this decision.

[69] Barnouin and Yu, Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution, pp. 188-196.

[70] During the trip back from China, the ship had to be sunk when it was discovered by the Philippine Navy; only 200 rifles reached shore.  Two other ships were sent to China but were not able to make it back to the Philippines.  Recollections of Juanito Rivera, a founding member of the NPA, in Bulatlat, April 2-8, 2006.  www.bulatlat.com  According to another knowledgable Filipino source, Zhou    intervened more than once to limit the size and frequency of the CPP’s delegations to China. This was an indication of continuing struggle in the CCP over whether the “opening to the West” required cutting back support for revolutionary struggles.

[71]  While the Chinese view of the “second world” was not correct, socialist China was able to utilize the limited contradictions between Japanese and U.S. capital to good effect.  In the early 1970s, as it developed economic ties with Japan, China did not trade with any Japanese companies that had investments in Taiwan or South Korea, that made or sold any materials for the U.S. war in Vietnam, and had any joint ventures with U.S. corporations.

[72] This disease, technically called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, caused the motor nerve cells to deteriorate in Mao’s throat, pharynx, tongue, diaphragm, right hand and right leg. MacFarquhar, p. 414.

[73] This position was justified by historical parallels to World War 2, when the Soviet Union made an alliance with the Western imperialist countries against German imperialism. This line was not simply a necessary tactic to defend socialism in the USSR, but was a general analysis of imperialism and strategy imposed on the international communist movement by the Soviet leadership through the Comintern. Just as in the China in the 1970s, this line of identifying one bloc of imperialists as more dangerous than an opposing bloc encouraged class collaboration on the part of communists in the U.S., France, Italy, and Britain, as well as in their colonies such as India, Algeria and the Philippines.

[74] Barnouin and Yu, p. 35.

[75] Ibid., p. 36.

[76] Barnouin and Yu, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life, p. 295.

[77] Barnouin and Yu, Chinese Foreign Policy During the Cultural Revolution, pp. 37, 36.

[78] Barnouin and Yu, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life, p. 299.

[79] Ibid., pp. 304-305.

[80]  MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 365.

[81] “Speech at Peking Rally Welcoming Cambodian Guests,” Peking Review, April 12, 1974, in And Mao Makes Five, ed. Raymond Lotta, 1980, p. 173.

[82] See Hung Yu, “History Develops in Spirals,” Peking Review, October 25, 1974, in Lotta, p. 163.

[83] See “Chairman Mao’s Theory of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds is a Major Contribution to Marxism-Leninism,” People’s Daily, November 1, 1977.

[84]  More in-depth investigation is needed into the terms of this struggle, and how the revolutionary and revisionist forces lined up during this period.

[85] The International Relations of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ed. Norton and Greenberg, 1989, p. 152.

[87] This struggle between revolutionary and revisionist trends in the U.S. Maoist movement is entirely different from the criticisms made by pro-Soviet revisionists such as Max Elbaum. (See footnote 25.) Those who attack the role of Maoism generally in the NCM have taken two tacks.  They ignore the great revolutionary achievements of the Cultural Revolution and Chinese foreign policy during the 1960s. They then play what they consider to be their trump card–the adoption of the Three Worlds Theory by the CCP in the 1970s, and the incorrect response to it by the majority of NCM groups. In doing so, they ignore the intense struggle that took place over foreign policy in the CCP in the 1970s between revolutionary and revisionist forces, and fail to analyse why most of the NCM groups latched onto Deng’s Three Worlds Theory.

[88] “On the Question of Stalin,” Polemic, p. 123. This essay, which was part of the polemics between the CCP and the CPSU, was written by or under the direction of Mao.

[89] Mouthing whatever line about the Soviet Union and the three worlds was emanating from Beijing at any particular moment, the Communist Party M-L (formerly the October League) endorsed Hua Guofeng’s ascension to leadership and the arrest of the “gang of four” after Mao died in 1976.  Shortly thereafter, Peking Review featured a picture of CPM-L Chairman Klonsky and Hua Guofeng toasting each other, and the CPML had, so to speak, the CCP’s U.S. franchise.  However, the very franchise that the CPML had so fawningly sought contributed to the organization’s subsequent implosion, as it became increasingly clear that China was no longer on the socialist road.

Prior to the CPML’s receipt of the franchise, an RCP delegation visited China. The RCP was, in effect, offered the franchise if it would endorse Hua and the suppression of the Four.  Wisely, the RCP declined.

[90]  www.marx2mao.com/Mao/PIS46.html. “Some Points in Appraisal of the Present International Situation,” April 1946, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Foreign Languages Press, 1969.

[91] See James Petras, “US-Latin American Relations: Measuring the Rise or Fall of US Power,” November 1, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15464.htm, In the second half of this article, Petras discusses Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.

For more than ten years Charles Darwin said nothing publicly about (what he called) his “very presumptuous work.” He wrote that talking about natural selection (even to friends) was “like confessing a murder.” [2] There were reasons for Darwin’s reluctance. He worried about possible errors in his analysis. He feared open debate might have unexpected consequences. But Darwin’s delay had to end and did. [3]

Without overstating an analogy, revolutionary communists need to undertake a “very presumptuous work.” It requires working through problems, not treating them as dark secrets. We too have reasons for caution. Our disputes take place within reach of a ruthless enemy. Yet, we need to deal with difficult truths about our movement, experiences and beliefs.

Even the most revolutionary forces have been lagging seriously. In the thirty years since Mao’s death, there has not been another communist revolution, and a whole generation has grown up without revolutionary societies. Communism is not contending within the deep channels of the world’s politics, culture or thought. International efforts to regroup communist forces have not overcome long-standing fractures. As rapid changes rework this planet, there have rarely been parallel innovations in communist understanding and work.

The experience of the last century has convinced many that communist revolution has been a failed dream. And yet, rising from every corner of life, weighing on the brain like a living nightmare, there it is: the horrifying suffering of people and the mounting crimes of this system.
Faced with these challenges, revolutionary communism is dividing into two around us. Or to be more precise: Events are revealing how much this movement already exists as two, three, many Maoisms. Several distinct conceptions now contend among Maoists. [4] There is sharp struggle over how to make the breakthroughs we need in both communist theory and revolutionary practice.

Because these letters develop a critique of Bob Avakian’s new synthesis, I’d like to start by acknowledging positive aspects of what he and the Revolutionary Communist Party,USA (RCP) have represented: For decades, the RCP as been an important pole around which revolutionary communist forces could rally. There has been a long, serious, stubborn, principled effort by the RCP and its leadership core to solve problems that far too many others simply believed were unsolvable. This party has been determined to find a way to actually bring down U.S. imperialism from within. And Bob Avakian, in particular, has churned over many key questions of communist revolution, keeping them before others, refusing to settle for anything less.

There have been periods over the last decades when it appeared the RCP’s leadership might be on the road toward those leaps we need. Avakian has long argued that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism should be approached non-dogmatically — as a developing “synthesis.” He later called for making communism a “wrangling” and “self-interrogating” movement. And more recently, he urges communists to fearlessly confront often-difficult truths. He says communists should refuse to be a “residue of the past,” and should fight to become a “vanguard of the future.” [5]

And yet… and yet… the RCP has proven to be one of the disappointments of this moment. After raising some of the right questions, this party prematurely rushed to embrace a synthesis that falls short. As a result, a stark set of contradictions now defines the RCP.

There has been a devastating contrast between Avakian’s talk of critical scientific thinking and the crudely un-critical thinking that surrounds this party’s escalating cult of personality.

Avakian made welcome criticisms of simplistic methodologies (including of the reductionism [6] and inevitabilism [7]of several of his party’s more notorious errors. [8]) But then, the RCP put forward yet another over-reaching analysis. This time it is that there is a post-911 ruling class lurch toward theocratic fascism that is creating the outlines of a “coming civil war” and could become a “stage manager” for socialist revolution in the period ahead. [9]

Avakian criticized the method of manipulating people by fudging the truth, but his party is jacking people up using instrumentalist predictions. [10] Seeking (once again) to “keep the advanced elements tense,” the party is insisting (once again) that the world is rushing rapidly toward a very specific, irreversible disaster and that only this Chairman and his supporters can save the day.
In words, Avakian talks about the masses in their millions being the makers of history, while the party seems to move further and further away from actually organizing people in struggle and extending living roots among the oppressed.

Meanwhile the militant and heart-felt internationalism so closely associated with the RCP is being deeply compromised. For the last year, the living revolution of Nepal has been treated with a long sour public silence by the RCP. [11]

Many people see this as a bewildering disconnect between Avakian “talking the talk” and his party somehow failing to “walk the walk.” But that summation doesn’t get past the superficial appearance of things. Whatever else can be said: Bob Avakian’s theorizing is an internally coherent synthesis and it is in command. The flaws that now mark the RCP’s work fundamentally arise from Avakian’s synthesis itself, from the methods and thinking it unleashes, not from somewhere else.

The RCP does not have a correct appraisal of the objective situation. It does not apply the mass line correctly. [12] It has not developed the correct tactics and strategy for the revolutionary process in this country. These are profound shortcomings for any party. And they are tied to shortcomings in method and approach that are concentrated within Avakian’s developing synthesis.

The flaws in the RCP’s current work arise from Avakian’s synthesis, not from somewhere else.

People often ask “What is this new synthesis?” They find it hard to pin down when confronted with Avakian’s loosely-woven body of work. [13]

For the purposes of these letters, I will break this synthesis down into a number of main areas:

• The RCP asserts that the “emergence” of a “unique, special and irreplaceable leader” of a “special caliber” has implications for everything communists and the masses of people do in the world today. This theory of great leaders justifies a number of other major programmatic and strategic shifts — especially moving the “promotion and popularization” of Avakian to the heart of the party’s work.

• There is a claim to seek and uphold truth in an entirely new way. This is called “Avakian’s epistemological rupture” [14] with previous communist thinking.

• There is a new “envisioning” of the socialist transition to communism — with a special stress on holding firmly onto power while creating the conditions for mass debate over major challenges facing the continuing revolution. There is an assertion that this new re-conception of the communist road should take center stage in political discussions now — both among communists and broadly among the masses.

• This synthesis is viewed as a world-historic re-conception of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). Avakian and his work is specifically compared and equated to the contributions Lenin and Mao made to communist theory. It is said that the masses worldwide must pass through the doorway that Bob Avakian has opened for the way out. And this leap in Marxism is said to be arising from Avakian’s summations of the whole previous history of communist revolution, not mainly from an application of MLM to the practice of making revolution in the U.S.
There are other components to Avakian’s synthesis which will need excavation at another time, including Avakian’s particular view of communist revolution as a world process, an idiosyncratic critique of democracy, and the RCP’s spiral/conjunctural theory of capitalist crisis. [15]
In the letters that follow, I will make some initial critiques — sometimes in detail, sometimes by indicating a line of thought. Many problems I unravel have been noted over years by others coming from their own diverse politics.

These letters can’t (and won’t) offer a tidy counter-synthesis to Avakian’s synthesis. That is because we are at the beginning, not the end, of our “very presumptuous work.” However woven into these letters will be thoughts about a different path that I believe serious revolutionaries need to take.

I hope this critical exploration will help gather now-dispersed forces for all that we need to bring into being.

Letter 2: A Gaping Hole Instead of Partisan Bases /by Mike Ely

A painful place to start: The RCP has not developed, ever, a mass partisan political base for revolutionary communist politics anywhere, among any section of the people.

The RCP has no partisan base.

Any synthesis that doesn’t solve this has a gaping hole at its core.

This political current has won recruits, in ones and twos, from people whose life and study gave them a inclination toward communism. But the language and banners of this movement have never connected. Revolutionary communists have never found the ways to fuse revolutionary politics with the aspirations of the masses. They have not created the thousands of “organized ties” or the “political base areas” that they worked for decades to build. The RCP never succeeded in transforming its racial or class composition — it has not trained or recruited significant numbers of new communists from the proletariat and oppressed nationalities despite all the efforts in that direction.
The RCP tried to take up the responsibilities of a vanguard force. But it has never succeeded in becoming a “party” — in the sense of actually leading a section of people that consciously supports its cause. [16]

Any synthesis that does not solve or even acknowledge these basic problems has a gaping hole at its very core.
The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) criticizes a trend within the international communist movement (ICM):
“What seems to be their regular routine is not to concentrate on how revolutionary struggle can be developed in one’s country by developing correct strategy and tactics but to talk more of world revolution, enjoy classical debate, eulogize strategy and tactic of the past successful revolutions, teach other fraternal parties as if they know everything about the concrete situation in that country and stick to what Lenin and Mao had said before. This trend represents dogmatism.” [17]

Dealing with Errors and Failure

Since we are talking bluntly here about failure, we need to talk about context. Reading an essay by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently, I stopped hard on this sentence:

“The greatness of Lenin was that in this catastrophic situation, he wasn’t afraid to succeed — in contrast to the negative pathos discernible in Rosa Luxemburg and Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of the failure which brings the truth of the situation to light.” [18]

Yes! There is far too much of this “negative pathos” around, as if we communists should chant, “We’re not worthy,” alongside Wayne and Garth. As if a shuffling, round-shouldered self-hatred would be the only possible proof that we communists “get” the lessons of our own past. That would be exactly wrong.

We need to excavate our shortcomings and listen to the criticism of others. But we will do so because the people of the world need a radically reconceived communist project. They need revolutionary internationalists in the U.S. to do our part well, here and now. We have something worthy to bring to this passage of history. And for that we must emulate Lenin’s hunger to win and his focus on grabbing the chance within the maelstrom.

This is a matter of intention, but not just intention. New truth emerges from the currently inexplicable — after practice reveals fissures in previous conceptions. We are at such a moment, not just around our own specific political practice, but at several levels of the human adventure.

Up Against It

How much of this failure of the RCP comes from the difficult objective conditions in the U.S.? How much is rooted in flaws of the RCP’s line and approach?

We excavate shortcomings because people need a reconceived communist project.

Clearly both are involved and intertwined.

These have been “awful decades” for communist work here. The plunder of a whole world has nurtured a corrupt political stability. The people are deeply affected by illusions, pulls of passivity and dreams of advancing within this system.

Here is one sign that these objective difficulties are very real: The RCP is hardly the only organized trend to have had trouble. No radical, left or revolutionary forces have gotten durable traction since the ‘70s — not revolutionary Black nationalists, not anarchists, not soft-socialist trade union organizers, not the Greens. Various left trends have also had their moments of influence, but all failed to develop ongoing support for their larger programs. Most have fared far worse than the RCP. Oppositional politics has flowed into loose social and cultural movements that are often organized around pressuring for reforms.

The objective conditions are the main reason why there has not been either a mass revolutionary movement or the basis for any actual revolutionary attempts. And these conditions have acted back on the subjective factor (the lines within the party itself) exacerbating now one or another “pull” — sometimes toward non-revolutionary tailing of the mass movements, sometimes toward a sectified acceptance of “puny thinking,” and now increasingly toward rampant wishful thinking.

These are errors made by sincere and dedicated revolutionaries operating under frustrating political conditions — but they are errors nonetheless. While the RCP tried to “wrench” all it could out of each moment — practice has fallen very far short of their hopes, and also — I believe — short of what could have been done with different methods and plans.

There have been long-standing problems of method and approach in the RCP’s work — how it viewed itself, the masses and the revolutionary process — that have all contributed to the overall failure.

Communists have not yet charted the uncharted course.

Communists have not successfully “charted the uncharted course” or mastered how to “do revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation.” [19]

The RCP’s failures in practice were not for lack of trying: This party fought from many sides to create a revolutionary movement around its politics. At one time or another over 35 years, the RCP tried to dig in among industrial workers, farm workers, Black proletarian youth, various immigrant communities, the homeless in major cities, the social movements of radical activists, punk street youth, progressive artists, outraged scientists and more. The party launched itself into militant trade unionism, then later into building proletarian bases around “mass combativity,” and then building broad mass movements around police brutality, imperialist war and the rise of the Christian fascists.
This work was carried out under an evolving strategic plan: In the 1970s, we told ourselves that “taking Marxism-Leninism to the workers is taking it home.” But we discovered that this “home” (among the unionized workers of basic industry) was already well stocked with other ideologies. The workers were apparently quite attached to them. The RCP then concluded that the real home for Marxism was “lower and deeper” in the ranks of the “real proletariat” — who are less privileged and conservatized. [20]

The RCP’s failures were not for lack of trying.

By 1980, the RCP rejected a previous emphasis on trade union struggles and the workers in heavy industry. It adopted a new central task called “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power” (CPOSP). This was intended to pursue doing “revolutionary work in a non-revolutionary situation” — in preparation for “the Time.”

From the beginning there was tension (and real line struggle) within the framework CPOSP. How much was communist work rooted in agitation and propaganda (centered around the newspaper)? How much was it focused on leading the masses in struggle (along key social faultlines)? How much do we focus on exposing the outrages of this system, and how much on the need for a new system? How does a communist movement accumulate forces, train revolutionary organizers, develop mass organization under communist leadership, and raise consciousness of the need for a new society and change-through-revolution?

There were real controversies over how, and even whether, to use the party’s press among the people. Formally the communist press was seen as the key way of connecting the people to an explicitly communist movement, and “diverting” their understandings. But at various times and places over the decades of the ‘80s and ‘90s, the What-Is-To-Be-Done-ist work around the newspaper took a distant second place behind efforts to lead people in political struggles.

After the late 1980s, and then especially after the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, the party made a series of shifts toward developing base areas among the most oppressed sections of the population — focused on selected housing projects and sweatshop districts. Two things were asserted as part of those shifts: First, that it was important to “come from within.” There had not been much success in acting as “revolutionary ambulance chasers” — showing up as unknowns, with leaflets and newspapers, whenever some atrocity or struggle went down.

Going “lower and deeper” did not solve the problem.

And second there was an emphasis on building the organized “mass combativity” of people — taking the 1917 Viborg district or the Peruvian experiences of Raucana as rough models of how a mass radical oppositional movement could be built [21] — especially among oppressed youth. This took distance from an early trend toward “advanced actions” where the party and a few individuals combatively stepped out — to burn flags or obstruct the destruction of housing projects — in hopes of inspiring others to follow.

This was a plan to create partisan political base areas — where the party would lead combative mass political struggle, build wisely-constructed party organization around the communist press, and publicly set radical new terms for how people related to each other. And there remained a view of building a broader revolutionary united front — in many ways that would be energized and radicalized around an emerging proletarian core. [22]

There was much value to this orientation toward the youth, toward the oppressed, toward the protracted work of “coming from within” and toward polarizing society around an emerging revolutionary core.

Experience reveals a continuing gap between communist politics and the advanced.

These changes were an assertion of the importance in accumulating forces, leading struggle and “developing the muscles” of a real social force. And the importance of actually organizing people was incorporated in a new formulation of the central task (in the 2001 draft program): “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power — prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.”

The organizing projects associated with these “shifts” played an important role in training the next generation of communists. But the RCP never succeeded in creating the much-desired base areas for the party’s politics. The U.S. has no Red Wedding District, Raucana, Kreuzberg or Putilov Works. [23] There were never multiplying circles of newspaper readers creating an ongoing basis for the party’s influence and leadership. [24]

At the same time, this practical work was never characterized by simple isolation. At times, the RCP has been able to unite with significant numbers of people to wage struggle — from the 1970s coalfields, to antiwar resistance, to the 1990s marches in LA against police brutality. Those have been moments when the “crown lay in the gutter” and a bold political force could give shape to grievances. Still, the influence built around important short-term demands and the “felt needs of the masses” did not develop into a partisan base of support for the party itself or its program of proletarian revolution.

Like it or not, the RCP’s experience reveals a real and continuing gap between communist politics and even the advanced among the masses.
We either bridge that gap or we don’t.

There are significant numbers of people curious about revolutionary politics. We meet them whenever we walk out the door. But even the most advanced, discontented, restless, conscious sections of the people, even those who CRAVE a revolutionary change, are often not particularly inclined toward a revolutionary communist pole. It is a gap that is objective to us. It has deep roots — in how politics in the U.S. developed, in the international position of U.S. imperialism, in social mobility, in the privatization of American life, in the dynamics of racist oppression — and in the general verdict that alternative societies have sadly “failed.”

This is a gap that a communist movement either learns how to bridge or doesn’t. This needs to be much more deeply summed up in order to be transformed — a process the RCP has shied away from in regard to its own practice.

Real disappointment within the RCP over the protracted failures of base-building encouraged currents of orthodox dogmatism that seemed resigned to puny marginalization — content with political work in tired familiar circles, in ways that never lit the sky or dared to actually lead. It also fanned a tendency to tail whatever promised traction — content to become administrators of mass movements and willing to lower sights in a reformist way. “Build the sea to swim in, bring in an independent role.” Or so it was said in the 1990s — but far too often the second half of that slogan evaporated. An unspoken verdict gained influence: “We have seen all the revolution we are going to see.”

The wind of life gusting around the Mumia campaign, the national movement against police brutality, and the post-911 antiwar activities actually caused intensified stresses. These problems demanded line struggle and new theoretical work — grounded in a materialist accounting of all that previous work. That did not happen. In particular: There has been no summation of the last twenty years of work in building base areas in the “real proletariat” — at least no serious summation known to the membership, or those involved in this work, or that emerged to be discussed as part of the larger Draft Programme process. And silence still surrounds those important experiences. The spiral from theory to practice back to theory has been broken.

No serious known summation of seeking political base areas over 20 years.

In the last few years, a new leading line in the RCP argues that the problem over decades has been that the party (as a whole) was gripped by a “revisionist package,” in opposition to Avakian. The party itself “got in the way” of its own chairman’s ability to reach and transform the masses. Such a simple-but-unlikely explanation makes summation of real work and real shortcomings less necessary.

In theory and practice, this new line has pointed in a very different direction. The old tension between newspaper agitation and leading mass political struggle has been superseded: Both are now overshadowed (and redefined by) the work of promoting Avakian as the central leader of the revolution. Communist work must now be centered around the task of “appreciating, promoting and popularizing this rare, unique and special leader, his body of work, method and approach.”

In the absence of materialist summation, a project of multiple fantasies can take hold. There is the fantasy of “re-polarizing” the society around one leader, linked to other fantasies of “vaulting” to mass influence in a crudely voluntarist way. [25]

Summing up decades of precious experience is crucial for the forging of new practice and a new communist synthesis. Whoever among us is willing, let’s dig in.

There was some truth to that, then. Can any one look at the party today and still say that?

Problems of dogmatism, self-isolation and political fantasy — that have always plagued the RCP and contended within its politics — are now in command to a new degree. The heart of this — both its theoretical core and most visible manifestation — is how the RCP’s central leader, Bob Avakian, is seen and promoted.

The RCP now holds that “once a unique leader of this caliber emerges” the tasks and responsibilities of the party and its members change — in ways that directly impact revolutionary strategy. “If we don’t do anything else,” it is said, “we must do the promotion of this leader well.” This concentrates a major change in line. While the RCP still seeks to lead struggle around major faultlines in society, such crucial work clearly takes a back seat to the promotion of this cult of personality.

One graphic comparison reveals a great deal about the change:

On the left is the RCP’s poster from May Day 1980. On the right is the cover on Revolution newspaper’s 2007 “Special Issue on Bob Avakian.” The cover on the right is clearly a retread of the poster on the left. That similarity creates a chance to “compare and contrast the lines”:

In 1980, the RCP was putting out a challenge to advanced workers, who are portrayed in a doorway, possibly on the verge of stepping out, alone if necessary, with their eyes set on dreams of red flags and revolution. It is a poster that is marked in some ways by a lingering workerism — complete with hard hat, factory setting and a presumably male figure. However (setting all that aside) the political essence of the poster was posing a choice to the workers themselves about daring to act and transform the political stage in a revolutionary direction.
By contrast, the 2007 cover shows the uplifted profile of a party supporter with eyes fixed intently on the word “leadership.” It is an act of adoration. The challenge now is not “Take history into our hands!” It is now “Engage with Bob Avakian,” to become a “follower.”
Previously the party’s work was seen as rooted in “What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” It involved being a “tribune of the people” using lively and compelling communist exposure, agitation and propaganda that “put before all our communist convictions.” It envisioned a paper as an organizational “scaffolding” and “collective organizer” for a diverse and growing revolutionary movement. It aspired to being a newspaper that could “cast a line” far beyond the organized ranks of communists.

Promotion of Avakian is now at the center of work.

The RCP now holds that there are “two mainstays” of communist work — one “mainstay” is the work of “AP&P” (developing the appreciation, promotion and popularization of Avakian). The other “mainstay” is the work of the newspaper. And the newspaper has also been reconceived to give greater weight to Avakian’s theoretical articles and to promoting his “re-envisioning of communism,” while the concepts of agitation and exposure have undergone a related transformation. This new conceptual package is called “Enriched What-Is-To-Be-Done-ism.” That enrichment is a negation of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. It represents a different (and idealist) view of how the activity and consciousness of people can be diverted in a communist direction.

The “two mainstays” formulation marks a major departure from the Party’s previous strategic views. One way or another, the Party’s 2001 New Draft Programme [27] has been superseded — though replacement formulations are not public yet.

The net effect is that the promotion of Avakian — as a person, leader and theorist — is much more fully at the center of the Party’s work, including its new conception of the communist press.

In this synthesis, the organized collectivity of the party has been demoted to an “instrumentality” of the great leader. Several promising projects of mass struggle have been allowed to wither, or been transformed into “vehicles” for get-rich-quick fantasies.
For example, on October 5, 2006, the RCP had plans to conjure a government-shaking movement into being. They were spectacularly unsuccessful. Avakian later said:

“All this — and the whole experience that is captured with the metaphor of living in the house of Tony Soprano — does come back around to the question of complicity. Now, in this connection I want to say a few things about the mobilization on October 5 (2006) that was called by World Can’t Wait, and the fact that, frankly, in terms of numbers and accordingly in terms of impact, this fell far short of what was needed. Now, as Maoists, we’re not supposed to blame the masses when things don’t go well. But goddamnit — I want to blame the masses a little bit! Not strategically. Ultimately it is our responsibility — it is the responsibility of those who do understand the urgent need for massive opposition and political resistance to this whole course that the Bush regime is driving things on. But in line with, and as a part of, that responsibility, terms have to be presented sharply to people. Someone made the point that we should say to those people who knew about October 5, and who said they agreed with its basic stance and aims but did not come out that day: ‘Shame on you if you sat on your ass on October 5! If you knew about it or had a basis to know about it and you did not make use of this vehicle and help make this vehicle as powerful as possible — shame on you’!”

“I want to say, just for the record, that at times I myself have been acutely disappointed by — and, yes, have cursed in graphic terms — the people in this society who are sitting by and doing nothing in the face of atrocities and horrors committed by their government and in their name…” [28]

Let’s unpack this: The “vehicle” has been built and the masses have (yet again!) not responded according to plan. And who gets the blame?
“I want to blame the masses…”

Not the current party leadership. Not the plan. Who is left (logically) to blame but the masses (and the lower level of cadre)?
It is as if the RCP’s leadership feels their pearls have been cast before swine. [29] Is every utterance of leadership a gem? Does skeptical withholding of “appreciation” by comrades and the masses mean they are “part of the problem”?

Impending failure of many kinds drives forward a farrago of scapegoating.

There is complicity and corruption within an imperialist superpower. But blaming, shaming and literally cursing the masses is wrong — both in principle and in this particular case. (And it is wrong with or without a caveat like “Ultimately it is our responsibility.”)

On the Mass Line

Here leaders dream up grand schemes out of whole cloth — without forming alliances, constituencies or trained networks over time. They don’t have their own base to bring to the process. They “plan” to reach millions without actually organizing thousands — as if the masses will be jolted by public appeals in newspaper ads and made to flow, like water, through a quickly engineered canal.

We should be suspicious of such contrivances and “get rich quick” schemes. They flow from a sectarian view of what “proletarian leadership of the united front” means, of how a revolutionary movement is built and led.

A plan to reach millions without organizing thousands.

A party without a correct mass line — without a correct approach toward leading and learning from the people — cannot hope to lead a great revolution or a new society. This is a problem that urgently needs theory, struggle and solution.

The RCP has understood that communists can’t merely hold a mirror up to the masses to reflect (and politically tail) whatever people already know and think. This party has understood that communist work needs to bring revolutionary, scientific understandings from without — from outside the experiences, struggles and understandings that the people themselves spontaneously generate.

However these crucial insights have been applied in a sterile and sectarian way. The RCP has not correctly appreciated the importance of actually organizing the advanced to win over the intermediate in their masses. There is little practical sense of alliance, coalition or protracted engagement with other political forces or with important sections of the people. There is little sense of how people, in their masses, learn through struggle (even as communist political work and leadership “diverts” that process to influence how radical it gets).

Summation will have to be made of how much specific “mass initiatives” gave rise to real organization, breadth, ferment and struggle – certainly efforts around Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality, and early antiwar work had a real breath of life. These efforts often represented a desire to take initiative and respond to burning issues in society. However overall, and especially more recently, the RCP’s “mass initiatives” have taken on a more and more skeletal and self-isolating nature.

Becoming a Living Vanguard: Protracted Fusion or Last-Minute Telescoping

The belief that huge movements will congeal around prefabricated vehicles is no minor or recent problem: The RCP itself has been conceived as such a “vehicle.”

The RCP originally emerged from a political upsurge where revolutionary forces had real, if primitive roots among the people. But those roots shriveled as that upsurge died. In the 1980s, the party correctly stressed its need to have tens of thousands of “organized ties” in each city and established political base areas in order to be able to make an approach to power.

However as those goals were not accomplished, the party seems to have fallen back, more and more, on a mythology – where at some future point the masses of people will come to “the rescue of a few scores” of revolutionaries. Lenin’s poetic phrase is often taken too literally, as if a small stubborn agitation-based organization can have its correctness and leadership suddenly discovered by awakening millions and can then catapult to power “in a telescoped way.”

As if zero-to-60 is possible — if all the gears are clicking, if the moment’s right, and if full appreciation of the “Main Man” is in command.

This is an illusion.

This conception of forging a vanguard has never produced either a revolution or a real vanguard party with deep living roots among the people. It rests on an instrumentalist distortion of the Bolshevik history. [30]

No substantive revolutionary party ever came to have social weight through some magical “telescoping” from a few “scores” of rootless communists — not Mao’s Communist Party and Red Army (who emerged from the earlier Nationalist upsurge), or the German KPD (who emerged with major forces out of the previous Social Democratic movement), not the Naxalites of India nor the Maoists of Nepal.
And it was never true of the Bolsheviks either. Early in Lenin’s work he put it this way:

“Only the fusion of socialism with the working-class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both. But in every country this combination of socialism and the working-class movement was evolved historically, in unique ways, in accordance with the prevailing conditions of time and place. In Russia, the necessity for combining socialism and the working-class movement was in theory long ago proclaimed, but it is only now being carried into practice. It is a very difficult process and there is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that it is accompanied by vacillations and doubts.” [31]

The Bolsheviks were occasionally decimated by repression. The links were often broken between their leaders in exile and their activists on the ground. But this was nonetheless a party that emerged with deep connections to social movements against the maddening backwardness of Tsarist Russia and the brutal oppression of working people. [32]

Fusion of socialism with the struggles of the people according to conditions of time and place.

The Bolshevik Party was not just a few circles of Lenin’s followers who suddenly sprouted political wings “in a telescoped way.” They were a real party carved into the political life of that empire, with lively internal political life and raucous differences, real roots within a real social base (especially from 1905 onward), and an organizational capacity to influence and lead. They grew in both size and influence under that “awful” decade before 1917. [33]

All communist parties that have been able to seriously contend emerged organically, pulling their forces out of larger radical movements and broad anti-system intellectual currents by a living process of fusion and differentiation. To take power, especially if you intend to dismantle the old state — you need more than a line, or a “special” leader, or even a shadow cabinet — you need the organizational wellsprings of a shadow state emerging within the framework of the old order. You need to win over and train thousands of creative and hardened cadre capable of becoming the framework for the new state — a force capable of seizing power, directing the economy and its transformation, creating a new media, and so on.

And imagine how much more true this is now — given the mind-boggling complexity of modern society — than it was in agrarian China or semi-agrarian Russia.

Yes, in periods of intense crisis, many new forces can be attracted to existing revolutionary movements. Some things will have to be “telescoped,” but they can’t all be. As Avakian once knew, a political movement can “come from behind” but it can’t “come from nowhere.” To actually seize and hold power in a major social crisis, a revolutionary party needs to arrive at that crisis with flesh and bone.
So, how is a revolutionary vanguard forged under our conditions?

Seriously attempting this will require something quite different from what we now have. We need a revolutionary current that grows and emerges within the living tissue of today’s wrenching contradictions – as thousands of radical people go through a series of political processes together, under conditions where creative communist politics can seriously contend and transform. There is a necessary process with stages and leaps that you learn more about as they ripen – all as the revolutionary pole works to accumulate and transform organized forces. There are turning points where you either have critical mass and correct methods, or you are not in the game.

For all this, communists need a culture of organizing people to wage sharp struggle over the major questions of society. And we need a deeply creative new sense of how to bring revolutionary understandings to those who want to change the world.
To launch this process we need to criticize incorrect understandings entrenched in Avakian’s new synthesis. But that is only the start. This is a process that will deepen only as we learn more by doing more.

The RCP’s current path will not work.

In sum: The RCP’s current path and methods have not worked and will not work.

Its recent strategic turn is indifferent to the lessons of its own practice. It is a voluntarist attempt to magically leap over real obstacles and necessary stages in communist work. The assumption that things can come together, suddenly and massively, under communist leadership makes an idealist overestimation of spontaneity. If unchallenged, it will squander the remaining revolutionary communist forces within the U.S.

The Masses: Always “Out There,” Separate and Distant

Looking back, I have been struck by the damage done by the constant suggestion that a revolutionary crisis might be just over the horizon. It is as if the RCP has been operating through a series of two-year, or three-year plans — hurling itself into this, then pulling out to hurl itself into that. In fact, developing deep ties among the people requires perseverance, maturity, careful choices and real commitment to those choices — not a rootlessness that constantly shifts plans based on short-term speculations and expectations of quick growth.
It was a promising thing in the late 1980s, when the RCP raised to itself the importance of “coming from within.” And yet the party’s overall method repeatedly thwarted that process. The party’s work has remained a series of “forays” — constantly re-approaching people “from without,” as if they are some unexplored territory. Over and over, the party would pull back without real roots or networks, only to sally out again in some new direction with new hopes and schemes.

In a very typical statement, the party said (summing up disappointments in 2005):
“[T]he truth is this: the people that can make this into a movement of millions are out there. We have to get them.” [34]
In some important ways, the masses of people have always remained “out there” for this party — as something separate, distant, unresponsive, and very disappointing. Objective conditions played their role in this — but a bitter view of the people has taken root subjectively.

A revolutionary organization has to be integrated into struggles of the people — directly in its own name while connecting with (or initiating) a variety of other organizations. And it has to draw the thinking and activity of people toward creatively-conceived communist solutions to this awful capitalist present – a task which can only be accomplished with methods that are bold yet sophisticated (not hackneyed or infantile).

A revolutionary organization has to be integrated into living struggles while drawing everything toward communist solutions.

The issue here is, again, the mass line — which rests on an understanding that people need to emancipate themselves, and that it can’t be done “for” them. In a fundamental way, people (in their masses) are the makers of human progress and emancipation. This materialist insight has a series of necessary consequences for communist work and socialist society.

In words, the RCP affirms that revolution is an act of “the masses in their millions.” However, its methods of “mass work” have moved farther and farther away from organizing or learning from (or even appreciating) those people who are not interested in becoming “followers of Bob Avakian.” There is an overestimation of how much the communists already know, and an underestimation of the importance of knowing the people well, so that revolutionary communications can truly connect with our key audiences.

In place of the mass line, there is a one-sided stress on telling — in patronizing ways reminiscent of Christian evangelizing. As if communist analysis in convoluted detail will sprout a revolutionary movement with real social weight. Here the fetish of the word morphs into the fetish of the leader. It tries to “vault over” the complicated processes by which people really decide what to think and how to act.

Re-reading documents from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I noticed again how Mao believes people develop consciousness and sophistication in the course of political struggle. One key document announces: “Let the masses educate themselves in the movement.” [35] People learn to appreciate and apply the ideology of revolution and communism in the course of political struggle.

This is in contrast to Avakian’s linear view of first theory and ideology, and then mass organization:

“It is important to grasp this point that the need for radical change in society gets called forth in the superstructure — in the thinking of people, and then in the political organization of people. People form groups, they form parties with programs and objectives which reflect — reflect not in a reductionist, linear and one-to-one sense, but reflect ultimately — what’s going on in the basic relations in society, in terms, most fundamentally, of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This gets reflected more or less consciously in people’s thinking and then in their political organization.” [36]

This linear view is embodied in the RCP’s current linear tactics: First study Avakian, then go tell people about it, then expect them to congeal as organization on that basis.

However, the ripening of a revolutionary people is in many ways an objective process. For example: The civil rights generation of African American activists were quite organized, while deeply wedded to bourgeois-democratic illusions about integration and voting. They became revolutionized by their practical experiences and by events that formed the larger context for that work.

Such moments of mass political experience cry out for revolutionary communist activity, so that strands of oppositional and revolutionary sentiments actually go over to communist consciousness and serious preparation.

I believe we may be entering such a radicalization period among immigrant workers in the U.S. — who come here as refugees of the larger “planet of slums.” [37] I hope we see such a period emerge among Black youth in the wake of Katrina and the Jena events.

We need to be very sensitive to such potential radicalization, and poised to respond with energy and strategic appreciation. We need to reclaim the understanding that we are responsible for organizing a specific political revolution for socialism in a specific country (as part of a world process). We need to build a base deep among the oppressed and proletarian. We need to persevere in bringing forward young advanced proletarians as communist political cadre and leaders of society generally. We need an inspiringly multinational movement that has deep thinking on the current conditions facing oppressed nationality communities and lives-and-breathes the struggle against racism and white supremacy. We need to create a visible, attractive, accessible revolutionary communist pole at every step of this process — whose solution of socialist revolution makes sense in a living way to growing numbers of people. We need a militant movement that dares light the sky in combative ways that stir the heart — not a risk-adverse trend that nervously jumps at shadows. And we have to do our work, wisely and well, in ways that protect the party’s links to the masses of people, not merely its crucial inner core.

And each part of that last paragraph stands in sharp contrast to the road the RCP has now taken.

Let’s grapple together again over how to actually build a base for revolutionary politics deep among the oppressed, learning from the positive and negative experiences of the past.

Letter 4: Truth, Practice and a Confession of Poverty/ by Mike Ely

“From the time of Conquer the World [38] [CTW], I have been bringing forward an epistemological rupture with a lot of the history of the ICM [International Communist Movement], including China and the GPCR [Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution], which had this thing arguing that there is such a thing as proletarian truth and bourgeois truth — this was in a major circular put out by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. In some polemics we wrote around the coup in China, we uncritically echoed this. Later on, we criticized ourselves for that. This rupture actually began with CTW. CTW was an epistemological break — we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things, etc. — a whole approach of interrogating our whole history. That’s why it was taken as a breath of fresh air by some, while other people hated it, saying it reduced the history of the international communist movement and our banner of communism to a ‘tattered flag’ — which was not the point at all.” Bob Avakian, 2004 [39]

“The dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge places practice in the primary position, holding that human knowledge can in no way be separated from practice and repudiating all the erroneous theories which deny the importance of practice or separate knowledge from practice. Thus Lenin said, ‘Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also of immediate actuality.’” Mao Tsetung, 1937 [40]

There are major philosophical questions of truth and reality that communists urgently need to take up. Avakian sniffs at some of them and papers over others.

This is not the place to give these larger questions the depth and freshness they deserve. And I am not the writer to draw those threads together. That must be one of our collective projects-to-come. The best I can offer are the following tentative thoughts on Avakian’s philosophical claims.

A Thought Experiment

Step into a room full of geologists or working philosophers, and announce “Our leader Bob Avakian has made a major epistemological break. He says we have to go for the truth, rather than hiding things.”

Would anyone be impressed?

The need for an honest pursuit of truth is pretty old news to most thinking people. So is Avakian’s other argument that we should engage the arguments of opponents and independent thinkers in depth — with an intention of learning from them in the course of our own work. [41]
When Louis Althusser first analyzed Marx’s epistemological break, he compared this leap in historical understanding to the breaks made by Galileo in physics, Lavoisier in chemistry, Darwin and Mendel in biology and so on. [42] Each of these breaks with medieval idealism split society’s thinking into before-and-after — and that philosophical and scientific process, of pioneering a materialist struggle for truth, is now hundreds of years old.

Avakian’s epistemological rupture is far more limited. It is conceived only as a “rupture with a lot of the history of the whole ICM.” And in that narrow framework, it has value. We should be fans of Conquer the World. It opened doors toward a materialist examination of the history of communism by communists.

But this attempted rupture within MLM is hardly a breath-taking innovation for how larger society thinks. It is really a very late plea for Maoism to race to catch up with a basic scientific approach to truth that is casually assumed in many spheres of investigation.
Avakian’s break is actually banal wherever serious research and debate goes on — i.e., wherever thinking is not dominated by religious dogma, the lying of politicians, or the bully habits of paid hacks. The fact that his defense of truth may be shocking and disquieting among Maoists is not proof of its profundity. It is (unfortunately) a confession of the poverty within that Maoist movement.

There is real glory and continuing value to Maoism, as a body of thought and as a movement for liberation. As a distinct international trend, it was born during the 1960s in raging opposition to both the global rampages of the U.S. and the suffocating gray norms of the Soviet Union. Maoism proclaimed “It is right to rebel against reactionaries,” and gave new life to the revolutionary dream. It said “Serve the People,” and promised that no one (not even the communist vanguard) would be above the interrogations of the people. A loose global current congealed from many eclectic streams, and it included many of the world’s most serious revolutionaries. There have been important and heroic attempts at power — in Turkey, Iran, India, the Philippines, Peru, Nepal and more. There were important revolutionary movements of 1968 that included Maoists in France, Germany, Italy and more. There was real ferment around the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the League of

Revolutionary Black Workers, and then at times around the RCP in the U.S.

But since Mao died in 1976, this Maoist movement has not been a fertile nursery of daring analyses and concepts. A mud streak has run through it. Even its best forces often cling to legitimizing orthodoxies, icons, and formulations. The popularization of largely-correct verdicts often replaces the high road of scientific theory — allowing Marxism itself to appear pat, simple and complete. Dogmatic thinking nurtures both self-delusion and triumphalism. In the name of taking established truths to the people, revolutionary communists have often cut themselves off from the new facts and creative thinking of our times.

We need to break with that fiercely, and seek out the others who agree.

Revolutionary communists have often cut themselves off from the new facts and creative thinking of our times.

In a cloistered universe, Avakian’s ruptures in inherited ideologies can appear as a radical break. But measured by our tasks, it hasn’t gone nearly far enough.

The issue facing our movement is not so much “are we for truth?” The issue is much more “what is true and what isn’t?” It involves the problem of bridging the limited and prejudiced vantage point of each observer, and collectively getting into what is real. It is the measure of theories, established verdicts and relative truths against objective truth.

A Denigration of Practice

In Avakian’s hands, theory is teased far away from practice. [43] And the result of this methodological denigration of practice is (ultimately) new strains of subjective idealism. [44]

Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach starts by making exactly this point: “The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.”

A persistent example of this denigration of practice is the marked dilettantism of Avakian’s analysis. Avakian is an innovative and provocative thinker, but his expositions are often brainstorms masquerading as science. They often involve his commentary on a bookshelf of popular commentators and typically use a revealing quote or sometimes a close textual read of those commentators as a substitute for real research. This is fine for agitation and public argumentation. It is fine for running out preliminary ideas and tentative hypotheses. However it is not sufficient for creation and confirmation of the underlying analysis itself. The necessary research (and general summation of practice) does not need to be visible. It can be done by others testing preliminary theses. But it does need to exist and it does need to be done in a critical (and even skeptical) spirit. [45]

Brainstorms masquerading as science.

Avakian argues for “doing the work” of serious research and engagement with others. He denounces complacency and “the moronization” of his own followers. Here, as in so many places, his own break is incomplete. The model he demonstrates continues the old problems in new idiosyncratic forms.

Take, for example, the RCP’s conclusion that there is a concerted rush toward fascist theocracy that is threatening a deep social schism (even perhaps literally “civil war”) between thinking people and theocrats within the U.S. Go look at the limited and fragmentary work which underlies that claim — not just underlying the public argumentation, but the analysis itself.

Another example: Everyone knows that understanding capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union is important. But how can a movement claim to have a real analysis of those events without working up a credible materialist history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s? How is it possible to assess the Stalin years (with all their complexity, heroism and horror) without having any real analysis of the struggles of the 1930s, including the events called “the purges” [46] in the late thirties? And how can a party claim to “Set the Record Straight” if it makes no effort to learn from the new scholarship and argumentation based on the mountains of information contained in the now-opened Soviet archives? How can we more deeply sum up either the revolution or the counter-revolution in China without a credible materialist history of major events like the Great Leap Forward or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?

Research doesn’t need to be visible. But it does need to exist.

When Avakian suggests taking a new look at the GPCR, he means retooling past summations in light of his new theoretical conclusions. There has been very little serious revisiting the actual events and problems in light of new debates and new information. [47]
Avakian exhibits a great precision of formulation but a real lack of rigor in research compared to most serious intellectual work conducted outside his movement. [48]

Hyping the objectivity of relative truths

Dogmatism among communists willfully ignores objective reality and its complexity. That is a problem Avakian calls out. Dogmatism among communists also exaggerates the objective nature of relative truth. That is a problem Avakian aggressively perpetuates (in the name of fighting relativism). [49]

There is objective truth meaning truth that objectively exists — i.e., that corresponds to reality independent of the thoughts of humans. For example it is objectively true that the earth revolves around the sun, and this was objectively true for billions of years before any humans subjectively realized it was true. It was even objectively true before there were humans.

But our ideas emerge from “individual human beings with their extremely limited thought.” [50] The truth is not just “out there” like a ripened fruit waiting to be plucked and delivered whole. What we have available to us are relative truths, which only approximate absolute truth through protracted collective work, where humans develop theories, test and refine them.

In a recent piece, Avakian quotes Mao’s On Practice:

“Marxists recognize that in the absolute and general process of the development of the universe, the development of each particular process is relative, and that hence, in the endless flow of absolute truth, man’s knowledge of a particular process at any given stage of development is only relative truth.”

Right after quoting this, Avakian adds: “It is relative truth, but it is truth.” [51]
Avakian acknowledges the existence of relative truth, but his addition here pooh-poohs Mao’s point. And it deliberately downplays all the ways relative truth divides into two — into both truth and falsehood. The relationships between our relative truths and reality are dynamic, contradictory and often painfully tenuous.

Relativism incorrectly asserts that humans are unable to distinguish between true and false, progressive and reactionary. Materialist dialectics however insists that we can, through work and struggle, determine true things about reality, but that the truths we uncover remain inherently partial and relative compared to the full and absolute truth about objective reality. If we really grasp that, we see the importance of constantly identifying errors and contradictions in our current thinking.

Passionate defense of objective truth becomes the front-end for overstating the correctness of flawed theories.
The inherent contradictions of relative truth are the reason communists need to place great importance on critical thinking, collective vetting, public self-interrogation and the application of the mass line. It takes a great deal of collective struggle and practice to advance human knowledge through the necessary spirals from lower to higher, from somewhat correct to more correct.

The RCP advocates returning complexity to communist analysis, but then, all too often leaches complexity from its own discussion. Here, the real, nagging, structural problems and controversies surrounding the development of correct understandings are minimized. With Avakian’s method and approach, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth are pancaked flat, producing a simplified set of ideological assertions.
Put another way: The actual thing, the perception of that thing, the latest conception arising from perceptions, and the latest presentation of that concept are effectively muddled. [52]

It creates a situation where the RCP can give lip service to critical thinking and yet promote a logic of close-minded zealotry.
At the end, a passionate-sounding defense of objective truth becomes the front-end for overstating the correctness of Avakian’s own current, partial and often flawed set of working assumptions. Supporters of the RCP typically end up promoting a reductionist package: (1) There is the truth, (2) it corresponds to objective reality and (3) “Avakian knows the way out.”

About the Class Struggle Over Truth

Avakian describes how he views truth entering the class struggle:

“…so long as society is divided into classes, anything that is learned will become part of the class struggle in many different ways… The truth doesn’t have a social content in that sense. It just objectively exists. But knowing the truth (or approximating the truth) is important in the same way beauty is important (even while people’s differing class viewpoints will lead them to have different conceptions, or notions, about what beauty is and what is and is not beautiful). And there is this process, as I was speaking to earlier — how truths enter into the class struggle in a very non-reductionist way.” [53]

Let’s deal with how this describes the way truths “enter into the class struggle.”

This view underestimates the ways class struggle is involved in how relative truth is learned. Truth doesn’t suddenly “enter” the class struggle — because we discover truth through a social process, our knowledge of truth never exists in a realm unmarked by class struggle. Avakian’s comments display a lack of appreciation (actually a denial) of the problem of observer (and of human observers’ inherent limitations and subjectivities).

The real existing social process of uncovering and refining relative truths does not start with a classless inventory of data or a classless connecting of dots to make concepts. There is not a moment when we all watch those new truths cruise into the choppy waters of social controversy.

Complex truths (and in particular complex social truths) are marked by struggle at each point in their existence: including in their whole process of conception and elaboration, in their struggle for acceptance, in the ways they are popularized, in the way their social implications are portrayed, and in the struggle over their eventual replacement by newer and more correct concepts. And such struggle — which takes philosophical, ideological and political forms — is inherently entwined with the larger class struggle raging over the direction and nature of society itself.

I can think of three ways Avakian’s error manifests itself:

First, there is the marked lack of appreciation by Avakian of his own subjective limitations and of the relative nature of his attempts at truth.
Second, there is a one-sided overestimation by the RCP of the degree to which scientific work in bourgeois society spontaneously approximates materialist dialectics. [54] The RCP has downplayed the differences that separate materialist dialectics from the many shades of positivism and empiricism in modern science. This overestimation of spontaneous materialist dialectics has both political and philosophical implications for the RCP — especially given the new strategic prominence the RCP now gives those strata who “work with ideas.” [55]
A third manifestation is Avakian’s rejection of “class truth.” Some of this is hard to unravel since Avakian’s sketchy polemics treat the concepts of “class truth,” “political truth” and “truth as an organizing principle”– as virtually equivalent, and implies that they all imply a denial (or deceitful ignoring) of objective reality. Avakian makes no critical references to Lenin’s Materialism and Empiro-Criticism or Mao’s On Practice or Engels’ Anti-Duhring — so we are left without any clear sense of what, precisely, his break is.
However, in fact, the communist notion of class truth is not “whatever we believe is true, whatever the bourgeoisie believes is not.” Nor is it “we create our reality by declaring our truths, while the bourgeoisie creates its reality through its truths.” Nor is it “whatever serves our cause is true, whatever doesn’t serve our cause should be treated as untrue.”

Avakian criticizes the May 16th circular, which was an opening shot of the GPCR. It says:

“Just when we began the counter-offensive against the wild attacks of the bourgeoisie, the authors of the Report raised the slogan: ‘Everyone is equal before the truth.’ This is a bourgeois slogan. Completely negating the class nature of truth, they use this slogan to protect the bourgeoisie and oppose the proletariat, oppose Marxism-Leninism and oppose Mao Tsetung Thought.” [56]
An article from Peking Review’s revolutionary days writes,

“Truth has a class character. There have never been truths commonly regarded as ‘indisputable’ by all classes in the field of social science.” [57]

Why is that wrong?

Is Lenin so wrong when he writes,

“It is one of our basic tasks to contrapose our own truth to bourgeois ‘truth,’ and win its recognition.” [58]
Or Alain Badiou, when he writes,

“Ultimately, we should affirm that the same abstract description of facts by no means leads to the same mode of thinking, when it operates under different political axioms.” [59]

On the Re-Envisioning of Socialist Transition

All of these philosophical problems bubble up in Avakian’s re-envisioning of socialism and communism — the underestimation of practice, the overestimation of the objective character of tentative theories, a dilettantism of historical summation, and the underestimation of class struggle in the fight for truth. There is a lot of assertion about the future with little appreciation of the ways that unanticipated particularities in the future will necessarily shape possibilities and policy. And again, much of this is hard to pin down because of the sketchiness of Avakian’s presentation and the incomplete articulation of his break with Mao. All this will need a more extensive exploration in its own right.

However, for now: the struggle to advance to communism is presented (by Avakian) as a highly ideological process, where intellectual contestations over truth and the allowing of debate (important though those two things are) one-sidedly overshadow the need for waves of mass struggle against old ways, old ideas and capitalist roaders in high places. And once again, Avakian does not correctly understand how the needed transformations of world outlook (among the masses generally) are connected to that class struggle.

Avakian raises the importance of holding onto revolutionary power firmly, while risking a lot to allow space for ferment, criticism and debate. [60] His is a model of a state with key power levers (army, top courts, foreign policy) firmly in the hands of a single vanguard party that simultaneously encourages “vibrant debate and dissent.” Avakian raises a whole subsidiary set of issues regarding the rule of law under socialism, contested elections and the ruling party’s approach to criticisms. He starts a needed polemic against the way that the communist movement has often viewed intellectuals (and really anyone who thinks) as “problem people.” He questions the naïve notion that the problems of previous socialism can be solved by institutionalizing more democracy of various kinds. [61] And Avakian explores the historic problem of enabling the masses of people to become (more and more) a decisive part of the “we” that rules during the socialist transition period.

To all of this one can say: So far so good. Virtually everyone recognizes that a major dilemma of earlier socialism was that there was a waning of political liveliness and popular support, and a difficulty rallying mass revolutionary activity for new advances toward communism.

But if we are going to deal with all this, let’s get real as well as “visionary.”

Once again, important questions are raised, and interesting tentative conclusions are put forward — that deserve more critical examination than are allowed around his party.

Avakian’s denigration of practice appears here in at least three ways:

First, there is an overestimation of how fully the theoretical problems of transition can be solved isolated from new practice in seizing, holding and wielding state power. It defies the insights of materialist dialectics (and of communist epistemology) to think anyone can make an overarching new “re-envisioning” solely by mulling over the bones of past revolutions, or that the nagging world historic problems of socialist transition can be pre-solved in some definitive and decisive way.

Mao started developing a critique of Stalin’s socialism quite early in his revolution. He fought to forge a new path (starting with the “Yenan Way” before victory, and then increasingly after coming to power in 1949). But his transition from critique to a new eveloped-and-developing synthesis required the practical experiences of actually building socialism (including both victories and failures): land reform, implementation of the Soviet industrialization model, the Great Leap Forward, Socialist Education campaigns, and then the GPCR.

Think of the living process, methodology and epistemology concentrated in Mao’s famous remark:

“In the past we waged struggles in rural areas, in factories, in the cultural field, and we carried out the socialist education movement. But all this failed to solve the problem because we did not find a form, a method, to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way and from below.” [62]

Mao’s theoretical understanding of socialism and his alternative road developed in the course of those storms of class struggle — in the practice of China taking the socialist road and the Soviet Union taking the capitalist road. Mao’s breakthroughs could only have been developed that way. History has given us many critiques of Stalin’s socialism — but Mao’s is unique in its profundity and materialism in part because it is rooted in (and extracted from) the vast practice of our second great revolution.

New theoretical solutions require a deep summation of the past — but also the living practice of actually going through the transition anew (with all the real testing, new errors, and new innovations that this makes possible).

The RCP has always leaned too far in its assumptions of what can be known apart from practice. Two cautionary examples are its past declarations that homosexuality would be “eliminated” under socialism, and its current declarations that it can know (from afar) which transitions to power are possible in Nepal and which are not. The whole elaborate structure of future society that Avakian has constructed in his mind is a creation and culmination of that mistaken methodology.

Second, there is an overestimation of how much the nagging practical problems of socialist transition can be solved now, ahead of time. It is as if adopting Avakian’s approaches like “solid core with a lot of elasticity” now is crucial (for all communists worldwide) to avoid the previous dynamics that plagued socialism in China and the USSR. In fact many stubborn problems of the actual transition to communism and the material basis for solving them emerge from the actual class struggle (from the practice!) of the particular socialist transition, and can’t simply be solved ahead of time.

Certainly the future revolutionary movement must adopt far better methods of learning from and working with people than communists (including the RCP) have historically employed. And yes, improvements now in the grasp of mass line can greatly improve the capacity and nature of that movement which ultimately seizes power.

But revolutions are always (by their nature) on the brink of being “drawn and quartered.” This is not (as Avakian suggests) something brought on by the decisions and choices of revolutionaries. It is not the opening of doors that brings the revolution to an abyss, but the abyss that has historically made it so hard to open the doors. [63] And those problems can be anticipated but not solved apart from the concrete dilemmas of the actual process.

Third, Avakian injects an idealist element into the RCP’s politics when he claims that his “re-envisioning” is at the center of his synthesis. This “enriched What is to be Done-ism” funnels massive energy into questions of the future ultimate transition to communism (like the controversies over “crossing the narrow horizon of bourgeois right” [64] ). This method denies the specificity of politics at each necessary stage of revolutionary practice.

Where are the poets, novelists, comics, songs, films, jazz riffs inspired by a communist outlook?

It is extremely important to grapple, theoretically and practically, with the problems of socialism and capitalist restoration. It is extremely important to correctly sum up the experiences of the 20th century and make those insights known broadly among the people. But there is an idealist air of classic utopian socialism about Avakian’s work on this: as if we can show people how to act now by fleshing out fully (from our current imaginings) details the future society must adopt.

On one hand, this involves a wrong understanding of class struggle under socialism. And on the other hand, this approach directs the attention of the party and the masses now aggressively toward issues of “re-envisioned” communism, leaving many questions of this moment’s struggle for socialism unexamined and undiscussed.

Take the theoretical speculation made on the future transition to communism, and compare it to the glaring poverty of theoretical work that has been devoted to many other core problems of the specific revolution we need to take responsibility for: on the struggle to create a revolutionary base, on deindustrialization and the situation of African American people, on the entwining of the revolutionary processes across North America, and a dozen other ignored questions. Why does a movement that emerged from the 1960s have such a muffled voice when it comes to society’s raging controversies over ecology and sexuality?

Let’s go a step further using a specific example: Where are the theories of culture, the literary criticism or even discussion of television that any real revolutionary movement would need? Where is our Yenan Forum [65] for this generation’s multimedia world? Where are the works (or even serious commentary) on film, philosophy, geology, geography, linguistics, physics, and more? Where is any analysis or visionary exploitation of the Internet and all the dizzying opportunity in the new media?

This lack of theory and commentary connects with real shortcomings in practice. As we wonder why there are no Kreuzbergs in the U.S., we also have to ask: Where are the poets, the novelists, the beloved songs, the shocking films, the cartoons, the jazz riffs inspired by a revolutionary communist outlook? Where are the video game designers? How has the RCP trained, squandered or dissuaded the artists who came to it or who emerged within its ranks or who are just “out there” working in society?

There, undeniably, are a few people, projects and theoretical works that could be listed in answer to all this, but what does it say that there are so painfully few?

Reality is a Tough Judge

You can hide problems using info diets. But the truth will out.

Meanwhile, there is that glaring disconnect between all this talk of “wild and wooly” debate in a “re-envisioned” future society and this party’s current grim press for ideological singularity.

Who could emerge from this party’s training prepared (or inclined) to creatively lead in the riptides of mass debate that will accompany any real revolutionary process or future socialist society?

In the end, the RCP’s promises of fresh materialist analysis are not realized. The past remains heavily mythologized, the present is crudely simplified and hyped, and the newly “re-envisioned” future serves as justification for idealist methods.

The fetish of the leader is rooted in the fetish of the word. The fetish of the word is the platform for the promotion of the speaking man. These problems really are epistemological.

This body of work displays a clear streak of subjective idealism — a celebration of will, a distance from practice, and a marriage between the self and the idea. The compulsive self-referencing of Avakian’s work (that everyone finds so odd) is the result of seeking to painstakingly situate his every new theoretical remark within the grid of his OWN previous body of work — not mainly within frameworks of his audiences or the rich explorations others make around us.

Reality is a tough judge: You can run on vapors. You can hide problems using denial and info diets. But in the end, the truth will come out. That was true for Lysenko. [66] It was true for the RCP’s faulty 1980s predictions of “world war or revolution.” It is true when the preachers around us swear “we live in the end times.”

Let’s critically re-visit On Practice together. Let’s critically consider what comrades in the international communist movement are saying philosophically. Then let’s open it up and re-find our path.

“Truth is good for the proletariat. I don’t mean that in a narrow way. Truth is good for the political struggle, yes — the more that is understood about reality, the more favorable it will be strategically for the proletariat and its revolutionary objectives. But there is a whole thing being missed if truth is approached in a narrow and utilitarian way. If somebody discovers something about the big bang, that will be interesting and exciting. Truths are important just for what they are, because that’s the kind of world we want to get to. For what they are. Human beings do need to be amazed. You don’t need religion to realize or appreciate that. In the motion of the material world and the interaction of human beings with the rest of reality, mysteries get resolved and new mysteries emerge. Why wouldn’t someone with broadness of mind be interested in questions of cosmology in their own right? (Cosmology refers to the science and philosophy of the origins and development of the universe.) On the other hand, in another dimension, so long as society is divided into classes, anything that is learned will become part of the class struggle in many different ways, including in the dimension of the proletariat knowing the world more profoundly to change it more profoundly…. The truth is important to the proletariat in two senses — or should be. One, it is important in the same way that beauty is important, or should be important. Yes, as opposed to the truth, different people do have different social viewpoints on what is beautiful. The truth doesn’t have a social content in that sense. It just objectively exists. But knowing the truth (or approximating the truth) is important in the same way beauty is important (even while people’s differing class viewpoints will lead them to have different conceptions, or notions, about what beauty is and what is and is not beautiful). And there is this process, as I was speaking to earlier — how truths enter into the class struggle in a very non-reductionist way.” (“Intoxicated with the Truth,” Revolution 9, July 24, 2005, revcom.us)

[54] Ardea Skybreak’s recent book on evolution and creationism presents the RCP’s current thinking on science. In one significant footnote she wrote:

“In fact, the method of dialectical and historical materialism is just as applicable to the natural sciences as to the social sciences. While most working scientists today would not acknowledge this, either because of a lack of familiarity with some of the terms involved (dialectics in particular) and/or prejudice against dialectical and historical materialism’s Marxist-communist connotations, it is objectively the case that what most groundbreaking scientists actually do — the way they pose questions, structure research projects and analyze data — especially in the historical sciences (such as evolutionary biology, paleontology, anthropology, astronomy, etc.), reflects, of necessity, important aspects of dialectical and historical materialism, even though most scientists today apply this somewhat unconsciously, and not consistently and systematically, and in general think of what they are doing as simply applying ‘the modern scientific method.’” (The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism – Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters, Chapter 8, footnote 13, 2006,insight-press.com.)

Scientists are clearly dealing with material reality in their work, and generally apply forms of materialism (at least in their narrow areas of expertise). But this highly qualified statement by Skybreak avoids the fact that there is sharp class struggle over philosophy and ideology raging around all scientific processes of discovery – and there always has been. Many “ground breaking” scientists (the names Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Stephen Jay Gould come to mind) have real and important differences with materialist dialectics. It is wrong (and more than a little condescending) to chalk this up to “lack of familiarity” or “prejudice” (including for the three I just mentioned, who were quite acquainted with communist thinking). In fact there are real controversies and differences here, including philosophical insights uncovered by non-communist scientists that communists should learn from. Gould’s work, for example, raises important challenges to entrenched linear assumptions about progress in nature and society.

Letter 5: Particularities of Christians and Fascists/by Mike Ely

During a Catholic mass held at county fairgrounds in North Carolina as speakers called for the legalization of undocumented workers.

The RCP has given prominence to Avakian’s atheist polemics against religion. These are important topics. There needs to be a lively militant atheist-materialist pole raised among the people and in the fight against political reaction. This is after all a highly religious country, and this is a political moment when fascist forces of the Religious Right have been seizing positions of power.

However, Avakian’s analyses of religion have a distant, schematic, and reductionist quality. These works show little interest in the specific social and historic roots of people’s religious faith — and why particular religions have such power among particular communities. There is little appreciation of the complexity, sophistication and diversity of what people actually believe. And quite frankly there is little respect for the people and little real understanding of why many believe — or why some don’t. [67]

Little respect for the people. Little appreciation of what they believe and why they believe it.

The problem is methodology: As Avakian dissects Christian fundamentalism and the “Christian Fascist” political movements, you can’t shake the feeling that it is done without really knowing the people or their beliefs. I don’t mean just personally knowing — but the deeper scientific sense of knowing. There is a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice that is largely missing here.

For one thing, you can’t actually understand people and religious movements (not even “fundamentalists”) by relying so heavily ona close textual read of their holy scriptures. And a communist understanding of political fundamentalism can’t be developed by just reworking lots of secular-liberal exposés of theocratic political trends. You can’t speculate that a Christian theocratic political order is coming without studying the real historically-specific political obstacles to both centralized fascist power and the establishment of state religion.

I spent most of the 1970s among West Virginia coalminers who (as most people know) include many born-again Christians. [68] This is personal experience, admittedly from quite a few years ago. But it was experience and it has left me with a sense of the living contradictions surrounding religion and the cultural wars.

Here is Avakian on the causes of religion:

“…religious notions don’t appear out of, or arise out of, the mist or out of nowhere, but of course have their roots, historically, in the ignorance, the lack of knowledge, of human beings in early society; but they have been carried forward, codified and institutionalized by ruling classes throughout the ages as part of enforcing their rule.” [69]

This view attributes religion to a mix of ancient ignorance plus the later ruling class manipulations. It profoundly underestimates how deeply religious faith is rooted in the needs and desperations of people’s existence. Faith and religious community are rooted in the search for consolation and meaning.

Those religious impulses are then shaped by very specific historical experiences and simultaneously by the ideological operatives of various classes in society (including, but certainly not limited to, the ideologues of the ruling classes).

To take one example: The adoption of Christianity by enslaved African people in America was not just the result of enforced ignorance or the forced indoctrination by Christian slave-owners (though both were involved). The mass conversion of slaves to Christianity happened as part of larger religious movements that swept across the U.S., sometimes in the face of resistance from their immediate owners. In the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s, African slaves and freemen flocked to camp meetings held by traveling white Baptist and Methodist preachers, some of whom were convinced of the humanity of the slaves (a then-radical idea) and of the slaves’ subsequent need for salvation. As they embraced Christianity and as they established churches, Black people shaped and reshaped Christian worship — in both form and content — marking it with their dreams and accommodations and, in some moments, creating a gospel of escape or emancipation.

The defining elements of Christianity were certainly codified over centuries by ruling class ideologues. Many core messages Black people received via Christianity reinforced and justified oppression. The Christ of the Bible preaches “turn the other cheek” to the oppressed. Slaves were told that African people were “the descendants of Ham,” condemned to be “servant of servants.” [70]

But at the same time, the “spirit-filled” worship and music of plantation churches was carried over from West African cultures and they developed through the creative work of once-African people. The Christian fervor by many African American people over the last two hundred years is rooted not mainly in the imposition of “false consciousness” from without, but in a deep need for ecstatic relief and mutual consolation in a horrific world.

Avakian often points out (correctly) that science can satisfy the human need for “awe and wonder.” But religion is not just born from that outward-looking desire for context and amazement — but often in the painful inner despair of loss and powerlessness.

Marx understood this and his assessment is a sharp contrast to Avakian’s:

“The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” [71]

I think back on many intense discussions with fundamentalist believers — where I would dig into the absurdity of a loving God allowing innocents to suffer, or into the scientific absurdities of Genesis. While I was thinking I had “really pinned them down,” my friends often turned to me in exasperation to say, “Look, this is really not the issue. I feel Jesus as a living, healing, guiding presence in my heart.”
In fact the attraction of born-again Christianity includes an ecstatic “personal relationship” — not just the certitude of absolute biblical truth and attraction of reactionary morality in a world of “turbocapitalism.” [72] And getting at that personal attachment requires upholding Marx’s dialectical materialism over Avakian’s superficial rationalism.

You can undermine brittle dogmatic religions by using their inconsistencies. You can pry some individuals over toward communistic atheism that way. But you really can’t touch the potency of religion if you don’t appreciate the source of its influence.

You can’t challenge Christian morality by crudely equating it with venality — with Old Testament “horrors” or the ugliest “traditional values.” You also have to deal (in truly dialectical ways) with Jesus’ admonitions to “love your brother” and “turn the other cheek.” You have to deal with grace, redemption, forgiveness, reconciliation, charity and hope for blessings — in other words, you have to all-sidedly deal (critically!) with what actually attracts people to Christian teachings.

Further: Religions are not just scientifically “wrong” world outlooks — but are also the rituals, traditions and cultures through which people identify themselves with historically constituted communities. Look at the stubborn Catholicism of many Irish people or the tenacious Judaism among dispersed Jewish people — who are often not particularly drawn to the supernatural.

There are no gods who hear our muffled cries. No one should expect divine blessings or miracles. The meek will not inherit the earth. But that doesn’t mean religion is simply self-deception or that communities of people don’t reap real benefits by organizing themselves into congregations.

No gods hear our muffled cries. But religion is not simply self-deception.

To return to my previous example: Can anyone hope to deal with the gap separating communism from the radical sections of Black people without appreciating the reasons why many African American people are so deeply attached to their churches and faiths?

Surely we have to understand the historic institutional role of Black churches, as economic support, as a political voice for a voiceless community, and even as the wellspring of world-changing music. Yes, those churches have been a force for accommodation and even reactionary purposes. But how can we evaluate all this if we don’t understand that religion (including the Black church) has had progressive and even revolutionary currents all through history. Let’s understand well the armed preacher Thomas Münzer [73] , the slaves’ prophet Nat Turner [74] , the last Puritan John Brown, and the still-beloved Sheik Bedreddin. [75]

The RCP has recently promoted the observation that “The Bible Belt is the lynching belt” — to suggest that violent racism is one of fundamentalist Christianity’s bedrock “traditional values.” But this approach lacks a sense of both history and dialectics: Christianity of the southern Bible Belt is not just the religion of the lynch mob — but also of the lynched. This is because the Bible Belt and the lynching belt is centered on the Black Belt — the former plantation areas of the deep South (what Black people called “the soil of our suffering”), a place where two distinct nations and national cultures cohabited in gruesome ways. Christianity there includes the African American churches.
Quite a few Black churches uphold some reactionary social values (including most recently in the controversies over abortion and same sex marriage). However, the gospel of the African American churches is obviously not marked by the “traditional value” of white supremacy. They have often interpreted the story of Jesus to explain, validate and inspire their own struggle for survival (including against the horrible threat and impact of lynching). [76]

Taking Claims of Fundamentalists Literally

Part of the problem with the RCP’s current approach is the fetish of the word — here taking the form of overestimating the value of textual readings. When fundamentalists say that they take the Bible literally, a dialectical materialist can’t take that statement literally. [77]
Sometimes secular people read the barbaric punishments advocated by the Old Testament and assume that fundamentalists “must” uphold this or else disavow the Bible. This is exactly what Avakian teaches. [78]

But in fact, many fundamentalists explain that (in their actual theology) there were different “covenants” with God — including a Mosaic Covenant (in the Old Testament) that was then replaced by a New Covenant brought by Jesus (in the New Testament). They often uphold some passages and insights of the Old Testament (like the Ten Commandments), but basically are not “bound” by its details or general moral tone.

In other words, conservative Christians have, long ago, cobbled together various theological ways of dealing with the contradictions and barbarism of the Old Testament. There is a long-standing conflict between that Christian fringe which literally believes in stoning people to death, and the broader ranks of fundamentalists who think those folks are nuts (even while they often condemn sex outside marriage in their own ways).

Their world is NOT rocked when the RCP naively points out that the Old Testament calls for stoning sinners. “After all,” people would explain to me, “Jesus stopped the stoning of the adulterous woman and said ‘let those without sin cast the first stone.’” [79]

With a few exceptions, the RCP ignores such distinctions — and at the street level, RCP activists (following Revolution newspaper [80] ) imply that executing gay people or disobedient women must be the program of the Religious Right today (and even of fundamentalists generally) because (after all) “that’s what the Bible says.” But it is wrong to functionally ignore the complex shades and divisions of faith. [81] You can’t act like fundamentalists (or even the politically active ones) are inherently or generally inclined toward literal theocracy [82] or (at the same time) imply that fundamentalists are essentially the only real Christians because of their literalism.

To actually understand the political programs (and shades of program) among the Religious Right forces (or anyone else), you have to do some real work of investigation. And you can’t just analyze the text of their programs — you have to analyze their actual living political movement, and what its driving contradictions are (which in real politics often lead in directions quite different from stated intentions.)
To understand the Religious Right, you have to do more than a close read of their Bible and a few public statements.

Related example: Over many years of writing about elections for Revolution and the Revolutionary Worker, I was often amazed by how literally some within the RCP assumed that the stated program of bourgeois politicians represented what they actually intended to do. I sometimes thought, “This party is the only place in society where the statements of lying politicians are actually believed.” Again: the fetish of the word leads to overestimating the analytic value of close textual reading.

It is certainly true that some powerful ruling class circles have deliberately trained, financed, promoted and empowered extremely reactionary Christian fundamentalist forces. In many ways that process has reshaped these forces and even reworked their theology. It is true that the Religious Right has a common program: they generally want to “bring religion back into the public square,” erase the separation of church and state, funnel tax money into their ministries, replace state social programs with church programs, and promote vicious reactionary values in opposition to the ‘60s values, science and progressive thinking. It is true that one piece of that movement literally wants a fascist Christian theocracy. All of that is true, dangerous and quite alarming.

But it is a huge leap to claim that a Christian theocracy is literally in the works, or that no other organized force has comparable political initiative within the ruling “pyramid”: [83]

“Straight up — Bush and his people aren’t just ordinary Republicans. And they’re not ordinary Christians either. They are Christian Fascists — dangerous fanatics who aim to make the U.S. a religious dictatorship and to force this upon the world. If they get their way — and they are very far along the road to getting it — society will be plunged into a high-tech Dark Ages.” [84]

“…there will in fact be no ‘pendulum swing,’ back to ‘the center’ of bourgeois politics and bourgeois rule… Where do you see the forces who are going to do even that — are you looking to the ‘liberals’ among the powers-that-be, the ‘liberal’ imperialists? Sorry, but let’s be real!” [85]
Here is one of those places where a necessary substratum of research, investigation and the summation of political practice is missing.
You want to put forward an analysis of trends toward fascism in the U.S.? You need to analyze their actual movements (inside and outside the ruling class), their history, sharp internal contradictions, and what they would actually have to knock down (not just ideologically, but institutionally, legally, structurally and politically). We would also have to hear and debate, in its own right, the underlying theory of fascism. [86]

In some ways, the RCP’s analyses lack a living sense of history — in ways too typical of American political thought generally. Yes, we should be outraged that evolution has been under attack in some target school districts and that it is being widely deemphasized in biology textbooks — but to understand this (to contextualize it) we need a historical perspective to this long struggle over evolution. Yes, we should be outraged that a chunk of the Republican Party thinks the Democrats should be criminalized as traitors — but don’t we need a historical understanding of how and how much that has previously been true — from Joe McCarthy’s demands for purges in the State Department, to Oliver North’s comments about “the Communists in Congress”? How can we really specify how much the pace is quickening and how much new force the fascists are gathering without a living sense of where all this comes from?

Another example of particularity: German and Italian fascism in the 1920s arose from deep political currents that were infatuated with a powerful central state. But American fascism (in most of its many popular forms) has always had a powerful anti-centralist streak. This is rooted in the whole history of slavery and frontier — and in the resultant politics of “states rights” and lynchmob localism. The fascist right in the U.S. (from the David Duke South to Oliver North-type officers, to James Dobson’s “pro-family” movement, to the thugs of “Free Republic” and more) have significant unity around militarism, draconian punishments, opposing immigration and a vicious vision of “traditional values.” But there remain some deep structural fractures (among them, and between them and more mainstream conservative forces), when it comes to specific, centralized codification of culture, religion, and government tracking of people.

The religious diversity of this country (and of the Religious Right itself) makes it hard to institute a single national theocracy. This is not Franco’s mono-Catholic Spain. The separation of church and state was never conceived as a protection of secularism, but as a federal accommodation to religious diversity. Theocracy is imaginable in some areas where one religion predominates, like the southern Bible belt or Utah. But wherever you have real religious diversity (including Judaism), that diversity re-creates the (very American) structural pull to institute policies (including future abortion bans) in a leopard-spot localist way within the existing federal framework.

Is a theocratic form of fascism coming? Are things really so either/or?

Is the current arc going towards a specifically theocratic form of fascism? Are the possibilities really so either/or? Aren’t many stages and outcomes possible? Have we no respect for the role of political accident and the real-world mediations of necessity? The current fascization [87] of society may accelerate and there may well be sudden leaps if there is another 9/11 event. But the Christian fascists were always a minority wing of the Bush ruling coalition, subordinated to forces like Cheney and Rumsfeld. And clearly the Christian fascists’ top level influence has been in flux, with new inroads in the federal judiciary and setbacks in other arenas, all as elections and change of regime approaches.

Even if something close to fascism comes (and it might!), the process, outcome and contradictions will likely be quite different from the cartoonish Handmaid’s Tale [88] the RCP keeps projecting. [89]

It is right to sound an alarm in the U.S. If, for example, new acts of warfare erupt on U.S. soil, we can expect some dangerous tightening of many legal, political and even cultural restrictions — and even a growth of popular support for such tightening. There could well be reversals in long-standing legal norms. Such changes could well make revolutionary politics even harder to pursue. And there could well be a vicious reversal of abortion rights ahead. It is quite reasonable to discuss all this in terms of a fascist danger, and a process of fascization.
Not enough people are facing the danger. The theocrats are a real threat– as part of an even larger spectrum of fascist threats.
But the RCP’s specific analysis and predictions betray a real inability to dig deep into the actual history and particular dynamics of this country. And that reflects badly on their larger project and method.

Letter 6: The Theory Surrounding “A Leader of This Caliber”/by Mike Ely

It would be one thing if Avakian’s many ideas were presented as hypotheses for exploration. But the RCP has articulated specific verdicts concerning leadership and synthesis:

1. That human history — and specifically the world’s transition to communism — is shaped by the emergence of special leaders who transform the times in which they live.

2. That Avakian can now be recognized as a leader “of the caliber” of “a Lenin or a Mao” — i.e., that he is a “rare, unique, and irreplaceable leader” who makes world-historic leaps in both theory and practice possible.[90]

3. That the new synthesis for communism already exists now in the “body of work, method and approach” of Bob Avakian — a synthesis that is seen as still developing, but that is already fundamentally “there for the taking.”

4. That this “appreciation” of Avakian and his synthesis is now formally a “cardinal question” for communists in the U.S., and a decisive question facing the world movement. [91]

5. That it is theoretically possible for other leaders to emerge as communist leaders of historically special “caliber” (after all Marx had his Engels) — but that this is only possible on the basis of a real appreciation of Avakian’s synthesis. The basic method of communists, in the U.S. explicitly, must be to “race to catch up” with Avakian and “steep themselves” in his synthesis — not to vet each of his many
still-unfolding theories critically and test them against reality.

6. That once the emergence of this rare leader is grasped correctly there follows a whole sequence of strategic implications for the work of communists and the functioning of vanguard organization.

7. And that communism (and by extension the future of humanity) “hangs by a thread.” In not-fully-formulated ways, that “thread” is Avakian and whether he is correctly appreciated (in the larger sense of that word) among communists and the people of the world.
These theses are newly articulated and newly adopted. [92] They reveal that the extreme forms and claims of the Party’s current cult of personality is not just a passing phase — but are foundational to Avakian’s newly articulated synthesis and worldview. These theories are now literally defining the party’s methods at the most fundamental level. They need to be brought fully into view and subjected to sharp criticism.

there is no law of history or biology that creates a special notch or “caliber” within humanity called “a Lenin” or “a Mao.”

Revolution requires farsighted leadership. But there is no law of history or biology that creates a special notch or “caliber” within humanity called “a Lenin” or “a Mao” — as if some of us arrive stamped as .50 caliber shells and the rest show up as .22s or blanks. There is far more continuity and variation in the spectrum of human potential than that.

Julius Caesar was a history-making military dictator of Rome — but in the hands of his successor Augustus, “Caesar” went from being a man’s name to being a title. It was a bid for borrowed legitimacy. Should we really agree to turn the names of our leaders like Lenin and Mao into categories of stature?

Should we accept proposals from living revolutionary leaders that their “packages” of ideas and method be accepted whole, as comprehensive new overhauls of Marxism — for Gonzalo [93] to style himself as the “fourth sword of Marxism,” or for Avakian to view himself and his work as a “cardinal question”? Are these really the only (or the most likely) choices?

Isn’t it quite possible to be influential or creative in human events and not represent a correct new communist synthesis (as shown by Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara)? Isn’t it possible to be a prominent and creative revolutionary leader and yet not be bringing Marxism to a new level (as shown by Charu Mazumdar, İbrahim Kaypakkaya or Zhang Chunqiao) [94] ? Isn’t it possible to have a positive impact in one period, and fall seriously short in another (as might be said about Joseph Stalin)? Isn’t it possible to probe important questions without solving some of the key problems or reaching a new synthesis of Marxism? And isn’t it possible to make contributions in one realm of theory or practice, while falling far short in another?

Avakian is alive and engaged. We can expect new amendments and developments for his synthesis to be announced regularly, for years to come — and new initiatives into practice as well. Some things criticized here, in these letters, may yet be modified with new layers of caveat and nuance. And some of his insights may be proven correct by future practice.

But it is wrong to declare that a coherent new leap in Marxism is taking shape (or that the core of it is already “there for the taking.”) And it is especially wrong when there are major flaws and gaps running deep in the synthesis now being put forward.

In addition: Our verdict need not be “either/or” — is our only choice that Avakian is “a new Mao” or a new Kautsky [95] ? No. A later assessment might well reveal that Avakian is comparable to the 19th century’s Daniel DeLeon, who established an early Marxist pole in the U.S. but whose schematic ideas condemned his party to relative marginalization. Or that Avakian may one day appear to us as the abolitionist John Brown, whose passionate belief in the emancipation of slaves drove him toward revolution, but whose sectarian grandiosity left him with only a handful of followers (while millions of people around him were on the verge of waging a revolutionary war).

Throughout history, leaders (of many classes) left unique marks on their times. [96] There are moments in history when movements will fall apart and fail if key leaders are “neutralized” (which obviously means that they are functionally irreplaceable).

But leaders can claim to be “special” in ways they are not. And the importance of key leaders can be exaggerated in ways that promote a false theory of history that (among other things) denies the role of the masses.

For example, Avakian’s synthesis misstates how exceptional leaders are forged, and denigrates therole of revolutionary practice in the development of both theory and leadership.

Revolutionary communist leaders are fundamentally a product of the struggle of the broad masses of people, especially (but not solely) of movements they actually lead. It is not the “emergence” of “rare and special” people that “repolarizes” the political alignments of society in ways that make revolutionary change possible. The objective emergence of deep social fissures and the collective struggles of the people to make fundamental change have more to do with the “emergence” of great leaders than the other way around. [97]

One comrade wrote:

“Lenin and Mao became Lenin and Mao through the process of gaining and giving leadership in the world-historic Russian and Chinese revolutions. Not: that’s how they attained the stature in the eyes of the world that they would have (should have) had anyway by right, but rather, it’s only in this way that their theories were forged. Bob Avakian’s contributions are exploratory and unfinished. He is often not able to fully or correctly answer the important questions in revolutionary theory he raises. This is not a criticism, and in fact I don’t think these questions, which are crucial questions of revolutionary theory, are resolvable by one person reflecting and struggling with them, or one person with the resources of this party (certainly not as it stands).” [98]

The RCP argues correctly that you cannot judge the value of a leader by simply measuring the size of their forces. Marx was more correct than the leaders of the Paris Commune. Lenin was more correct than Kautsky (despite his legions of supporters in Germany). It is wrong to dismiss Avakian’s theories simply because he is not yet leading a significant revolutionary movement. But, it is possible to connect some of the real weaknesses and failures of this “party of Bob Avakian” to real weaknesses in his method and approach.

The adoption of a new synthesis requires critical scientific evaluation, including real testing and modification in practice. It can’t be done on faith or decree. It can’t be done sight-unseen. In other words, it can’t be done the way Avakian demands, as we will now discuss.

Letter 7: Whateverism in Evaluating Avakian/by Mike Ely

In April 2007, the “Special Issue” of Revolution dedicated to Avakian announced, “There has never been a leader like Bob Avakian in this country.” [99]

This may well be true. Avakian is a visible tree on a parched political scrubland. He has put his stamp on this generation of communists in the U.S. But that does not necessarily make him “a Lenin.”

And no matter how highly we esteem and value a leader, the communist movement this person leads has the obligation to deeply, collectively and critically evaluate the theories, analyses and plans put forward, no matter who the author of those ideas is.

However, before the core theses of Avakian’s synthesis were ever debated, understood or even elaborated (including before any real discussion of “epistemological break” or “solid core with a lot of elasticity”) — it was formally asserted to the RCP that the “appreciation” of Avakian’s work has become a “cardinal question” for communists and that the outlines of communism’s new synthesis “is there for the taking.” [100]

This was argued on the basis of a specific discussion of the “relationship between simple and complex.” It was said: It is possible to understand all theoretical matters at different levels — on a simple basic level for beginners, and on a deeper and complex level later on. And, it was argued, communists had to acknowledge that many of them accepted important doctrines of communism (like the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat) on a quite simple basis, at least at the beginning, often without having yet looked deeply into the details, controversies and history surrounding the concept. This was then used to argue that communists can and should embrace (on a “simple” basis if necessary) the theory that Avakian’s leadership has become “the cardinal question” within the movement.

This is what country people call “buying a pig in a poke” — meaning: embracing something without close scrutiny.

Advocating that a whole movement accept a new ideology (in this case, a still-unelaborated synthesis of Marxism) on such a basis imposes an unscientific method upon that party over precisely the most defining questions imaginable, and over matters that should precisely be vetted in the most full way possible. In short, this argument around “simple and complex” was used as a call for acceptance on faith.
It is further asserted with great energy that communists need to “Have the humility to be led.” There is (of course) nothing wrong with humility. But in context, this campaign has been an assault on critical thinking and the RCP’s righteous old slogan, “Communists are Rebels!”
A scientific method demands that we evaluate all ideas (including Avakian’s) against reality — that we not assume the correctness of whatever Avakian says (or of whatever he will say). Revolutionary leaders have to “prove it all night.” [101] And all communists have the responsibility to evaluate the concepts, methods and plans of their leadership and party.

Honestly, this kind of supervision has never been a feature of the RCP. Obviously there is a range of practices within any organization and generalizations don’t apply to all experiences and places. But there is something about the party’s specific overall conception of democratic centralism — with its militarized view of organizational discipline — that routinely squeezes out wrangling or collective research on major matters. Democracy in this party is conceived as little more than “a chain of knowledge” passing opinions upwards for consideration in the deciding centers. Security is routinely misused as an instrument of control and information diet.

Open and Shut Discussion

Some burning political questions are “opened” briefly in a highly limited way, others are never opened at all. It is worth looking at the RCP’s views on homosexuality as an example of this.

From 1970 until 2001, the RU/RCP [102] held that homosexuality was incompatible with revolutionary communist goals and ideology. Gay men and lesbians could not be members. Formal programmatic statements held that homosexuality would be abolished under socialism through ideological struggle or “re-education.” The party’s wrong and backward views became rather notorious through the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis exploded and the Republican Right sought to exploit anti-homosexual bigotry.

What is less well known is how such views were maintained. In the early 1970s it was said that gay people couldn’t be communists because they were a security risk of blackmail. [103] Then after the party’s founding in 1975 the stress was on ways homosexuality was linked to “bourgeois degeneracy.” Then after 1988, the argument was that homosexuality had to be rejected because male homosexuality was (supposedly) inherently hostile to women and lesbianism was (supposedly) inherently a manifestation of lifestyle reformism. [104]
In other words, over the first thirty-plus years of the RU/RCP, the end verdict (the incompatibility of homosexuality with communism) remained the same, while the public justifications for that position morphed with time. And there were essentially no open discussions of these views allowed within the party’s ranks, though controversy and debate increasingly raged around the party’s youth brigade (RCYB).
By the late 1990s, these anti-homosexual politics were so controversial (inside and outside the party) that it would have been impossible to create a new program without major changes. The question was opened briefly but then shut down when the discussion proved highly volatile.

The method used for cutting off this debate is revealing: The new party analysis acknowledged that homosexuality is not inherently counterrevolutionary, [105] but insisted that the Party’s long-standing condemnation of gay people had not come from any influence of anti-gay bigotry. The error, it was said, came from general problems of method and reductionism, not from anti-gay prejudices within the Party. [106]

It was officially argued that the question of homosexuality itself had never been a cardinal question, but the method used to criticize the party’s previous position had to be considered a cardinal question. Translated: The party would still not consider the previous anti-gay errors a huge deal, but it would consider any discussion of possible homophobia among leaders to be completely intolerable. Also considered hostile to the party: Any discussion of why the change in line had taken so long, any appraisal of the huge political cost to the revolution because of this error and any discussion of “the closet” within the party (i.e., ways that secretly gay or bisexual members may have been forced to deny their sexual orientations).

In short: The party had adopted a new (and truly better approach) to homosexuality, but slammed the door hard on any real exploration of anti-gay bigotry among communists and its real-world consequences.

What emerges from such methods is a party where discussions are maddeningly confined and ritualized. They generally take place only after positions (or even a whole new synthesis) have been formally adopted. Questions are “opened” so a new orthodoxy can replace an old one, and then discussions are slammed shut again. Throughout that process ready agreement is expected. Real dissent is assumed to be backward (or worse).

Without a healthy climate of ongoing struggle, a party’s life cannot be an engine of new ideas, mutual supervision, and new levels of party unity. The actual process in this party codifies a deep distrust of debate (except as a means of indoctrination in official positions).
Such training sharply undercuts this party’s ability to even hear other voices.

Whatever else we now do together, let’s not repeat any of this. [107]

The RCP correctly (if too quietly) criticized the notion of “jefatura” that emerged from the Communist Party of Peru. It was seen as wrong that Peruvian party members should swear their loyalty or subordination to the person of their chairman, who is seen as being above the collectivity of the party and portrayed as a living guarantee of victory. It was correctly argued by the RCP (in connection with Peruvian line controversies in the 1990s) that new lines and sharp departures needed critical evaluation, and the key issue should be “line not author.”
The new formulations of the RCP are not identical to the PCP’s. But I cannot, for the life of me, see any difference between the PCP’s disastrous dogma of “jefatura” and the RCP’s new refrains that “this is the new party of Bob Avakian” and “appreciation of the Chair is the cardinal question.” Can anyone point out any real difference?

The assertion of “Avakian as the cardinal question” is whateverism. [108] It is a blank check signed in advance by the collectivity of party leadership. It is inherently slavish and metaphysical. It denigrates the test of practice and violates any scientific approach to ideas. And it inevitably unleashes a party culture of sycophancy and cynicism.

Letter 8: On the Cult of Personality: Revisiting Chen Boda’s Ghost/by Mike Ely

“Such is my aversion to all cult of personality that when I was plagued by repeated attempts to honor me publicly, coming from different countries at the time of the International, I never allowed any of them to break into the public sphere — nor did I ever reply to any of them, except with a snub here and there. When Engels and I first joined the underground Communist League, we demanded the removal of everything in the organization’s statutes that could have encouraged any superstitious awe of authority.”
Karl Marx, 1877 [109]

“Authority and prestige can be established only naturally through struggle and practice. They cannot be established artificially. Prestige established artificially will inevitably collapse.”Mao Tsetung, 1967 [110]

“I remember, for example, being challenged by someone interviewing me — I believe this was on a college radio station in Madison, Wisconsin — who asked insistently: ‘Is there a “cult of personality” developing around Bob Avakian?’ And I replied: ‘I certainly hope so — we’ve been working very hard to create one.’”

Bob Avakian, 2005 [111]

Let’s talk about the cult of personality in its own right.

Bob Avakian wrote in 1984:

“[T]here is also a dialectical relation — unity as well as opposition — between cult(s) of the individual around leading people and on the other hand ease of mind and liveliness, initiative, and creative, critical thinking among party members and the masses following the party. In the future communist society, this need for firmly established revolutionary authority as an ‘anchor’ will no longer exist and would run counter to developing the critical spirit and critical thinking; it too will have to be abolished as an important part of the advance to communism. But to demand its abolition now runs counter to that advance, and to unleashing and developing that critical spirit and critical thinking.” [112]

A decade later, he agrees with himself:

“This statement (from A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror) puts it right: there is unity and opposition here — between, on the one hand, authority invested or embodied in certain individuals and, on the other hand, ease of mind and liveliness, individual initiative and creativity and critical thinking among party members and the masses broadly.” [113]

This only gets it half-right. Meaning: he gets it wrong.

You can promote revolutionary leadership and authority in ways that do not unleash critical thinking and initiative. You can promote awe and slavishness. You can unleash a cascade of elitism and disrespect that showers down through your own organization with far-reaching consequences.

What Avakian downplays is that there has been sharp struggle among communists over what kind of authority to give leaders, and over which world outlookshould imbue the way leaders are viewed. The style and content of Avakian’s promotion, its formal assertion of specialness, is connected to the reasons his party as a whole does not hear other people and disrespects its own rank-and-file. It is rooted in errors of line.

This question can’t be explored here in the needed depth. But I want to contribute to the larger discussion by raising Mao’s little-known struggle against “the genius theory” — because of ways Mao’s approach contrasts with Avakian’s.
In the late ‘50s, new leaders of the USSR were knocking down the authority of the revolutionary past. They focused their attacks on Stalin. Mao responded in 1958:

“There are two kinds of cult of the individual. One is correct, such as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the correct side of Stalin. These we ought to revere and continue to revere for ever. It would not do not to revere them. As they held truth in their hands, why should we not revere them? We believe in truth; truth is the reflection of objective existence. A squad should revere its squad leader, it would be quite wrong not to. Then there is the incorrect kind of cult of the individual in which there is no analysis, simply blind obedience. This is not right. Opposition to the cult of the individual may also have one of two aims: one is opposition to an incorrect cult, and the other is opposition to reverence for others and a desire for reverence for oneself. The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be revered. If truth is not present, even collective leadership will be no good. Throughout its history, our Party has stressed the combination of the role of the individual with collective leadership.” [114]

Mao and his followers started to talk about “Mao Tsetung Thought” in the 1940s. It is a historical fact that this assertion of a new synthesis came after Mao had actually started to lead millions on a new road toward liberation, after he was actually leading both an army and expanding liberated zones in the midst of revolutionary war. Mao’s theoretical innovations were worked out and tested in that living practice of making a revolution. They were the dividing line within that movement between revolution and several wrong lines (including Stalin’s).
Mao did not declare his own words “historic.” He actually made history.

Then in the mid-sixties, Mao consciously used his existing prestige and authority to promote a new and less-well-understood program for the next stage of the revolution. When millions of people rallied to his banner in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), it was politically significant that they already loved and trusted him as a tested, visionary emancipator. There was nothing artificial or crudely self-declared about it.

At the same time, fierce struggle erupted over how Mao would be presented and how his line should be promoted. And in that struggle, Mao fought the so-called “genius theory.” The RCP, which has written much on Mao’s last battles, has only mentioned this Maoist campaign in passing references. [115] Let’s rectify that.

Mao Against the Genius Theory

While Mao was unleashing millions to “storm heaven” during the Cultural Revolution, powerful forces within his party were straining to channel everything into conservative directions. Already in 1966, Lin Biao [116] was using a “genius theory” to promote awe of the state and its leaders.

Lin claimed that:

“Chairman Mao’s sayings, works, and revolutionary practice have shown that he is a great proletarian genius…. He is unparalleled in the present world. Marx and Engels were geniuses of the nineteenth century; Lenin and Comrade Mao Zedong are the geniuses of the twentieth century.”

Later Lin raised Mao even further:

“A genius like Chairman Mao emerges only once in several hundred years in the world and in several thousand years in China.”
In essentially religious ways, it was argued that Mao’s work was a supreme “pinnacle” or “acme” of communist thinking. Lin said,
“Every sentence of Chairman Mao’s works is a truth, one single sentence of his surpasses ten thousand of ours.” [117]

The writings of other communist leaders (past and present) disappeared from the study lists after Lin declared:
“In the classical works of Marxism-Leninism, ninety-nine per cent of our studies must be from Chairman Mao’s works.”
Even statements that are true (literally speaking) helped emphasize obedience over conscious understanding. For example Lin Biao said:
“We must carry out not only those instructions we understand, but also those we fail to understand for the moment, and must try to understand them in the course of carrying them out.” [118]

This contributed to a trend of rote memorization (in contrast to scientific study, application and deepening understanding).
Communism’s anthem, the Internationale, has a famous phrase that rejects the idea of supreme saviors. At one point in China, the song was rewritten to cut that phrase out. [119]

Starting in 1966 Mao was called Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander and Great Helmsman. And soon those “four greats” were formally required in official statements. Respect for a communist leader was being twisted into enforced public rituals of praise and deference.

The struggle over these ideological matters came to a head with a political offensive by Chen Boda, Lin Biao’s ally. Chen came to a major party meeting (the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee in August 1970), and demanded that the agenda be thrown out. He insisted that the party leadership should adopt this notion of genius as a cardinal question. In a related organizational move, he insisted on a new emperor-like post of “state chairman” be created for Mao. This amounted to the first step of a coup d’etat, in which an arrogant military-fascist cult of obedience would be imposed on once-revolutionary China and an institutional framework for military dictatorship would be put in place.

Mao fought back by sharply repudiating this genius theory. [120] After days of struggle, Chen was beaten back. In April 1971, Mao started popularizing his rejection of the genius theory — as an opening shot of his struggle with the Lin forces generally. Mao told regional leaders:
“The question of genius is a theoretical question. Their theory was idealist apriorism. Someone has said that to oppose genius is to oppose me. But I am no genius. I read Confucian books for six years and capitalist books for seven. I did not read Marxist-Leninist books until 1918, so how can I be a genius?… I wrote ‘Some Opinions.’ which specially criticizes the genius theory, only after looking up some people to talk with them, and after some investigations and research. It is not that I do not want to talk about genius. To be a genius is to be a bit more intelligent. But genius does not depend on one person or a few people. It depends on a party, the party which is the vanguard of the proletariat. Genius is dependent on the mass line, on collective wisdom… I spoke to Comrade Lin Biao and some of the things he said were not very accurate. For example he said that a genius only appears in the world once in a few centuries and in China once in a few millennia. This just doesn’t fit the facts. Marx and Engels were contemporaries, and not one century had elapsed before we had Lenin and Stalin, so how could you say that a genius only appears once in a few centuries? In China there were Ch’en Sheng and Wu Kuang, Hung Hsiu-ch’üan and Sun Yat-sen, so how could you say that a genius only appears once in a few millennia? And then there is all this business about pinnacles and ‘one sentence being worth ten thousand’. Don’t you think this is going too far? One sentence is, after all, just one sentence, how can it be worth ten thousand sentences? We should not appoint a state chairman. I don’t want to be state chairman. I have said this six times already. If each time I said it I used one sentence, that is now the equivalent of sixty thousand sentences. But they never listen, so each of my sentences is not even worth half a sentence. In fact its value is zero.”

“You should study the article written by Lenin on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Eugene Pottier. Learn to sing ‘The Internationale’ and ‘The Three Great Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention’. Let them not only be sung but also explained and acted upon. ‘The Internationale’ and Lenin’s article express throughout a Marxist standpoint and outlook. What they say is that slaves should arise and struggle for truth. There never has been any supreme saviour, nor can we rely on gods or emperors. We rely entirely on ourselves for our salvation. Who has created the world of human beings? We the laboring masses. During the Lushan Conference I wrote a
700-word article which raised the question of who created history, the heroes or the slaves.” [121]

There are obvious parallels between what Chen Boda and Lin Biao argued and what the RCP promotes around Avakian. But I am leery of using analogies crudely. So let me note some differences instead:

• Mao had a lot of truth in his hands. Mao Tsetung Thought emerged from critical examinations of the Soviet experience, deepened by the lessons from decades of revolution, war, and state power. By contrast, I think Avakian’s synthesis has significantly less truth, and is methodologically distanced from practice.

• Mao did not deny that there were outstanding leaders or even geniuses among humans. But he opposed an incorrectmethod of describing and promoting his leadership: the particular “genius theory,” the ritual “4 Greats” and the stress on blind obedience. In the U.S. unfortunately, it is Avakian himself who formulates the theory concerning “caliber” and enforces those ritual words about a “unique, rare, special, and irreplaceable” person.

• Chen Boda and Lin Biao’s theories were raised and then repudiated in the throes of a great revolution. Now we encounter their ghosts under very different circumstances, and the repudiation is just getting started.

The best revolutionary leaders need to be known, valued, and followed. Their correct methods should be emulated. There are times when leading directives need to command great authority and quick action. There are periods when key leaders are objectively irreplaceable. And clearly, great efforts should be made to anticipate and defeat “decapitation strategies.”

In that sense I agree with Mao’s point about “revering” leaders.

At the same time we should not adopt any theories of a tiered humanity — with a formal insistence on the specialness of some people. We should not embrace the phrase “cult of personality” the way Bob Avakian does in his memoir. The word “cult” means organized worship, and worship is opposed to our social values and materialist outlook.

Leaders and the defense of leaders are necessary for real material reasons. But there is no material necessity to make cults around communist leaders. There are important reasons not to do so.

Letter 9: Traveling Light, Coming from Within/by Mike Ely

“…if, owing to objective and subjective conditions, this party exists and carries on for 40 or 50 years like the CPUSA before it and never leads a revolution, what’s so great about that? Really why would it be so terrible if somebody got together and formed another party and tried to learn from the positive and negative and went ahead and tried to make revolution?”
Bob Avakian, 1982 [122]

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
From a song [123]

No overarching historical mechanism guarantees a revolutionary outcome. New things will ceaselessly and inevitably emerge — and either something radically liberating takes roots in society or it doesn’t. The implications for humanity are profound.

Mao said there is no need to inoculate ourselves from ideas. We must dare to go through things and come out the other side. [124] Maoists, following Mao in this, have to leave the comfort of reassuring illusions and misplaced authority. We have to confront that here in the U.S. we have neither a vanguard organization nor the theoretical breakthroughs we need.

The Maoist project centered on the RU/RCP never really “took off.” It never took root as a leading representative of the oppressed (other than in the most abstracted, self-defined sense). After grappling with this contradiction from many sides, this party’s leadership has now consolidated itself around a course that is a particularly sterile response to long-standing problems. This is concentrated in the adoption of “Avakian as the cardinal question.”

Throughout these letters I have been forced to repeat the words “real,” “actual,” and “living” — over and over — because so much of communist project here in the U.S. has been fantasy draped in fine words.

“The train has left the station”? So be it.

Even if a turn of events pumped new life into old “vehicles” (including the RCP itself), the heart of the problem would remain untouched. Specific, voluntarist verdicts are fully consolidated at the heights of the RCP. When they say “the train has left the station” — they truly mean that the debate over those verdicts within that party is over. So be it.

Forging a way forward requires moving beyond all this, even as this party’s leadership presses ahead, white-knuckled, on the course it has set.

Meanwhile, five minutes out that door is a beautiful blue planet crammed with contradiction and life. The rush into the future does not hang by any single thread — but it does demand something of us. One way or another, something different has to raise its head. It is now left for revolutionary communists, both inside and outside the RCP, to re-conceive as we re-group.

This is not the place to actually make a positive accounting of “what we possess.” But we must start that soon. We need a process, a going, where we sort things through, think afresh and start to act, together.

When Mao’s Red Army abandoned their early base area, they carried with them all the hard-won apparatus of rebel state power: they brought archives, printing presses, factory equipment, rolls of telephone wire, furniture and more. That baggage cost them dearly in lives, when the heavily burdened column faced its first tests of fire. They then simply left off the boxes and machinery of their old apparatus. What they kept was that material that made sense when integrated into their new mode of existence. They were traveling light. They were ready to improvise, live off the land, and fight.

The analogy to our theoretical moment: We need to discard ruthlessly, but cunningly, in order to fight under difficult conditions. We will be traveling light, without baggage and clutter from earlier modes of existence. We need to preserve precisely those implements that serve the advance, against fierce opposition, toward our end goal. We need to integrate them into a vibrant new communist coherency — as we thrive on the run.

Not a remake of the RCP.

It is a great creative challenge. We don’t need a remake of the RCP, but better. The theoretical knife must cut deeper than that. There needs to be negation, affirmation, and then a real leap beyond what has gone before. We need a movement of all-the-way revolutionaries that lives in this 21st century. Not some reshuffling of old cadre, but the beginning reshuffling of a whole society.

We need to take up a great new project of practice — while applying and developing our theory.

I can propose two or three key places to start new practical work together. And I see at least four major problems for theoretical engagement:
First, we need to chart the uncharted course, sum up past practice and move to actually fuse revolutionary communism with the deep currents of discontent among the oppressed.

Second, communist theory needs to deeply comprehend our world today — the new connectedness of production and communications, the global shifts of industry, the mass migrations of people, the changes in class structures, the dynamics of modern warfare, the capitalist transformation of remaining feudal relations, the new interpenetrations and conflicts of imperialist powers, the basis and limitations shaping the unprecedented attempt to establish a global U.S. hegemony, the development of political Islam, and the stark historically-new ways the emancipation of women is posed. These changes (and more) are driving a world process quite different from the one explored in earlier communist analysis. There are related analyses of the U.S. itself that are needed, including deepening understanding of the impact of “de-industrialization” of the working class, and changes in the structures of national oppression (i.e., racist oppression of minority people in the U.S.).

We are at a fresh start.

Third, communist theory needs to comprehend the twentieth century — especially what that century revealed about the socialist transition to communism and the wellsprings of capitalist restoration. When encountering communists, people all over the world demand to know what we have learned from this exhilarating and painful process and what we would now do differently. Our answer must come in deep historical analysis and theoretical proposals — but also in our style, our methods, our program and our larger practice.

Fourth, communist theory needs to clean its Augean stables [125] — uprooting this legacy of dogmatism, deepening its struggle against various forms of capitulation, and tackling long-standing philosophical and strategic problems that stand as real obstacles to communist revolution.

Discussing their history, the Maoists of Nepal touched on outlook. They made their mental leap toward the seizure of power, “by protecting revolution from the revolutionary phrases that we used to memorize in the early period.” And they say that then, later, they dared “to abandon the course once selected and have the courage to climb the unexplored mountain.” [126]

Something important is being said if our movement in the U.S. can (at long last) develop an ability to even hear the voices of others. We have to learn to look past the text, the glib phrase, the comforting myth — and look deeply into the living thing and our living practice of engagement. We have to actually know this shimmering, dancing world in the course of actually fighting to end its many horrors.

We are in many ways at a fresh start. Let’s re-teach ourselves to think with a critical spirit. Let’s struggle and debate creatively, as comrades. Let’s chart that uncharted course. Let’s actually “prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.” Let’s bring down the beast and move toward the final emancipation of humanity.

Notes

[2] Charles Darwin’s Letter to J. D. Hooker, January 11, 1844

[3] Niles Eldredge, Darwin – Discovering the Tree of Life, W.W. Norton, 2005

[4] There are, at this moment at least three “packages” making claims to some universal (i.e. global) applicability: Gonzalo Thought of the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path), Prachanda Path of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Avakian’s New Synthesis. Other major Maoist parties, like the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines have their own distinctive analyses and approaches. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has taken initiatives to regroup the international communist movement on a new basis. (Worker 11 p.35)

[5] The public theoretical work of Bob Avakian, particularly his work since the mid 1990s can generally be found on two web pages: revcom.us/avakian/ and bobavakian.net .

[6] Reductionism is an analytical method that incorrectly boils down complex processes to just one or two determining factors. RCP’s self-criticism for previous reductionism appears in Notes on Political Economy – Our analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and the Current World Situation, RCP Publications, 2000, revcom.us/a/special_postings/poltoc_e.htm

[7] Inevitabilism refers to an assumption that end results in nature and society are inevitable given the nature of defining contradictions and processes. It is particularly associated with the oft-stated view within communist theory that communism is the inevitable outcome of the contradictions of class society. It is also refers to a tendency to overestimate the objective limits and inflexibility of capitalism, and therefore to overestimate the degree to which the existing system cannot offer “a way out.” RCP criticism of inevitabilism appears in “Views on Socialism and Communism: A Radically New Kind Of State, A Radically Different And Far Greater Vision Of Freedom.” revcom.us

[8] One well-known example of reductionism was the RCP’s insistence for many years that same sex orientation was a personal ideological decision. A prominent error of both reductionism and inevitabilism was the RCP’s fervent insistence that a nuclear world war was inevitable in the 1980s unless there was revolution “in large and/or strategic parts of the world.”

[9] Bob Avakian, The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution in the Present Era, 2005, revcom.us

[10] “By ‘instrumentalism’ here I mean torturing reality in the attempt to make a distorted version of reality an instrument of certain aims.” (Avakian, Bringing Forward Another Way, 2006, revcom.us)
To the RCP, instrumentalism means slanting and crafting ideas to serve political purposes in a manipulative or self-deceptive way.

[11] After initially supporting the Maoist revolution in Nepal, the RCP has stopped most references to that struggle and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). There has been virtually no public work building support for the revolution in Nepal against ongoing U.S. intervention. This is rooted in disputes over line and strategy – over the Nepali communist view of Avakian, their views on democracy and their temporary decision to enter Nepal’s government. Quite a few of Avakian’s recent writings can be read as polemics against the CPN(M)’s Prachanda Path. Even if things were to change and that silence were to finally end, there is a method exposed here that needs a critical look: The assumption is that the RCP can judge the zigs-and-zags of a party confronting complex transitions to power, based essentially on general principles and textual analysis from afar. This reveals a debilitating dogmatism rooted in the denigration of practice that runs through Avakian’s synthesis.

[12] The definition from the RCP’s Draft Programme: “The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses. To apply the mass line means to seek out and learn from the ideas of the masses and to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to concentrate what is correct in these ideas, distilling and synthesizing them into a more all-sided and correct reflection of reality and what must be done to change it. The party then takes this back to the masses in the form of line and policies, works to win the people to take these up, and unites with the masses to carry them out — summing up the results and then repeating the process. The mass line is an ongoing process which links theory with practice and the vanguard with the masses in an ever-deepening way all in the service of the masses’ fundamental revolutionary interests.” (2001, revcom.us) This program has not been publicly adopted by the RCP and it is unclear which draft formulations are still being upheld.

[13] Avakian recently gave a one-sentence capsule of his new synthesis. Here it is: “This new synthesis involves a recasting and recombining of the positive aspects of the experience so far of the communist movement and of socialist society, while learning from the negative aspects of this experience, in the philosophical and ideological as well as the political dimensions, so as to have a more deeply and firmly rooted scientific orientation, method and approach with regard not only to making revolution and seizing power but then, yes, to meeting the material requirements of society and the needs of the masses of people, in an increasingly expanding way, in socialist society — overcoming the deep scars of the past and continuing the revolutionary transformation of society, while at the same time actively supporting the world revolutionary struggle and acting on the recognition that the world arena and the world struggle are most fundamental and important, in an overall sense — together with opening up qualitatively more space to give expression to the intellectual and cultural needs of the people, broadly understood, and enabling a more diverse and rich process of exploration and experimentation in the realms of science, art and culture, and intellectual life overall, with increasing scope for the contention of different ideas and schools of thought and for individual initiative and creativity and protection of individual rights, including space for individuals to interact in ‘civil society’ independently of the state — all within an overall cooperative and collective framework and at the same time as state power is maintained and further developed as a revolutionary state power serving the interests of the proletarian revolution, in the particular country and worldwide, with this state being the leading and central element in the economy and in the overall direction of society, while the state itself is being continually transformed into something radically different from all previous states, as a crucial part of the advance toward the eventual abolition of the state with the achievement of communism on a world scale.” Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity, Part 1: Beyond The Narrow Horizon Of Bourgeois Right, 2007, revcom.us

[14] Epistemology is the study of how human beings come to know reality – answering Mao’s question “where do correct ideas come from?”

[15] See Notes on Political Economy – Our analysis of the 1980s, Issues of Methodology, and the Current World Situation, revcom.us

[16] Lenin remarks in passing that a revolutionary party “will not deserve the name until it learns to bind the leaders with the class and the masses into one single indissoluble whole.” “Left-wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder, marxists.org

[17] The Worker 10, May 2006, “International Dimension Of Prachanda Path” by Basanta. I believe this comment is directed at Avakian’s method and approach.

[18] Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates, Verso, 2002. The “catastrophic situation” he mentions is the disaster that enveloped Europe during World War 1 – including the collapse of widespread belief in linear progress, and the continent-wide failure of Social Democracy.

[19] The new communist movement that emerged in the U.S. after the 1960s was often gripped by the notion of emulating the methods and strategies from a “good period” of the old Communist Party. By 1980, after external experience and internal struggle, the RCP summed up that the road to revolution in countries like the U.S. had not ever been developed by the previous communist movement. The task of “charting the uncharted course” remained an immediate theoretical challenge for communists.

The Report of the RCP’s 1980 Central Committee meeting said: “The general question here is one of rising to the tasks that are required of our party, rising to the unprecedented task of carrying out a revolution in an advanced imperialist country like this. To rise to this task means that we have to destroy still further remnants of economism, remnants of 40 years and more of revisionism in the international communist movement. But even that is not enough, because destroying all this is inseparably linked with making further advances in the revolutionary science and its application.” (See Charting the Uncharted Course – Proletarian Revolution in the U.S., pamphlet, 1981)

[20] This was a central thesis of the 1980 Central Committee report (published as Charting the Uncharted Course – Proletarian Revolution in the U.S.).

[21] Viborg was a working class neighborhood that had been an important early center of Menshevik organization, but developed into a key political base area of the Bolshevik Party for launching the 1917 October Revolution in St. Petersburg. Raucana was a shantytown outside Lima that became a militant political base area of Peru’s Maoists during the 1980s and 1990s.

[22] At the time, Avakian and the RCP spoke about what was needed in order to “really have a basis for making a Beginning”:
“These can be called the ‘three needs’ (or the ‘three what-do-we-needs’). These are: (1) A revolutionary movement and a politicized, radicalized atmosphere among our social base, the proletarian masses; and in society generally; (2) A strong party organization and a solid organized base of support for the party, especially among the most bedrock solid social base, and (3) Leaps in forging the multinational unity of the proletariat and leaps in forging the solid core of the broader united front, under proletarian leadership.” (Bob Avakian, “Some Thoughts,” Revolution magazine, Summer/Fall 1988) This issue of Revolution is a good place to get a sense of the RCP’s political line at that point. It goes on to say that other strata in society need to “see a revolutionary movement with a conscious political expression — not an ‘intellectualized’ political expression, but a conscious, clear political revolutionary thrust — coming out of our basic social base.” That is in sharp contrast to the current line.

[23] The Wedding District was a famous, pro-communist, working class neighborhood in 1920s Berlin. Kreuzberg is a district in Berlin where radical immigrant workers and native-born German radicals created a revolutionary mix starting in the 1980s.The Putilov factory complex in early 1900 St. Petersburg emerged as an important political fortress for the Bolshevik revolution.

[24] These problems emerged early in the effort. By 1989, Avakian was mentioning arguments (arising from within the party) that “we’re making no real progress among the basic masses so even if the situation should erupt we would be totally unprepared and it would be a disaster.” This was discussed in “Making New Leaps in Preparing for Revolution” (Revolution Spring 1990). It was a rare public acknowledgement of the problems, shortly before the party would launch renewed efforts in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion.

[25] Voluntarism is thinking you can overcome problems and obstacles based on will and subjective desire. It is an underestimation of the need to systematically transform material constraints and necessity — and (as part of that) carefully identify necessary stages, prerequisites and (of course) openings.of immigrants; the fight for the liberation of women; the battles against the unjust wars waged by this system… and more.”

[26] “Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the RCP,USA,” Revolutionary Worker 1076, October 29, 2000, revcom.us

[27] New Draft Programme of the RCP,USA, 2001, revcom.us

[28] “Bringing Forward Another Way,” revcom.us

[29] A metaphor from the Bible, Matthew 7:6

[30] This is a distortion that grew over the 1920s, and reduced the living experience of the Bolshevik party to a dogmatic set of universal formulas, structures and forms.

[31] V.I. Lenin, The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement, 1900, marxists.org

[32] You can get a sense of the breadth of the anti-government resistance by the numbers of political prisoners held by the Tsarist government: 86,000 political prisoners in 1905 growing to 170,000 in 1909. (Simon Sebag Montefioer, Young Stalin, 2007)

[33] A few illustrations of the social weight of the Bolshevik party: The party entered the 1905 revolution with several hundred members in St. Petersburg. In early 1907, the Bolsheviks had a membership of over 2,000 in that city (LCW, vol.12, p.400). That year, their national membership is estimated at 46,000. The Bolsheviks often operated within the larger Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) which had a combined membership of 150,000. Around 1910, the Bolshevik apparatus was hit hard by repression, but by 1912, the Bolshevik party was strong enough to launch the newspaper, Pravda, in St. Petersburg. They had the organizational structure to fund, produce and circulate an average of 25,000 copies daily. After the 1912 elections, six Bolsheviks were elected to the 4th Duma (parliament) representing districts with over a million industrial workers. In St. Petersburg, the party led a citywide movement of radicalized workers who, by July 1914 on the eve of war, organized a general strike of 150,000 workers over both political and economic demands. Through the political crisis of 1917, Bolshevik ranks grew explosively. Party membership in the Viborg district had grown from 500 in March 1917, to 7,000 in October. In Petrograd as a whole, it went from 2,000 to 36,000. (Figures are largely from original Soviet sources, in Tony Cliff, Lenin 1, marxists.org)

[34] “November 2: The Real Beginning And The Challenge We Face,” Revolution 23, Nov. 20, 2005

[35] “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” adopted August 8, 1966, Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, rrojasdatabank.org

[36] Bob Avakian, “Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity,” 2007, revcom.us

[37] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006

[38] Bob Avakian, Conquer The World? The International Proletariat Must and Will, 1981, revcom.us

[39] “Bob Avakian in a Discussion with Comrades on Epistemology - On Knowing and Changing the World,” Revolutionary Worker 1262, December 19, 2004, revcom.us
[40] Mao Tsetung, On Practice. Lenin’s quote is from “Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic, marxists.org

[41] “Grasp Revolution, Promote Production - Questions of Outlook and Method, Some Points on the New Situation” and “The Struggle in the Realm of Ideas,” revcom.us

[42] Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy,” 1968, in the collection Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 1971, marxists.org

[43] We are not just talking about someone’s direct personal practice, or just the political practice of one organization. Practice (in this sense) is the broader social practice of changing the world – through productive work, political struggle and scientific experiment. Practice includes the broader historic experience of the revolutionary communist movement generally in taking the socialist road.

[44] Idealism (in communist discussion) means a philosophical outlook that sees ideas as primary over matter, so that material reality emerges from spirit or thought, rather than the other way around. Idealism includes “objective idealism” like God-based religious thinking (“In the beginning was the Word…”), and “subjective idealism” like “You can’t comprehend my reality” or the idea that you can overcome obstacles with hype and will. This Marxist definition of idealism is very different from the definition often assumed in popular discussion (where “he is idealist” commonly means someone is inspired by ideas and principles.)

[45] For example, Mao’s statements are famously pithy. But Mao was a ferocious advocate of real investigation and his verdicts were based on deep research. One illustration: Mao’s work Report from Xunwu (which only became available in the 1980s) lays bare in great detail how Mao investigated peasant life, as part of his work of agrarian revolution. (Stanford, 1990)

[46] The purges refers to events of the late thirties: the trials of previous party leaders, the imprisonment and execution of large parts of the Red Army officer corps, and the mass arrests and convulsions of the Yezhovshchina. The RCP explores the Soviet experience in a number of places including Mao’s Immortal Contributions, Conquer the World, and in a pocket summation called “The Question of Stalin and ‘Stalinism’” (Revolution, Fall 1990, p. 13-17). One neglected work was “Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation,” that raised important questions about previous approaches toward building an “international united front” against a single “main enemy.” However, what stands out in these discussions of the Soviet experience itself is that schematic evaluations of Stalin’s methods and ideology often remain separated from an in-depth analysis of the actual events and trends within the Soviet society itself. There is a methodological focus on a textual reading (and critique) of writings by Stalin and others. There is much less focus on a dialectical materialist uncovering of how this society developed and changed (including those dynamics which are obscured, not revealed, by official texts and contemporary summations). For example, there is a repeated discussion of Stalin’s tendency to mix up different types of contradictions in the use of methods of repression and dictatorship, but little actual analysis of how those social contradictions erupted, what actually happened in the late 30s and what impact it actually had on society and the socialist revolution. As a result, quite a bit of inherited “political truth” remains unchallenged and quite a few of the more difficult historical questions are functionally avoided. It is, in short, still far from “going for the truth rather than hiding things.”

[47] After the “Set the Record Straight” (STRS) project was initiated, people proposing fresh examination of the history and new scholarship were criticized as having “the wrong method.” It was formally said “STRS is not a research project.” In other words: STRS is conceived as a project that would popularize Avakian’s new envisioning of socialism, and retrofit past summations in light of those new theories. This is particularly unfortunate because communists need to set the record straight in a social discussion that has largely passed us by. For the work of STRS see thisiscommunism.org

[48] This problem does not uniformly characterize the work associated with the RCP. The analysis of U.S. imperialism in America in Decline (by Raymond Lotta with Frank Shannon) displays a different approach to rigor and research (even given the acknowledged errors of conceptual framework). Also see Larry Everest’s work on Oil, Power and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (larryeverest.com)

[49] Relativism refers to the deeply anti-scientific view that it is (in the final analysis) very difficult or even impossible to know what is true about reality or what is progressive in society. It is a view that assumes our subjectivity is overpowering and even blinding and so assumes an unbridgeable gulf between our theories and reality. As a result, relativism incorrectly assumes that debates over truth are irresolvable duels of “competing narratives.” Identity politics and some strains of cultural anthropology, for example, are often heavily influenced by the assumptions of relativism.

[50] Fredrick Engels, Anti-Duhring, quoted in Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, “Absolute and Relative Truth, or the Eclecticism of Engels as Discovered by A. Bogdanov.” marxists.org

[51] Bob Avakian, Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity, Part 1: Beyond The Narrow Horizon Of Bourgeois Right, 2007, revcom.us

[52] One handy example: look at Avakian’s definition of instrumentalism in footnote 10 – where he casually refers to “reality” when he is really referring to an ideological presentation of reality.

[53] Here is the full quote so the reader can see these points in context:

[55] If there is anything we can learn from what Stephen Jay Gould exposes in his historical writings, like The Mismeasure of Man, it is the degree to which ideological blinders and struggle mark the methods, theories and discoveries of scientists – just like they do for everyone else (including communist leaders).

[56] This document is believed to have been written by Mao directly or collectively under his close supervision. Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, May 16, 1966. included in the collection Important Documents on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Foreign Language Press, Peking 1970, marxists.org

[57] Shanghai Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “Who Transforms Whom? A comment on Kairov’s ‘Pedagogy’,” Peking Review, March 6, 1970, p. 11

[58] V. I. Lenin, Speech Delivered At An All-Russia Conference Of Political Education Workers Of Gubernia and Uyezd Education Departments, November 3, 1920; marxists.org

[59] Alain Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: the Last Revolution?” positions 13:3, Winter 2005, page 485

[60] Avakian poses it this way: “What is the new synthesis?… there is a point of basic orientation that is worth quoting from a paper written by a leading comrade of our Party: ‘If we try to embrace, encompass and explore non-communist people, ideas and perspectives ever more widely and flexibly (which we should do) but do so on the basis of something other than a truly solid core and strategic grounding in OUR project and objectives, we will at one and the same time fail to harvest as much as we could from these wider explorations and initiatives AND, most unconscionably, we will LOSE THE WHOLE THING!’ Now, this has particular application with regard to the orientation and approach of our Party; but, in the broader framework of the larger world we need to be transforming, this also has more general application. And what’s being said here is an important aspect of the principle of solid core with a lot of elasticity, which is itself a kind of encapsulation, or concentrated expression, of what is involved in the new synthesis I am referring to.” (“The Basis, The Goals, And The Methods Of The Communist Revolution,” revcom.us)

[61] Among the works I think deserves more critical engagement than it has gotten is Avakian’s polemic with Indian Maoist K. Venu which probes problems with hoping to adopt Paris Commune models of radical mass democracy. Bob Avakian, Democracy: More Than Ever We Can and Must Do Better Than That, revcom.us

[62] Peking Review, No.15, April 10, 1970, p.29

[63] “Drawn and quartered” was a medieval execution that pulled the prisoner apart using four horses. Avakian’s views on reasons for deliberately risking having the party and the revolution “drawn and quartered” appear in the “Discussion with Comrades on Epistemology - On Knowing and Changing the World.”

[64] See Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity, Part 1: Beyond The Narrow Horizon Of Bourgeois Right

[65] Mao gave a highly influential series of lectures called Talks at the Yenan Forum On Literature and Art, in May 1942, marxists.org

[66] Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), the prominent Soviet biologist-agronomist who argued that acquired traits could be inherited and that there was no special genetic material involved in reproduction. He claimed he could create new strains of food grain by subjecting kernels to adverse conditions. His theories and methods had a devastating impact on Soviet science, in part because scientific adversaries were silenced and sometimes punished. The discovery of DNA conclusively proved him wrong.

[67] As we publish these “Nine Letters,” there are announcements of a new book on religion coming from Bob Avakian (Away with all Gods, Insight Press, scheduled for publication in March 2008). That book will touch on issues discussed here.

[68] In that primitive communist organizing among coalminers, our atheism was often more shocking and fascinating than our communism. No serious discussions of the future or world affairs got very far without colliding head-on into dispensationalist interpretations of events, based on the Book of Revelations. And that collision with fundamentalism was hardly just ideological: In 1974, preachers in central West Virginia organized “Textbook Protests” — wildcat strikes against the teaching of sex education, drug education and Black literature in the high schools. RCP supporters organized a coalition of miners and Black Vietnam veterans to politically oppose these strikes and stop their spread out of West Virginia’s central Kanawha valley. It was an early battle of the cultural wars – straight up against the then-emerging Religious Right.

[69] Bob Avakian, “Making Revolution And Emancipating Humanity,” 2007, revcom.us

[70] King James Bible, Genesis 9:25

[71] In the early nineteenth century, opium was a newly arrived painkiller. Marx’s famous remark is not simply “drugs as illusion and escape” but a metaphor of self-dosed relief from agony. Karl Marx, Abstract from The Introduction to Contribution to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844, marxists.org.

[72] Since his work “Great Objectives & Grand Strategy,” Avakian has repeated his analysis of where the rise of fundamentalism and the religious impulse comes from. Avakian does acknowledge the role of “restlessness, anxiety, insecurity, and longings” rooted in the latest workings of “turbo capitalism” – but those points are made firmly within the context of the overall reductionism I am criticizing here.

[73] Radical preacher Thomas Münzer (approx. 1489-1525) led a great peasant rebellion against the feudal church and princes in late medieval Germany – claiming he was called by the Holy Spirit to establish theocratic order marked by common ownership of the means of life. See: Fredrick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, 1850, marxists.org

[74] Nat Turner (1800–1831), preaching that he had seen a great sign from God, led the greatest slave rebellion recorded in U.S. history in Virginia’s Southampton County. See: Mike Ely, “The Slave Rebellion of General Nat Turner,” mikeely.wordpress.com

[75] The revolutionary Muslim preacher Bedreddin (1359-1420) led a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1416. His early communist motto was: “Share everything you have, except the lips of your lover.” He inspired Nazim Hikmet’s masterful poem, The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin (Persea Books, 1977)

[76] If you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to African American theologian James Cone on “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Oct. 2006, www.hds.harvard.edu/news/events_online/ingersoll_2006.html

[77] The RCP has also painted political Islam generally with single big brush. Avakian says (in a quote published by itself):
“What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds,’ you end up strengthening both.”
Is there really only one “Jihad” that we “see in contention” with the U.S.? Is it all really so monochromatic? Though Islamic forces haven’t created political programs that can liberate people from imperialism, are there really only “historically outmoded” strata involved (presumably meaning: the entrenched comprador, bureaucrat capitalist and feudal elements)? Aren’t there places where political Islam has gained influence among other strata, or where its politics may reflect other programs? What would a serious and dialectical class analysis of the different Iraqi movements show? Shouldn’t the inter-imperialist contradiction also be seen as a considerable part of the U.S. “war on terror” and its consolidation of its hegemonic status, so that “what we see in contention here” is something more complex and many sided than colliding “universalisms.” These issues are beyond the scope of these letters, but obviously demand further engagement.

[78] Just one example of many, Avakian writes: “…the point that I’ve been hammering at has to do with a key contradiction I have spoken to a number of times—the contradiction that these Christian Fascists are objectively caught up in—the contradiction between an insistence on a literalist interpretation of the Bible, the insistence that the Bible is, in every word and detail, the true word of God that must be believed and followed to the letter, with all that the Bible actually calls for — all that in contradiction to what most people in this society would consider just, decent, and even sane.” (from: “Religion, Morality … Polarization, Repolarization, Two Solid Cores in Fundamental Opposition,” September 25, 2005, revcom.us

[79] Bible, KJV, John 8:1-11

[80] One notorious example of this among many is the Revolution series “God the Original Fascist” by A. Brooks (revcom.us/godoriginalfascist) which focuses on the five Mosaic books of the Bible and claims they are representative of “the fundamental essence” of the Bible. The whole argument rests on ignorance about what Christians (including fundamentalist Protestants) actually believe about the relationship of Old and New Testament. They are after all Christians – it is the teachings of Jesus (not Moses) that they consider “the fundamental essence” of their faith.

[81] Just one small example: The contentious theological and political differences among Christian conservatives don’t really come up. What separates dispensationalist Christians from their opponents – and what does that mean for “end times” predictions of the Book of Revelations, the Rapture and religious beliefs about Israel in particular? Does it matter which deep political and theological differences have historically divided Southern white and African American Baptists? Yes, it does. If we communists don’t understand such things, how deep is our analysis of “what fundamentalists believe”? Do we want to talk to actual believers about their actual beliefs and about actual political currents arising from the Bible Belt and “Red States”?

[82] Theocracy is a form of class rule where the state and legal system are dominated by religious principles and figures, ruling in the name of their God.

[83] Bob Avakian, “The Pyramid of Power And the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down,” Revolutionary Worker #1231, March 7, 2004

[84] “The Battle For The Future Will Be Fought From Here Forward!” Dec. 2004 revcom.us/future

[85] “More on ‘The Coming Civil War,’” Revolution #29, Jan. 8, 2006, revcom.us. Avakian’s arguments are rarely without nuances and caveats in the fine print, and this is no exception. In his essay “The Coming Civil War” he writes: “Now, it’s not impossible that a different section of the ruling class could come forward and cohere and get more backbone, but ‘the odds favor’ — and the way things are going now, they are pointing to — a one-sided conflict within the ruling class, and the continuation of the present dynamic.” And then almost immediately afterwards, he returns to the kind of argumentation we are criticizing: “The reality is — and it is crucial for people to grasp this — that even if we don’t provoke them, they are going to the extreme with this program. What more evidence do you need? Read the mainstream press, watch the mainstream media, day after day. To cite here just one crucial dimension of this, they are trying to redefine the definition of science — to include religion right within the definition of science — on a societal level. You think that’s just going to stay in a little small, confined sphere, in terms of its influence?”

[86] Avakian has not articulated the new definition of fascism embedded in his recent work. For Avakian, fascism seems to be a definitive new leap in the norms of operation of both the bourgeois state and civil society – a combination of state repression, ideological climate and new official consensus that conspire to effectively suppress of a range of oppositional options. This is a new break from the flawed and long exhausted 1935 Comintern formulation of fascism as “the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” which focused narrowly on open state terrorism.

[87] Fascization is the growth of fascist trends within the existing bounds of bourgeois democracy. An example: There was a dangerous growth of executive power and reactionary judiciary within Weimar Germany (under leaders like von Papen) before the rise of Adolf Hitler to power and the leap to a new fascist form of rule. Here too, things need not be so “either/or.” It is quite possible for very dangerous, reactionary norms to emerge within the U.S. without that process producing an inevitable or necessary leap to a qualitatively new form of bourgeois rule (i.e. for a full leap to fascism with the complete negation of former “norms” of law and politics).

[88] A powerful and cautionary novel about a future theocratic and rigidly male supremacist America, Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid’s Tale, 1985

[89] Revolution newspaper published a series of posters called “Scenes from a Faith-Based Future” set a few years into the future, where for example a kid can be legally stoned to death for wearing a witch costume on Halloween. Numerous people have commented to me how out-of-touch and crudely reductionist this kind of agitation is. revcom.us/i/090/bible-horror-pt3-m-en.pdf

[90] Sometimes a tactically softer “our Lenin” is used. The RCP does not use the formulation “Avakianism.” “A Lenin or a Mao” means a communist leader who is revamping all of communist theory in a world-historic leap. And the operative summation the RCP uses is that Avakian is “on the level of a Mao or a Lenin” with all the implications that holds for MLM around the world.

[91] A cardinal question is an issue that is a dividing line between revolutionary communism and counterrevolutionary revisionism. The RCP now holds that the appreciation of Bob Avakian and his synthesis is such a question – literally on the level of whether to uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat or the need for a vanguard party. Here is how it was popularly put in Revolution’s “Special Issue on Bob Avakian”: “At a time when the ‘science of revolution’ demands a leap in its understanding in a number of crucial realms, he has stepped forward to fill that great need. The contributions that we have outlined here are essential to the further and future advance of the revolutionary cause and communist project; they are a treasure for humanity.” (emphasis in original).

[92] It is said, at times that these theories have been the party’s line since 1979. But that is not true. They are recent, and negate previous understandings about collectivity and mass line.

[93] Chairman Gonzalo (Abimael Guzman) is the leader of the Communist Party of Peru, also known as the Shining Path.

[94] Charu Mazumdar (1918–1972) was leader of the 1967 “Spring thunder” uprising of peasants starting in Naxalbari that gave rise to the Maoist movement in India. İbrahim Kaypakkaya (1949-1973) was the founder of the Maoist movement in Turkey and leader of an early attempt to launch protracted people’s war. Zhang Chunqiao (1917-2005) was a leader of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, and first-rank figure in the Maoist circle called the “Gang of Four” by their enemies.

[95] Karl Kautsky was a top leader of German socialists and the Second International who was promoted as the successor to Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, but proved himself to be a scholastic pedant who clutched at old formulation and an enemy of the first socialist revolution in Russia.

[96] If Lenin had died in 1914, a communist revolution would not have taken place in 1917 Russia. Had Attila or Napoleon died young, world history would have taken some different turns.

[97] The RCP now talks of “repolarizing society” specifically around Avakian, as a person and a leader, (and the work of promoting him) playing a role of decisive importance in repolarizing society from the current hostilities between secular liberalism and recently ascendant rightist conservatism. It expresses this thought publicly like this: “Two futures confront each other. Will imperialism force a future of darkness and suffocation onto the people? Will tens of millions more needlessly suffer and die? OR, will the critical spirit be unleashed in a way that does a great GOOD for humanity? Will society move forward in a revolutionary direction and set about removing the great suffering and misery cast down on the people by capitalism? To put it another way, which vision will prevail: that of George W. Bush? Or of Bob Avakian?” from “The Battle For The Future,” op. cit.

[98] From an unpublished paper shared with Mike E.

[99] “The Crossroads We Face, the Leadership We Need” Revolution #84

[100] This whole process is in rather stark contrast to the methods explicitly promoted as part of the new synthesis. For example, Ardea Skybreak wrote: “The fact that it can take quite some time for new syntheses or theories to be tested and verified (and the fact that many will be ultimately discarded as dead-ends or significantly re-worked) typically does not disturb intellectuals, for they accept this state of relative uncertainty over protracted periods of time as a necessary and unavoidable part of the process of expanding human knowledge and understanding. Newly emerging and developing syntheses should not be grown in a hothouse and they should also not be held close to the chest in miserly fashion: they need to be sent out in the world. Reasonable efforts should be made to avoid excessive sloppiness, the regurgitation of that which has already been shown to be false, or dismissive discounting of the efforts of others (of whatever perspectives) who have been working on similar questions. Efforts should also be made to properly distinguish (and label accordingly) that which is known from that which is not yet known, and indicate clearly what may simply be informed speculation.” Very true, but in sharp disconnect with the party’s approach to its own process of synthesis. (Ardea Skybreak, “Working with Ideas and Searching for Truth: A Reflection on Revolutionary Leadership and the Intellectual Process,” 2002, revcom.us)

[101] “Prove it all night” is the title of a Bruce Springsteen song. For the RCP, it means that communist veterans and leaders cannot rest on reputations or past laurels.

[102] The Revolutionary Union (RU) was the pre-party communist formation established nationally in 1970 that gave rise to the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (founded in 1975).

[103] This was the position first explained to me and others around the early Revolutionary Union – a view lifted from the policies of the Communist Party USA.

[104] “On the Question of Homosexuality and the Emancipation of Women,” Revolution magazine, 1988

[105] It was a position that more or less adopted the work of a special writing group, “On the Position on Homosexuality in the New Draft Programme” revcom.us/margorp/homosexuality.htm

[106] Avakian used his conversations with Bill Martin to broach the nagging question of how the RCP could have been so stubbornly wrong for so long on its analysis of gay people. He asserts that the problem was reductionist and mechanical thinking inherited from the previous communist movement, and mainly manifested in analysis made on other topics (i.e., not just in matters of sexuality). Bill Martin describes anti-homosexual arguments made to him by party supporters, and probes whether there should be exploration of a “puritanical mindset” towards sexuality generally. This is an important question ruled out of order by the party’s approach.

[107] These Nine Letters do not excavate the internal operations and structures of the RCP. For that reason necessary criticisms of organizational line can only be touched on in this very general way. However, it has to be said that a very different approach to communist organization needs to be developed and fought for. We need real discussion of burning political controversies, active supervision of leadership, and appreciation for the views, experience and disagreements of cadre at all levels and of all generations. “If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I mean.”

[108] Whateverism is the uncritical acceptance of “whatever” comes down from above within a communist party.

[109] Letter to Wilhelm Blos, Nov. 1877 as Marx was working to finish his historic work, Capital. Our translation from German.

[110] David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside – Years in Revolutionary China – 1964-1969, Pantheon Asia Library, 1976

[111] Avakian describing an exchange from his 1979 speaking tour. From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, p. 393, Insight Press, 2005

[112] Bob Avakian, A Horrible End, or an End to the Horror RCP Publications, 1984, p. 212

[113] Getting Over the Two Great Humps: Further Thoughts on Conquering the World, Later published as “On Proletarian Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship: A Radically Different View of Leading Society: Part 9: Individual Leaders and the Larger Interests of Society and the People,” Revolutionary Worker #1222, December 14, 2003

[114] Mao Tsetung, “Talks At The Chengtu Conference,” March 1958, marxists.org

[115] There are mentions of Mao’s opposition to the “genius theory” in Raymond Lotta’s essay in And Mao Makes 5 – Mao Tsetung’s Last Great Battle (1978) and Bob Avakian’s The Loss in China and the Revolutionary Legacy of Mao Tsetung (1978).

[116] Lin Biao was the head of revolutionary China’s military and a leading figure within the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He was also, after the mid-60s, briefly seen as Mao’s most likely successor.

[117] Lin Biao, “Informal Address,” cited in Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution — The Post-Liberation Epoch 1949-1981, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 253–67.

[118] New China News Agency, 23 January 1968.

[119] Jean Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

[120] Unfortunately the 700-word essay Mao wrote and circulated at that meeting has been lost. The writer Han Suyin said she had access to this work (called “Some Opinions”) when researching her Wind in the Tower biography of Mao. Mao himself characterizes the essay’s arguments in the talks with regional leaders that I quote here.

[121] Mao Tsetung, “Talks With Responsible Comrades At Various Places During Provincial Tour,” from the middle of August to September 12, 1971, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, marxists.org Mao makes the methodological point that he learned from others before acting, and describes the value of reading other communist leaders. He fights for a communist understanding of the mass line – in opposition to the reactionary view that history rests on the arrival of great saviors. The Internationale anthem of communists contains the relevant refrain “Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes, Ni dieu, ni César, ni tribun” – in English, “There are no supreme saviors, not god, emperor nor tribune.”

[122] “A Party is Not a Holy Thing – It’s Got to be A Vanguard,” published as a chapter in If There is to be Revolution, There Must be a Revolutionary Party, RCP Publications, June 1982

[123] During the Pittston coal strike in 1989, I came upon a small circle of religious radicals singing these stirring words in the middle of a tense
scene.

[124] Conversations With Wang Hai-jung, December 21, 1970, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung: Vol. IX, marxists.org. Mao is talking to his niece about how to approach classic works of China’s feudal past.

[125] One of the “impossible” tasks that Hercules accomplished in Greek mythology was cleaning the vast Augean stables in a single day by diverting rivers to wash away long-accumulated muck.

We Celebrate today the founding our front , the National Democratic Front. Our Front was established in April 24, 1973. So today we have reached its 35’ th founding anniversary.

We are gathered here today not only to celebrate this historic moment, but to renew our commitment to liberate our country from the clutches of US imperialism, domestic feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism and struggle for national freedom and democracy. Your presence and our presence here speak a thousand words. A thousand words because this gathering is a manifest collection of our effort, a manifest collection that even inside the belly of the beast we persevere in our political task to continuously contribute out time and talent for the revolution. Our struggle is a continuation of the struggle of our forefathers, even to the time of the Spanish rule, to the time of Andres Bonifacio, Daguhoy, Emelio Jacinto, Diego Silang and the rest. But our struggle is of a new type, leadership wise, ideology and organization. In the course of the struggle many had offered their lives in the revolution.

Let us give time of silence to offer our respect to our martyrs knowing their spirits are with us giving us more courage and fire to serve our people.

Our front is one of the magic weapons that the revolutionary movement have, aside from the party, the communist party and army, the new peoples army.

The national democratic front serves to coordinate patriotic forces in the national democratic revolution with socialist perspective.

The NDFP as you know was formed during the firestorm days that swept our country in the 60 and the 70’s. When the Marcos regime implemented a military rule, it was futile for us to work above ground given the fascist atmosphere. In 1973 after brutal Martial law was proclaimed many legal organizations went underground. Many like Patriotic youth or Kabataang Makabayan, the Christians for National Liberation and the women’s organization, Makibaka decided to work clandestinely and allied with the communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army. As a matter of fact when martial law was proclaimed they offered safe haven for leaders in the open mass movement in the countrysides, many of whom joined the army and peasant organizing in the rural areas. Some had to operate in the underground manner serving as core leaders in the sectoral movements. It was an arduous struggle for many to make the illegal legal by continuously defying repressive state policies and expanded networks and organization on the basis of consolidation.

In 1973, the Preparatory Committee drafted a 10-point program. It is a program that unites the people in the national democratic revolution, a basis to win on our side those that can be won, neutralize and isolate die hard enemies of the people. Today it has become 12 a testamnent to our effort to learn from our experience adding the moro and national minority issue as well as women.

The NDFP had helped the movement in various ways. After martial law was proclaimed for example in 1976 the NDFP preparatory committee initiated to facilitate and help preparation of guerilla zones through organizing legal means and latter turned over to revolutionary forces and develop to guerilla zones. This combination helped expand our guerilla fronts to 29 at the end of 1980.

In the rural areas, the NDFP and its allied mass organizations function to develop alternative or revolutionary government. We have our own educational system, literacy and numeracy programs, we have our own health programs, we have our own self defense organizations, militias, and organizes of political power from the barrio up to the municipal level.

Because of the richness of our experiences, in 1977 the 10 point program became 12, which includes women and the Moro and national minorities.

In 1980, in order to further isolate the Marcos Regime, the NDFP formed the Permanent People’s Tribunal. The front worked to gain status of belligerency of the overall resistance and revolutionary struggle of the Filipino people.

In 1992, allied organization of the NDFP joined the CPP in carrying out the Second Great Rectification Movement, correcting major errors instigated and carried out by a small group that turned out to be renegades in the leadership of the CPP It was an overwhelming struggle that put back into perspective issues of leadership, and issues in the ideological, political and organizational field.

Today, we continue to arouse, organize and mobilizathe masses of people. We engage in proto-diplomatic negotiation organization to organization, institution to institution and even country to country.

I strongly disagree with Pastor Wright dichotomizing his response “descriptively” differentiating a pastor and a politician’s role. In fact his statement is deceptive. He tries to insulate himself rationalizing his continous political highjacking Obama’s campaign. What Pastor Wright is doing is political in nature full with  latent  intentions he only knows. Seems to me, he cannot bare himself to sidestep for a while and give full play to the elections. He seems enthusiastic to join the fray. What is disgusting in this controversy is how UCC have handled this issue in the past weeks.

For me, there is a little difference between a pastor and apolitician. The common thing they have in particular is they share the share living quarters. They live to dine and sleep under one roof - the superstructure.. The difference is, pastors operate within the ideological realm, exercises authority in a  persuasive manner ( speaking in pulpits ) while politicians do  work in courts directly having control over the coercive machinery of the state. Nontheless they work within the interstices of the superstructure, a superstructure that is supported by a mode of production that makes sure to protect the elites.

Globalization is nothing but the extension to almost the entire planet the intensification of all construction that has characterized imperialism since its birth in 1900. Far from being a natural and beneficial process for the whole world, globalization stretches exploitation, domination and repression to its limits, thus preparing the emerges of broadest anti imperialist and anti capitalist revolutionary movement on a world scale as never seen before.

With the rise of imperialism, the circuits of money, commodity and productive capital became internationalized under the dominance of finance capital. During the 20 to 25 years there is a substantial increase in the degree of integration of the world economy particularly the integration of international dispersed production activities. This integration are call functional integration, turns on tightly woven production and trade networks, and was facilitated by global financial markets, new production and transport technologies, and leaps in real time communication capabilities. This greater ability to break down and scatter, and link production processes and serve different market, to diversify production worldwide, and seek out least cost locations for specific products and exploit comparative regional advantages—this ability to undertake a kind of global scan and choice in the pursuit of the most profitable deployment and redeployment of capital—is a trend of “qualitative significance” now we can see that this labor processes is integrated, cheapened and transformed on a global scale . One measure is shifting of its center of gravity for production activities of some global industries to oppressed nations. Generation ago, most of the global shifting of manufacturing activity was concentrated in apparel and consumer electronics. Today more shifting is happening in the field of manufacturing, agriculture, and service activities. In the Philippines for example, today is the proliferation of call center wherein these are third level outfits which do the promotion and after sales support for companies throughout the world given the Filipino proficiency to speak the English language. Undoubtedly acceleration of the spread of productive process was to the upfront rise after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has been promoted through treaties agreements and policies through an aggressive push for deregulation and liberalization. These are definitely seen in the intellectual property rights which the monopolist has claimed proprietary claims over everything in sight, be that in technology, agricultural inputs, seed varieties, pharmaceuticals and genetic material. To state the development of globalization today, there are three elements to its process. First, is the intensification of the process in the oppressed nations with the virtual take over of the national management of Third World economist by the IMF and the World Bank and the imposition of neo-liberal policies and restructuring? But globalization is a more recent development than internationalization, which in no other way represents a new stage of capitalist development as imperialism did for capitalism that is the highest stage of monopoly capitalism. It is also not definitely obliterating rivalry between monopolistic firms or between national-imperialist states, or the division of the world into oppressor and the oppressed nations, rather it is a phenomenon of the heightening of the essential features of imperialism. I see a world economy in which the contradiction between the organization of production at the private ownership level and the anarchy of social production overall is intensifying on the global scale which is subject to the conscious control of the transnational corporations.

Some ideas point to the fact that globalization that territorial –national foundation of capital has lost much of its relevance, meaning the capital has no country. Their point of view is that fast flows of capital across national borders, the emergence of the global assembly line and the Tran nationalization of financial markets have led to a footloose of capital whose structures operate outside the grip of authority nation-states.

“Expanded the economic and political space in the world for transnational corporations and for the Transnationalizing the national systems of production, distribution and trade and consumption. This Tran nationalizing process has been sought to be achieved by dismantling the power of nation states to mange and intervene in their economy, and in particular diminishing the rights and powers of Third World countries in their local communities. ..The raison de etre for all this… is the restrict or dampen the competitive capacity of the enterprise and productive apparatus of the South in the world that is being globalize in the interest of the Northern transnational corporations.”

For all its mobility, capital has neither detached itself from its moorings in A home national market; more detached itself from the superstructure and institutional expression of these moorings, the imperialist national state. Why? The most significant portions and operations of individual, internationalized capitals tend to be based in, and they’re profits generated in or repatriated to, their home base, and their respective national market. Huge concentrations of a fixed capital factories, energy and power facilities of example are sunk in national markets. This is not a post-industrial world, or a post physical asset society that capital cannot easily pull up its stakes and dart from country to country. The home market is where research and development and corporate command and control operations of globalize capital are strategically located.

The home base remains s vital to the activity of internationalized capital, more so, in fact, in an era of heightened global competition. This is true even though there is growing trend toward large transnational corporations entering into various cross country alliances. A growing domestic market is a source of strength and international competitive advantage. Key firms in the home market can exploit economies of scale by lowering costs by producing on a large scale for a large market. They develop strategic network of customers, suppliers, and subcontractors. They gain cost saving from complementary clusters of industries and provide inputs and supplies and raise the overall technological capabilities of the national capital. Material existence of an integrated home base lends coherence and competitiveness to national capital in spite of there is both alliance and rivalry among different units of national capital and within these arrangements.

Capital requires that the national imperialist state act economically and super structurally to guarantee the general conditions under which production and exchange can occur. These conditions include physical infrastructure (harbors, communication systems, etc.) and the basic inputs (like energy); education, job training and skills upgrading for the labor force; management of the economy (through budgetary expenditures, deficits policy, etc.); central banking systems; and so forth. Capital could not function as international capital without these supports. For instance, the postwar expansion of Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the German Bundesbank. The imperialist state remains the indispensable guarantor production and social relations through coercion, suppression and cooptation. Capital must maintain and falsify itself in its home base. Indeed, stability in the national market is a necessary condition for internationalized activity, which normally entails risk and national capital tends to pay more attention to stability in their home market than elsewhere. At the same time, capital requires state apparatus or imperialist state and the militant industry to secure the international environment within which it can globally thrive. Individual capitals by themselves cannot generally obtain these conditions of domination whether they involve austerity programs , counter revolutionary terror or both or direct engagement in war . The imperialist state is the guardian of the interest of capital as awhile who arrange bailouts from bankruptcy, negotiating treaties like NAFTA. Seeking to resolve dispute, between capitals, and forging class consensus above individual interest. Imperialist states develop strategic trade, industrial and technology policies to enhance or protect the international competitiveness of national capital. Key industries, like aerospace and high technology are promoted and safeguarded. Modern financial institutions , for all their rapid, cross border, electronic money transfer , remain tied to particular national states and their central banking systems like the Federal Reserve Bank for example as lenders of the last resort. The material reality of distinct national markets to which individual capital is anchored has important consequence. National capitalist will seek directly and indirectly to influence policy direction, issues of governance, and so forth within their home national state in qualitatively want than they do in other countries. For the above reasons, national capital formations and states will tend to be reproduced. It is possible for individual capitals to detach themselves from a base in a particular country and national market. But, one, other capitals (newly generated or migrating inward to the national market) will take their place and two, will take their place and third, those detaching themselves from one base and state will, for all reasons cited above, have to seek the umbrella of another national state which is rooted in another national market. Now if the process of the individual capitals detaching themselves forms a national base were to continue ona massive scale, then a particular capital formation might well disintegrate but globalization as such is not dissolving national capitals and national states. There are no global institutions that functioned equivalent of international states with corresponding authority, resources and power. There are no global institutions that are supranational, meaning above imperialist nations. The International Monetary Fun for example does not assume or take over the overall functions of the imperialist state. It performs more limited and specialized functions although as instruments of imperialism. The IMF and World Bank do become what amounts to economic governing boards in many oppressed nations, especially in their capacity to impose sweeping conditions when they grant loans to the Third World countries. The IMF is not in its essence an institution above nations or one in which imperialist capitals have become effectively blended together, rather, it represents and operating fraternity of imperialist in which one national capital, US Imperialism is dominant. The World Trade Organization is a vehicle for forging and regulating imperialist trade and investment rules but it also an arena of inter-imperialist rivalry. The argument being made here is not globalization without significance in relation to national capital formations and states. Production, trade and finance are more footloose. There is a contradiction between national regulations by the imperialist state and the global economic organization of transnational corporations. In a world economy that has grown more globalize and that compels national economies to adjust and reorganize to maintain fitness and competitiveness, imperialist state economic policy is subjected to various global pressured and constraints. Its scope of effectiveness may be reduced but of course, the institutional control exercised by the imperialist state over the national economy is only relative, social production is not truly regulated. On the other hand, the world imperialist economy does not possess regulatory institutions commensurate with and adequate to this scope and complexity. In short, the anarchy bound up with processes of capitalist development creates new problems of “control”.

The contradiction between internationalized accumulation and the national character of capital, far from being transcended, is intensified. Thus imperialist world economy is a differentiated unity; it is not homogenous world capitalist economy. Capitalist accumulation is internationalized. Capital export is leading edge of the search for profitability. Capital competes on a global place through the competitive introduction of new technologies into the internationalized branches of production, through the competitive movement of capital from one country to another within the same branch of production, through the competitive movement of capital from one branch of production, through the competitive movement of capital from one branch of production to another branch across national boundaries. As a result, there are tendencies toward global norms of production, to stay competitive; capital has to produce at a certain levels of efficiency and toward the formation of average world values and international prices of production that is toward the universalization of social labor, the establishment of socially necessary labor time on a global scale. But these tendencies are not fully realized. They have not led to the creation of a single, global capital formation, in which national markets have no significant particularities, or to a single value/ price systems although there are complex global processed by which value formation takes place on a world scale. This is because of the qualitative differentiation within the world imperialist economy, because of barriers and divisions that are reproduced, because of the very modes of existence of internationalized capital.

Accumulation proceeds through monopoly, specifically the leading and activating role of finance capital and the existence of global monopolistic power relations in technology, finance, and control of natural resources, communications and armaments. It proceeds through rivalry, among corporations, banks etc., and among national imperialist states. And accumulation proceeds through the division of the world oppressor and oppressed nations. These three proceeds through are not historical leftovers of imperialism‘s or capitalism’s beginnings. They are integral to these structures and functioning of internalized capital even as capitalist production grows more globalize. World accumulation is inseparable from power relations. The world imperialist economy is far from being homogenous through and through. There is significant diversity in national and local conditions. The world’s economy’s production relations are differentiated, semi-feudalism and pre-capitalist relations still exist within the world economy, labor is reproduced under different conditions and productivity, labor conditions and wage payments and so on, vary especially as between the economies of the oppressor and the oppressed nations. These are all reasons why despite the existence of the world market, national imperialist economies have relative cohesion and exhibit significant variation. This is why, despite the circulation of goods and labor itself across the globe, there is no equalization of wages and rates of exploitation. The minimum wage in the Philippines is USD 4 per day while in the US it is over UDS 8 per hour. There is no way to explain the phenomenon of super exploitation in the Third World if globalization, the movement of capital and labor etc. have fattened differences. Globalization has obviously not eradicated these differences. Moreover, the differentiation of national circuits of capital is super structurally reinforced. For instance, privileges are granted to sections of the labor force in the imperialist countries while there is IMF mandated wage cutting in the oppressed countries. The global expansion of capitalism is not simple process of homogenization. It involves equalization of differentiation of production processes and disintegration and preservation. Capital constantly seeks to exploit, while it also engenders differentials, this is part of its dynamism and its violence.

But how his violence and dynamism reflects also how it manipulates its control in the superstructure, particularly the integrative state apparatuses, which props up the system to dialectically complement and economic base of infrastructure. In the offensive of capital accumulation is also the offensive of sophistication in cooptation and preemption. Basic to this is the strategic step to give a human face of imperialist globalization. Every major confab of the global economic elite since Seattle 1999 has been met with massive street demonstrations involving tens of thousands from a diverse range of organizations and nations. In the industrialized countries of the North as well as in the underdeveloped South, there is an upsurge in industrial actions by workers and other mass protests by social movements in opposition to neo-liberal policies and their iniquitous consequences. News tells that there were at least two dozen political general strikes in Europe, Latin America, Asia and North America between 1994 and 1997 – more than any time in the 20th century. In the face of this backlash, the agents of monopoly capitalism in government, multilateral agencies as well as in “civil society” are now keen on giving imperialist globalization a facelift to restore its lost momentum and sidetrack the anti globalization mass movements. As Werner Blenk, director of the International Labor Organization (ILO) for the Philippines, rationalizes, “There is growing recognition that unless questions of fairness and equality are more energetically addressed by the international community, the process of international integration may be rejected by increasing numbers of countries”. Even the World Bank (WB) appears willing to accommodate cosmetic changes. In its recent World Development Report, the WB revisits the problem of poverty in the light of over two decades of neo-liberal restructuring of the global economy. Compared to previous WB policy documents on poverty, the latest WDR places great importance of “governance” and “institutions” (i.e. Non – Market mechanism), on “asset distribution” (i.e. equity) and on the “participation” of “civil society” in addressing the problem of poverty although its still falls far short of acknowledging the patent failure of neo-liberalism in eradicating poverty and easing inequality. In fact, it reasserts the primacy of the capitalist market: all other mechanism is merely instrumental to “making marketing work for the poor”. Presently, as a way of reinvigorating the “liberalization” of trade and investments, the WB and the European Union (EU) have been pushing for a “development round” in the World Trade Organization (WTO). They are using the manifest failures of neo-liberalism – the grossly unequal distribution of gain and pains from trade liberalization – as the very excuse for launching a new round. Third world governments are being lured into a fresh round of commitments by promises that the negotiations would focus on third world development concerns. At the same time, Guy Verhofstadt, president of the European Union (EU), has called for “ethical globalization” to address the valid concerns raised by anti-globalization activist. This is the same thinking behind the Global compact purports to provide a “value-based platform” or norms for globalization’s major players. Multinational corporations (MNCs) who sign up to the compact are expected to abide by nine principles, drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ILO’s Fundamental principles on Rights and Work and the Rio Principles on Environment and development.

To further this UN secretary General Kofi Annan has encouraged all UN agencies to form “partnerships” with the private sector in order to foster “corporate social responsibility” among the verable corporate giants invited by the UN as “partners” in the Global Compacts are Nike, Royal Dutch Shell, Bayer and Rio tinto-all well known for their appalling labor, human rights and environmental records. These companies and over 50 other TNC “partners” are allowed limited use of the UN logo to seal their status as “good corporate citizens of the world” even as the UN admits that it lacks the capacity to monitor their compliance with the compact’s principles indeed, this comes at the end of three decades wherein the global corporate elite, with the aid of the US government, has consistently and steadfastly undermined the UN’s ability to monitor, regulate or in any way circumscribe the power and influence of TNC’s. They managed to do this, in part, through the threat and actual withholding of the US government’s dues to the UN. This has led to the virtual demise of the UN Center on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), which was originally set up in the 1970’s to monitor and curb the power of TNC’s in domestic political affairs. In the 1990’s, the UNCTC was downsized, absorbed as a division of the UNCTAD and re-oriented towards promoting TNC interests by matching countries with foreign investments. Consistent with UN’s commitment to promoting “globalization with a human face,” the ILO has adopted the slogan “decent work for all”. In particular, the ILO for example in 1998’s Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work seeks to promote core labor standards as universally recognized human rights. As far as toothless agreements go, the ILO is often credited for having the best system of supervision and monitoring implementation of human rights instruments. The ILO addressed governments through periodic reports, dutiful recommendations often go unheeded and it does not utilize any form of pressure that can be applied on recalcitrant governments. For example, as far back as in 1980’s the ILO’s committee of Experts has already “noted with regret” the Philippine government’s “very broad and non limitative” application of assumption of jurisdiction over labor disputes in the name of national interest, practically restricting or negating the effective exercise of trade union rights. Despite these findings, these same provisions are still in force in the Philippine labor code today (article 263) not to mention various other restrictive though “unwritten laws and regulations” enforced by capitalist employers, local governments and export zone authorities. Thus “civil society” groups calling for a labor clause to be inserted in trade agreements and administered by either the WTO or the ILO merely serve to deflect and blunt people’s fundamental opposition to imperialist globalization. The question of choosing between which institutions- the WTO or the ILO- should have jurisdiction over monitoring and “enforcement” of labor standards is moot and academic. It is like choosing between your opponent’s mangers or someone who sits outside the ring to serve as the reference in a brawl against Goliath. But what is the real reason for the creation of human face of globalization? It is merely to preempt and co-opt people’s struggle. But lots of social movements has been co-opted and preempted. Their struggle has been blunted. This goes back to the issue of the concept of state and revolution, which Lenin aptly wrote about. Later this debate of state collaboration with regards to the mass movement had split the two parties the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. This also had long been debated to what extent do integrative approach, that is working within the system of the ruling class do the working class and oppressed class participate on? What is the basis for its participation? For me, with my 20 years in the mass movement in the Philippines, the determinant is how strong the critical mass is and to the level of political organization it has achieved. In my country, we have participated now in the last two elections and catapulted progressive leaders from the ranks of peasants and workers in congress. These however do not mean that we abandon the primacy of building mass organizations and mass movement and bases in the rural areas. Through identifying the primary and secondary forms of struggle we have effective in tactically opposing the rottenness of the semi-colonial and semi feudal system in the country and further strengthened the mass movement, primarily among the peasants who comprise 85% of the total population and the 15 percent urban based industrial workers and the 7 percent middle class. The movement has been critical to the civil society and uploaded the importance of painstaking organizing mass movement and class movements. Civil society is non-class movement, it denies the concept of class struggle and interprets state as devoid of class domination and control, operates in static vacuum. This goes back to the classical political theory, notable from Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America and the work of 18th century “Scottish moralist” such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and Francis Hutcheson. Tocqueville, for instance, including neighborhood groups, networks of mutual aid and local structures providing collective service. The aim was to foster civility among citizens in a democratic society. The modern version, as simplified by Jacek Kuron and Adam Michnik in the Polish resistance of the 80’s seeks to embody the values and interest of social autonomy in the face of the threats of modern state. In other versions it is an anti-statist and anti modernist in the light of the pro-capitalist state’s tendency to destroy social values and harmonious community relations. Civil society therefore is seen as a “counterweight to the state”. To trace further, in Eastern Europe, the antagonism between civil society and state marked its dramatic return in Poland in the mid-80’s with the advent of the workers’ solidarity in the era of Soviet modern revisionism in Eastern Europe. Rather than launching a revolution to respond it what they believe were failures of “socialism” however, civil society leaders sought structural reforms through organized pressured from below. But the pressure was to come from a plurality of independent groups that coalesced under solidarity. Disorder soon caught up with the civil society groups over whether the autonomy, which they represented, would be preserved once they took over the state, considering too, every state’s tendency to demobilize social forces in its attempt to achieve political governance. Civil society also championed the call for economic individualism and freedoms of property – the very same fabric of capitalist society, which the classic civil society doctrine disdains. In France, civil society theorist disrupted capitalism as totalitarian but also distanced themselves from the left whose links to Soviet Revisionism they saw as deeply connected to the totalitarian state. They then sought to reorient civil and political society by relocating the locus of democratization from the state to society, which is represented, by political forms of solidarity, interaction and group life. They also called for the founding of ideological political parties. Like their Polish counterpart, the French theorist notably Pierre Rosanvallon found a reconciliation with both the bureaucratic state and the capitalist class in a bid to win concessions for civil society: with the first, reducing economic demands in exchange for autonomy; the second, rationalizing capital in exchange for self-management and free time.

In Latin America, the long period of dictatorial rule in many countries gave rise to mass mobilizations and popular upsurge and, later the birth of civil society movements. In the drive for “democratization”, civil society turned to political society, i.e. civil society groups became organized political parties. The result of this radical departure from European version of civil society was to devalue movements and associations by political parties. Just in the same, as political parties shunned revolutionary approach to achieving democratization, it was unavoidable for them to enter into the process of negotiation, bargaining and compromise with the authoritarian rulers, first through elections, then to post-elections state reorganization. Civil society theorist Cardoso proposed the conjunction of civil society self-organization and an acceptable albeit reformed state. This reconciliation saved most dictators and torturers of Latin America from the gallows. No, thanks to civil society, no structural change has taken place in most of Latin America.

In the United States, Robert D. Putnam , who formulated the recent version of civil society as gleaned from the civil society praxis in the United States and Italy, emphasizes the importance of horizontal networks of civil society praxis in the united States and Italy, emphasizes the importance of horizontal networks of civil associations as a counterweight to the state. This network, which sustains cooperation, and “civic engagement” that cut across class cleavages include choral societies and bowling leagues. Because he envisions civil society as being “nonpartisan” and not “polarized” to retain its pluralist character, Putnam does not welcome the participation of social movements, non-profit organizations and most of all political parties. Civil society groups, he say, must bridge social and political divisions and remain autonomous. Critics of Putnam point out that civic engagement is essentially a political act, advances a political or even ideological cause and eventually sharpens social cleavages. They also remind him that in fact, most triumphant social transformations have been the product of ideologically driven political parties and social movements. Another thing, Putnam’s postulate may not simply work in a state of repression and tyranny where citizens will have to raise their struggle to the supreme political act- of a revolution. Recent accounts reveal the fact that the “civil society” democratization that emerged in Eastern Europe was not simply the inevitable result of the historic flaws of modern revisions but was also fanned and secretly backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and conservative institutions and foundations in the United States. Huge funds were funneled to several Eastern European media groups and NGO’s operating in the guise of “democratization” in order to accelerate the disintegration of governments and their economic and social infrastructures. The United States’ long drawn and archaic “policy of containment” in the cold war era called for a combination of arms superiority, military encirclement, economic aggression, the launching of covert and overt operations and support for anti- socialist campaigns in order to undermine the credibility of socialist states thus leading to their fall. In Latin American, the civil society-initiated “democratization” movement was also supported as a third way to replace the long era of authoritarian rule in many countries particularly Chile and Argentina. This had to be done as dictatorial regimes, which had long enjoyed strong U.S. Support became America’s liability and their stay in power only fueled liberationist movements and Maoist-inspired armed struggle. In order to thwart the growth of liberationist movements, the United States government promoted the policy of reconciliation with authoritarian regimes, institutions of bourgeois elections as well as symbolic political and economic reforms. In the end, civil society option failed to address the institutional roots of political and social unrest even as the return of authoritarian rule remains in the shadow today.

In the Philippines, some civil society embodies the influence of the European, Latin and American experience although not in the sharpest interpretations that their foreign counterparts have so far crafted. This is especially so in the case of the now-moribund popular democrats “pluralist” concept and the social democrats’ reformism and moderation. What is crystallized in both political shades in abhorrence to any form of class struggle as well as a counter-revolutionary stance? In the tradition of developing a diversity of interpretations and tendencies in the entire civil society movements where “non-partisanship” and political tendencies are strong, both Philippine groups sow further confusion by their highly partisan, elitist and anti-national democratic biases. Actually, they continue to journey in to the level of compromise and opportunism by opting to join state bureaucracies in the guise of instituting reform from within. They have done so since the regimes of Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada and now, the Macapagal Arroyo. And so far, they only became part of the elitist and repressive policies that have aggravated the country’s economic and political crisis and oppression- the same conditions that both classical and modern civil society purports to eliminate. In the current stage of modern globalization, it is the same instrumentalities of globalization that implements civil society. Thus, for the church to be effective, it has to recognize the importance of class definitions and struggle. Non-recognition have entrapped the progressives in the church to the whims of the ruling elites and had them ambivalent of this is seen in the writing of Luis Segundo, the Theology for Artisan of a New Humanity, the transformation of the church to New Humanity, the transformation of the church to serve the poor. Upholding class struggle will unshackle the long-standing onslaught of cooptation and preemption. It is on the connection that solidarity movements must also carry on to be critical. Only then, we can be effective in carrying out an ecumenical movement on a broader sense and effective in addressing the root causes of oppression and exploitation. Only then for activist can we carry a vibrant anti-globalization or anti-imperialist movement.