tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67674277510796067542024-03-19T00:49:18.014-04:00The BlanquistA blog for unapologetic Marxist and communist views on history, politics and current events.Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.comBlogger177125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-19603700629058772432024-01-22T00:00:00.016-05:002024-01-22T00:00:00.352-05:00The French Turn, DSA, and Revolutionary Regroupment<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm4arRo9JXtAS_pXbYcDCtE7y_6j3MclopwsMYTCkJ_so4kBuDrCcDJWL5Fqj2BdiRDuLNUX6enpV4nj4adBGBxY7_nLWlECPuGHNaDL5_SC1ngk_7de-6igM8me7IRVNV57VlBT-MeEkRkGEUlXW_nAktQ8PPg-_IlWP3NWEMR4c9Qk337TnLu3rzPiPZ/s1920/french-turn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1920" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm4arRo9JXtAS_pXbYcDCtE7y_6j3MclopwsMYTCkJ_so4kBuDrCcDJWL5Fqj2BdiRDuLNUX6enpV4nj4adBGBxY7_nLWlECPuGHNaDL5_SC1ngk_7de-6igM8me7IRVNV57VlBT-MeEkRkGEUlXW_nAktQ8PPg-_IlWP3NWEMR4c9Qk337TnLu3rzPiPZ/w640-h266/french-turn.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Originally published at <i><a href="https://firebrand.red/2024/01/the-french-turn-the-dsa-and-revolutionary-regroupment/?fbclid=IwAR26qiJQhMsf-RoEqNP4aLalUfkqv3Elu3_gbGV_RjyKTBMxs9cJ-EUM3HE">Firebrand</a></i>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In March 2020,
several longtime members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
published an essay “<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/dsa-socialist-alternative-entryism-socialism-marxism">Factionalism in
DSA</a>”
that warned about the dangers of entryism by organizations such as Socialist
Alternative. Using the example of the “French Turn” undertaken by American Trotskyists
in the 1930s, the authors argue that disciplined revolutionary entry into
broader organizations was necessarily destructive. They state that DSA should
not allow any entryists into its ranks: “If the Left
is to succeed where past generations have failed, it can’t allow sectarian
organizations to operate as “parties within a party.””</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">However,
these claims have an ironic and deluded whiff of redbaiting. If there was
serious Trotskyist entryism, then DSA’s intimate relationship with the
Democratic Party would be fundamentally challenged. While it is nice to
imagine, there is no Trotskyist “French Turn” occurring in DSA. Rather, the
threat of imaginary Trotskyists and other “ultra-leftists” in DSA has led to “<a href="https://socialism.com/fs-article/deadly-serious-dsa-leaders-joke-about-trotskys-murder-in-revealing-tweets/">ice pick</a>”
jokes threatening violence against political opponents and the <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/04/to-rule-an-empty-palace/">dissolution</a> of
the BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group who have opposed Zionist
politicians such as Jamaal Bowman. In fact, the <a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/08/did-the-dsa-convention-move-left/">2023 DSA
convention</a> reaffirmed the organization’s support for the Democratic Party.
As a result, the article’s claims about the dangers of entryism resemble
anticommunist paranoia.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The
article’s caricature of Trotskyist entryism obscures the real history and
lessons of the “French Turn”. Trotsky advocated the “French Turn” as a
short-term tactic for revolutionaries to build up their forces by joining
reformist organizations. While Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party of
America proved successful in its objectives, this does not mean it applies to
the present-day DSA. Unlike the Socialist Party, DSA is not a site of struggle
for leftists, but a wing of the Democratic Party. Entryism into DSA does not
build up the capacity of the revolutionary left but serves as a rationale for
opportunism and political liquidation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">The French Turn</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The development of
the French Turn cannot be separated from the political crossroads faced by
Trotskyism in 1933. Until now, the Trotskyist movement had functioned as an
external faction in the Communist International, hoping to return it to its
original program as a center for world revolution. Yet in Germany, the
sectarianism of the Third Period that saw the social democrats condemned as “social
fascists” cleared the way for Hitler’s rise to power that ended with the
destruction of the once-powerful Communist Party of Germany (KPD). For Trotsky,
the German debacle proved beyond any doubt that the Third International was unreformable.
Now he said it was time for revolutionaries to organize a Fourth International to
lead the working class against capitalism.<br />
<br />
The victory of Nazism immediately raised the stakes for the workers’ movement
across the world. In 1934, an abortive fascist coup occurred in France
threatening the stability of the Third Republic. French workers responded with
united action that cut across traditional party lines. This joint action by
socialists and communists produced a massive impulse for unity from the
rank-and-file in both parties. In response, the Communist Party made overtures
to the Socialists for broader unity. However, by 1935-36, this unity took the form
of class collaborationism with the liberal bourgeoisie known as the popular
front.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The bankruptcy of
the Third Period discredited the Stalinists in the eyes of many left-wing
workers internationally. That meant the social democrats were among the main
beneficiaries from this upsurge of proletarian militancy. Trotsky believed that
the growth of leftwing social democracy and Stalinist moves toward non-revolutionary
unity with the liberal bourgeoisie represented both a danger and an
opportunity. If the Stalinists succeeded in building unity with the social
democrats, then this would sideline the French Trotskyists for the coming
period. Therefore, it was necessary to find a way to forestall this
development. <br />
<br />
At the moment, Trotsky believed that his followers were too weak to intervene
in events, but there was the possibility of joining this radicalization from
within. This raised the question of which organization to join. The
bureaucratized internal life of the Communist Parties meant that they were
closed to the Trotskyists. By contrast, the social democratic parties –
particularly in France – seemed to offer more possibilities for intervention. <br />
<br />
At the time, the French Socialist Party (SFIO) was presenting itself as a more
democratic party. In late 1933, the party’s “neo-socialist” right-wing split
away, and the leadership had lurched to the left and was encouraging
revolutionaries to join. The party’s left-wing led by Marceau Pivert had
thousands of members and was open to Trotskyism. As a result, Trotsky
encouraged his followers to join the SFIO in June 1934. A year later, Trotskyists
had over 20% of the vote in the Seine Federation and their paper, <i>Révolution</i>,
had a circulation in the tens of thousands. They also managed to triple their
membership to roughly 600. Ultimately, entryism ended in October 1935 when the
Trotskyists were expelled for openly repudiating the Popular Front. Yet in a
limited amount of time, the Trotskyists had made some important gains in the
SFIO.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><br />
<br />
At every juncture, however, the French Turn was confronted with major problems.
The Trotskyists failed to seize opportunities due to their own internal
divisions. The problems came down to a feud between a group led by Pierre
Naville and the other by Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank. Naville was a
gifted theoretician but was inflexible and opposed to the French Turn. By
contrast, Molinier was more enthusiastic about the French Turn but had a
tendency toward opportunism. When the Trotskyists entered the SFIO, Naville
split from the group. In an ironic turn of events, Naville later joined the
SFIO but refused to join the Trotskyist entryists. The fact that there were two
separate Trotskyist entryist groups clearly limited their impact. The two groups
would only reunify in September 1935 just as the period of entryism ended.<br />
<br />
At the end of 1935, Trotsky drew the following conclusions from the French
experience:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">1. Entry into a reformist centrist party in itself
does not include a long perspective. It is only a stage which, under certain
conditions, can be limited to an episode.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">2. The crisis and the threat of war have a double
effect. First, they create the conditions in which the entry itself becomes
possible in a general way. But, on the other hand, they force the ruling
apparatus, after many sharp fluctuations, to resort to expelling the
revolutionary elements (just as the ruling class after long vacillations finds
itself forced to resort to fascism). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">3. Entry at the present moment, one year later than in
France-and what a year!-could mean that the duration would not be too long. But
this by no means decreases the importance of the entry: in a short period an
important step forward can also be made. But what is necessary, especially in
light of the French experience, is to free ourselves of illusions in time; to
recognize in time the bureaucracy’s decisive attack against the left wing, and
defend ourselves from it, not by making concessions, adapting, or playing
hide-and-seek, but by a revolutionary offensive. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">4. What has been said above does not at all exclude
the task of “adapting” to workers who are in the reformist parties, by teaching
them new ideas in the language they understand. On the contrary, this art must
be learned as quickly as possible. But one must not, under the pretext of
reaching the ranks, make principled concessions to the top centrists and left
centrists (like the SAP, which, in the name of the “masses,” prostrates itself
before the reformists). <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">5. Devote the most attention to the youth. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">6. The decisive condition of success during this new
chapter is still firm ideological cohesion and perspicacity toward our entire
international experience.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span></span></a><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">For Trotsky,
entryism was a strategic turn that had to be done very carefully. To avoid
being swamped by the larger reformist leadership, he believed the Trotskyists must
maintain their discipline so they could reach a wider audience. Entryism was not
meant to support the reformists but allow the Trotskyists to be in a better
position to expose them. This would enable the Trotskyists to regroup the more
militant sections of their working class base around a revolutionary program. Ultimately,
Trotsky hoped that when the period of entryism ended that a stronger
revolutionary party would emerge.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>The United States</i><br />
<br />
While French Trotskyist entryism achieved mixed results, the Americans carried
out a much more successful “French Turn.” By 1934, the Communist League of
America (CLA) only numbered 200 members and was dwarfed by the much larger
Communist Party (CPUSA). Despite their small size, the CLA possessed a great
many strengths that allowed them to break out of their isolation. For one, they
were led by capable organizers such as James Cannon and Max Shachtman.
Secondly, the CLA played a major role in mass struggles, most notably leading
the Minneapolis Teamster Strikes of 1934. This showed that a few well-placed
unionists backed by a strong revolutionary organization could lead workers to
victory. This led the CLA to fuse with the A.J. Muste-led American Workers
Party (AWP), which organized Toledo auto-part workers in militant strikes. Now
with a tested core of working class organizers behind them, it appeared that
the Trotskyists were poised for greater political breakthroughs.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">During this
period, the then-largely moribund Socialist Party of America (SPA) experienced
a rapid growth in membership. Like the French Party, the SPA was confronted
with growing working class militancy and calls by the Communist Party for
unity. From 9,500 members in 1929, the SPA grew to over 20,000 by 1934. Many of
these new recruits considered themselves to be revolutionary Marxists and
filled the ranks of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). This influx of
leftist members had the effect of increasing the amount of factionalism within
the party. <br />
<br />
The Trotskyists were watching all these developments and wondering how they
would be resolved. Even though the SPA was a spent force on the revolutionary
left, it still attracted radicalizing workers to its ranks. Looking back at
this situation in 1944, Cannon believed that the SPA’s internal situation was
unstable and would not last long:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The party itself was not viable. It was already in the
stage of violent ferment and disintegration in 1936 at the time of our entry.
The Socialist Party was destined, in any case, to be torn apart. The only
question was how and along what lines the disintegration and eventual
destruction of the historically unviable party would take place.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span></span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It was possible
that the leftists in the SPA would be silenced or expelled. Then the party
would likely tail Roosevelt and the Democrats. Alternatively, the party could
be taken over by these uneducated new militants, who as Cannon said were “philistines
to the marrow of their bones, without tradition, without serious knowledge,
without anything at all…”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Finally, considering the “strong
sentiments of conciliation with Stalinism” that existed within its ranks, it
was possible that the Socialist Party would be captured by the Communist Party.<br />
<br />
For Cannon, entryism into the Socialist Party could forestall all these
developments. If the Trotskyists used this limited window, then they could gain
forces for the revolution:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The question was: Would the potentially revolutionary
element of the centrist party-the worker activists and rebellious youth-be
engulfed by these forces? Or, would they be fused with the cadres of Trotskyism
and brought over to the road of the proletarian revolution? This could be
tested only by our entry into the Socialist Party.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></sup></sup></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">However, Cannon
faced opposition to an American “French Turn” from two quarters. The first was
from Muste, who was partly opposed to entryism since he believed it was an
accommodation to the reformists. Another reason for his opposition was an
attachment to the Workers Party. As Cannon said: “Muste couldn’t bear the
thought that after we had founded a party and proclaimed it the one and only
party, we should then pay any attention to any other party. We should go on in our
own way, keep our heads up, and see what happens. If they failed to join us,
well, that would be their own fault. Muste’s position was not sufficiently
thought out, not reasoned with the necessary objectivity. It would not do in
the situation.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><br />
<br />
A second and more volatile source of opposition came from Hugo Oehler. A CLA
veteran, Oehler was a talented mass worker and union activist, but was opposed
to any entryism into non-revolutionary organizations based on principle. For
Oehler, entry into a party affiliated with the Second International represented
an abject betrayal of Marxism. Inside the Workers Party, Oehler’s opposition
proved disruptive as he engaged in factionalism – including physical
confrontations – and continually violated party discipline. While Oehler fought
with blunt instruments, Cannon used a more surgical approach to win over the
party: “Medicinal treatment is the more important and must always come first in
any case. Ours consisted of sound education on Marxist principles and their
sectarian caricatures; thorough discussion, patient explanation.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a> This
enabled Cannon to isolate Oehler and win over a majority to his side. <br />
<br />
Once these obstacles were dealt with, the way was clear for the Workers Party
to join the SPA in 1936. To enter the SPA, the Trotskyists had to make many
organizational concessions which included dissolving their party organization
and ceasing all publications. As Cannon recalled, these compromises were a
bitter pill that the Trotskyists were willing to swallow:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Our problem was to make an agreement with this rabble
to admit us to the Socialist Party. In order to do that we had to negotiate. It
was a difficult and sticky job, very disagreeable. But that did not deter us. A
Trotskyist will do anything for the party, even if he has to crawl on his belly
in the mud.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[8]</span></sup></sup></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">However, the
Trotskyists did not lose their political identity inside the Socialist Party.
They managed to gain control over the Chicago-based <i>Socialist Appeal</i> and
used that to spread their message. <br />
<br />
During the period of entryism from 1936-37, the Trotskyists accumulated
invaluable political experience. For one, they were the main force organizing
the Dewey Commission to defend Leon Trotsky and expose the Moscow Trials.
Second, the Trotskyists organized support for the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War. The war in Spain was an acid test for the wider left.
Revolutionaries defended anarchists and other radicals who were leading a
social revolution in the Loyalist Zone. On the other side, the Communist Party
and other reformists backed forces that defended capitalist property and engaged
in the repression of revolutionary workers. Finally, the Trotskyists were
involved in the maritime strikes occurring in California.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[9]</span></span></span></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As Cannon
observed, the Trotskyists simply carried out their work and waited for the political
issues to inevitably arise: “Our plan was to let the political issues develop
normally, as we were sure they would. We didn’t have to force discussion or to
initiate the faction struggle artificially. We could well afford to let the
political issues unfold under the impact of world events. And we didn’t have
long to wait.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[10]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a><br />
<br />
Indeed, it seemed that the Socialist Party leadership wanted to drive out the
Trotskyists almost as soon as they joined. On March 26, 1937, a national
convention was held in Chicago to contain the Trotskyists. In a move targeting <i>Socialist
Appeal</i>, factional publications were banned. In another move, the SPA
leadership introduced a “gag” law to stop the discussion about disputed
questions inside party branches. However, the Trotskyists were not yet formally
expelled from the party. In addition, forces in the SPA wanted to endorse New
Deal-aligned politicians like Fiorello La Guardia while the Trotskyists opposed
this move.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In August 1937,
little more than a year after they had entered the Socialist Party, the
Trotskyists were expelled. At the beginning of 1938, the Trotskyists
reconstituted themselves as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Based on sheer
numbers, the Trotskyists measurably gained from the French Turn. They had
entered the SPA with only a few hundred and now counted at least 1,000 members
and supporters. They also won over the bulk of the YPSL to revolutionary
politics. As a result, a solid revolutionary party had been created in the
United States. In addition, the Socialist Party was no longer a serious
competitor on the left. As Cannon said: “Since then the SP has progressively
disintegrated until it has virtually lost any semblance of influence in any
party of the labor movement. Our work in the Socialist Party contributed to
that.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[11]</span></sup></sup></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">
What was the overall balance sheet on the “French Turn”? For one, entryism
required a disciplined organization and an adherence to principled politics to
succeed. Secondly, Trotsky observed, entryism was – at best – merely a
short-term tactic: “I will not say that the entry into the Socialist Party [of
America] was a mistake in itself, but the weakness and bad composition of the
party gave very limited possibilities to this maneuver and demand from us a new
orientation and a new policy.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[12]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></sup></a> Moreover,
entryism over the long-term raised the danger of revolutionaries adapting to
opportunist politics. As Cannon noted, this opportunist deviation appeared
among the American Trotskyists: <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">There is no doubt at all that the leaders of our
movement adapted themselves a little too much to the centrist officialdom of
the Socialist Party. A certain amount of formal adaptation was absolutely
necessary in order to gain the possibilities of normal work in the
organization. But this adaptation undoubtedly was carried too far in some cases
and led to illusions and fostered deviations on the part of some members of our
movement.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" title=""><sup><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="line-height: 107%;">[13]</span></sup></sup></a></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As a short-term
tactic, entryism needed a clear goal and exit strategy. If pursued for the
long-term, then the entryists would see their task not as building a
revolutionary party but “capturing” a majority in the reformist party. This
effectively amounted to political liquidation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Contrary to anticommunist
claims, the American “French Turn” was not a sectarian wrecking operation that
destroyed an otherwise healthy Socialist Party. This retelling overlooks many
crucial elements of history. First, the Socialist Party leadership were not
innocent victims of “sectarian” Trotskyists, rather they were aggressive agents
who wanted to remove their political critics. Secondly, Cannon and the
Trotskyists did not so much split the Socialist Party as they were driven out.
Third, entryism showed that the Socialist Party could not honestly answer
leftist critics without silencing them. Fourth, the Socialist Party’s “big tent”
approach that included revolutionaries, centrists, and reformists under one
umbrella was not a workable idea in reality. As the historian Bryan Palmer
noted, “an all-inclusive party of the left” that would “transcend the strategic
differences separating distinct strands adhering to counter-posed politics of
revolution and social democratic reform has historically been an attractive
panacea.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
To function, a “big tent” organization must avoid confronting major political
questions. What Cannon and the Trotskyists did was clarify how unworkable the “big
tent” approach was in practice.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Finally, Cannon
and the Trotskyists did not set out to destroy the Socialist Party. Rather,
they wanted to build something new and better. They looked for arenas where it
was possible to merge principled party building with mass work. Hundreds inside
the Socialist Party were convinced that a Marxist program provided the needed
answers. In the end, this tactic allowed the Trotskyists to build a small, but
valuable, beachhead for revolutionary politics in the United States.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-family: arial;">The Democratic
Socialists of America</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Since the first
Bernie Sanders campaign and the election of Donald Trump, the Democratic
Socialists of America have jumped in membership from nearly 6,000 in 2016 to 94,000
in 2021, albeit falling to <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zll3BCBpr4ZwruT_ctugQUMCODRcZv7T/view">58,000</a> members in good
standing by 2023. This makes DSA the largest nominally socialist organization
in the United States since the 1940s. On the surface, it appears that DSA has
shed a great deal of its longtime more conservative social democratic outlook
by adopting left-sounding resolutions at various conventions. As a result, many
leftists and those without a political home have flocked to DSA seeing it as a
vehicle for socialism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">
This raises the question over whether Trotskyists should enter organizations
like DSA. Currently, no socialist organization proposes a strategy that is
completely analogous to the “French Turn.” Yet there are “soft” entryist
efforts adopted by various groups. For example, in 2020 Socialist Alternative (SAlt)
<a href="https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/12/15/why-socialist-alternative-members-are-joining-dsa/">proposed</a> dual membership
for its cadre inside DSA. They claim that DSA’s “big tent” offers opportunities
to expand the horizon of socialist politics: “While Socialist Alternative is an
ideologically and politically cohesive organization, we also see the need for
broader, “big tent” organizations like DSA to help bring together wider forces
in campaigns, movements, and ongoing united fronts.”<br />
<br />
SAlt claims they are an “explicitly revolutionary Marxist organization,” who
will help “build [DSA] while engaging in comradely debates about how to advance
socialist politics and struggles of workers and the oppressed.” In addition, SAlt
argues that DSA could make a major contribution to building the socialist
movement if they broke from the Democrats:<br /><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We think that DSA will be best positioned to grow and
develop both the organization and the wider socialist movement by popularizing
the need for a new party, running exemplary viable campaigns outside of the
Democratic Party, and focusing its energy on building mass movements. This
approach would require DSA decisively breaking from the Democrats and helping
lay the basis for a new mass party.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In judging SAlt’s strategy, we should ask if it meets two of the
criteria for entryism established by Trotsky and Cannon. The first being that
an entryist organization is a disciplined group with a revolutionary program.
Is this true about SAlt? In both <a href="https://www.socialistalternative.org/2016/02/01/movement4bernie-takes-country/">2016</a>
and <a href="https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/01/30/socialist-alternative-in-action-sanders-campaign/">2020</a>,
SAlt supported Bernie Sanders and registered people to vote in the Democratic
Party. Despite his claims to be a socialist, Bernie Sanders is a New Deal
Democrat with a long history of <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/not-on-our-side-on-bernie-sanders-and-imperialism/">supporting
imperialist wars</a>. Kshama Sawant, a SAlt member elected to the Seattle City
Council, was an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQQvJ2pwIq0">active</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8OXfsR_WA">campaigner</a> for
Sanders and has a history of <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/kshama-sawant-and-socialist-alternative-have-turned-against-police-unions-sort-of/">supporting</a>
police unions. Thus, Sawant acts more like a careerist politician than a
revolutionary tribune. <br />
<br />
At times, Socialist Alternative has <a href="https://www.socialistalternative.org/2022/03/20/dsa-leadership-dissolves-bds-working-group/">criticized</a>
DSA for giving left cover to the Squad and “progressive” Democrats who in turn
back the Biden administration. However, SAlt has never questioned their previous
record of backing Bernie Sanders and has never given an account for this
incoherence. Like DSA, SAlt has fostered illusions that the Democratic Party
can become an instrument for socialist politics. Compared to DSA, SAlt is
inconsistent; they seem to promote a revolutionary line but they are advocating
reformism in practice. We can conclude that based on the Trotsky-Cannon
criteria for entryism that SAlt does not satisfy that revolutionary standard. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">A second criteria for entryism is the class character of the
organization that one enters. Clarifying this point requires understanding the
nature of the “class line.” It is necessary for Marxists to recognize the line
separating working class organizations from those of the bourgeoisie on the
other side of the line. Moreover, it is imperative to educate workers to break from
bourgeois organizations. Blurring the class line confuses issues and only aids
those who want to channel workers back into support for capitalist politics, which
can only damage the struggle for socialism.<br />
<br />
When it comes to the class line, the Socialist Party of America for all its
faults was a <i>reformist working class party</i>. By contrast, DSA functions
as a pressure group inside the Democratic Party, a <i>bourgeois-imperialist
party</i>. While many DSA members claim that their chapters do “good work” and are
not connected with the national organization, the local and national are not
separate. For one, dues money from members goes to the national organization
which uses that to fund Democratic Party election campaigns. While it may be
true that some local members do good work, we can also say the same about
Democrats and Republicans who do good work on a local level. Should we then
support the Democrats or Republicans because we like “good work” done by their
local members? Ultimately, talk about “good work” by local DSA members serves
as an excuse to channel people into an organization that materially supports
the Democratic Party. While the analogy is not exact, Trotsky <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti10.htm">exposed</a>
similar opportunist arguments of those who differentiated between the “good”
rank-and-file versus the “bad” leadership in bourgeois organizations such as
the Kuomintang:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">To
consider the Kuomintang not as a bourgeois party, but as a neutral arena of
struggle for the masses, to play with words about nine-tenths of the Left rank
and file in order to mask the question as to who is the real master, meant to
add to the strength and power of the summit, to assist the latter to convert
ever broader masses into “cattle,” and, under conditions most favorable to it
to prepare the Shanghai coup d’etat.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Even though DSA has passed a number of left-sounding resolutions at
its conventions, this has done nothing to change their fundamental orientation
toward the Democratic Party and imperialism. In 2016 and 2020, DSA supported
Bernie Sanders despite his record. Currently, there are nearly 200 elected members
of DSA including <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/the-politics-of-aoc/">Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez</a>, <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617/actions?fbclid=IwAR0o1fQKYfTJQeCUbpa8Fq335eIrN2p1bU0_M-C62KqOYLSyClxu0aA3VpU">Rashida
Tlaib</a>, and <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/which-side-are-you-on-dsa-fails-to-expel-pro-zionist-congressman-jamaal-bowman/">Jamaal
Bowman</a> who are all members of the Democratic Party. As Democrats, these DSA
“electeds” support <a href="https://apnews.com/article/aoc-endorses-biden-2024-president-democrats-3c722f5ac1bc2c568b6d962d4fe4e2b7">Joe
Biden</a>, <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/biden-congress-and-the-squad-just-voted-to-block-a-rail-strike-workers-should-be-the-ones-to-decide/">strikebreaking</a>,
<a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/without-opposition-from-aoc-house-votes-1-billion-for-apartheid-israel/">Apartheid
Israel</a>, <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/the-squad-calls-for-u-s-intervention-in-ukraine/">NATO,
and imperialist war</a>. Despite materially supporting the bourgeoisie, DSA has
made no moves to discipline or expel any of these “electeds.” Finally, DSA’s
membership is not being taught to fight these adaptations to imperialism, but
as judged by their enthusiasm to campaign for AOC and other “electeds,” they
are being drawn ever deeper into the Democratic Party.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite the election of a “left” leadership at its 2023 Convention,
DSA reconfirmed its relationship with the Democratic Party. For example, one (ironically
named) resolution that was passed, “<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/images/2023_DSA_Convention_Results.pdf">Act
Like an Independent Party</a>” declared: “It is not advisable for us to form an
independent political party with its own ballot line at this moment.” Based on
this, “DSA commits to making electoral politics a priority for the next two
years… [and] that DSA will continue to pursue an approach of tactically
contesting partisan elections on the Democratic ballot line and other lines
where viable.” This resolution merely recommits DSA to what has been called the
“dirty break” strategy and not political independence. The “dirty break” means that
socialists should use the Democratic Party ballot line before eventually
breaking off to create their own party. The rhetoric of the “dirty break”
promises a future break from the Democrats, but in practice that always proves
to be an unreachable horizon. In effect, the “dirty break” amounts to a “dirty
stay” inside the Democratic Party.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />
Achieving working class
political independence requires acting on it now and drawing organizational
conclusions. For example, the Comintern demanded communist parties adopt <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x01.htm">21
Conditions</a> that necessitated removing open opportunists and reformists from
their ranks. Even though there are caucuses in DSA such as Red Labor that
advocate a “clean break” with the Democrats, they have not been able to achieve
this. At the 2023 DSA Convention, they proposed a “<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe87QSUInotQ6zcV_J96B0h6C_FgsNduKOE6nPa3qS_NLExoQ/viewform">Clean
Break Resolution</a>” that would “immediately pursue a clean, irrefutable, and
permanent break from the capitalist Democratic Party…” However, it is worth
noting that this resolution did not make it to the convention floor since it did
not gather the required 300 signatures (no doubt a sign of DSA’s organizational
consensus on the Democrats). But even if the resolution was adopted, its
effective implementation would require removing AOC and every “elected” from
DSA along with all others who work for the Democratic Party. However, Red Labor
and other “clean breakers” do not fully work out the implication of what this approach
would practically mean.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Has Israel’s recent war on Gaza changed DSA’s relationship with the
Democratic Party? DSA has made some tepid statements opposing Israel and some
of its members have taken to the streets to protest the war. This has angered
longtime members associated with the reformist politics of DSA’s founder Michael
Harrington. For example, Maurice Isserman (Harrington’s biographer) resigned
and <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/">claimed</a>
that DSA had been “captured by left sectarian “entryists.”” Other founding
members <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/176781/open-letter-why-leaving-democratic-socialists-america">state</a>
that DSA is now “beyond redemption” and that their positions on Palestine “lack
basic human empathy and solidarity.” <br />
<br />
Perhaps DSA’s rhetoric does not please Isserman and others, but their practice
is fully in line with support for Apartheid Israel and their genocidal war in
Gaza. Shortly after October 7, AOC <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-condemns-hatred-antisemitism-palestinian-rcna119687">condemned</a>
protests against Israel’s war as “antisemitic.” Later in an October 16
interview, AOC walked back her
half-hearted opposition to Israel’s Iron Dome and <a href="https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnap/date/2023-10-16/segment/01">stated</a>
that she would now vote for it:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />
PHILLIP: So, you would vote yes
today if it came to the United States Congress, additional funding for the Iron
Dome?<br />
<br />
OCASIO-CORTEZ: I think if it was explicitly around that. I have concerns about
white phosphorus. I have concerns about the respect for humanitarian -- about
human rights and ensuring that we have humanitarian aid going through. But on
the sole principle of Iron Dome and defense, I absolutely think there's an
openness, for sure.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Despite nominal calls for a ceasefire, AOC and the Squad have previously
voted to fund the IDF with the weapons that are now carrying out genocide in
Gaza. In addition on November 28, AOC and other members of the Squad also <a href="https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023677?fbclid=IwAR3b3N8l1Bv-I0cI0NxyRtqnfPMdvmpDZxuJwvhiVY7HkdpjrffNJOsiZU4">voted</a>
in favor of recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state.” All these actions by DSA’s
“electeds” that materially support Israel make their token opposition to the
Gaza war completely meaningless.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The simple truth is that entryism in DSA resembles an opportunist
version of <i>Inception </i>with two dream levels. On the first level, there is
DSA which is itself an entryist organization inside the Democratic Party.
Whether utilizing the language of “Realignment”, “dirty break”, “inside/outside”,
or the “party surrogate”, they are attempting to transform the Democrats from a
bourgeois party into a social democratic party. In other words, they are trying
to transform the Democrats into something they are fundamentally not. On the
second level, entryists in DSA are pursuing the same effort to transform DSA
from an adjunct of the Democrats into an independent socialist party. Falling
that deep into the entryist dream logic ensures that one will never wake up but
forever remain trapped in the political limbo of the Democratic Party. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />
<i>Revolutionary Regroupment</i><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Given the analysis above, there was never a moment when a “French
Turn” in DSA was either principled or feasible. The DSA is not an arena of
struggle for revolutionaries, but a safety valve for the Democratic Party. A
clean break with the Democrats requires a clean break with DSA. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">While many well-meaning DSA members acknowledge this, they still
claim that they have nowhere else to go. However, instead of advocating
half-hearted entryism or encouraging a “left” caucus in DSA, communists and
socialists should build our own organizations. That way, there will be a place
for disillusioned DSA members and other unaffiliated communists to join.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="color: black; line-height: 107%;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
There are also existing groups that leftists can find a home in such as <i>Left
Voice</i> and <i>Firebrand,</i> among others. However, small organizations,
even if they are rooted in the class struggle, are not enough. Rather, a
process of revolutionary regroupment is needed. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Regroupment cannot be achieved by uniting on the basis of the
lowest common denominator or a “big tent” which papers over genuine differences.
Genuine revolutionary regroupment requires bringing together workers and cadre
from different organizations around the program of revolutionary Marxism
leading to the formation of a real communist party.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">In the meantime, there are opportunities for revolutionaries to
conduct principled work together around the united front. From the threats of
rising inflation, transphobic reactionaries, fascist irrationalism, and nuclear
war, capitalism is slouching toward barbarism. To fight back, united front
action is necessary. Trotsky <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/08.htm">laid out</a>
the basic approach for communist participation in a united front:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></o:p></p><p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">We
participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved
in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is
precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from
experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than
the others, that we are more audacious and resolute. In this way, we shall
bring closer the hour of the united revolutionary front under the undisputed
Communist leadership.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="background: white; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">As opposed to a popular front which includes an alliance with parties of
the bourgeoisie, a united front <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; letter-spacing: 0.25pt;">is based on the mobilization of working class organizations <i>independent </i>from
those of the ruling class. Organizations that adhere to a united front would
rally around certain common points such as no support for the Democrats or
imperialism. However, a united front does not mean organizations would need to
bury political disagreements. Instead, they would look for the areas where they
can come together to achieve practical results. A united front would build the
fighting capacity of workers and allow them to successfully challenge the
ruling class. Not only does the united front strengthen the immediate struggle
of workers, but it opens them to the vision of going further and overthrowing
capitalism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; letter-spacing: 0.25pt;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span></span></p><p style="background: white; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The French Turn and entryism into DSA are not on the agenda for
today’s revolutionary left. However, we possess the same goal as Trotsky and
Cannon in the 1930s: the creation of a vanguard organization of
revolutionaries. This will not be achieved by pseudo-entryism or adapting to
opportunism. Rather, the path forward requires the principled work of
revolutionary regroupment and the united front.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-family: arial;"><br clear="all" />
</span><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> See Robert J. Alexander, <i>International
Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement</i> (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991), 348-351.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Leon Trotsky, <i>The Crisis in the
French Section (1935-36)</i> (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 162-63.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> James P. Cannon, <i>The History of
American Trotskyism 1928-1938: Report of
a Participant</i> (New York: Pathfinder Books, 2002), 283. For addition
background see Bryan D. Palmer, “The French turn in the United States: James P.
Cannon and the Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party, 1934–1937,” <i>Labor
History</i> (2018): 1-29 and Jacob A. Zumoff, “The Left in the United States
and the Decline of the Socialist Party of America, 1934–1935,” <i>Labour/Le
Travail</i> Issue 85 (Spring, 2020): 165-198. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Cannon 2002, 233-234.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ibid. 283.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ibid. 237.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ibid. 238.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ibid. 271.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> For more details on the
Trotskyists in the SPA see Bryan D. Palmer, <i>James P. Cannon and the
Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38 </i>(Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2023), 815-1051.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Cannon 2002, 286.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Ibid. 301.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Leon Trotsky, “A ‘Critical’
Adaptation to Centrism,” in Naomi Allen and George Breitman, ed., <i>Writings
of Leon Trotsky 1936-37</i> (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1978), 307.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> Cannon 2002, 285.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> <a name="_Hlk146468553">Palmer 2023,
</a>942.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/French%20Turn/French%20Turn%20DSA%20and%20Revolutionary%20Regroupment_NEW.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 107%;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> As Christopher Lasch said about Michael
Harrington’s Realignment strategy, radical change can only become a viable
prospect when serious organizations are created outside of the Democratic
Party:</span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: arial;">“[Harrington]
is correct in saying that there are no new social forces automatically evolving
toward socialism (which is what “democratic planning” comes down to).
Presumably this means that radical change can only take place if a new
political organization, explicitly committed to radical change, wills it to
take place. But Harrington backs off from this conclusion. Instead he seems to
predicate his strategy on the wistful hope that socialism will somehow take
over the Democratic party without anyone realizing what is happening. He admits
that “there is obvious danger when those committed to a new morality thus
maneuver on the basis of the old hypocrisies.” But there is no choice, because
radicals cannot create a new movement “by fiat.” It is tempting, Harrington
says, to think that the best strategy for the Left might be to “start a party
of its own.” But this course would not work unless there were already an “actual
disaffection of great masses of people from the Democratic Party.”<br />
<br />
Christopher Lasch, <i>The Agony of the American Left</i> (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1969), 198-199.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div><div><div id="ftn15">
</div>
</div><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;"><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-50492067501278381732023-11-21T00:00:00.003-05:002023-11-21T00:00:00.159-05:00When History Failed to Turn: The German October of 1923<p><span style="font-family: times;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgImFIzvkpZrjjwu6qCAFWTCBDAhbjIsVaqk8k5Gpua6uamVFbR5Qn-PkXGGJ03rdJ57rPW-l3aiBQqe7Dgu4UMHVlxfFC5SgP-ZQOer1lI0-RTwprJOxTzoi3KdJM4CQLwHiycC3PAVmzcvbM6AWMH9jVjv1eGVzLiAcn3XyHLshlyTfWRIIUyaReKscuK/s1200/hamburg-uprising-revolution-germany.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="690" data-original-width="1200" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgImFIzvkpZrjjwu6qCAFWTCBDAhbjIsVaqk8k5Gpua6uamVFbR5Qn-PkXGGJ03rdJ57rPW-l3aiBQqe7Dgu4UMHVlxfFC5SgP-ZQOer1lI0-RTwprJOxTzoi3KdJM4CQLwHiycC3PAVmzcvbM6AWMH9jVjv1eGVzLiAcn3XyHLshlyTfWRIIUyaReKscuK/w437-h251/hamburg-uprising-revolution-germany.jpg" width="437" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px;">Originally published by <i><a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/when-history-failed-to-turn/">Left Voice.</a></i></span></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px;">In September 1923, German Communist Ruth Fischer visited Moscow, where she observed that the people were excited about the prospects of revolution in the west:</span></span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">[Moscow was] plastered with slogans welcoming the German revolution. Banners and streamers were posted in the center of the city with such slogans as “Russian Youth, Learn German — the German October Is Approaching.” Pictures of Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were to be seen in every shop window. In all factories, meetings were called to discuss “How Can We Help the German Revolution?”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_1" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">1</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">It is not hard to imagine the reasons for this renewed hope. If the German proletariat took power, then this would end the isolation of the Soviet Union and quite possibly change the whole international situation.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Looking back a century later, we can confidently say that a German Revolution would have changed the course of history. The spread of socialism to Germany — one of the most developed capitalist countries in the world — would have made Stalin’s slogan of “socialism in one country” a nonstarter. Furthermore, it would have meant that Adolf Hitler — should he have escaped justice from the German Red Guard — would have likely died unknown in exile. The German October of 1923 represents one of the moments when history failed to turn.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Occupation of the Ruhr</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The postwar years in Germany, from 1918 to 1921, were marked by the clash between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution. In Berlin, Munich, and the Ruhr, the working class rose in revolt, and a state of semi–civil war existed. But all these upheavals were violently suppressed thanks to the joint work of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the army, and right-wing paramilitary death squads known as the Freikorps.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Yet the Weimar Republic remained anything but stable. Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty (1919), which formally ended the First World War, Germany was obligated to not only accept responsibility for the war but also to pay reparations to the Allies (mainly France). Yet these reparations were more than Germany could afford to pay. Even with various reductions, the German debt remained enormous. Soon the economy suffered, and Germany fell behind on its payments.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">To force Germany to pay reparations, French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial heartland of the Ruhr on January 11, 1923. Two days later, the conservative German government of Wilhelm Cuno called for passive resistance. As a result, local authorities and businesses in the Ruhr boycotted the occupation forces, industrial production ceased, and reparation payments were halted.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Passive resistance quickly led to the effective collapse of the German economy. This was most dramatically reflected in the collapse of the German mark. The exchange rate of the mark to the U.S. dollar in 1923 showed just how worthless it became:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">January: 17,920<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />February: 20,000<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />May: 48,000<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />June: 110,000<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />July: 353,412<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />August: 4,620,455<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />September: 98,860,000<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />October: 25,260,208,000<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />November: 4,200,000,000,000<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_2" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">2</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Scenes of hyperinflation became one of the enduring memories of 1923. The value of paper money disappeared so quickly that some companies paid their employees in the morning so they could rush and spend their wages at lunchtime. At restaurants, one could order a coffee and then find that the price had doubled or more by the time the bill arrived. The most familiar image of hyperinflation was of workers who brought wheelbarrows full of bank notes to grocery stores to buy bread and other simple items.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">While the working class was reduced to pauperism and despair, the bourgeoisie used hyperinflation as an opportunity to gain immense fortunes and pay off their debts. As the historian Pierre Broué recounts,</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">It is said that Stinnes acquired 1,300 firms in the most varied sectors of activity, and that he confessed that he could not give a full account of his own affairs. The export industries made fabulous profits. On the one hand, the low level of rents and wages, and the fall in the real value of their debts, enabled them to charge prices against which no one could compete, and, on the other, they were paid in foreign exchange. Large businesses could deposit capital abroad in foreign currencies. They set up firms in Switzerland, the Netherlands and South America to hide their gains, and created intermediary companies through nominees to enable them to evade the law against capital exports. In short, the big capitalists collected their profits in dollars or gold, and paid their debts in paper — to their very great benefit.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_3" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">3</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Nor was passive resistance a common struggle by Germans of all classes. During the duration, the industrialists did not lose sight of their short-term interests. They made sure coal was not distributed to the workers who were on strike, particularly if they were left-wing activists. In addition, the Cuno government subsidized coal and steel businesses to compensate for their losses. The working class received no such relief. Not only was there a sharp divide between how the proletariat and bourgeoisie experienced hyperinflation, but the state seemed both powerless and unwilling to do anything about it.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Passive resistance also heightened social tensions in Germany. By February, the conflict in the Ruhr escalated into clashes with French soldiers, ending in violent reprisals. Moreover, the Far Right gained immeasurably from the crisis. Thanks to the complicity of the army, paramilitaries across Germany gained new volunteers, particularly Hitler’s National Socialists in Bavaria.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In this situation, the traditional reformist working-class organizations associated with the Social Democratic Party were completely powerless. As Broué notes,</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The traditional trade-union practice of Social Democracy was empty of all content. Trade unionism was powerless, and collective agreements a joke. Working people left the unions, and often turned their anger against them, reproaching them for their passivity, and sometimes for their complicity in their plight. The collapse of the apparatuses of the trade unions and Social Democracy paralleled that of the state: what happened to notions of property, order and legality? How, in such an abyss, could anyone justify an attachment to parliamentary institutions, to the right to vote and universal suffrage? Neither the police nor the army escaped the infection. A whole world was dying. All the elements which only a year before had served as a basis for analysing German society had now been destroyed.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_4" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">4</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Germany appeared to meet the three criteria for Lenin’s definition of a revolutionary crisis: (1) the bourgeoisie could no longer rule in the old ways; (2) the suffering and exploitation of the oppressed classes had grown more acute; and (3) there was a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who were now being drawn into political action.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_5" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">5</sup></a></span> In this atmosphere, millions of Germans concluded that revolution offered the only escape.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Communist Party of Germany</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">While all the objective factors of the revolution were falling into place, this was only part of the equation. For this situation to become a full-blown revolution, an organized vanguard party also had to exist, one that was willing to act and seize power. The dominant force on the Far Left was the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which had been formed in late 1918. The KPD had participated in two abortive uprisings (1919 and 1921) and was allied with neighboring Soviet Russia. By 1922, the KPD numbered 222,000 members, making it the largest nonruling Communist Party in the world. Everyone on the Left and Right knew that the KPD stood for armed revolution and communism.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Despite its mass base and rich revolutionary experience, the KPD lacked a political leadership of the caliber of Lenin and Trotsky. Its early and talented leaders — Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Eugen Leviné — had all been murdered during the revolutionary storms of 1919. The KPD’s next leader, Paul Levi, had been expelled after publicly criticizing the ultra-left March Action of 1921. Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer, Jacob Walcher, and Ernest Meyer formed the leadership of the KPD in 1923. Compared to their predecessors, however, they were politically cautious and dependent on Moscow for advice. After the March Action, according to Broué, that they had become</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">resolute “rightists,” systematically persisting in an attitude of prudence, armed with precautions against the putschist temptation or even a simple leftist reflex. Convinced by the leadership of the International of the magnitude of their blunder, they lost confidence in their own ability to think, and often failed to defend their viewpoint, so that they systematically accepted that of the Bolsheviks, who had at least been able to win their revolutionary struggle.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_6" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">6</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">As a result, during the first half of 1923, the KPD’s line lacked direction, cohesion, and courage.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Even though the KPD possessed no clear revolutionary line, it was still a visible pole of attraction for the workers. Throughout the year, the party condemned the government and economic misery. It also led strikes and other actions to combat the crisis. In 1923, at least 70,000 joined the KPD, increasing its membership by a third. These numbers, however, underestimate the party’s reach in the working class. By June, the Communist Party had influence over at least 2,400,000 union members, approximately one third of the organized working class.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_7" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">7</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In addition, the KPD had a great deal of support among the factory council movement, which had taken over many functions from the unions. Out of about 20,000 factory councils, the Communists had a majority in 2,000. The Communists gained a hearing in the councils because they suggested forms of action that could succeed. Communist-led councils also organized committees to control prices on food and rent. The control committees allowed the KPD to mobilize not only workers but also women and the unemployed.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">As the historian Arthur Rosenberg observed, both the state and Social Democracy were paralyzed by the crisis, while the KPD appeared to have a mandate for revolution by the middle of 1923:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Since the SPD failed to find a way out of the existing misery, the disappointment of the workers in the Cuno government was to some extent transferred to Social Democracy. The SPD was obliged to pay in 1923 for mistakes in policy of which they were entirely innocent, merely because their legal tactics seemed to imply acquiescence in the laws and therefore in the existing state of affairs. The KPD had no revolutionary policy either, but at least it criticised the Cuno government loudly and sharply and pointed to the example of Russia. Hence the masses flocked to it. As late as the end of 1922 the newly-united Social Democrat Party comprised the great majority of the German workers. During the next half-year conditions were completely changed. In the summer of 1923 the KPD undoubtedly had the majority of the German proletariat behind it.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_8" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">8</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Between Internationalism and Nationalism</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Ruhr occupation had unleashed a wave of nationalism across Germany that the KPD attempted to navigate. One method it used to combat national chauvinism was to encourage fraternization between working-class Germans and French troops in the Ruhr. The KPD was assisted in this endeavor by the Communist Party of France (PCF) and the Communist International. Both the KPD and PCF produced posters encouraging French soldiers to resist the occupation. One bilingual poster read: “French soldiers, workers in uniform, you have been brought to the Rhine on the orders of your exploiters in order to put a yoke on your proletarian German brothers, already oppressed by their own bourgeoisie. French soldiers, your place is alongside the German workers. Fraternise with the German proletariat.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_9" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">9</sup></a></span> While the results of the fraternization policy were mixed, this was a principled action of internationalist agitation by the Comintern.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The Communists, however, also appealed to some of the nationalist sentiment in Germany. On May 28, the KPD paper <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Die Rote Fahne</em> published a statement entitled “Down with the Government of National Disgrace and Treason against the People!” The Communists also attempted to win over outright fascist elements among the middle classes. Brandler argued that there was a class division in the fascist camp “between capitalist-paid Pinkerton” and “those petty bourgeois who have joined the [Fascist] movement from genuine nationalist disappointment.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_10" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">10</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The main impetus for this nationalist line came from Karl Radek, who was partly responsible for the ultra-leftism of the March Action in 1921. Now he argued that the Versailles Treaty was reducing Germany to the rank of a colony, which meant that the Communists must “place the nation first.” At an enlarged meeting of the Comintern’s Executive Committee, held in June 1923, Radek made a speech eulogizing Leo Schlageter, who had been executed by the French in the Ruhr. A martyr to the nationalists, Schlageter was a Freikorps veteran who fought the Bolsheviks in the Baltics and the workers in the Ruhr in 1920. Radek claimed that Schlageter was an honorable, albeit misguided, figure who deserved to be honored by the Communists. He argued that the example of Schlageter showed that Communists should join together with rank-and-file nationalists:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">But we believe that the great majority of the nationalist-minded masses belong not to the camp of the capitalists but to the camp of the workers. We want to find, and we shall find, the path to these masses. We shall do all in our power to make men like Schlageter, who are prepared to go to their deaths for a common cause, not wanderers into the void, but wanderers into a better future for the whole of mankind; that they should not spill their hot, unselfish blood for the profit of the coal and iron barons, but in the cause of the great toiling German people, which is a member of the family of peoples fighting for their emancipation.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_11" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">11</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The KPD’s embrace of the “Schlageter line” was endorsed by Comintern president Grigorii Zinoviev. This began a Communist campaign of appeals to German nationalists, including joint public meetings and debates with the Nazis. However, Communist speakers seemed more inclined to appeal to the anti-Semitic prejudices of their audience than to combat them. For example, KPD leader Ruth Fischer said at one meeting, “Whoever cries out against Jewish capital … is already a fighter for his class [<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Klassenkämpfer</em>], even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts. … But … how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klöckner? Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">völkische</em> side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_12" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">12</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">These “debates” continued until August 14, when the Nazis broke them off. Some historians, such as Broué and Harman, claim that the debates ended because the Communists were making headway among Nazi supporters. Yet a more sober analysis reveals that the Schlageter line brought little to no political benefit to the Communists. Radek claimed that his purpose had been to combat fascism by showing the petty bourgeoisie that capitalism was the source of their legitimate nationalist grievances. But this adaptation to the Right brought with it the genuine danger that sections of the proletarian movement could cross over to the class enemy. In addition, the campaign undercut initiatives for fraternization with French soldiers and building a united front with the SPD.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">However wrongheaded the Schlageter line was, it was marginal compared to the KPD’s calls for a united front with the SPD against the Nazis. Furthermore, the KPD’s main effort in 1923 was against nationalism. For example, Communist deputies in the Reichstag voted against nationalist resolutions, while the Social Democrats voted for them.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Toward Insurrection</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Throughout the spring and summer of 1923, the situation in Germany continued to deteriorate. Wages lost all their value, and the populace headed toward destitution. The working class found itself desperately fighting for the bare necessities as bread riots erupted in major cities. As Fischer observed, the state seemed to be fracturing under the strain of the crisis:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">This disruption of economic life endangered the legal structure of the Weimar Republic. Civil servants lost their ties to the state; their small salaries had no relation to their daily needs; they felt themselves in a boat without a rudder. Police troops, in sympathy with the rioting populace, lost their combative spirit against the hunger demonstrations and closed their eyes to the sabotage groups and clandestine military formations mushrooming throughout the Reich. Hamburg was so tense that the police did not dare interfere with looting of foodstuffs by the hungry masses. In August, large demonstrations of dock workers in the Hamburg harbor led to rioting. “Parts of the police,” [KPD member Walter] Zeutschel wrote, “are regarded as unreliable; they sympathize with the working class.” The Cuno cabinet itself contributed to the weakening of legality by sponsoring the Black Reichswehr and instigating sabotage in the Ruhr.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_13" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">13</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In June and July, a strike wave engulfed Germany. By now, the KPD wanted to show that it could lead a nationwide movement. To that end, Brandler proposed an Anti-fascist Day for July 29. This was not just a call for a united front against the Right, but also a chance for the Communists to show their strength. Brandler’s plan was adopted by the KPD, and he wrote a front-page article announcing it in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Die Rote Fahne</em>:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">We Communists can win this battle with the counter-revolution only if we succeed in leading the Social-Democratic and non-party workers into the struggle with us. Our party must raise the combativity of its organisations to a height that can ensure that they are not taken unawares when civil war breaks out. … The fascists hope to win the civil war by overwhelming brutality and the most resolute violence. Their attack can only be put down by red terror opposed to white terror. If the fascists, armed to the teeth, fire on our proletarian fighters, they will find us ready to wipe them out. If they put one striker in ten up against a wall, the revolutionary workers will shoot one fascist in five! … The Party is ready to fight shoulder to shoulder with anyone who sincerely agrees to fight under the leadership of the proletariat. Forward! Let us close the ranks of the proletarian vanguard! Into battle, in the spirit of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg!<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_14" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">14</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">When it was announced, this event electrified the masses, who escalated strikes. The SPD and conservatives denounced the event while fascists and the police prepared for a confrontation. When the Anti-fascist Day was banned by the government, the KPD — following the advice of Moscow — backed down.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">By the beginning of August, the government was on the brink of collapse. On August 8, Cuno gave a speech in the Reichstag defending his policies and calling for a vote of confidence. As the deputies debated, worker delegations surrounded the Reichstag and demanded Cuno’s resignation. They were ignored. After two days, Cuno got his vote of confidence (the SPD abstained, and the KPD voted against).</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In response, anger in the population boiled over into a general strike. Comintern correspondent Victor Serge described the strike and mood as follows:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The big factories in Berlin began passive resistance, systematic go-slow and then more vigorous action. Berlin metalworkers stopped work. Printers too — in particular those working for the Reichsbank; a tube strike had just been ineffectively stifled. In Hamburg, work stopped in the docks. At Lübeck in Saxony, at Emden, at Brandenburg, at Gera, at Lausitz, at Hanover, at Lea, huge mass movements stopped production, brought massive crowds onto the streets, sometimes turned into rioting, and confronted shopkeepers and capitalists with the immediate threat of a revolution.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_15" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">15</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">A mere two days after receiving the support of the Reichstag, Cuno resigned in humiliation. A new government was formed by Gustav Stresemann, who led a grand coalition stretching from the conservatives to the SPD. Stresemann promised to end the Ruhr crisis, reach an agreement with France, and stabilize the mark. Yet Stresemann was not at all confident of success and admitted that he was the final barrier preventing revolution: “We are the last bourgeois parliamentary government,” he said.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_16" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">16</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">After the Cuno strike, the Communists felt the wind was at their back. Now they began seriously contemplating the possibility of a German Revolution. To that end, a KPD delegation led by Brandler traveled to Moscow in late August to consult the Comintern Executive. The delegation found that the Soviet party was divided on the prospects for a revolution. Zinoviev and Radek did not think the situation was ripe. Joseph Stalin doubted that any revolution was on the horizon in Germany:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Should the [German] Communists strive, at the present stage, to seize power without the Social-Democrats? Are they sufficiently ripe for that? That is the question, in my opinion. When we seized power we had in Russia such resources in reserve as (a) the promise [of] peace; (b) the slogan “land to the peasants”; (c) the support of the great majority of the working class; and (d) the sympathy of the peasantry. At the moment, the German Communists have nothing of the kind. They have, of course, a Soviet country as neighbour, which we did not have; but what can we offer them? If the Government in Germany were to topple over now, in a manner of speaking, and the Communists were to seize hold of it, they will end up in a crash. That is in the “best” case. While, at worst, they will be smashed to smithereens and thrown way back. The whole point is not that Brandler wants to “educate the masses” but that the bourgeoisie plus the rightwing Social-Democrats are bound to turn such lessons — the demonstration — into a general battle (at present all the odds are on their side) and exterminate them [the German Communists]. Of course, the Fascists are not asleep; but it is to our advantage to let them attack first: that will attract the whole working class to the Communists (Germany is not Bulgaria). Besides, all our information indicates that fascism is weak in Germany. In my opinion we should restrain the Germans, not spur them on.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_17" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">17</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Others in the Soviet party, such as Trotsky, thought the situation in Germany was maturing rapidly and that a decisive battle would take place in the near future. Trotsky argued that preparations for an insurrection needed to begin at once. As he said later,</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Precisely for this reason the Communist Party has absolutely no use for the great liberal law according to which revolutions happen but are never made and therefore cannot be fixed for a specific date. From a spectator’s standpoint this law is correct, but from the standpoint of the leader this is a platitude and a vulgarity. … If the country is passing through a profound social crisis, when the contradictions become aggravated in the extreme, when the toiling masses are in constant ferment, when the party is obviously supported by an unquestionable majority of the toilers and, in consequence, by all the most active, class-conscious and self-sacrificing elements of the proletariat, then the task confronting the party — its only possible task under the circumstances — is to fix a definite time in the immediate future, a time in the course of which the favourable revolutionary situation cannot abruptly react against us, and then to concentrate every effort on the preparation of the blow, to subordinate the entire policy and organization to the military object in view, so that this blow is dealt with maximum power.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_18" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">18</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Eventually, the Soviets decided to give the German Revolution their blessing. Over the objections of Brandler and Radek, Trotsky suggested fixing the date of the uprising as close as possible to the anniversary of the Bolshevik insurrection (November 7) — making the revolution into “the German October.”</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Brandler, however, was honest enough to admit that he was not the “German Lenin.” He wanted someone with more experience to lead the forthcoming revolution and asked the Soviets to send Trotsky to Germany. Even though Trotsky was interested, this idea was vetoed by the Politburo. According to Deutscher, Stalin was worried that Trotsky would score another revolutionary victory. Yet as head of the Red Army, Trotsky was involved in preparations for war. If the German insurrection were successful, Britain and France would likely intervene. In response, the Red Army was preparing to send its soldiers through Poland and the Baltic states to aid Germany.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_19" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">19</sup></a></span> Ultimately, the Red Army never sent its troops, but these mobilizations are a testament that the USSR was willing to risk a general war to support a proletarian revolution in Germany.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Preparations</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Despite his doubts, Brandler returned to Germany with plans for an insurrection. The technical preparations for an uprising had already begun. The KPD had an underground apparatus known as the M-Group to handle various aspects of military affairs. The previous year, its organization had been strengthened with help from the Soviet Red Army. As plans for an insurrection gained traction in September, the work of the M-Group picked up speed. It created a general staff known as the Revolutionary Committee (REVKO), headed by August Gulasky (aka Kleine). The REVKO divided Germany into six districts corresponding to the military defense districts of the German army (aka the Reichswehr). These, in turn, were subdivided into districts and subdistricts with a clear chain of command.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_20" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">20</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">At the subdistrict level, the combat groups were expected to train and drill the Proletarian Hundreds, eventually leading them into battle. The Proletarian Hundreds were originally formed in March by the factory councils as self-defense militias. Now the KPD hoped that they would be the nucleus of a German Red Army. According to the historian Werner Angress, the Proletarian Hundreds had an estimated strength (on paper) of 100,000 fighters by October 1923.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_21" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">21</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">To carry out a revolution, cadre alone — no matter how dedicated — were not enough. The KPD needed arms if it was going to seriously challenge the Reichswehr. Historical sources give wildly different figures, ranging from 600 to 50,000 for the number of rifles at the KPD’s disposal.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_22" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">22</sup></a></span> Even if one accepts the highest estimate for rifles, then the Communists were still seriously outgunned by the Reichswehr. As part of its preparations, the KPD worked to split both the Reichswehr and the police forces. The Reichswehr, however, was an all-volunteer force that carefully screened its recruits to keep Communists, socialists, and Jews out of its ranks. By 1923, much of the Freikorps had been incorporated into the Reichswehr. The police were equally immune from Communist agitation. Yet this does not mean that the Reichswehr and the army would have remained solid in the face of an insurrection. As Arthur Rosenberg argues, “If there had been a really great popular movement against the ruling system, the civil servants — who were after all themselves victims of the inflation — including the police, would hardly have displayed much severity, and whether the Reichswehr soldiers would have fired on their starving fellow-citizens for the sake of exchange profiteers is very doubtful.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_23" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">23</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">If the KPD launched an insurrection, then it would likely find the full strength of the Reichswehr and the police on the side of the counterrevolution.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">To procure arms, Moscow instructed the KPD in October to form workers’ governments. This plan was based on policies developed at the Comintern’s fourth congress in 1922, which focused on the united front. One resolution stated that in certain circumstances a workers’ government supported by the mobilized movement could serve as a transitional step toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky said in December 1922,</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">If you, our German Communist comrades, are of the opinion that a revolution is possible in the next few months in Germany, then we would advise you to participate in Saxony in a coalition government and to utilize your ministerial posts in Saxony for the furthering of political and organizational tasks and for transforming Saxony in a certain sense into a Communist drillground so as to have a revolutionary stronghold already reinforced in a period of preparation for the approaching outbreak of the revolution. But this would be possible only if the pressure of the revolution were already making itself felt, only if it were already at hand. In that case it would imply only the seizure of a single position in Germany which you are destined to capture as a whole. But at the present time you will of course play in Saxony the role of an appendage, an impotent appendage because the Saxon government itself is impotent before Berlin, and Berlin is — a bourgeois government.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_24" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">24</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky believed that communist participation in a regional government alongside the SPD was a tactic that could only be used in preparation for an insurrection.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Now the Comintern argued that this situation applied in Saxony and Thuringia where the SPD was dependent on the KPD for a legislative majority. As the left wing of the SPD, it was nervous that they would be swept away by the fascists if it didn’t join with the Communists. The KPD was instructed to accept an open SPD invitation to join the government. Afterward, the Communists would use their new positions to prepare popular resistance to an attack from the national government in Berlin. On October 10, the KPD joined the government in both provinces.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Brandler objected to these efforts to accelerate the revolution:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">I strongly objected to the attempt to hasten the revolutionary crisis by including communists in the Saxon and Thuringian governments — allegedly in order to procure weapons. I knew, and I said so in Moscow, that the police in Saxony and Thuringia did not have any stores of weapons. Even single submachine guns had to be ordered from the Reichswehr’s arsenal near Berlin. The workers had already seized the local arsenals twice, once during the Kapp putsch, and again in part in 1921. I declared further that the entry of the communists into the government would not breathe new life into the mass actions, but rather weaken them; for now the masses would expect the government to do what they could only do themselves.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_25" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">25</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">As expected, Berlin saw the entry of Communists into provincial governments as a provocation. On October 19, the national government invoked emergency powers and sent the Reichswehr to remove the SPD-KPD governments and disperse the Proletarian Hundreds.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The moment of decision for the KPD was now at hand. On October 21, delegates of factory committees from across the state of Saxony gathered in a hastily convened conference in Chemnitz to decide on their response. Brandler called for a general strike to defend Saxony. He had expected the Social Democrats to agree with the call to arms, instead he was met with icy silence. The conference rejected the call for a general strike and delegated a committee to look into the topic. As August Thalheimer observed: “It was a pauper’s burial of the proposal.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_26" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">26</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Bandler believed that Communists could not act alone and after conferring with other KPD leaders, he called off their planned insurrection. As he recalled years later:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">After discussions with the other members of the Zentrale, I advised against the proclamation of a general strike, and in this course I received the assent of all the Zentrale members present, including Ruth Fischer… I was of the opinion, and I still am today, that a defensive uprising is condemned to defeat, and should only be risked if there is no other possible way out.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_27" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">27</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Even though Radek and other Comintern delegates were not present at Chemnitz, they accepted Brandler’s decision.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">What followed was an anticlimax. The army entered Saxony and Thuringia where it ousted the communists without any serious opposition. While the KPD had dispatched couriers across Germany to countermand orders for an uprising, word never reached Hamburg. Two members of the central committee, Hermann Remmele and Ernst Thälmann, left before the end of the Chemnitz Conference. Both were under the impression that the uprising was assured of victory. However, this remains in dispute among historians. Some believe that Thälmann deliberately avoided the message and tried to provoke a national uprising himself. Arriving in Hamburg on October 23, they ordered the Communists to take power. For the next 48 hours, several hundred communist insurgents fought heroically as they occupied several police stations and seized control of portions of the city. Yet they fought alone and defeat was inevitable once the Reichswehr was sent into Hamburg. Aside from the street-fighting at Hamburg, the German October ended before it truly began.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_28" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">28</sup></a></span></span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Aftermath</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the following days, the German government seized the initiative. On November 3, the KPD was declared illegal, its press was suspended, and its activists were arrested. A few days later, on November 8–9, Adolf Hitler staged his famous beer hall putsch in Munich, which was quickly put down. By the middle of November, order had been restored throughout Germany.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The debacle in Germany immediately led to a huge debate in the USSR and the Comintern over what had gone wrong. While this was a necessary discussion, it occurred just as bureaucratization was accelerating in Russia. This meant that any discussion immediately became embroiled in the inner-party struggle between Trotsky and the troika of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. At first, Zinoviev accepted that the retreat was necessary, and he minimized the defeat.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The ultraleftist Ruth Fischer said that the KPD should have given battle even at the risk of defeat. Fischer, now backed by Zinoviev, blamed Brandler for the defeat. New research by Ralf Hoffrogge confirms that Fischer was completely passive in October, making her an armchair insurrectionist. <span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_29" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">29</sup></a></span> In January 1924, both Brandler and Thalheimer were removed from the KPD’s leadership in disgrace. As Victor Serge recalled, this was a sign of the Comintern’s growing bureaucratization: “But now the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International], solicitous above all for its own prestige, condemns the ‘opportunism’ and inefficiency of the two leaders of the KPD, Brandler and Thalheimer, who have been so incompetent in managing the German Revolution. But they did not dare move a finger without referring the matter to the Executive!”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_30" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">30</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Even though Trotsky had criticized Brandler’s leadership, he objected to the Comintern’s summarily removing a foreign party leader. As he said sometime later, “In [Brandler’s] case as in others, I fought against the inadmissible system which only seeks to maintain the infallibility of the central leadership by periodic removals of national leaderships, subjecting the latter to savage persecutions and even expulsions from the party.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_31" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">31</sup></a></span> Trotsky believed that the responsibility for the German defeat lay with the Comintern, which had failed to act until many crucial months had already passed. The Comintern, however, shrank from assessing its role in the defeat. As a result, no sober balance sheet was drawn on the German October.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Assessment</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">We are left with the question of why the German Revolution was defeated. Even though Brandler was no Lenin, he was not solely to blame. The KPD itself possessed several major weaknesses that prevented it from taking advantage of the revolutionary situation in 1923. First: the KPD had experienced organizers and fighters but no leaders who could take the place of either Luxemburg or Liebknecht. To compensate for their lack of experience, Brandler and Thalheimer looked to Moscow for guidance. Second: the KPD leaders made crucial errors on the road to power. For example, at Chemnitz, they gave the Social Democrats veto power over the revolution. As the historian Evelyn Anderson pointedly noted, “The Communist position was manifestly absurd. The two policies of accepting responsibility of government, on the one hand, and of preparing for a revolution, on the other, obviously excluded each other. Yet the Communists pursued both at the same time, with the inevitable result of complete failure.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_32" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">32</sup></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Contrary to the claims of Anderson, the workers’ government tactic was not an impossible contradiction. As Trotsky argued, the purpose of the workers’ government was to establish “fortresses” that could strengthen the factory councils, Proletarian Hundreds, etc., into a network of self-organization and self-defense bodies. This would enable the Communists to organize a national insurrection under the banner of defending the workers’ governments against the Reichswehr. The problem was that, once the SPD opposed a general strike, the KPD leadership transformed the workers’ governments into ends in themselves after they backed down from revolution. Instead of acting as a launching pad for revolution, the workers’ governments ended up as dead weights.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">This analysis of the German October’s defeat assumes that the situation was objectively revolutionary. But according to others, such as Brandler and Thalheimer, the balance of forces in Germany did not favor a revolution in 1923. Thalheimer, for example, argued that after the August strikes, the Stresemann government could have stabilized Germany. In addition, the entrance of the Social Democrats into the grand coalition fostered reformist illusions in the working class. As Thalheimer said, “When we had discussions with the Social Democrats we found that they placed high hopes on the entry to the government of Hilferding. Social Democrats who, quite spontaneously, had stood shoulder to shoulder with us in every struggle, who had joined in the strike against Cuno, the whole mass of them were filled with new illusions.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_33" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">33</sup></a></span> By September, Stresemann managed to stabilize the mark and ended passive resistance in the Ruhr. Given the unfavorable objective circumstances, the masses were unwilling to fight for power.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Thalheimer’s position, however, assumes that the mass of the workers accepted in advance that Stresemann’s plans would prevail. This was far from the case. The end of passive resistance was not immediately followed by an agreement with the French. Inflation was still rampaging Germany in the autumn of 1923. Contrary to Thalheimer’s claims, the workers had little reason to believe that Stresemann would succeed where other governments had failed.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky offered an alternative rationale for the failure of the German October. He concurred with Thalheimer that the Cuno strike was the crest of the revolutionary wave:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">True, in the month of October a sharp break occurred in the party’s policy. But it was already too late. In the course of 1923 the working masses realized or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party. And when the latter began its feverish preparations for an uprising, it immediately lost its balance and also its ties with the masses.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_34" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">34</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Yet the KPD should not have stood down. Into the autumn, the political situation in Germany remained fluid, and an offensive by the Communist Party could still unveil the true balance of forces, as Trotsky noted: “Only a pedant and not a revolutionist would investigate now, after the event, how far the conquest of power would have been ‘assured’ had there been a correct policy.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_35" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">35</sup></a></span> Success may not have been certain in October, but the KPD still had an opening that it failed to exploit. Its mistake in October only culminated its failure to keep up with events throughout the summer.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Because the KPD failed to provide leadership at the decisive moment, the bourgeoisie was able to seize the initiative and defeat it. As he wrote in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The</em> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Third International after Lenin</em>, Trotsky did not believe this outcome was inevitable:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the summer of 1923, the internal situation in Germany, especially in connection with the collapse of the tactic of passive resistance, assumed a catastrophic character. It became quite clear that the German bourgeoisie could extricate itself from this “hopeless” situation only if the Communist Party failed to understand in due time that the position of the bourgeoisie was “hopeless” and if the party failed to draw all the necessary revolutionary conclusions. Yet it was precisely the Communist Party, holding the key in its hands, that opened the door for the bourgeoisie with this key.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Why didn’t the German revolution lead to a victory? The reasons for it are all to be sought in the tactics, not in the existing conditions. Here we had a classic example of a missed revolutionary situation. After all the German proletariat had gone through in recent years, it could be led to a decisive struggle only if it were convinced that this time the question would be decisively resolved and that the Communist Party was ready for the struggle and capable of achieving the victory. But the Communist Party executed the turn very irresolutely and after a very long delay. Not only the Rights but also the Lefts, despite the fact that they had fought each other very bitterly, viewed rather fatalistically the process of revolutionary development up to September-October 1923.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_36" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">36</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky argued that the KPD needed to act in October. Even if the moment to act had passed by then, the KPD still let many opportunities pass by. These possibilities went untested since the party had a certain level of conservatism that prevented it from taking the offensive. As Trotsky said in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Lessons of October</em>, this conservatism was only natural, since most of the time the opportunity to take power does not exist:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">This preponderance manifests itself in daily life, at every step. The enemy possesses wealth and state power, all the means of exerting ideological pressure and all the instruments of repression. We become habituated to the idea that the preponderance of forces is on the enemy’s side; and this habitual thought enters as an integral part into the entire life and activity of the revolutionary party during the preparatory epoch. The consequences entailed by this or that careless or premature act serve each time as most cruel reminders of the enemy’s strength.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_37" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">37</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The decision to struggle for power was not just a matter of this or that decision by a particular leader but required a complete transformation in the party’s outlook. Thus, it is unsurprising that sections of the party dragged their feet and refused to make the needed changes. The confusion inside the party affected the class as well:</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">On one and the same economic foundation, with one and the same class division of society, the relationship of forces changes depending upon the mood of the proletarian masses, the extent to which their illusions are shattered and their political experience has grown, the extent to which the confidence of intermediate classes and groups in the state power is shattered, and finally the extent to which the latter loses confidence in itself.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_38" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">38</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Throughout a good portion of 1923, the KPD showed more confidence in the stability of German capitalism than the bourgeoisie itself. Rather than taking advantage of fault lines in the enemy camp, the KPD ended up inadvertently giving the bourgeoisie an opportunity to regroup. While the Communists had a base of millions on their side, they failed to show them a way out. As a result, the workers lost confidence in the KPD, shifting to the SPD and the right-wing parties.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">It is not voluntarist to claim that the German October was a missed opportunity. Based on Lenin’s three criteria outlined above, Germany was in a revolutionary situation in 1923: (1) the German ruling class proved unable to handle the crisis throughout the year, resulting in governmental paralysis; (2) hyperinflation and economic collapse had exponentially increased the suffering of the dominated classes; and (3) the strikes, mass actions, and growth of the factory councils and Proletarian Hundreds signaled an increase in working-class self-activity.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">The failure in 1923 was due to vacillating leadership. During the first half of 1923, the KPD had not grasped the possibility of revolution, and then, after the Cuno strikes, it rushed almost haphazardly toward an insurrection. Yet the KPD could have made different decisions. It could have coordinated and led the nationwide strike movement in the summer rather than let this scattered resistance sputter out. This would have placed the KPD in a better position to lead the masses in a civil war.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Appealing to the nationalist Right was both a violation of principle and a waste of effort for no gain. Instead, the KPD could have focused on mobilizing a united front against the Right on Anti-fascist Day. This event could have galvanized the workers and positioned the Communists for leadership over a mass movement. Anti-fascist Day could even have started the KPD’s fight for power. Yet after the Anti-fascist Day was banned, the KPD leadership feared any premature action and refused a contest.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">This vacillation in the party’s upper echelons prevented them from taking the initiative at favorable moments in 1923. As Trotsky observed, a revolutionary party — no matter its size or the depth of the capitalist crisis — can hope to lead the working class only by mastering the whole arsenal of strategy and tactics, along with developing a tested core of leaders who can put them into practice. Ultimately, the KPD failed to overcome its internal weaknesses to rise to the challenge in 1923.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Even if the KPD had made its bid in October and failed, it would have been better to go down fighting than surrender without a battle. As the Communist Rosa Leviné-Meyer said after the insurrection was called off,</span></p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; color: #383838; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">A retreat may have been inevitable. But not such a catastrophic and defenseless retreat. The workers were never able to find out by their own experience whether the revolution was “betrayed” or whether they lost the battle in a square fight, not yet being strong enough to achieve their goal. They felt humiliated and cheated.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_82864_1_39" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">39</sup></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">This is not a call for needless bloodshed. If every avenue is cut off and there is no other option, then it is better to go down fighting than to wave a white flag without a struggle. The latter will do far more to demoralize the working class than the former. While communists may not be able to avert defeat, they are responsible for the state in which workers emerge from it: either dispirited and apathetic or energized and ready to resume the struggle. A heroic defeat in October 1923 could have inspired the workers in future battles. That was a valuable contribution that the KPD could have made instead of retreating. The Stalinists did this after the fact by idealizing the Hamburg Uprising and Thälmann’s role in it, while masking the Comintern leadership’s failure as a whole.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Not only was the defeat without a struggle demoralizing for the working class and the party, but it was also felt materially in working and living conditions. Just as the workers paid for the passive resistance in the Ruhr with soaring prices while capitalists kept the mines open, now they were made to pay by the bourgeoisie again: the eight-hour day was abolished, and once the Rentenmark was stabilized in November, unemployment shot up dramatically.</span></p><h2 class="wp-block-heading" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Failure to Turn</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Looking back a hundred years later, we can conclude that the German October was a moment when history failed to turn. The stormy year of 1923 showed that workers in advanced capitalist countries were not immune to communist politics. After the Russian Revolution, the German October was one of the best opportunities for the workers to seize power in the world. Unfortunately, this opportunity was lost, and the German October marked an end to the revolutionary wave that had begun in 1917. After 1923 came the isolation of Soviet Russia and, 10 years later, the rise of Hitler’s counterrevolution. If we want to ensure that history turns to socialism at the next opening, then it is crucial to develop a party and leaders who can take advantage of a revolutionary situation. The German October failed to turn because the KPD lacked this type of tested leadership.</span></p><div class="speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; break-inside: avoid; color: #181818; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-top: 24px !important; max-width: 100%;"><div class="footnote_container_prepare" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%; padding-top: 24px !important;"><p style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170) !important; box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; line-height: 1.3 !important; margin-block: 0.83em !important; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px !important; vertical-align: middle;"><span class="footnote_reference_container_label pointer" role="button" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.5em !important;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;">Notes</span></span></p></div><div id="footnote_references_container_82864_1" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%;"><table class="footnotes_table footnote-reference-container" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; caption-side: bottom; width: 865px;"><caption class="accessibility" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; height: 1px !important; margin-top: -2px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding-bottom: 0.5rem; padding-top: 0.5rem; text-align: start; text-wrap: nowrap !important; width: 1px !important;"><span style="font-family: times;">Notes</span></caption><tbody style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_1" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>1</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Ruth Fischer, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 312.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_2" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>2</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Werner T. Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–1923</em> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 285, 350.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_3" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>3</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Pierre Broué, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The German Revolution 1917–1923</em> (Boston: Brill, 2005), 712.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_4" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>4</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Broué,<em style="box-sizing: inherit;"> German Revolution</em>,<em style="box-sizing: inherit;"> </em>714.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_5" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>5</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">V. I. Lenin, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Collapse of the Second International</a>” (1915), Marxists Internet Archive.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_6" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>6</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Broué, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">German Revolution</em>, 577.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_7" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>7</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Chris Harman, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923</em> (London: Bookmarks, 1982), 246.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_8" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>8</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Arthur Rosenberg, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/rosenberg/history-weimar/ch07.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“The Occupation of the Ruhr and the Inflation, 1923,”</a> chap. 7 in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A History of the German Republic</em> (1936), Marxists Internet Archive.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_9" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>9</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Harman, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Lost Revolution</em>, 251.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_10" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>10</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 318–19.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_11" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>11</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Karl Radek, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/radek/1923/06/schlageter.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void”</a> (June 1923), Marxists Internet Archive. In 1933, the philosopher and Nazi Party member Martin Heidegger also praised Schlageter as an authentic hero for Germany: “Schlageter died the most difficult of all deaths. Not in the front line as the leader of his field artillery battery, not in the tumult of an attack, and not in a grim defensive action—no, he stood defenseless before the French rifles. But he stood and bore the most difficult thing a man can bear. Yet even this could have been borne with a final rush of jubilation, had a victory been won and the greatest of the awakening nation shone forth.” Martin Heidegger, “Schlageter (May 26, 1933),” in Richard Wolin, ed., <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader</em> (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 42.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_12" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>12</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 339–40. Years later, Fischer defended her remarks as follows: “At a meeting of Berlin University students organized by the Berlin party branch, I was the speaker. The attitude of the nationalists against capitalism was discussed, and I was obliged to answer some anti-Semitic remarks. I said that Communism was for fighting Jewish capitalists only if all capitalists, Jewish and Gentile, were the object of the same attack. This episode has been cited and distorted over and over again in publications on German Communism”; Fischer, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stalin and German Communism</em>, 283.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_13" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>13</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Fischer, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stalin and German Communism</em>, 291–92.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_14" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>14</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Broué, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">German Revolution</em>, 736.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_15" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>15</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Victor Serge, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Witness to the German Revolution</em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 75. Lübeck is not in Saxony.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_16" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>16</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">International Communist League, “Rearming Bolshevism: A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Spartacist</em> 56 (Spring 2001): 9.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_17" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>17</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leon Trotsky, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence</em>, trans. Alan Woods (London: Wellred Books, 2016), 530.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_18" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>18</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leon Trotsky, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/25c.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Can a Counter-revolution or a Revolution Be Made on Schedule?,”</a> September 23, 1923, in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The First Five Years of the Communist International</em>, vol. 2, Marxist Internet Archive.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_19" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>19</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">David Stone, “The Prospect of War? Lev Trotskii, the Soviet Army, and the German Revolution in 1923,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">International History Review</em> 25, no. 1 (December 2003): 799–817. See also Edward H. Carr, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A History of Soviet Russia: The Interregnum 1923–1924</em> (London: Macmillan, 1954), 215–19.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_20" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>20</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Harman, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Lost Revolution</em>, 274–75; Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 107, 416–22.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_21" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>21</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 422.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_22" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>22</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 422.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_23" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>23</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Rosenberg, “Occupation of the Ruhr.”</span><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky came to an assessment — which he would later revise — that a third of the police would fight the revolutionaries while another third would stay neutral, and the final third would join the KPD. Leon Trotsky, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/trotzki/1923/10/revaussicht.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Revolutionsaussichten in Deutschland,”</a> October 20, 1923, Marxists Internet Archive.</span></p></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_24" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>24</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky, “Report on the Fourth World Congress.”</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_25" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>25</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Isaac Deutscher, “Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler,” in Fred Halliday, ed., <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxism, Wars, and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades</em> (New York: Verso, 1984), 162.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_26" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>26</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">August Thalheimer, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/missed/3.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“A Missed Opportunity? The German October Legend and the Real History of 1923,”</a> Marxists Internet Archive; see also Carr, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">History of Soviet Russia</em>, 221–22.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_27" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>27</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Deutscher, “Dialogue with Heinrich Brandler,” 160.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_28" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>28</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">For more on the Hamburg uprising, see Larissa Reissner, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Hamburg at the Barricades: And Other Writings on Weimar Germany</em> (London: Pluto Press, 1977); A. Neuberg, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Armed Insurrection</em> (London: New Left Books, 1970), 81–104. As Angress observed, the Hamburg uprising gained unearned mythical status in the party due to the participation of future KPD leader Ernst Thälmann: “The Hamburg barricades became the party’s Thermopylae, and Thälmann its Leonidas.” Angress, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Stillborn Revolution</em>, 451.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_29" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>29</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">See Ralf Hoffrogge, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany The Life of Werner Scholem (1895–1940)</em> (Boston: Brill, 2017), 322-26.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_30" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>30</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Victor Serge, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Memoirs of a Revolutionary</em> (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), 204.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_31" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>31</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leon Trotsky, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Third International after Lenin</em> (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1996), 119–20.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_32" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>32</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Evelyn Anderson, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Hammer or Anvil: The Story of the German Working-Class Movement</em> (London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 95.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_33" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>33</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Thalheimer, “A Missed Opportunity?”</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_34" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>34</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leon Trotsky, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/intro.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Author’s 1924 Introduction,”</a> in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The First Five Years of the Communist International, </em>vol. 1, Marxists Internet Archive.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_35" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>35</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Third International after Lenin</em>, 117.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_36" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>36</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Third International after </em>Lenin, 116–17.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_37" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>37</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Leon Trotsky, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch6.htm" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“On the Eve of the October Revolution — the Aftermath,”</a> chap. 6 in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Lessons of October</em>, Marxists Internet Archive.</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_38" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>38</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Trotsky, “On the Eve of the October Revolution.”</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_82864_1_39" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; text-wrap: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span style="font-family: times;"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>39</span></a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;"><span style="font-family: times;">Rosa Leviné-Meyer, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Inside German Communism: Memoirs of Party Life in the Weimar Republic</em> (London: Pluto Press, 1977), 56.</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-58329413611116086112023-08-21T00:00:00.001-04:002023-08-21T00:00:00.144-04:00Stalinism, Anti-Communism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union: An Interview with Doug Greene<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvMOkgcUVFwagbmdH5-36mDWIOMBppJpcuAldSTUY4kC064x3IfrHz0TAH4QV7y3gZ9dKTElgqkHNdzfGyM4x65BBjABceEtbC7flEkbem_sca5PeDtEECgOD1WbuZw63cAoOdM1eDMldDWkjOBzt9kaBJgT9so6dtd3dgYNnVJwAfnkYVXi5CxubYLhXZ/s312/all%20thats%20left1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="312" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvMOkgcUVFwagbmdH5-36mDWIOMBppJpcuAldSTUY4kC064x3IfrHz0TAH4QV7y3gZ9dKTElgqkHNdzfGyM4x65BBjABceEtbC7flEkbem_sca5PeDtEECgOD1WbuZw63cAoOdM1eDMldDWkjOBzt9kaBJgT9so6dtd3dgYNnVJwAfnkYVXi5CxubYLhXZ/s1600/all%20thats%20left1.png" width="312" /></a></div><p>My latest interview on <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn</a></i> which I did with Left Voice. You can listen to it <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stalinism-anti-communism-and-the-fate-of/id1607835194?i=1000624371999">here</a>.</p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-21751917514955809682023-08-11T00:30:00.002-04:002023-08-11T00:30:00.142-04:00The Movements of American Communism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKcBbL0n_93-H65aRWmVJuBgrtKoywpax52xU2q3WdFNgN2nwBTdbtBtZrPpEHJWfYNLQ4Lm5RhJwmrfv-DCUWBGBZFtpdH35Wufd4zbbpsMG9EvyC52akI68q_SB12irfYz2sKgYXatF7vJNThbvoZwUrlTPoShQLOSNoVHtUuDKRqtH0oY8vfLunyjvv/s290/cpusa5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="174" data-original-width="290" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKcBbL0n_93-H65aRWmVJuBgrtKoywpax52xU2q3WdFNgN2nwBTdbtBtZrPpEHJWfYNLQ4Lm5RhJwmrfv-DCUWBGBZFtpdH35Wufd4zbbpsMG9EvyC52akI68q_SB12irfYz2sKgYXatF7vJNThbvoZwUrlTPoShQLOSNoVHtUuDKRqtH0oY8vfLunyjvv/w517-h311/cpusa5.jpg" width="517" /></a></div><br />Originally published at <i><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/04/the-movements-of-american-communism/">Counterpunch</a></i>. <p></p><div><p class="MsoNormal">Joshua Morris<br /><i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793631961/The-Many-Worlds-of-American-Communism">The Many Worlds of American Communism</a></i><br />Lexington Books: New York, 2022. 528 pp., $145.00</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Far too often, scholars have mystified the history of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Historians influenced by Cold War anticommunism
saw the CPUSA as a totalitarian import that was alien to American political
life. In other words, it was the connection to the Soviet Union, not any social
struggles that defined the CPUSA. Revisionist historians inspired by the New
Left resisted this interpretation and highlighted the role of CPUSA militants
in struggles fighting racism, unemployment, and for social justice. The
revisionists told the history of the CPUSA as one of indigenous radicalism
where the connection to the Soviet Union and communist ideology was downgraded.
While there is a great deal to learn about the Communist Party from these two
schools, in practice they act as mirror images of each other, producing a
distorted and one-sided portrait of history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To understand the history of the CPUSA, it is necessary to
take seriously the commitment by militants to the ideals of communism, labor
activism, and antiracism which is situated in a complex national and
international context. Among the works that truly undertake this endeavor is
Joshua Morris’ <i>Many Worlds of American Communism</i>. His account is written
with a balance of objectivity and sympathy, telling the story of the CPUSA from
its origins in 1919 through its early growing pains, and the height of its
influence in the 1930s and 40s through its decline after 1956. <i>Many Worlds</i>
manages to guide the reader through labor struggles, factional fighting, civil
rights activism, and political repression. At times, both serious and funny, Morris’
work is an impressive work of scholarship that synthesizes party documents,
memoirs, and a vast array of secondary sources to give a big picture history of
the Communist Party.<br />
<br />
At the center of Morris’ approach is examining the role of communists as
involved in multiple worlds of engagement as political activists, labor
organizers, community organizers, etc. The CPUSA’s different worlds show that
it was a multifaceted movement and its militants came from many backgrounds
with their own objectives. For example, political leaders were more focused on
theory and international questions than labor organizers who had to deal with
local workers and the legal strategy around collective bargaining. The
experiences of a black sharecropper in Alabama fighting the Klan, a Jewish
textile worker in New York City, or a theoretician in Chicago were different
worlds even if they fell under the same overall umbrella of communism.
According to Morris, the existence of different worlds show that the party was
not a monolith: “I assert that American communist history is not a history of
one political entity, nor is it a history of how certain ideologies had effects
on the actions of certain influential individuals. It is a history of certain
Leftists at the grassroots who chose to balance their lives between the
practical realities of American society and the ideals of Marxian socialism.”
(viii)<br />
<br />
This approach of multiple worlds is a valuable methodological tool for
explaining the roles and intersection between various areas of communist party
life and work. For instance, the “political world” of the CPUSA – especially in
its first decade – was characterized by a high degree of factionalism. Despite
their initial optimism, party leaders found that their efforts to implant
revolutionary doctrines in the United States were met with extreme hostility
and repression, causing them to turn inward as opposed to directing their
efforts outward into strikes and organizing. At the same time, the labor world
– centered around dedicated trade unionists – found that their answers of how
to organize unions and build the party differed from the political world. As
Morris notes: “By the start of the Communist Second Period in 1924, the
American communist movement possessed neither theoretical nor tactical factions
but rather different worlds of experience—one deeply engrained in political
solutions to societal woes, and another dug into the day-to-day struggles of
the American labor movement.” (50)<br />
<br />
By the time of the Great Depression, the Communist Party had entered its Third
Period where members believed that socialist revolution was just around the
corner. While the Third Period is associated with ultra-leftism, Morris observed
it enabled the Communist Party to become a sizeable force on the American left.
While activists were inspired by a revolutionary vision, its application varied
among the different communist worlds. The political world ran William Z. Foster
for president in 1932 to spread a communist message across the country while
advancing a series of practical demands to combat the crisis. <span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">In
addition, members of the labor world “were encouraged to involve themselves in
extra-party organizations, even if such organizations were amassed by nonparty
members.” (209)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">During the Third Period, the <span style="background: white;">CPUSA saw capitalism as embroiled in such a deep
crisis that it was incapable of granting any fundamental reforms. This meant
that the party viewed every economic struggle as potentially
revolutionary. To win over the masses, the CPUSA adopted a “left”
economist strategy by acting as the most resolute defenders of the economic
needs of the working class.</span></span> By the end of the Third Period,
communists proved to be among the most effective labor organizers who mobilized
the masses far beyond their ranks.<br />
<br />
While Morris does not deny that changes in political strategy were dictated in
Moscow, he tends to emphasize the local experience of communists behind these
shifts over decisions made by Stalin and the Comintern. For instance, the
adoption of the Popular Front in 1935 originated in the USSR, but he notes its
strategy had support from domestic rank-and-file communists. The activists in
the labor and community worlds saw the Popular Front as a logical development of
the mass initiatives that began during the Third Period: “Like the Political
World, communists active in labor organizing found little difficulty adapting
to the Popular Front line after 1934. In fact, many who had helped in key
strikes throughout the early 1930s developed the understanding of cooperative
organizing strategies long before it was brought up by party leaders.” (282)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Party militants in the labor and community worlds followed
Comintern directives not solely due to ideology, but because the USSR’s views
aligned with their experiences. In fact, activists in these worlds were more
likely to fight American party leaders than the Comintern, believing that they
dictated struggle from afar and did not understand local conditions: “Rather
than blindly accept the party line, communists at the grassroots showed
resistance and hostility toward efforts by party leaders to dictate the needs
of local labor struggles. The support seen by communist unionists for Comintern
policies reflected less of an ideological commitment to international communism
than it did a perception that the Soviet’s understanding of class struggle
aligned with their own.” (282)<br />
<br />
While the community, labor, and political worlds were distinct, when they acted
together it could produce dramatic results. For example, Communists played
critical roles in the Flint sit down strike of 1936-1937 and the growth of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) into a mass industrial union. It was
during these years that the labor world was characterized by a “focus on
practical needs and demands of the rank-and-file—not party politics.” (323) The
focus on “practical politics” was shared by the CPUSA’s political world where
the popular front necessitated an alliance with the forces of New Deal
liberalism and the CIO’s leadership while dispensing with revolutionary
politics. As a result, the Communist Party changed its strategy of “left” economism
by dropping left pretensions and simply ending up as economist and reformist in
its approach. <br />
<br />
The CPUSA’s shift to economism meant that the political world of communism was
reduced to following the dictates of the USSR and seeking respectability at
home. These two goals were not always compatible and found themselves at odds
when Stalin signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939. The party refused
to distance itself from the USSR and abandoned antifascist organizing, leading
to a decline in membership by 15%. When the line shifted again after the German
invasion of the USSR in 1941, party militants were glad that the previous moral
ambiguity was gone. Now they considered the defense of the Soviet Union as a
“just war for the purpose of destroying fascism and defending the socialist
motherland.” (268) <br />
<br />
As the political world with their goal of respectability gained ascendency
during the war, this led to conflict with other communist worlds. In the labor
world, the CP’s support for the no-strike pledge “slowly broke down the
effectiveness of communist labor activism.” (333) While the community world
continued to struggle against racism during the war years (notably in the labor
movement), the party’s standing among civil rights activists was harmed by the
political world in 1944. Earl Browder’s dissolution of the Communist Party into
the Communist Political Association was accompanied by a reversal of the
party’s long-standing stance on civil rights activism. Although the CPUSA was
reestablished the following year and reaffirmed its support for civil rights, permanent
damage had been done: “Unfortunately, the fight to rectify Browder’s policy on
civil rights and African American integration took far longer than it took to
actually oust Browder and helped sever the Political World’s ties with its
community activists.” (409)</p><p class="MsoNormal">
As Morris observed, the struggle over Browderism revealed the larger problem of
keeping the labor, political, and community worlds of communism bound together.
Many civil rights activists associated with communism believed they had to make
a choice between fighting in their communities or maintaining party ties. As a
result, many were willing to cut their allegiance to the party since they were
not primarily motivated by ideology: “The moment the political dimension of the
movement forced grassroots activists to decide between their morals and their
political ideology, those who had come into the movement because of moral and
ethical alignment found little difficulty severing their connections with the
Political World.” (409-410)</p><p class="MsoNormal">
As a result of Cold War repression, internal strife, and revelations from
Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the CPUSA’s membership declined. By the end of the 1950s,
the party “was like a snake without a head.” (449) Now lacking a unifying political
center, the labor and community worlds of communism went their separate ways. As
Morris argues, this did not represent a decline of communism, but a diffusion
of its ideas on unions, civil rights, women’s liberation, etc. into new social
movements and enduring to the present day:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Though
the many worlds of American Communism certainly faced increasing internal and
external pressure during the postwar years, the only thing that declined during
this era was the palatability of “communism” as a viable identity for activists
to rally behind. The ideas that were built during the 1920s, 1930s, and early
1940s—that Americans deserved fair, equal, and safe workplaces; unemployment
protections; the ability to bargain as a union with employers; an end to Jim
Crow; recognition of the unique nature of women’s oppression; social
unemployment paid for by increases in taxes on the wealthy; and an expansion of
the New Deal program—remained not only dominant in the postwar era but also
wholly continued to evolve and produce new forms of activism by the 1960s.
These concepts once ridiculed as “communist” in 1925 became championed by
hundreds of thousands of civil rights activists less than 40 years later. In
this way, American Communism continues to linger on today albeit without a
strong ideological nucleus to bind the various worlds of experience together.
(451)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It would be impossible for any history to be totally
comprehensive without becoming overly long. Yet there are some glaring
omissions. The reader is left feeling underwhelmed at Morris’ discussion of the
cultural world of American communism. What Michael Denning called the “Cultural
Front” with its rich array of art, literature, music, and plays produced by
those in and around the Communist Party exercised an enduring influence on
American culture. Furthermore, another gap involves one of the darker areas of
party history. While Morris does not shy away from the negative aspects of
Communist Party history, he says very little about the party’s support for
Japanese internment during World War II. Unfortunately, we do not learn how the
various worlds of American communism dealt with this disgraceful episode.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">All these criticisms aside, Morris succeeds in covering the
broad historical sweep of American communism. Analyzing the many worlds of
American communism not only acknowledges the complexity experienced by party
militants but breaks with the constraints of anticommunist and revisionist
scholars who obscure a great deal of that history. Any radical who wants to
learn about the history of the Communist Party USA owes it to themselves to
pick up a copy of <i>The Many Worlds of American Communism</i>.</p><br /></div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-76937393296729933372023-07-18T00:00:00.000-04:002023-07-18T00:00:00.145-04:00Does the Revolution Eat Its Children?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisw7Xp1rEhvpRaiNtbmYnZmJjl8v9DEHrxf-EYKPcrarViMu991V_KWiEVatBPz-1IxqPZjUMWA3suL_f8ibwThQshcRLlPcOlRtOH-c0_sOaNSzg-gPoXqOqQmoB8AxF8vg8wY8cCYdSB0a-ejdqMAgbR2SfJgirWKTfmnnUrIqltc_IRTL3KmAQSTA/s598/saturn%20cover.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="598" data-original-width="405" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisw7Xp1rEhvpRaiNtbmYnZmJjl8v9DEHrxf-EYKPcrarViMu991V_KWiEVatBPz-1IxqPZjUMWA3suL_f8ibwThQshcRLlPcOlRtOH-c0_sOaNSzg-gPoXqOqQmoB8AxF8vg8wY8cCYdSB0a-ejdqMAgbR2SfJgirWKTfmnnUrIqltc_IRTL3KmAQSTA/s320/saturn%20cover.png" width="217" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: times;">This interview was originally published at <i><a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/does-the-revolution-eat-its-children/">Left Voice</a></i>.</span><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-bcde4bc2-7fff-2bfd-3e58-00c1090b9f4e"><span style="font-family: times;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An interview with historian Doug Greene about his new book about Stalinism, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Dialectics of Saturn</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Interview: Nathaniel Flakin</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your new book is called </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Dialectics of Saturn</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. There is a picture of Lenin and Stalin on the cover. When I first got my hands on a copy, I wondered: What Saturn have to do with Stalinism?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The title refers to a quote that was first coined during the Great French Revolution of 1789: the revolution was devouring its own children like the god Saturn from Greco-Roman mythology. This phrase was uttered both by counterrevolutionary ideologues like Jacques Mallet du Pan and by revolutionaries such as Georges Danton (who was guillotined by the Jacobins). Despite the hopeful and egalitarian beginnings of the French Revolution, it ended with a reign of terror and the transformation of revolutionaries into new oppressors such as Robespierre and Napoleon. The later detractors of the Russian Revolution saw it undergoing a similar “dialectic of Saturn”: with the rise of Stalinism, the children of the revolution were being eaten. Conservatives, liberals, and reactionaries believed it was written into the stars that </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">all</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> revolutions were destined to follow the “Dialectics of Saturn.”</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Italian Marxist scholar Domenico Losurdo used the phrase “Dialectic of Saturn” in his book </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2008). Losurdo claims that both the French and Russian Revolutions began with universalist and egalitarian visions that inspired the people. Yet the messianic radicalism embodied by Leon Trotsky was unsuited to the construction of socialism. In Losurdo’s view, socialism had to give way to the realism, conservatism, and pragmatism represented by Stalin. Losurdo argues that Trotsky did not understand this requirement of history and was necessarily swept away. He uses the “Dialectic of Saturn” to argue that Stalin did not betray the Russian Revolution but was actually its savior. Losurdo himself is part of a long line of figures in the Communist Parties and Western Marxism who believed that Stalinism was historically necessary to reach communism.</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are rightwing or leftwing positions that use the Dialectic of Saturn to explain Stalinism, but the two camps are not so far apart. They both share the same underlying historical fatalism: Stalinism was the inevitable end result of the Russian Revolution, and no alternatives were possible. However, there is the position that rejects this “unity of opposites”: Leon Trotsky developed the theory of “Proletarian Jacobinism.” Like all other Bolsheviks, Trotsky saw the Russian Revolution through the prism of its French precursor, with historical examples to both emulate and avoid. Trotsky used this approach to develop an alternative program to the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, and to understand the material conditions that led to the rise of Stalinism. He concluded that there is no mystical “Dialectic of Saturn.” Above all, he showed that Stalinism was </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">historically unnecessary</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to reach communism.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s almost “common sense” to say that the Russian Revolution led directly to Stalinism. Defenders of bourgeois society claim that every violent revolution is only going to lead to more violence. Now I know you just wrote a whole book on the topic, but can you very briefly try to explain where Stalinism came from?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First, we should provide a brief definition of Stalinism. It is the rule of a bureaucracy over collective property relations that were originally meant to produce proletarian democracy. The reigning ideology of Stalinism was the theory of “socialism in one country.” This national parochialism stood in stark contrast to the proletarian internationalism of Bolshevism in Lenin’s time. In fact, Stalinism represented the antithesis of Leninist communism.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Secondly, Stalinism was a result of the concrete material conditions stemming from the isolation of the Russian Revolution. Russia suffered from economic underdevelopment, the decimation of the working class during the civil war, and the atrophy of the workers councils, i.e. the soviets. In this political void, the Soviet bureaucracy centered around Stalin managed to solidify its rule. After taking power, the Stalinists purged, imprisoned, and murdered many of the best communist militants of the Russian Revolution. This counterrevolutionary process was vividly described in Trotsky’s magisterial work </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Revolution Betrayed</span></a><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Contrary to conservative or social democratic claims, Stalinism was not the fulfillment of Bolshevism. It was a betrayal of its commitments to workers’ power and international revolution.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stalin's rule was so terrible — purges, Gulags, mass deportations, and shameless distortions of the truth — that some socialists say: that was in reality just another form of capitalism! How would you respond to that?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think it was the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel who once said that many communists look at everything that was wrong with the USSR and want to condemn it as the worst thing we can think of: capitalism. On a certain level, this is understandable since there is much about the Stalinist-era USSR that has little to do with socialism. Yet if we look soberly at the USSR, we can see that these “new class” theories do not provide illumination on how it functioned.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let us take the example of Tony Cliff, a leader of the International Socialist Tendency, who argued that the USSR became state capitalist circa 1928. Cliff believed that the USSR underwent rapid industrialization and capital accumulation to establish itself as a military power to compete with imperialism. He saw the USSR as essentially one big factory that was compelled to accumulate and match its productivity levels to its rivals like any other capitalist business.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are several problems with Cliff’s analysis. For one, the political and economic structure of the USSR was largely the same before and after 1928. This state capitalist counterrevolution is supposed to have occurred without any fundamental change in how the society functioned. Cliff’s theory cannot explain how ownership relations were suddenly overthrown, which he pictures as happening like a thief in the night. Secondly, the USSR did not have key features of capitalism: there was no generalized commodity production, labor was not bought and sold like a commodity, and the social surplus was not appropriated by the capitalists for profit. It is true that the law of value existed in the USSR, but it was not dominant in society; it was actively constrained by the state and the planned economy. Thirdly, the central plan did not operate according to the imperatives of profit and avoided the periodic crises that characterized capitalism. Fourthly, the bureaucracy lacked many of the attributes of other ruling classes: they were not necessary to the productive process but parasitic upon it. The bureaucrats did not own the means of production, and they could not transmit property to their children. Finally, if the USSR was already capitalist in 1928, then what happened to its economy in 1991? Did the country just go from capitalism to capitalism?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Whether this “new class” approach uses the labels of “state capitalism,” (Tony Cliff) “bureaucratic collectivism,” (Max Shachtman) or “social imperialism” (Maoists), all of them are more rooted in subjective moralism, surface-level empiricism, and extreme voluntarism. None of them can scientifically grasp the USSR’s genuine laws of motion that occurred due to the contradiction that existed between its nationalized economy and the bureaucratic caste. Lastly, many of these new class theories capitulate to right-wing anticommunism by arguing that the USSR was objectively worse than imperialism.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After Stalin's death in 1953, there was a certain liberalization in the Soviet Union: political prisoners were released and the mass murders ended. Some thinkers from the Trotskyist movement, such as Isaac Deutscher, thought this meant that the Stalinist states could finally start moving toward socialism. Why didn't this happen?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Deutscher believed that democratization should’ve come from the Trotskyist opposition, but they were largely wiped out as a coherent and organized force during the Great Terror. That meant the only conceivable force for de-Stalinization could not come from below, but only from above, inside the Communist Party. This is what happened after Stalin’s death with </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Khrushchev’s Secret Speech</span></a><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. While Khrushchev’s reforms ended mass terror and allowed for more liberalization, there were always limits to how far he was willing to go. For example, Khrushchev said all the crimes of Stalinism came from the “cult of personality,” but he nonetheless defended Stalin’s campaigns against oppositionists. He only condemned Stalin for turning against fellow comrades, and thus absolved the party bureaucrats of any complicity. This allowed him to preserve the legitimacy of the Soviet bureaucracy while blaming everything bad on Stalin.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Secret Speech was not a true accounting of the material conditions that allowed Stalinism to emerge in the first place. To do otherwise could raise dangerous challenges to the whole system of bureaucratic rule, and this was something that Khrushchev was not willing to do. While Khrushchev and other reformers in the Eastern Bloc were willing to end the most egregious practices of Stalinism, they were not willing to do anything that would endanger their bureaucratic privileges. When reforms went too far and led to mass upheaval in both Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the USSR sent in tanks to crush them. In the end, bureaucratic self-reform always had a built-in limitation of trying to maintain the overall system without involving the masses from below, since that could bring the whole apparatus down.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today there are very few Stalinist states left. But Stalinism continues to be a topic that divides the Left. Why is this debate still relevant? Some socialists say we should move on.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To start, I would not discount the People’s Republic of China where the Communist Party still claims to be following Marxism-Leninism. This matters since China is the most populous country in the world, with a massive economy. Therefore, it remains important to pay attention to China and its impact on contemporary understandings of socialism. Beyond that, there are non-ruling Communist Parties that claim allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, i.e. Stalinism. In places like Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, India, and Japan, these parties are not sects, but genuine mass organizations. So in that sense, it is worth paying attention to Stalinism since it is still a significant force on the broad left.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, there is another reason to pay attention to Stalinism in contemporary debates on socialism. Even though the USSR is gone, it casts a long shadow on any discussion on the nature of socialism. Well-meaning people who are interested in an alternative to capitalism will ask Marxists: Won’t socialism just end in Stalinist terror? It is imperative to answer that question. Even after wiping away all the anticommunist distortions about the Soviet past, we should be able to explain how Stalinism’s crimes are not those of socialism. In other words, Stalin's record is something communists must explain — rationally and accurately — but I don't think we need to own him or his crimes.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every once in a while, you will see an online Stalinist defending the unhinged conspiracy theories behind the purges. They will claim that anti-Stalinists communists like Leon Trotsky were indeed collaborating with the Nazis. How would you respond to this?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To start, there was the sectarianism of the Communist International’s third period line in Germany. The </span><a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/the-origins-of-antifa/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Communist Party labeled the Social Democrats as “social fascists,”</span></a><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> saving their vitriol for them rather than the Nazis. This had the effect not only of leaving the Nazis alone as they gained in power and strength, but alienated workers who still had faith in the SPD. The alternative, as </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trotsky argued</span></a><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, would have been trying to win them over to a united front against fascism. The third period line may not have directly led to Hitler’s rise to power, but it did next to nothing to stop it. The Comintern leadership under Stalin should bear its share of responsibility for the disaster in Germany.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many arguments favoring Stalin’s historical necessity claim that his policies industrialized the USSR and led the country to militarily defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. However, the experience of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939-1941 undermines a great deal of those claims. For one, the USSR collaborated with the Third Reich in dividing up Poland and Eastern Europe between them. This was supposedly to create a buffer zone for the Soviet Union and buy time before an eventual war. Yet the USSR provided a great deal of vital raw materials to the Nazi war machine. While Germany benefited from this trade, Hitler did not want to remain beholden to Stalin and believed he could gain even more resources by conquering the Soviet Union. Stalin honored those trade agreements even as the Third Reich was massing its troops on the border. In one grotesque act of collaboration, Stalin sent several hundred German and Austrian anti-fascists living in Soviet exile back to the Third Reich, even though there was no provision in the pact for a prisoner exchange. This was viewed as a “gift” by the USSR to Germany. Despite all this collaboration during the Pact, the world’s Communist Parties were compelled to defend the Soviet agreement with their avowed fascist enemies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Furthermore, the pact did not buy needed time for the USSR to prepare for war. Stalin expected a long war in the West and Hitler basically defeated France in six weeks. This meant that war with the USSR was on the near horizon. To maintain the pact and appease Hitler, Stalin willfully ignored intelligence reports about an imminent German invasion. The Red Army was also out of position when the Germans attacked and many of its best commanders such as Mikhail Tukhachevsky had been killed in the military purges. As a result, the Germans achieved some stunning victories when their soldiers invaded the USSR. We can conclude that Soviet collaboration with Nazi Germany did a great deal to discredit socialism and nearly doomed the USSR in 1941.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The most unhinged conspiracist theorist of them all is a medieval literature professor named Grover Furr who claims to have discovered evidence that all of Stalin's accusations were true. You are probably one of very few serious historians to have read Furr. What is his argument?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Grover Furr has spent several decades defending Stalin, stating in 2012: "I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed. … I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bullshit.” His most well-known book is </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Khrushchev Lied</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2011), where he argues that the Secret Speech is a complete fabrication and a rehashing of bourgeois and “Trotskyite” lies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Throughout Furr’s writings, he argues that the Moscow Trials of the 1930s were not frame-ups, but that the defendants were guilty of being in league with foreign powers. He uses hearsay, half-truths, and rumors to bolster his case since there is no documentary evidence at all. The only “evidence” that Furr can rely upon are the confessions of the defendants at the Moscow Trials. According to Furr, the defendants were telling the truth when they confessed and that no torture was involved. Yet we know that the USSR routinely practiced various forms of coercion to extract confessions that included physical torture and threatening the families of victims. For example, the signed confession of Mikhail Tukhachevsky was covered in blood stains. Furr thinks these might have come from a pricked finger and not a beating. In other words, Furr’s justification for the Moscow Trials is based on leaps of logic and pure fiction.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In addition, Furr claims that Khrushchev was able to take power due to underlying historical and ideological weaknesses in the USSR. He says that these weaknesses were inherent in the idea of a transitional socialist stage itself. Since Soviet socialism contained material inequality, privileges, and wage differentials, it did not lead to communism, but back to capitalism. Furr concludes by rejecting socialism and stating that society must go straight to communism by immediately abolishing money, markets, and inequality. On the surface, it may seem paradoxical that Furr justifies Stalin's repression alongside a quasi-anarchist rejection of socialism. However, these positions naturally go together since implementing sweeping changes right away would require massive force. The implication is that the people cannot reach communism on their own, but it must be beaten into them. This is why Furr celebrates Stalin's use of state power and police repression since it showed the type of ruthlessness needed to achieve communism.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the end, Furr acts as a Stalinist Jesuit who gives the appearance of rigorous research and documentation by fiercely defending the faith from all heretics. For Furr, the old orthodoxy on Stalin must be upheld at all costs. Anyone who questions its catechisms is automatically viewed as an anticommunist enemy. His approach is deceptive to many new audiences who don’t have much background and appeals to Stalinist dogmatists who want someone to “prove” their faith. However, this is not to say that Furr has no useful attributes. If we want to do a serious historical materialist analysis of the USSR and Stalin, then Furr’s work serves as a magnificent example of what </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">not</span><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to do. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The book has been published by an academic publisher, and is rather expensive. How can people get a copy?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Please help generate support for a paperback version by asking your library to order a copy, writing reviews, doing interviews, and writing to the publisher. Thanks for your support!</span></p><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Douglas Greene, Foreword by Harrison Fluss, </span><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism, and the Fate of the Soviet Union</span></a><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023), 402 pages, $125 / $50.</span></span></span></div></div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-57000979118399548962023-06-30T00:00:00.001-04:002023-06-30T00:00:00.138-04:00The Fraud of Stalinism<p>Presentation on <i>Beyond Devils and Messiahs: On the Origin and Meaning of Stalinism</i> for the Denver Communists.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bCB-Y-Nkxl4" width="320" youtube-src-id="bCB-Y-Nkxl4"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-34646010085061116362023-06-21T07:00:00.004-04:002023-06-21T07:00:00.150-04:00Michael Harrington Interviews<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjErLkRIxC7pcTkR5Yd_b7q4ZA03foGGM6VtbqZUBlL8BaNjRAIzcjuJeuN45MAeQ2pRDEOoxyA2j_FIqGEUN0Y0o6dLJOyDgYdhu3iE7eGniCmwKD6vV4yY_Sl6IieCdefMYwujKZL__i_22NR0Xi9Gp1pZlXue2PnNyaRJyo2-_ZOYPiAspHeXjuQ2A/s544/harrington%20cover%20final.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="352" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjErLkRIxC7pcTkR5Yd_b7q4ZA03foGGM6VtbqZUBlL8BaNjRAIzcjuJeuN45MAeQ2pRDEOoxyA2j_FIqGEUN0Y0o6dLJOyDgYdhu3iE7eGniCmwKD6vV4yY_Sl6IieCdefMYwujKZL__i_22NR0Xi9Gp1pZlXue2PnNyaRJyo2-_ZOYPiAspHeXjuQ2A/s320/harrington%20cover%20final.png" width="207" /></a></div><p>Last year, I delivered a number of talks, interviews, and lectures on <i><a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism">A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism</a></i>. I'm posting them most of them here.</p><p>First, here's a link to the podcast I did with Eric Draitser of <i><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/04/doug-greene/">Counterpunch Radio</a></i> on Harrington. </p><p>Second, here's a link to a podcast I did with Stephen Dozeman of the <i><a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/failure-of-vision-a-michael-harrington-and-the-limits-of-democratic-socialism">New Books Network</a></i> on Harrington.</p><p>Third, I already have a separate post on the <i>Left Voice</i> podcast on Harrington, but I'm resharing it here.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f7ZJzjVi3yI" width="320" youtube-src-id="f7ZJzjVi3yI"></iframe></div><p>The others are Youtube videos linked below.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o8LXJw1rqAg" width="320" youtube-src-id="o8LXJw1rqAg"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vkR-mB-8f3U" width="320" youtube-src-id="vkR-mB-8f3U"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UIRgjA3VxXY" width="320" youtube-src-id="UIRgjA3VxXY"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eG9gJfaren0" width="320" youtube-src-id="eG9gJfaren0"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/trUIGc5xVb8" width="320" youtube-src-id="trUIGc5xVb8"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/obHdsiWNWOI" width="320" youtube-src-id="obHdsiWNWOI"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HrYoOpjTOPU" width="320" youtube-src-id="HrYoOpjTOPU"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/arX_CWLq9bo" width="320" youtube-src-id="arX_CWLq9bo"></iframe></div><p><br /></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-1272655248163354612023-06-17T00:00:00.001-04:002023-06-17T00:00:00.142-04:00New Books Network interview on Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfVPspfZQ6xeoP-X3l08-ij8iyf_SUeck35pgq1ZtJaBCqocrtt26oEX8QmavCL60rstovoc0RRfr3caKgJ9l08BD2x5NjTbRvTZXNRDlyMOU86_CnYngKLlSwTMBsgigVxJ9XvWOeHWolnZfMfx4Gquqox4npSOLOr_vXsgNiyQOCi3j8odDRsmtzxQ/s598/saturn%20cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="598" data-original-width="405" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfVPspfZQ6xeoP-X3l08-ij8iyf_SUeck35pgq1ZtJaBCqocrtt26oEX8QmavCL60rstovoc0RRfr3caKgJ9l08BD2x5NjTbRvTZXNRDlyMOU86_CnYngKLlSwTMBsgigVxJ9XvWOeHWolnZfMfx4Gquqox4npSOLOr_vXsgNiyQOCi3j8odDRsmtzxQ/s320/saturn%20cover.png" width="217" /></a></div><p>My interview with Stephen Dozeman of the New Books Network on <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn</a></i>. To listen to the interview, click <a href="https://newbooksnetwork.com/stalinism-and-the-dialectics-of-saturn">here</a>.</p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-36249384686984508032023-06-16T00:00:00.001-04:002023-06-16T00:00:00.173-04:00Che and Mao: Revolution Within the Revolution?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHx9QjyF0Fhqz8Mlj4QbMczu4e32wuWFk23Z4apDYWSZbtwcmFPGFhjGKTiFyakY_b_ekhmWCmAIji_aVUdREHQuVTf-RFDRDGAHndu-PKFP4EoSXs1JmREC7wPzCJSDDqOm0LORZxRt1ouHE4Hui3LeeaD1f2NiWcwlHMg8sTfDu1V9IkBd-oAcaVsA/s1079/che-and-maooo-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="1079" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHx9QjyF0Fhqz8Mlj4QbMczu4e32wuWFk23Z4apDYWSZbtwcmFPGFhjGKTiFyakY_b_ekhmWCmAIji_aVUdREHQuVTf-RFDRDGAHndu-PKFP4EoSXs1JmREC7wPzCJSDDqOm0LORZxRt1ouHE4Hui3LeeaD1f2NiWcwlHMg8sTfDu1V9IkBd-oAcaVsA/w391-h267/che-and-maooo-3.jpg" width="391" /></a></div>Originally published at <i><a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/06/che-and-mao-revolution-within-the-revolution/">Cosmonaut</a></i>.<div><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">
As time wore on, many within the international communist movement recognized
that the claims of Stalinist historical necessity were not holding up. Instead
of uprooting age-old class oppressions and empowering the people, there was
bureaucratic rule, ruthless conformism, and the retrenchment of cultural
conservatism. In short, the Soviet Union did not appear to be leading the way
to a communist future.<br />
<br />
Yet by in large, Stalinist historical necessity remained an unquestioned article
of faith within the international communist movement until Khrushchev’s Secret
Speech. For communists around the world, Khrushchev’s revelations and the crushing
of the Hungarian Revolution forced them to seriously confront the meaning of
Stalinism for the first time. To many, this marked their complete demoralization
and the abandonment of not only Stalinism, but of any allegiance to Marxism. <br />
<br />
However, the end of the Stalinist monolith in 1956 opened up the chance for potential
revolutionary alternatives to emerge. In China and Cuba especially, there were “revolutions
within the revolution” that imagined new forms of socialism that challenged many
of the dogmas and practices of Stalinism. Yet despite these bold endeavors,
these attempts at revolutionary renewal did not succeed in either understanding
or offering a durable communist alternative to Stalinism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<h1 style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; color: #162521; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 2.33em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Che Guevara and the New Socialist Man</span></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">An almost mythical figure, Che Guevara symbolized the liberatory spirit of the Cuban Revolution and its search for a “New Socialist Man.” A fervent internationalist, he advocated guerrilla warfare as opposed to the tepid gradualist strategies of the Latin American Communist Parties. The power of his alternative was enhanced by the fact that Che himself practiced what he preached by fighting for the revolution in the Congo and Bolivia, where he died a martyr in 1967. In addition, Che rejected the dull, gray, and bureaucratic socialist models of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European People’s Democracies. He sought a radical, egalitarian, and heroic socialism that would transform humanity and create a new man. At the time of his death, Che's ideas on a new socialism were not a fully fleshed-out vision, appearing more as tantalizing hints still in search of a new path.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Born
into an upper-class Argentine family in 1928, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was
introduced to radical ideas at an early age. Despite his class background,
Che’s family supported the political left and the Argentine Communist Party.
His parents were resolute supporters of the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil
War, hosting Republican veterans in their home. The young Guevara shared these
Loyalist sympathies and followed the course of the war closely on a makeshift
map. Later in his teens, Che was an avid reader of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
Stalin.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> However, he was not politically
active and focused more on his studies.<br />
<br />
While studying medicine, Che took a motorcycle trip around Latin America with
his close friend Alberto Garando. During this trip, Che encountered first-hand abject
poverty and the weight of imperialist domination on the continent. In Chile, he
was enraged by the conditions that workers endured at the American-owned
Anaconda mining company. He was particularly moved after spending the night
talking with a couple who were members of the outlawed Communist Party of Chile:
“The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night,
were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the
world....It’s a great pity that they repress people like this. Apart from
whether collectivism, the “communist vermin,” is a danger to decent life, the
communism gnawing at his entrails was no more than a natural longing for
something better, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love
for this strange doctrine, whose essence he could never grasp but whose
translation, “bread for the poor,” was something which he understood and, more
importantly, filled him with hope.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
After completing his medical degree in 1953, Che traveled to Guatemala. He was
eager to observe the left-leaning government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán that was
carrying out land reform and confronting the power of the US-owned United Fruit
Company. In December, he wrote to his aunt Beatriz and cited Stalin in his
burning desire to fight capitalism: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Along
the way, I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United
Fruit, convincing me once again of just how terrible the capitalist octopuses
are. I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I
won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala I
will perfect myself and achieve what I need to be an authentic revolutionary.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
While in Guatemala, Che met members of the local Communist Party (Partido
Guatemalteco del Trabajo PGT) who supported Arbenz’s government. While Guevara
kept the PGT at a distance, he wrote to his aunt that he considered himself to
be a fellow-traveler: “I have taken a definite position in support of the
Guatemalan government, and, within it, the PGT, which is Communist.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Che observed that the PGT adopted “a
cautious position,” but believed that they were the only group in the country
advocating “a program in which personal interests don’t count.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <br />
<br />
In June 1954, US-backed mercenaries led by Castillo Armas launched a coup d’état
against Arbenz. Che reached out to the PGT, urging them to arm workers and
defend the government, but the party refused. According to the account by his
first wife Hilda Gadea: “Ernesto told me how he constantly urged the Youth
Alliance to go to the front, and that many youngsters, encouraged by him, were
willing. He said that time and again the suggestion was presented to the PGT,
but the only answer they got was that the army was already taking care of
everything and that the people should not worry.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Che’s efforts were of no avail since
the Arbenz government was overthrown and the PGT was outlawed.<br />
<br />
In the aftermath of the coup, Guevara sought protection inside the Argentine
consulate, where he remained for a few weeks before making his way to Mexico.
The experience in Guatemala transformed Che from a mere Bohemian rebel into a
dedicated revolutionary. Now he recognized that a revolution could not be made
using the state and army of the bourgeoisie. Arbenz failed to understand this
essential truth and it had led to his downfall. To defeat imperialism and the
bourgeoisie, Che believed that it was necessary for revolutionaries to destroy
the old army and state. In its ashes, they would create new institutions of
popular power defended by the armed people. When the next revolution inevitably
came, Che wanted to be ready for it. He left Guatemala proclaiming: “The
struggle begins now.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
His opportunity was not long in coming. In Mexico City, Che met Cuban exiles
Raúl and Fidel Castro. The Castro brothers were leaders of the 26th of July
Movement, who planned to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Convinced of their sincerity, Guevara joined their cause as a doctor.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[8]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> In June 1956, mere months before
their expedition was set to embark for Cuba, Castro and Che were arrested by
the Mexican police. Castro was accused of working with communists to
assassinate Batista, charges which he vehemently denied. By contrast, Che, who
was honest to a fault, admitted to the police that he was a communist.
According to Castro: “They took Che before the prosecutor, the prosecutor
interrogated him, and Che even started arguing about the cult of personality,
doing a critique of Stalin. Imagine Che involved in a theoretical discussion
with the police, the district attorney and the immigration authorities over
Stalin’s errors!”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[9]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Eventually, thanks to the
intervention of former Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas, both Castro and Che
were released.<br />
<br />
Months later, the rebels departed the yacht <i>Granma</i> for Cuba. The
expedition nearly ended in total disaster when they were attacked almost instantly
upon landing. The majority were killed with only 22 survivors out of 82 regrouping
in the Sierra Maestra. Despite this initial set-back, the rebel army survived. In
the opening battles, Che decided that he would no longer serve as a doctor, but
as a soldier:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">This
might have been the first time I was faced, literally, with the dilemma of
choosing between my devotion to medicine and my duty as a revolutionary soldier.
There, at my feet, was a backpack full of medicine and a box of ammunition.
They were too heavy to carry both. I picked up the ammunition, leaving the
medicine, and started to cross the clearing, heading for the cane field.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[10]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Over
the coming months, Che proved to be an exemplary soldier. After their initial
encounter, the rebels managed to evade the army by hiding in the forests and
mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Their measures of land reform won the
allegiance of the peasantry. However, Che believed that more radical measures
would be needed: “Our revolutionary war was already beginning to acquire new
characteristics. The consciousness of the leaders and the combatants was
growing. We were beginning to feel in our flesh and blood the need for an agrarian
reform and for profound, essential changes in the social structure that were
vital to cleanse the country.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[11]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> For the next two years, the July 26<sup>th</sup>
Movement became the center of the anti-Batista resistance. Its urban wing launched
actions that included assassination attempts on Batista and insurrectionary
general strikes. These efforts failed to topple the dictatorship. The main
battlefield of the revolution was in the Sierra Maestra, where Batista's
soldiers were defeated by Castro's guerrillas. In late 1958, the guerrillas
shifted to the offensive and a column commanded by Guevara successfully
captured the city of Santa Clara, cutting Cuba in half. Seeing his rule
tottering, Batista fled into exile and within days, Castro, Guevara, and their troops
marched into Havana to cheering crowds. <br />
<br />
Even though the guerrillas were in power, Che believed this was only the
beginning of the revolution. It was not enough to overthrow Batista, but the
socio-economic roots of exploitation had to be uprooted: “The first difficulty
is that our new actions must be accomplished on the old foundations. Cuba's
antipeople regime and army are already destroyed, but the dictatorial social
system and economic foundations have not yet been abolished.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[12]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Che knew this required the
mobilization of the people. Over the next few years, the revolution radicalized
as the people confronted local exploiters and their American backers. The
agrarian reform struck a major blow to the latifundia. Property belonging to
the wealthy supporters of Batista and American citizens was nationalized. To
defend these gains and fight the counterrevolution, Committees for the Defense
of the Revolution were created.<br />
<br />
The revolutionary intransigence of the Cuban people brought down the wrath of
the United States who feared communist subversion. To arrest developments in
Cuba, the American government organized terrorist attacks. Economic measures
were also instituted with the hopes of strangling the revolution, but these efforts
backfired. When the Eisenhower Administration threatened to cut off Cuba’s
sugar quota after Castro refused to compensate the sugar planters, the USSR
stepped in and bought the sugar. In June-July 1960, the Cuban government
proceeded to nationalize all American-owned industries without any compensation.
In July 1960 at the First Latin American Congress, when asked to define the
ideology behind the Cuban Revolution, Guevara proclaimed: “I would answer that
if this revolution is Marxist — and listen well that I say Marxist — it is
because the revolution discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by
Marx.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[13]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Whether Guevara realized it or not,
he was expressing the logic behind Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.<br />
<br />
While Che and Castro pushed for the radicalization of the revolution, their
allies in the Popular Socialist Party/PSP (Moscow-aligned CP) trailed far
behind. While many of their rank-and-file members had fought bravely alongside
the July 26<sup>th</sup> movement in the mountains, the party’s leadership
hesitated until very late before supporting the armed struggle.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[14]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Now the PSP said that Cuba must
remain at the bourgeois-democratic stage in order to avoid antagonizing either the
national bourgeoisie or American imperialism. In July 1960, the PSP published
“Trotskyism: Agents of Imperialism” that condemned Trotskyist provocateurs as
liars when they claimed that “the Cuban people are seizing the assets belonging
to the imperialists and their national allies.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[15]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> A month later, PSP General Secretary
Blas Roca declared that the revolution remained “a patriotic and democratic
revolution” and recognized that “it is necessary to guarantee the profits of
private enterprise, its normal functioning and development. It is necessary to
stimulate zeal and increase productivity among the workers of these
enterprises.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[16]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> A mere few weeks later, the
revolutionary government launched even more sweeping nationalizations that gave
them control over 80 percent of the economy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On
the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Fidel Castro proclaimed the
socialist character of the revolution: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">What
the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. What the imperialists
cannot forgive is the dignity, the firmness, the courage, the ideological
integrity, the spirit of sacrifice, and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban
people. This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under
their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution right
under the nose of the United States!</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[17]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">By
the mid-1960s, the Cuban Revolution had successfully defended themselves
against American efforts to overthrow them. However, the revolution was
suffering major economic problems. Dependency on sugar halted the government’s ambitious
plans for industrialization. Other economic issues were further compounded by
the US blockade that limited Cuba’s ability to import raw materials. The
alliance with the Soviet Union provided needed supplies and kept the revolution
afloat, but it also came with an imported bureaucratic model of socialism. As the
Minister of Industry and head of the National Bank, Che initiated a discussion
over how Cuba should confront these difficulties and what path to socialism it
should follow. The ensuing “Great Debate” between advocates of the
Auto-Financing System (AFS) and the Budgetary Finance System (BFS) was one of
the most important debates on the transition to socialism since the 1920s. The
“Great Debate” touched on a wide-ranging number of issues related to socialism such
as the role of consciousness, material and moral incentives, money,
bureaucracy, planning, and the law of value.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[18]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
The position of AFS was aligned with Soviet orthodoxy and supported by Alberto
Mora, the Minister of Foreign Trade, and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, the Minister
of Agriculture, both of whom were former PSP members. The AFS position advocated
that Cuban enterprises should be legally independent and trade their products
with each other through a market, thereby their products would remain
commodities. The success of enterprises would be determined by their
profitability and material incentives among workers would be used to promote
efficiency and innovation. <br />
<br />
Among the main champions of the AFS was the French economist Charles
Bettelheim, then serving as an advisor to the Cuban government. He quoted
Stalin to support his position, arguing that it was an “economic law that the
relations of production must necessarily conform with the character of the
productive forces.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[19]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Bettelhiem argued that effective
economic organization must conform to the economic structure of society. Since
Cuba was an underdeveloped country, the necessity of AFS and the survival of
the law of value was in conformity with the current development of the
productive forces. Furthermore, Bettelheim said that the law of value was an
objective law during the transition to socialism and it would remain operative
in the planned sector due to the low level of development of the productive
forces. An underdeveloped economy like Cuba was not in the position to know either
social wants or plan for them. For Bettelheim, enterprises needed autonomy and
the economy must rely on the law of value until the productive forces were adequately
developed. <br />
<br />
Che (supported by the Belgian Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel) was one of
the foremost proponents of the BFS position and “opposed the use of capitalist
mechanisms to determine production and consumption.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[20]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> He argued that socialism was not
just an economic system but entailed a new way of life and the transformation
of human beings. As he said in 1963: “A socialist economy without communist
moral values does not interest me. We fight poverty but we also fight
alienation. One of the fundamental aims of Marxism is to eliminate material
interest, the factor of ‘individual self-interest’ and profit from man’s
psychological motivations. Marx was concerned with both economic facts and
their reflection in the mind, which he called a ‘fact of consciousness.’ If communism
neglects facts of consciousness, it can serve as a method of distribution but
it will no longer express revolutionary moral values.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[21]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
Che did not deny the existence of the law of value in socialism, but argued
that it was unsuitable as a guide for social justice and it had no role to play
in the public sector. He said that enterprises in the planned sector should operate
as a single whole and not produce commodities. These enterprises would be subject
to strict accounting, but this was not the same as relying on the law of value.
Rather, Che argued for rejecting the law of value as an economic regulator and
that production must be done according to a central plan. <br />
<br />
He believed that AFS proponents were aping capitalist institutions and
mechanisms. In 1959, he had condemned a similar type of enterprise autonomy
found in Yugoslavia as reminiscent of capitalism:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">They
practice something like competitive capitalism, with a socialist distribution
of the profit of each enterprise; that is, taking each enterprise not as a
group of workers but as a unit, this enterprise functions more or less as in a
capitalist system, obeying laws of supply and demand and carrying on a violent
struggle over prices and quality with enterprises of the same sort. They thus achieve
what is called in economics free competition.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[22]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
Che said that economic development and the pursuit of social justice
necessitated limiting the law of value. Socialization of the means of
production would open the road to central planning and overcoming the anarchy
of the market. Che believed that the success of the Cuban Revolution proved
that deterministic economic laws were false and that the revolutionary vanguard
“is capable of consciously anticipating the steps to be taken in order to force
the pace of events, but forcing it within what is objectively possible.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[23]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Moral incentives as opposed to
material ones would be the main lever to promote a collective spirit. This
vision of socialism would create new human beings guided by a new ethical consciousness.
For Che, a voluntarist will guided by a higher morality could create socialism
almost regardless of material conditions.<br />
<br />
In 1965, the “Great Debate” ended and Che appeared to have won. Yet if he won
the public battle, then Che lost the war behind the scenes. According to
Mandel’s biographer Jan Willem Stutje, the private debate lay over the
direction of revolution and how the workers exercised power: “That is, along
with the question of the law of value came the issue of how much freedom the
proletariat would have to make its own decisions. As Mandel saw it, though Che
triumphed in the public debate, he was defeated in the hidden one. Guaranteeing
freedom was a political problem: it required the creation of workers’ councils
and popular assemblies. Such organs were never developed.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[24]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Despite Che's criticisms of the AFS
system, he never truly answered the question of proletarian democracy and who
should plan. <br />
<br />
A few years later in 1968, Cuba launched a radical offensive that nationalized
most non-agricultural businesses still in private hands, which eliminated the
market as a medium of exchange. At the same time, Cuba relied on sugar and
agriculture as its main sector of growth. This shift to agriculture occurred
just as the percentage of agricultural workers declined, leading the government
to utilize moral incentives as a short-term solution to the labor shortage.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[25]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Moreover, the whole-scale
nationalizations disrupted the economy and moral incentives could not
compensate for low productivity and mismanagement. In 1970, the Cubans launched
a major effort to harvest 10 million tons of sugar (double the 1968 harvest).
This effort diverted a significant amount of resources and led to further
difficulties in the economy. The sugar harvest campaign failed and afterwards,
Cuba ended up adopting the Soviet economic model.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[26]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
Following the Great Debate, Che's criticisms of the non-revolutionary character
of the Soviet Union deepened. One of his final works,<i> Apuntes críticos a la
economía </i>(1965-1966) was a series of unfinished commentaries on the Soviet <i>Manual
of Political Economy</i>, the standard textbook of the time.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[27]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> In a letter to Minister of Education,
Armando Hart, Che concluded that these type of manuals were useless: “[Soviet
manuals] have the drawback of not letting you think, because the party has
already done it for you and you just have to digest it. In terms of
methodology, it is anti-Marxist as can be and, moreover, the books tend to be
very bad.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[28]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Che hoped his notes would be useful to
both students and socialists who were interested in new ideas beyond Soviet
dogmas:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">For
those who view us with suspicion because of the esteem and loyalty they feel
with respect to the socialist countries, we give them a single warning: the
affirmation by Marx, in first pages of <i>Capital</i>, about the incapacity of
bourgeois science to criticise itself, falling back on apologetics instead, can
be applied today, disgracefully, in the science of Marxist economics. This book
constitutes an attempt to return to the correct path and, independently of its
scientific value, we are proud of having tried to do so from this small
developing country. Humanity faces many shocks before its final liberation but
– and we are completely convinced of this – it will never get there without a
radical change in the strategy of the principal socialist powers.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[29]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Che
claimed that the USSR and the Eastern Bloc were “returning to capitalism”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[30]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> due to their dependence upon
capitalist methods such as material incentives: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Individual
material interest was the arm of capital par excellence and today it is
elevated as a lever of development, but it is limited by the existence of a
society where exploitation is not permitted. In these conditions, man neither
develops his fabulous productive capacities, nor does he develop himself as the
conscious builder of a new society.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[31]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He
traced the current Soviet impasse back to Lenin's introduction of the New
Economic Policy in 1921:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">In
the course of our practice and our theoretical investigations we have
discovered the most blameworthy individual with the name and surname: Vladimir
Ilich Lenin. Such is the magnitude of our audacity. However, those who have the
patience to continue to the final chapters of this work can appreciate the
respect and admiration that we feel towards this ‘guilty’ person and towards
the revolutionary motives for those acts whose final results would today shock
their author . . . Our thesis is that the changes brought about by the New
Economic Policy (NEP) have saturated the life of the USSR and that they have
since scarred this whole period. The results are disheartening: the capitalist
superstructure was increasingly influencing the relations of production and the
conflicts provoked by the hybridisation that was the NEP, are today being
resolved in favour of the superstructure; it is returning to capitalism.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[32]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara
believed that Lenin would have abolished NEP if only he had lived longer. Unfortunately,
Lenin had died, and his successors had failed to “see the danger and it
remained as the great Trojan horse of socialism, direct material interest as an
economic lever.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[33]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> In Che’s notes, Stalin is largely
exonerated of any blame for the USSR’s predicament. In fact, he saw Stalin as
better than Khrushchev since he recognized the danger of market relations: “In
the supposed errors of Stalin is the difference between a revolutionary and a
revisionist attitude. He saw the danger in commodity relations and attempted to
pass over this stage by breaking those that resisted him. The new leadership,
on the contrary, give in to the impulses of the superstructure and emphasise
commercial activity, theorising that the total use of these economic levers
will take them to communism.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[34]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> That is not to say that Che has no
criticisms of Stalin. He observed that Stalin’s “great historical crime” was to
have “underestimated communist education and instituted an unrestricted culture
of authority.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[35]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> At most, one can say that Che’s
comment is inadequate since he does not truly begin to grapple with the
Thermidorian nature of Stalinism.<br />
<br />
It is perhaps only a coincidence that both Che and Trotsky use the term “caste”
when referring to the Soviet elite.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[36]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> This does not mean Che was directly
influenced by Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union in <i>The Revolution
Betrayed</i>. His opinion on Trotsky was both uninformed and hostile. As he wrote
in 1965: “I think that the fundamental stuff that Trotsky was based upon was
erroneous and that his ulterior behaviour was wrong and his last years were
even dark. The Trotskyites have not contributed anything whatsoever to the
revolutionary movement; where they did most was in Peru, but they finally
failed there because their methods are bad.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[37]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Yet Che believed that Trotsky was
someone who should be studied, albeit as a negative example. In a letter to
Hart, he suggested that Trotsky should be included in Marxist study courses for
Cuban Communists alongside Khrushchev as one of the “great revisionists.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[38]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> When Che went to Bolivia, he brought
along Trotsky’s <i>History of the Russian Revolution</i>, a book he praised
despite his negative opinion of the author: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">This
is a fascinating book, but from which it is impossible to extract a critique
because the historian is also a protagonist of the events. In any case, he
sheds light on a whole series of events of the great revolution that had
remained hidden by myth. At the same time, he makes isolated statements whose
validity still remains absolute today. In the last analysis, if one disregards
the personality of the author and limits oneself to the book, it must be
considered as a source of utmost importance for the study of the Russian
Revolution.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[39]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">When
it came to Trotskyists, Che’s views were different. Che counted individual
Trotskyists such as Ernest Mandel as allies during the Great Debate. When plates
to Trotsky’s <i>Permanent Revolution</i> were destroyed by the government, Che
admitted that this was a mistake to the American sociologist Maurice Zeitlin:
“It was a mistake made by a second-rate bureaucrat. They broke the plates. It
shouldn’t have happened.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[40]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> In 1965, shortly before he left
Cuba, Che was instrumental in freeing the Trotskyist Roberto Acosta Hechevarria
from jail. Upon his release, Che amicably told Hechevarria: “Acosta, you can’t
kill ideas with blows.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[41]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
By contrast, Che recognized that his criticism of bureaucracy, careerism, and
privilege found in the Soviet Union were close to Maoist positions: “In many
aspects I have expressed opinions that could be closer to the Chinese side:
guerrilla warfare, people’s war, in the development of all these things,
voluntary labour, to be against direct material incentives as a lever, a whole
set of things which the Chinese also raise … .”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[42]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <br />
<br />
While Che refused to take a public side in the Sino-Soviet split, he did openly
criticize Moscow. At a February 1965 conference on Afro-Asian Solidarity held
in Algiers, he condemned the USSR for its complicity in the exploitation of the
Third World: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">If
we establish that kind of relation between the two groups of nations, we must
agree that the socialist countries are, in a certain way, accomplices of
imperialist exploitation. It can be argued that the amount of exchange with the
underdeveloped countries is an insignificant part of the foreign trade of the
socialist countries. That is very true, but it does not eliminate the immoral
character of that exchange. The socialist countries have the moral duty to put
an end to their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[43]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These
public criticisms of the Soviet Union were viewed negatively in Cuba. When Che
returned to Cuba from Algeria, he was accused of being both a Trotskyist and a
Maoist by Raúl Castro while Fidel watched silently. Daniel Alarcón Ramírez
recalled asking one of Che's bodyguards what happened in the exchange:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">“I
overheard a very big argument between el Fifo and Che.” So I asked him, “What
about?” He said: “They were discussing Chinese policy and discussing another
Soviet leader”—for he was semi-literate. So I mentioned the names of several
Soviet leaders. He said, “No, it was one that’s already dead. The one they call
Trotsky, and they said to Che that he was a Trotskyist. Raúl said that. Raúl
was the one who said he was a Trotskyist, that his ideas made it clear that he
was a Trotskyist.” Argudín told me that Che got up very violent, as if he were
about to jump on Raúl, and said to Raúl: “You’re an idiot, you’re an idiot.” He
said he repeated the word idiot three times; then he looked over at Fidel, says
Argudín, and Fidel did not respond. … When Che saw that attitude, he left very
upset, he slammed the door and left.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[44]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore,
Che believed that both the USSR and China were guilty of failing to support
Vietnam against American imperialism. As he wrote in the <i>Message to the
Tricontinental</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">U.S.
imperialism is guilty of aggression — its crimes are enormous and cover the
whole world. We already know all that, gentlemen! But this guilt also applies
to those who, when the time came for a definition, hesitated to make Vietnam an
inviolable part of the socialist world; running, of course, the risks of a war
on a global scale-but also forcing a decision upon imperialism. And the guilt
also applies to those who maintain a war of abuse and snares — started quite
some time ago by the representatives of the two greatest powers of the
socialist camp.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[45]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara’s
criticisms of the Soviet Union (and China) in regards to Vietnam were more
reprimands as opposed to excommunications. He hoped that through criticism and pressure
that the Soviet Union could change course. Unlike the Chinese, Che still
believed that the USSR was a potential ally of revolutionary struggles around
the world.<br />
<br />
In Che's call to create “ two, three, many Vietnams,” he gave voice to an
open rejection of the Soviet line of “peaceful coexistence” along with the
popular front stagism and the legalistic strategies advocated by the Latin
American Communist Parties. Che’s revolutionary strategy of focoism involved
small groups of determined guerrillas (known as focos) who would go into the
mountains, launch armed actions that would rally the oppressed around them, and
eventually take power. At first, he did not consider focoism to be a universal
model. In his 1961 book, <i>Guerrilla Warfare</i>, Che argued that focos should
not be used against formal democracies since conditions were unfavorable to
armed struggle: “Where a government has come into power through some form of
popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of
constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the
possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[46]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">By
the time <i>Guerrilla Warfare: A Method</i> (1964) was published, Guevara
argued that focoism was applicable across all of Latin America. He claimed
armed struggle would reveal the true class nature beneath the façade of
bourgeois democracy: “The dictatorship tries to function without resorting to
force so we must try to oblige it to do so, thereby unmasking its true nature
as the dictatorship of the reactionary social classes. This event will
deepen the struggle to such an extent that there will be no retreat from it.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[47]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Che argued that the conditions in Latin
America were already objectively revolutionary and that it would only take a
small spark to ignite them: “popular forces can win a war against the army. It
is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the
insurrection can create them.”</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn48" name="_ftnref48" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[48]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> All that was needed for revolutionary
victory was the creation of a subjective factor comprised of heroic guerrillas.
According to Michael Löwy, Che’s strategy of a continental-wide Latin American
socialist revolution harkened back to the great days of the Russian Revolution:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">This
was the first occasion in a very long time that a Communist leader of world
stature had tried to outline an international revolutionary strategy that was
not dependent on the interests of any state. In this sense, too, Che’s ideas
meant a return to the sources of Leninism, to the Comintern in the glorious
years of 1919-1924, before it was gradually turned into a tool of the foreign
policy of the USSR under Stalin.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn49" name="_ftnref49" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[49]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">However,
for all Che’s epic daring, focoism was not the theory of permanent revolution
or a return to Leninism, but a voluntarist approach to revolution. The focoist
strategy neglected many crucial political and military questions: 1) the roles
of a vanguard party and mass organizations (unions, general strike, etc); 2)
There was no careful planning on whether the cities or the countryside were the
best strategic terrain to begin armed struggle; 3) Che did not analyze the
different class and political forces in Latin America; 4) the working class did
not play a leading role in the armed struggle. In the 1960s, Latin American
revolutionaries launched foco campaigns in countries such as Peru, Argentina,
Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil. The most famous foco was Che’s own
in Bolivia. None of them succeeded.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn50" name="_ftnref50" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[50]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> In the following decades, the
guerrilla movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador and elsewhere abandoned focoism
and developed far more sophisticated political and military approaches to
warfare such as protracted warfare and guerrilla-inspired popular insurrection.</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn51" name="_ftnref51" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51;" title=""><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 107%;">[51]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></span></a><span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk107241448;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> Like Blanqui, Che was an
incorruptible figure who rejected the mediocre reformists of his day, but
neither offered a viable road to power.<br />
<br />
In the end, Che Guevara embodied the idiosyncrasy of the Cuban Revolution
vis-à-vis Stalinism. He had sincere intentions and was willing to pursue a
different path to socialism, but the results were decidedly mixed. His
socialism failed to discuss Stalinism or the role of proletarian democracy. Che
saw morality and acts of will as the main levers of socialism. After the early
years of the revolution and the open atmosphere of the Great Debate, Cuba
adopted a similar economic and political structure found in the Eastern Bloc.
While focoism was a challenge to the ossification of the Moscow-line Communist
Parties, it proved to be a cul-de-sac.</span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<h1 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; color: #162521; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 2.33em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution</span></span></h1>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) represented
the most far-ranging alternative to Stalinism that emerged inside the
international communist movement. Reacting to the loss of revolutionary
momentum and conservatism inside the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong feared that similar
tendencies were taking hold in the People’s Republic of China. To renew the
revolution, Mao called for mass action to overthrow “capitalist roaders” in
party-state bureaucracy in order to keep China on the socialist road. <br />
<br />
The Chinese Revolution, both before and after 1949, saw its share of collaboration
and conflict with Stalin and the Soviet Union.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn52" name="_ftnref52" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[52]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Until Stalin’s death,
criticisms by Mao and other party leaders of the Soviet Union were generally
kept private. Following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Chinese were placed in
the position of both defending Stalin from Khrushchev while offering their own
distinctive criticism. Mao said that blaming the “cult of personality” was a
superficial criticism of Stalin. He also believed that it was a mistake for
communists to discard Stalin wholesale. To do so meant that the USSR ceded political
and ideological ground to anticommunists. According to Mao: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would like to say a few words about the Twentieth
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I think there are two “swords”:
one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded
by the Russians. Gomułka and some people in Hungary have picked it up to stab
at the Soviet Union and oppose so-called Stalinism. The Communist Parties of
many European countries are also criticizing the Soviet Union, and their leader
is Togliatti. The imperialists also use this sword to slay people with. Dulles,
for instance, has brandished it for some time. This sword has not been lent
out, it has been thrown out. We Chinese have not thrown it away. First, we
protect Stalin, and, second, we at the same time criticize his mistakes, and we
have written the article “On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat”. Unlike some people who have tried to defame and destroy
Stalin, we are acting in accordance with objective reality.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn53" name="_ftnref53" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[53]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By the early 1960s, tensions between the Soviet Union
and China had led to open rupture. In their polemics, the Communist Party of
China (CPC) said that the USSR was now ruled by “modern revisionists” who “have
completely betrayed the revolutionary spirit of Marxism-Leninism, betrayed the
interests of the people.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[54]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
The Chinese singled out Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign that <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">aimed at erasing the indelible influence of [Stalin]
among the people of the Soviet Union and throughout the world, and at paving
the way for negating Marxism-Leninism, which Stalin had defended and developed,
and for the all-out application of a revisionist line. Their revisionist line
began exactly with the 20th Congress and became fully systematized at the 22nd
Congress.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn55" name="_ftnref55" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[55]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Chinese polemics took further aim at the “three
peacefuls” and “two wholes” promoted by Khrushchev. The three peacefuls
consisted of the following: first was “peaceful coexistence” between socialist
and capitalist countries; the second was “peaceful competition” whereby existing
contradictions between socialism and capitalism would be resolved peacefully
through economic competition; lastly, “peaceful transition” where capitalism
would give way to socialism through parliament and the ballot box as opposed to
a violent revolutionary struggle.<br />
<br />
China condemned the three peacefuls as a revisionist package, stating:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If the general line of the international communist
movement is onesidedly reduced to “peaceful coexistence”, “peaceful competition”
and “peaceful transition”, this is to violate the revolutionary principles of
the 1957 Declaration and the 1960 Statement, to discard the historical mission
of proletarian world revolution, and to depart from the revolutionary teachings
of Marxism-Leninism.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn56" name="_ftnref56" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[56]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The “two wholes,” were in reference to the program
adopted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) at its 22<sup>nd</sup>
Congress in 1961. The CPSU declared that the dictatorship of the proletariat
had been superseded in the USSR, meaning that there was now a “state of the
whole people” and the communist party had become “the party of the whole
people,”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn57" name="_ftnref57" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[57]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
representing not just the working class. According to the Chinese, this was
revisionist because “the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably
continue for the entire historical period of the transition from capitalism to
communism, that is, for the entire period up to the abolition of all class
differences and the entry into a classless society, the higher stage of
communist society.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn58" name="_ftnref58" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[58]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The Chinese argued that
it was impossible for there to be a state of the whole people because “so long
as the state remains a state, it must bear a class character; so long as the
state exists, it cannot be a state of the “whole people.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn59" name="_ftnref59" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[59]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Moreover, the CPSU line
of the “state of the whole people” was similar to bourgeois arguments which
claimed that their states were not class states, but representative of everyone.
Contrary to the Soviets, the Chinese argued that class contradictions continue
to exist within the socialist countries. Therefore, the dictatorship of the
proletariat was needed because<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">remnants of the old exploiting classes who are trying
to stage a comeback still exist there, since new capitalist elements are
constantly being generated there, and since there are still parasites,
speculators, idlers, hooligans, embezzlers of state funds, etc., how can it be
said that classes or class struggles no longer exist? How can it be said that
the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer necessary?<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn60" name="_ftnref60" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[60]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">On the Chinese side of the polemics, there were warnings
about the continuing dangers of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. In </span></span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Long
Live Leninism!</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> (1960), modern revisionists were described as "the agents of imperialism and the enemies of the proletariat and working people of all countries.</span></span></span>”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn61" name="_ftnref61" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[61]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> Yet this did not necessarily mean the restoration
of capitalism. As late as 1964, Mao stated that the USSR was ruled by modern revisionists,
but they only faced the “unprecedented danger of capitalist restoration.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn62" name="_ftnref62" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[62]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> By 1967, China publicly declared that the USSR had
in fact restored capitalism: “The Soviet revisionists can never cover up these
hard facts of the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union no matter how
much they may resort to their propaganda machine to produce volumes of lies
about the “achievements” of the “new system.””</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn63" name="_ftnref63" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[63]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
in 1968, Chou En-lai declared that the Soviet Union was now a
“social-imperialist power.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn64" name="_ftnref64" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[64]</span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> Finally, in 1970, China announced that the Soviet
Union had become fully-fascist: “The Soviet Union today is under the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, a
dictatorship of the German fascist type, a dictatorship of the Hitler type.”</span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn65" name="_ftnref65" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[65]</span></span></span></a></p><p class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
The Chinese position on capitalist restoration in the USSR can be traced back
to Mao’s view on the continuation of contradictions under socialism. Whereas
the USSR claimed that antagonistic contradictions no longer existed under
socialism, Mao said that they did. In his 1957 work, <i>On the Correct
Handling of Contradictions among the People</i>, Mao argued that not only did
contradictions continue to exist under socialism, but that class struggle
continued as well, where it took on new forms:</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The class struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the various political forces, and the
class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the ideological
field will still be protracted and tortuous and at times even very sharp. The
proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook,
and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win
out, socialism or capitalism, is not really settled yet.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn66" name="_ftnref66" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[66]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In another work, <i>A Critique of Soviet Economics</i>,
Mao criticized Stalin’s methods of planning for focusing strictly on developing
the economic base and ignoring the superstructure. He said that the Soviets denied
the role of contradictions under socialism and failed to combat bourgeois
survivals in the superstructure that conflicted with newly emerging socialist
political, cultural, and ideological ideas. Soviet economism and its inability
to recognize and deal with contradictions meant that their planning was
bureaucratic and commandist with a focus on heavy industry that distorted the
economy and failed to achieve a more balanced approach particularly when it
came to light industry and agriculture.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn67" name="_ftnref67" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[67]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mao's critique was not just focused on the USSR, but
on parallel developments he saw within China. As he said in 1964, there were
those in China who wanted to return to capitalism:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The bureaucrat class on the one hand and the working
class together with the poor and lower-middle peasants on the other are two
classes sharply antagonistic to each other...Those leading cadres who are
taking the capitalist road have turned, or are turning, into bourgeois elements
sucking the blood of the workers; how can they possibly realize fully the
imperative need for socialist revolution?<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn68" name="_ftnref68" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[68]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mao’s understanding on the continuing class struggle
under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dangers of capitalist
restoration offered a more “revolutionary” summation of Stalin’s achievements
and mistakes than was provided by the USSR. On the one hand, China defended
Stalin as a “great Marxist-Leninist, a great proletarian revolutionary.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn69" name="_ftnref69" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[69]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
He was praised for many achievements that include building socialism in one
country, defeating oppositionists such as Trotsky and Bukharin, and leading the
Red Army’s victory in the Second World War. <br />
<br />
On the other hand, Mao believed that Stalin failed to stop the rise of modern
revisionism and capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union. He observed that Stalin
did not recognize that the ideological and political struggles inside the
communist party were an expression of the internal contradictions of socialism.
As Mao said in October 1966:<i> </i>“In 1936 Stalin talked about the
elimination of class struggle, but in 1939 he carried out another purge of
counter-revolutionaries. Wasn’t that class struggle too?”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn70" name="_ftnref70" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[70]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Since Stalin mistakenly
believed that socialism contained no antagonistic contradictions, he saw all
opposition as originating from external counterrevolutionary forces. To combat these
oppositional forces, Stalin used administrative and repressive methods as
opposed to relying on the people. This meant he struck blindly and failed to
see the internal contradictions that were the <i>true</i> source of capitalist
restoration: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are there any contradictions in socialist society?
Lenin once talked about this question and thought there were contradictions.
But Stalin did not admit this for a long time. During Stalin's later life,
people were neither allowed to speak ill of the society nor to criticize the
party or the government. In fact, Stalin mistook contradictions among the
people for those between ourselves and the enemy, and consequently regarded
those who bad-mouthed [the party or government] or who spread gossip as
enemies, thus wronging many people.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn71" name="_ftnref71" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[71]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Elsewhere in <i>On the Correct Handling of
Contradictions among the People, </i>Mao noted that a distinction should be
made between “contradictions among the people” and “contradictions between the
people and the enemy.” The former should be handled “non-antagonistically” by
political means and listening to the issues being raised by the people: “The
only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues
among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion,
criticism, persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or
repression.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn72" name="_ftnref72" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[72]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Antagonistic contradictions with the enemy were different and could dealt with
by violent means. Mao warned that there was a danger when “people fail to make
a clear distinction between these two different types of
contradictions--those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the
people -- and are prone to confuse the two. It must be admitted that it is
sometimes quite easy to do so. We have had instances of such confusion in our
work in the past; In the course of cleaning out counter-revolutionaries good
people were sometimes mistaken for bad, and such things still happen today.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn73" name="_ftnref73" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[73]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> While not directly named,
this passage could easily be considered a rebuke of Stalin.<br />
<br />
In another speech, Mao was clear that Stalin failed to distinguish between
antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions. In <i>On the Ten Major
Relationships</i>, Mao spoke about Stalin’s practice of mass terror and
executions. He noted that Stalin was “absolutely right to execute those
counter-revolutionaries,” but held that the practice of China was better in
this regard.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn74" name="_ftnref74" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[74]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
While defending the suppression of the Guomindang and landlords, Mao believed
that going forward, “there should be fewer arrests and executions in the
suppression of counter-revolutionaries in society at large.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn75" name="_ftnref75" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[75]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> He preferred the Yenan
policy “of killing none and arresting few.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn76" name="_ftnref76" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[76]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Mao noted that mass
executions were damaging to production and the revolution. He said that if
someone was killed by mistake, then this could never be undone: “Once a head is
chopped off, history shows it can't be restored, nor can it grow again as
chives do, after being cut. If you cut off a head by mistake, there is no way
to rectify the mistake, even if you want to.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn77" name="_ftnref77" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[77]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> To handle incorrect
attitudes, Mao argued for a different approach: “The correct attitude towards
them should be to adopt a policy of “learning from past mistakes to avoid
future ones and curing the sickness to save the patient”, help them correct
their mistakes and allow them to go on taking part in the revolution.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn78" name="_ftnref78" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[78]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
In the CPC’s 1963 document, <i>On the Question of Stalin</i>, the Soviet
leader’s error in regard to contradiction is stated as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In his way of thinking, Stalin departed from
dialectical materialism and fell into metaphysics and subjectivism on certain
questions and consequently he was sometimes divorced from reality and from the
masses. In struggles inside as well as outside the Party, on certain occasions
and on certain questions he confused two types of contradictions which are
different in nature, contradictions between ourselves and the enemy and
contradictions among the people, and also confused the different methods needed
in handling them. In the work led by Stalin of suppressing the
counter-revolution, many counter-revolutionaries deserving punishment were duly
punished, but at the same time there were innocent people who were wrongly
convicted; and in 1937 and 1938 there occurred the error of enlarging the scope
of the suppression of counter-revolutionaries. In the matter of Party and
government organization, he did not fully apply proletarian democratic
centralism and, to some extent, violated it. In handling relations with
fraternal Parties and countries, he made some mistakes. He also gave some bad
counsel in the international communist movement. These mistakes caused some
losses to the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn79" name="_ftnref79" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[79]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This criticism of Stalin meant that Mao rejected the
monolithic character of the Communist Party. He argued that there was an
ongoing “two-line struggle” within the party. Struggle between two lines was
inevitable inside the party since it was not homogenous. People joined the
party to pursue different goals and at each victory or bump in the road, a
struggle would erupt over where to go next. At these instances, the two lines
of the bourgeois and proletarian headquarters represented opposed directions.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn80" name="_ftnref80" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[80]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
The proletariat headquarters wanted to continue pressing the revolution forward
down a socialist road. <br />
<br />
When it came to the bourgeois headquarters, they represented those in the
Communist Party who pursued a capitalist road. According to Zhang Chunqiao: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are undeniably some comrades among us who have
joined the Communist Party organizationally but not ideologically. In their
world outlook they have not yet over-stepped the bounds of small production and
of the bourgeoisie. They do approve of the dictatorship of the proletariat at a
certain stage and within a certain sphere and are pleased with certain
victories of the proletariat, because they will bring them some gains; once
they have secured their gains, they feel it’s time to settle down and feather
their cosy nests.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“As for exercising all-round dictatorship over the
bourgeoisie, as for going on after the first step on the 10,000-li long march,
sorry, let others do the job; here is my stop and I must get off the bus.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">“We would like to offer a piece of advice to these
comrades: It’s dangerous to stop half-way! The bourgeoisie is beckoning to you.
Catch up with the ranks and continue to advance!”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn81" name="_ftnref81" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[81]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">During the Chinese Revolution, the proletarian
headquarters pushed for going past New Democracy and building socialism. This
provoked resistance from the bourgeois headquarters who wanted to stay at a
non-socialist stage and solidify capitalism instead. According Chih Heng, these
bourgeois-democrats in the Communist Party (such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping) turned into capitalist roaders:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With the victory of the new-democratic revolution, the
character and principal contradiction of the Chinese society changed. The contradiction
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie became the principal contradiction
in our country. This contradiction not only exists in society at large but is
also reflected in the Party.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The socialist revolution we are carrying out is a
revolution waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all other
exploiting classes. The spearhead of the revolution is directed mainly against
the bourgeoisie and against Party persons in power taking the capitalist road.
Its task is to replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the
dictatorship of the proletariat, use socialism to defeat capitalism, and
through protracted class struggle gradually create conditions in which it will
be impossible for the bourgeoisie to exist, or for a new bourgeoisie to arise,
and finally eliminate classes and realize communism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949
marked the beginning of the socialist revolutionary stage.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">If one’s ideology still remains at the old stage and
views and treats the socialist revolution from the stand and world outlook of
bourgeois democrats, one will become a representative of the bourgeoisie, a
capitalist-roader and a target of the socialist revolution.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn82" name="_ftnref82" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[82]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">According to the Maoists, the material origin of the
new bourgeoisie in socialism lay in the survival of “bourgeois right.” This
bourgeois right was embodied in “the commodity system and the principle of
distribution according to work provide an important economic foundation out of
and upon which capitalism and new bourgeois elements are engendered.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn83" name="_ftnref83" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[83]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In order to achieve
communism, Mao believed all these inequalities needed to be narrowed and ultimately
eliminated. Otherwise, these contradictions provided the material basis for a
new bourgeoisie. According to the <i>Shanghai Textbook</i>: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If leadership of the socialist economy is usurped by
those in power taking the capitalist road, they will turn the responsibility of
serving the people that is given to them by the Party and the state into
special privileges serving their own private interests and gain. They will
utilize the traditions and birthmarks of the old society that still exist in
the socialist economy to restore those bourgeois rights in the system of
ownership that have already been abolished and to erode the system of socialist
public ownership.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn84" name="_ftnref84" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[84]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Maoists, the contradictory nature of socialism
meant that old capitalist social relations clashed with emerging socialist
ones. This struggle resembled a battlefield with all that metaphor implies. Two
armies take the field – led by the bourgeois and proletarian headquarters –
where they engage in fierce combat characterized by daring offensives and
desperate rearguard actions. The raging battle cuts across all aspects of
society – politics, economics, culture, etc – until finally the dust clears
when one side emerges victorious and follows either the capitalist or the socialist
road.<br />
<br />
Mao’s stress on struggle can be found in his major work of philosophy, <i>On
Contradiction</i>. Here, Mao emphasized the role of contradictions for societal
development as lying at the heart of communist dialectics: “The law of
contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the
basic law of materialist dialectics.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn85" name="_ftnref85" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[85]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> He
argued that states of equilibrium between the opposed contradictions were “only
temporary and relative,” while “absolute struggle constitutes the movement of
opposites in all things.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn86" name="_ftnref86" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[86]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
In other words, Mao saw struggle between opposed contradictions and not a
reconciliation between them as a basic law. Or to put it in Chinese parlance,
one divides into two is revolutionary while two merging into one is
revisionist.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn87" name="_ftnref87" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[87]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
In the 1964 <i>Talks on Questions of Philosophy</i>, Mao rejected Engels’s
three laws of dialectics and claimed that the unity of opposites was the only law:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Engels talked about the three categories, but as for
me, I don’t believe in two of those categories. (The unity of opposites is the
most basic law, the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is
the unity of the opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the
negation does not exist at all.) The juxtaposition, on the same level, of the
transformation of quality and quantity into one another, the negation of the
negation, and the law of the unity of opposites is “triplism,” not monism. The
most basic thing is the unity of opposites. The transformation of quality and
quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity.
There is no such thing as the negation of the negation. Affirmation, negation,
affirmation, negation… in the development of things, every link in the chain of
events is both affirmation and negation.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn88" name="_ftnref88" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[88]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Slavoj Žižek argued, Mao’s emphasis on the primacy
of contradiction meant he rejected “enforced reconciliation” and saw “eternally
ongoing division” as the basis of radical change.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn89" name="_ftnref89" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[89]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It does not take much to
see this as the philosophical foundation of the Cultural Revolution.<br />
<br />
In the struggle against the capitalist roaders, Mao wanted to train a new
generation of successors who would carry on the revolution:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the final analysis, the question of training
successors for the revolutionary cause of the proletariat is one of whether or
not there will be people who can carry on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary
cause started by the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries, whether
or not the leadership of our Party and state will remain in the hands of
proletarian revolutionaries, whether or not our descendants will continue to
march along the correct road laid down by Marxism-Leninism, or, in other words,
whether or not we can successfully prevent the emergence of Khrushchovite
revisionism in China.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In short, it is an extremely important question, a
matter of life and death for our Party and our country. It is a question of
fundamental importance to the proletarian revolutionary cause for a hundred, a
thousand, nay ten thousand years. Basing themselves on the changes in the
Soviet Union, the imperialist prophets are pinning their hopes on “peaceful
evolution” on the third or fourth [sic] generation of the Chinese Party. We
must shatter these imperialist prophecies. From our highest organizations down
to the grass-roots, we must everywhere give constant attention to the training
and upbringing of successors to the revolutionary cause.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn90" name="_ftnref90" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[90]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Mao, a conscious effort was needed through mass
campaigns and actions “to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect
openly, in an all-round way and from below.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn91" name="_ftnref91" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn91;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[91]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
That is precisely what Stalin had failed to do. Rather, his methods deadened
mass enthusiasm for socialism and failed to stop Khrushchev's rise to power and
the restoration of capitalism.<br />
<br />
Mao’s ideas on the importance of culture were different from Stalin. In <i>Dialectical
and Historical Materialism</i>, Stalin said that a transformation in the base
inexorably led to change in the superstructure: “First the productive forces of
society change and develop, and then, depending on these changes and in
conformity with them, men’s relations of production, their economic relations,
change.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn92" name="_ftnref92" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn92;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[92]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
As opposed to Stalin, Mao argued that the ideological superstructure could play
the principal role in changing the base: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">that in certain conditions, such aspects as the
relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest
themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the
productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production,
then the change in the relations of production plays the principal and decisive
role.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn93" name="_ftnref93" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn93;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[93]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This meant that the continued reproduction of
bourgeois ideology was a major source for the restoration of capitalism. These
cultural survivals remained in the superstructure where they conflicted with socialist
ideas. If people’s outlook remained unchanged, then all bourgeois relations
would be reproduced, which threatened the future of socialism in China:
“Ideological and political work is the guarantee for the accomplishment of our
economic and technological work; it serves the economic basis. Ideology and
politics are the commanders, the soul. A slight relaxation in our ideological
and political work will lead our economic and technological work astray.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn94" name="_ftnref94" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn94;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[94]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mao’s thinking on the contradictions of socialism
culminated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, officially launched on
May 16, 1966. The GPCR sought to rally the masses inside and outside of the
party to overthrow the capitalist roaders and root out old ideas and culture: <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is
still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the
exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to
stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet
head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the
new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental
outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle
against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist
road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic
“authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting
classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of
the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so
as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn95" name="_ftnref95" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn95;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[95]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ultimately, Mao’s answer to Stalinism was the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. <br />
<br />
Yet did Maoism and the GPCR succeed as an alternative to the Stalinist
Thermidor? As we have<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>seen, while the
People’s Republic of China was built on the Soviet model, Mao recognized its
many problems of bureaucratization, stagnation, and regression. He envisioned a
new road to socialism that would transform ideas, culture, and consciousness. He
hoped that by mobilizing the masses that he could defeat the “capitalist roaders”
and continue the revolution. <br />
<br />
The role of Mao himself during the Cultural Revolution was contradictory to say
the least. Unlike Stalin, Mao encouraged mass involvement to “bombard the
headquarters” and potentially bring down both the state and party that he had
created. Yet he did not want that to happen. Mao wanted to keep the Cultural
Revolution within clearly defined limits. Events took an unexpected turn since the
factionalism of the Red Guards went beyond anything he had anticipated. There
were disruptions of production and the possibility of civil war. This came at
the worst possible time since China faced the danger of war from the United
States and Soviet Union.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn96" name="_ftnref96" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn96;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[96]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <br />
<br />
Communiques explaining the aim of the GPCR posed the need to replace the existing
party and state with new institutions modeled on the Paris Commune.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn97" name="_ftnref97" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn97;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[97]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
When the Shanghai People’s Commune was created in February 1967, Mao opposed it.
He argued that a commune could not sustain itself on a national level without
the leading role of the party.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn98" name="_ftnref98" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn98;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[98]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
Instead of a commune, Mao advocated a “grand alliance” and the creation of new
“revolutionary committees” composed of cadres from the party, army, and the new
mass organizations. These “three-in-one” committees marked the decisive end to
the power of the mass organizations that were the driving force behind the
GPCR’s radicalism up to that point. In a case of dialectical irony, the “grand
alliance” became a vehicle for the army (who stressed the maintenance of social
peace) to unite with anti-Maoists in the party against the rebel groups. Radicals
such as the Shengwulian with their program of an anti-bureaucratic revolution
were disbanded.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn99" name="_ftnref99" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn99;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[99]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
This laid the groundwork for the return of Deng Xiaoping, the anti-Maoist par
excellence. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng rose to power and proceeded to reverse
the Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, no new forms of proletarian democracy were
institutionalized during the GPCR.<br />
<br />
Despite his willingness to challenge Stalinism and the existing Chinese state,
Mao believed it could be revitalized without being overthrown. According to
Alain Badiou, this left Mao at a stalemate since he remained<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">a man of the party-state. He wants its renovation,
even a violent one, but not its destruction. He knows full well in the end that
by subjecting the last outpost of young revolting “leftists,” he liquidates the
last margin left to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized
leadership of the Cultural Revolution: a line of party reconstruction. He knows
it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis—nobody
does—as to the existence of the state, and because the large majority of
people, after two exalted but very trying years, want the state to exist and to
make its existence known, if needed with rude force.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn100" name="_ftnref100" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn100;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[100]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In addition, it is one of the ironies of the Cultural
Revolution that while calling for mass mobilization it relied on one of the
most odious aspects of Stalinism: the personality cult. For Mao, personality
cults were not inherently bad, but could serve as useful tools in the class
struggle. At the 1958 Chengdu Conference, he made a distinction between good
and bad personality cults:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn101" name="_ftnref101" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn101;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[101]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Undoubtedly, Mao saw his own personality cult as being
of the correct kind. In fact, Mao’s cult was a useful tool for circumventing
the party and state bureaucracy to implement his own policies. During the 1955
Socialist Offensive, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao
used his cult to appeal directly to regular cadre and the people themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This use of his cult against the bureaucracy showed a
crucial difference between Stalin and Mao. It even led foreign supporters of
Mao such as Maria Antonietta Macciocchi to say that the cult surrounding Mao
was a different species than found in Stalin since ideas were being promoted,
not the man:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">The question of the omnipresence of Mao, which in the
eyes of many people appears as a ‘cult-dogma’ with overtones of Stalinism, must
be cleared up. A preliminary distinction must be made between Mao and Mao
thought. The thought is distinct from the man; it will survive him, as Marxism
survived Marx and Leninism survived Lenin....Mao’s thought is the opposite of
Stalinist dogmatism. Mao is the Marxist theoretician who possesses to the
highest degree a feeling for differences in situations, for combinations of
circumstances, for reality, for inequality.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn102" name="_ftnref102" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn102;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[102]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reverence for Mao reached a fever pitch during the
Cultural Revolution, where allegiance to Mao’s ideas determined the correct
line. Edgar Snow advanced the idea that one of the central struggles of the
Cultural Revolution was over Mao’s cult of personality. Would the cult be used
by the party elite to exalt Mao as a genius and make him a “figurehead on a
pedestal” or by Mao himself and the Red Guards to popularize his teachings to
ideologically mobilize the people in order to attack the “capitalist roaders.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn103" name="_ftnref103" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn103;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[103]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><br />
<br />
For figures like Lin Biao and Chen Boda, Mao was promoted as a genius where his
work and thought was presented in a religious manner as the pinnacle of
communist thinking. In official statements, Mao was referred to as the Great
Teacher, Great Leader, Great Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman. Respect for
Mao was turned into enforced public rituals of adulation and deference. Charles
Bettelheim claimed that this use of the cult of personality undermined Mao's
authority and “encourage[d] blind obedience to any directive allegedly
emanating from him. This approach would in the long run have led to extensive
manipulation of the masses.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn104" name="_ftnref104" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn104;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[104]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
Mao himself rejected this “genius theory” in 1971:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">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....<br />
<br />
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 men? We the labouring
masses. During the Lushan Conference I wrote a 700-word article which raised
the question of who created history, the heroes or the slaves.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn105" name="_ftnref105" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn105;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[105]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In fact, promotion of the genius theory was officially
repudiated after 1971 with the death of Lin Biao. While Mao was still the
center of adulation, ‘excesses’ of the cult of personality were now blamed on
Lin Biao.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn106" name="_ftnref106" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn106;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[106]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a>
Whatever its ‘excesses’ though, the cult of personality was a substitute to any
genuine political challenge against established institutions and to detriment of
radical and democratic change. For all Mao's reasoning that his cult
represented the “good” kind as opposed to Stalin’s “bad” one, it fell into the
same problems. He was transformed into a figure larger than life. His writings
and ideas were canonized almost like a new religion. Truth was made identical
with Mao’s thought. Mao’s cult of personality may have served as an effective
tool of mass mobilization, but it was also an instrument of dogmatism, abuse,
and Stalinism. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">When it comes to Mao’s theory of capitalist
restoration, he saw the issue primarily determined by ideology and political
line. For Mao, Khrushchev represented “revisionism” as opposed to the “revolutionary”
Stalin. If revisionists come to power, then they can overturn the socialist
economic base. Yet the change from Stalin to Khrushchev did not mean the
restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. There was a basic continuity
between Stalin and Khrushchev, whatever their many differences, since the
planned economy remained and the law of value was not dominant. Nor is there
any basis for describing the Soviet Union as fascist. According to Livio
Maitan, a Trotskyist who was sympathetic to the Cultural Revolution, </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">the Maoists attribute the degeneration of the USSR to
ideological and political rather than economic and social causes... [the
privileged Soviet administrators] are not strata of the traditional industrial
or commercial bourgeoisie...but new strata that spring from the new society
itself and acquire a position of privilege not by virtue of an economic
mechanism but thanks rather to the exercise of political power at the different
levels...[their higher living standards and privileges] stem not from their
appropriation of the means of production, but from the functions they perform
and the control they exercise in the distribution of the surplus product.</span> <span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">It is entirely
possible in theory that this situation might generate or revive a process of
capitalist accumulation. But it is necessary to analyse whether this has
actually happened, whether the privileged strata manage to acquire means of
production, make investments, etc. The Maoists have failed to prove - or
rather, they have not even tried to prove - that this has happened in the USSR.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn107" name="_ftnref107" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn107;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[107]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What Maitan is describing is the fundamental flaw of
the Maoist theory of capitalist restoration. Maoism focuses on the
superstructure and ideas while giving scant attention to the economic base. As
Maitan noted the Maoist position presented little in terms of theoretical,
historical, or empirical evidence on the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.
Finally, the Maoist theory of capitalist restoration departs from Marxism and finds
itself embracing extreme idealism.<br />
<br />
The Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin noted: “Maoism offered a critique of Stalinism
from the left, while Khrushchev made one from the right.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftn108" name="_ftnref108" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn108;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">[108]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Certainly, Mao offered a
far more comprehensive critique of Stalinism than Khrushchev. Yet this was a
contradictory critique that failed to break with many aspects of Stalinism. In
the end, the Cultural Revolution did not involve the overthrow of the inherited
bureaucratic system, but an impossible effort at its revitalization. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The “revolutions within the revolution,” championed by
Che and Mao did not offer alternatives to Stalinism. Che’s conception of a “new
man” and socialism was highly voluntarist and disregarded objective conditions.
At best, Che’s own writings on Stalinism and the Soviet Union were
impressionistic, but his ideas are far from being fully-worked out. To an even
greater degree than Che, Mao shared a voluntaristic approach to Stalinism. Mao
believed that if the masses of Red Guards were motivated by correct ideas, then
they could not only overcome the capitalist roaders but every material obstacle.
Ultimately, Maoism’s whole understanding of capitalist restoration and
Stalinism was suspended in the air and could not find its feet on solid ground.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br clear="all" />
</span><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Later, Che told his second wife Aleida
March that he “hadn’t understood a thing” from his earlier readings of Marx. See
Jon Lee Anderson, <i>Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life</i> (New York: Grove
Press, 1997), 37. For the young Che following the progress of the Spanish Civil
War, see Paco Ignacio Taibo II, <i>Guevara, Also Known as Che</i> (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 6.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, <i>The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey</i>
(New York: Ocean Books, 2004), 78.<br />
<br />
In Cuba, Che reflected on his trip and how it developed his political ideas:<br />
<br />
“In the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I began
to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the
inability to cure a child because of lack of resources, with the numbness that
hunger and continued punishment cause until a point is reached where a parent
losing a child is an unimportant accident, as often happens among the hard-hit
classes of our Latin American homeland. And I began to see that there was
something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a
famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science,
and it was helping those people.”<br />
<br />
Quoted in Ernesto Che Guevara, “Speech to medical students and health workers,”
in <i>Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Politics and Revolution</i>, ed. David
Deutschmann (New York: Ocean Books, 2003), 112.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Anderson 1997, 121.<br />
<br />
During his time in Guatemala, Guevara met Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian Communist,
who became his first wife. She helped deepen his study of Marxism, which
included reading Marx, Engels, Mariátegui and Mao. She wrote later that he
developed an admiration for the Chinese Revolution: “When he had read [Mao
Tse-tung’s <i>New China</i>]<i> </i>and we talked about the book, he expressed
great admiration for the long struggle of the Chinese people to take power,
with the help of the Soviet Union. He also understood that their road toward
socialism was somewhat different from the one followed by the Soviets and that
the Chinese reality was closer to that of our Indians and peasants. Since I
also admired the Chinese Revolution, we often talked about it.” When they had
their daughter Hilda in 1956, Guevara nicknamed her “my little Mao.”<br />
<br />
Quotes in ibid. 129 and 196.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Paul
J. Dosal, <i>Comandante Che: Guerrilla Soldier, Commander, and Strategist,
1956-1967</i> (The University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2003), 39.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Jorge G. Castañeda, <i>Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara</i>
(New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 69.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Hilda
Gadea, <i>My Life with Che: The Making of a Revolutionary</i> (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 72.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ibid.
81.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>In a letter dated December 1957 to René
Ramos Latour, Che explained that he viewed Fidel Castro as a genuine leader of
the bourgeois left. <br />
<br />
“Out of ideological conviction, I belong to those who believe the solution to
the world’s problems lies behind the so-called iron curtain and consider this
movement one of many provoked by the bourgeoisie’s urge to rid itself of the
economic shackles of imperialism. I have always considered Fidel to be the
authentic leader of the bourgeois left, although he himself has personal
qualities of extraordinary brilliance that place him well above his class. This
was the spirit in which I entered this struggle: honorably in the hope of going
beyond liberating the country, prepared to go away when the conditions of the following
struggle shift to the right (toward what you people represent).” <br />
<br />
Quoted in Taibo 1997, 154.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Fidel
Castro, <i>My Life: A Spoken Autobiography</i> (New York: Scribner, 2009), 180.<br />
<br />
Carlos Franqui says that when he first met Che that he was avidly reading
Stalin’s <i>Foundations of Leninism</i>, considered Khrushchev’s secret speech
to be imperialist propaganda, and defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary. See
Castañeda 1997, 86. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, <i>Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War</i> (New York:
Ocean Books, 2006), 18.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ibid.
159.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, “An Old New Che Guevara Interview,” in <i>Che: Selected Writings
of Ernesto Guevara</i>, ed. Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdes
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 372.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, “Speech to the Latin American youth congress” in Deutschmann 2003,
232.<br />
<br />
Renzo Llorente notes that Che’s ideas are markedly close to Trotsky on
permanent revolution, which led him to be considered a “Trotskyist” by the
Soviet Union:<br />
<br />
“The resemblance between Guevara’s theses and Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution is, then, undeniable. It also has quite significant implications: as
Tamara Deutscher has rightly observed, “The cornerstone of Trotskyism has been
and remains the theory of permanent revolution.” This is one reason that it
should not surprise us that Soviet authorities would come to suspect Guevara of
being a “Trotskyist”—though one must bear in mind, of course, that after the
rise of Stalinism the Soviets used the term, always meant as a slur, quite
loosely—or that students in Moscow would level the same accusation during a
meeting with Guevara in November 1964.”<br />
<br />
Renzo Llorente, <i>The Political Theory of Che Guevara</i> (New York: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2018), 78.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">See
Steven Cushion, <i>A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working
Class Shaped the Guerillas’ Victory</i> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Michael Löwy, <i>The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory
of Permanent Revolution</i> (New York: Verso, 1981), 147.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Michael Löwy, <i>Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present</i>
(Amherst NY: Humanities Press, 1992), xxxviii.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Fidel
Castro, “The Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Socialist Character of the
Revolution,” in <i>Fidel Castro Reader</i>, ed. David Deutschmann and Deborah
Shnookal (New York: Ocean Books, 2008), 192.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Portions of this were drawn from
Doug Greene, <a name="_Hlk87633921">“Charles Bettelheim and the Socialist
Road,” <i>LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, </i>July 7, 2016.
http://links.org.au/node/4745</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Joseph
Stalin, “Economic Problems of the USSR,” Marxists Internet Archive. </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm</span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
See Charles Bettelheim, “On Socialist Planning and the Development of the
Productive Forces,” in <i>Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate</i>,
ed. Bertram Silverman (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 38.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Helen
Yaffe, “Ernesto 'Che' Guevara: a rebel against Soviet Political Economy,” <i>Marxists
Internet Archive</i>.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/yaffeh/che-critic.htm<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Carlos Tablada Pérez, <i>Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the
Transition to Socialism</i> (New<i> </i>York: Pathfinder, 1990), 77.<br />
<br />
Georg Lukács describes Che’s ascetic approach to socialism as reminiscent of
Jacobinism:<br />
<br />
“But this does not mean that the aspirations towards socialist democracy should
ever be dealt with by administrative methods. The problem of socialist
democracy is a very real one, and it has not yet been solved. For it must be a
materialist democracy, not an idealist one. Let me give an example of what I
mean. A man like Guevara was a heroic representative of the Jacobin ideal —his
ideas were transported into his life and completely shaped it.”<br />
<i><br />
</i>Georg Lukács, <i>Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch</i> (New
York: Verso, 1983), 171.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Michael Löwy, <i>The Marxism of Che Guevara: Philosophy, Economics,
Revolutionary Warfare</i> (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 49.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Che viewed the Liebman reforms in the USSR negatively
as potentially foreshadowing the restoration of capitalism:<br />
<br />
“The latest economic revolutions in the USSR reassemble those that Yugoslavia
took when it chose the path which would gradually take it back to capitalism.
Time will tell whether this is a fleeting accident or entails a definitive
reactionary current. This is all part of an erroneous conception of wanting to
construct socialism with capitalist elements without <i>really </i>changing
their meaning. This results in a hybrid system that arrives at a dead end with
no exit, or with an exit that is difficult to perceive, that obliges new
concessions to economic levers, that is to say retreat.”<br />
<br />
Ernesto Che Guevara, </span><em><span style="background: white; color: black; mso-color-alt: windowtext;">Apuntes</span></em><span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"> <i>críticos a la Economia Política</i> (La Habana:
Ocean Sur, 2006)</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"> 112–13. Quoted in Helen Yaffe, <i>Che
Guevara: The Economics of Revolution</i> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 250-251.
[Her translation]<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, “The Meaning of Socialist Planning,” in Silverman 1971, 102.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Jan
Willem Stutje, <i>Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred</i> (New York: Verso,
2009), 152. <br />
<br />
Oliver Besancenot and Michael Löwy concur that a major failing of Che is an
undeveloped sense of proletarian democracy: “Che Guevara never worked out a
theory of the role of democracy in the transition to socialism. Perhaps this is
the greatest lacuna in his work.” Oliver Besancenot and Michael Löwy, Che
Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 72.
See also Löwy 2007, xxvi–xxvii and Michael Löwy, “Che Guevara in Search of a
New Socialism,” Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/2384.html<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Contra Besancenot and Löwy’s position, Llorente argues
that Che did have a commitment to socialist democracy, but that he lacked the
time to write extensively on the topic:<br />
<br />
“Furthermore, it seems clear that Guevara was committed to political democracy
as he understood it (i.e., in fairly conventional Marxist terms), and he
plainly identified socialism with democracy. Perhaps Guevara could have devoted
more time and thought to the question of democracy. But given the fact that his
very considerable political responsibilities and commitments scarcely left him
time to write on other topics he considered of great importance (such as
revolutionary strategy, political economy, or guerrilla warfare), and the fact
that he died before reaching the age of forty, one could reasonably wonder
whether it is entirely fair to take Guevara to task for failing to reflect on
questions pertaining to democracy.”<br />
<br />
Llorente 2018, 122.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">See
Bertram Silverman, “The Great Debate in Retrospect: Economic Rationality and
the Ethics of Revolution,” in Silverman 1971, 16-21.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">See
Richard Gott, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cuba: A New History</i> (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 240-243; Piero Gleijeses, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington,
and Africa, 1959-1976</i> (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002), 222-223; Silverman 1971, 22-26.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">These
observations draw heavily on Yaffe 2009, 233-256. As she writes, these were
incomplete notes by Che:<br />
<br />
“However, it is vital to remember that these notes were not written for publication,
nor brought together as text. They were comments written in response to
specific paragraphs of the <i>Manual </i>– notes to himself, including
indications of areas for further study. It would be disingenuous to present
these private commentaries as a comprehensive critique, rather than the
preliminary sketch of a more long-term study. Guevara demonstrated an awareness
of the relative historicity of both the <i>Manual </i>and his own critique.
Readers of the notes should do likewise.” Ibid. 240.<br />
<br />
See also John Riddell, “Che Guevara’s final verdict on the Soviet economy,” <i>John
Riddell: Marxist Essays and Commentary</i>. </span><a href="https://johnriddell.com/2008/06/06/che-guevaras-final-verdict-on-the-soviet-sconomy/"><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; text-decoration: none;">https://johnriddell.com/2008/06/06/che-guevaras-final-verdict-on-the-soviet-sconomy/</span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">
and Michael Löwy, “After a long wait..."Critical Notes" from Che,” <i>International
Viewpoint</i>, 20 June 2007. </span><a href="https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1218"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1218</span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Ernesto Che Guevara, <i>Self-Portrait</i> (North Melbourne: Ocean Press,
2004), 212.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[29]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara
2006, 32. Quoted in Yaffe 2009, 242. [her translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[30]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Yaffe,
“Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara: a rebel against Soviet Political Economy.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[31]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Yaffe 2009, 237-238.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[32]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><a name="_Hlk107501388"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara 2006, </span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">31. Quoted in Yaffe 2009,
241. [her translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[33]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Yaffe, “Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara: a rebel against Soviet Political Economy.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[34]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara
2006, 214. Quoted in Yaffe 2009, 250. [her translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[35]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara
2006, 214. [my translation]</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[36]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ibid.
235. Observed by Besancenot and Löwy 2009, 75.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[37]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Guevara
2006, 402.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[38]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ibid.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[39]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>In his diary entry for July 31,
1967, Che was angry that the guerrillas had lost important supplies that
included a book by Trotsky:<br />
<br />
“We lost 11 backpacks with medicines, binoculars, and some potentially damaging
items, such as the tape recorder onto which we which we copied the messages
from Manila, Debray’s book with my notes in it, and a book by Trotsky; all this
does not take into account the political value that this haul has for the
government and the confidence it will give the soldiers.”<br />
<br />
Ernesto Che Guevara, <i>The Bolivian Diary</i> (New York: Ocean Press, 2006),
202. See also remarks by Besancenot and Löwy 2009, 76.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[40]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted in Taibo 1997, 230. Elsewhere, Che
says that one day Trotskyist literature would become legal in Cuba. See Löwy
2007, 129.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[41]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted in Löwy 2007, 124.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn42" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[42]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted
in Yaffe 234.<br />
<br />
According to Llorente, while Che was a fervent admirer of Mao, his ideas on several
issues ranging from guerrilla warfare to socialism were very different:<br />
<br />
“To begin with, one might cite Guevara’s views on economic development: Mao’s
Great Leap Forward, for example, involved a practice and degree of
decentralization wholly at odds with Guevara’s thinking on planning under
socialism. Guevara would also surely reject Maoism’s approach to ideological
struggles, the problem of bureaucracy, and the evil of inequality, at least to
the extent that the principles and practices of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution exemplify this approach.”<br />
<br />
Llorente 2018, 108.<br />
<br />
During the war against Batista, PSP leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez went to the
Sierra and let Che Mao’s <i>On Guerrilla Warfare.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reflecting later, Che said that he admired Mao and
copied his methods.<br />
<br />
“We have always looked up to Comrade Mao Tse-tung. When we were engaged in
guerrilla warfare we studied Comrade Mao Tse-tung's theory on guerilla warfare.
Mimeographed copies published at the front lines circulated widely among our
cadres ; they were called "food from China." We studied this little book
carefully and learned many things. We discovered that there were many problems
that Comrade Mao Tse-tung had already systematically and scientifically studied
and answered. This was a great help to us.”<br />
<br />
Guevara, “An Old New Che Guevara Interview,” in Bonachea and Valdes 1969, 368.
See also Castañeda 1967, 125.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn43" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[43]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ernesto Che Guevara, “At the
Afro-Asian conference in Algeria,” in Deutschmann 2003, 342.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn44" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[44]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Castañeda
1997, 296.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn45" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[45]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto
Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” in Deutschmann 2003, 352-353.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn46" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[46]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <a name="_Hlk107503247">Ernesto
Che Guevara, “Guerrilla Warfare,” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guerrilla
Warfare</i></a>, ed., Brain Loveman and Thomas M. Davis, Jr (Wilmington:
Scholarly Resources Inc., 2001), 51.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn47" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[47]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ernesto Che Guevara, “Guerrilla
Warfare: A Method,” in Loveman and Davis 2001, 154.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn48" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref48" name="_ftn48" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[48]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Ernesto Che Guevara, “<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Guerrilla
Warfare</span>,” in Loveman and Davis 2001, 50. See also the “codification” of
focoism in Régis Debray, <i>Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political
Struggle in Latin America</i> (New York: Verso, 2017).<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn49" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref49" name="_ftn49" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[49]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Löwy 2007, 103.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn50" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref50" name="_ftn50" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[50]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">For
criticism of focoism see Dosal 2003; Richard Gott, <i>Guerrilla Movements in
Latin America</i> (New York: Doubleday, 1971); and the case studies in Davis
and Loveman 2001. Focoism is not even an adequate description of how the Cuban
Revolution unfolded which included an important urban component, see Cushion
2016. For a Trotskyist criticism of focoism see Joseph Hansen, <i>The Leninist
Strategy of Party Building: The Debate on Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America</i>
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979). A Maoist critique of focoism can be found
in Lenny Wolff, “Guevara, Debray, and Armed Revisionism,” <i>Bannedthought</i>.
http://bannedthought.net/Cuba-Che/Guevara/Guevara-Debray-Wolff.pdf<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn51" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref51" name="_ftn51" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[51]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">In
addition to sources cited above, see Doug Greene, “Machiavelli and the Primacy
of Politics,” <i>LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.</i>
http://links.org.au/node/4717</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn52" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref52" name="_ftn52" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[52]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> For Mao’s record as an oppositional
figure to Comintern plenipotentiaries, see John E. Rue, <i>Mao Tse-Tung in
Opposition, 1927-1935</i> (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
1966).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
In a 1936 interview with Edgar Snow, Mao said: “We are certainly not fighting
for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow!” See Mao Tse-tung,
“Interview with Edgar Snow on Special Questions,” in <i>Mao Tse-tung Selected
Works</i>, vol. 6 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 92 (henceforth <i>MSW</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn53" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref53" name="_ftn53" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[53]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>“Speech at Second Session of Eighth
Central Committee,” in <i>MSW</i>, vol. 5, 323-324.<br />
<br />
For the first Chinese responses to the Secret Speech, see “On the Historical
Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “More on the Historical
Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in <i>Documents of the
Communist Party of China: The Great Debate Volume I - 1956-1963 </i>(Paris:
Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 1-45.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn54" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref54" name="_ftn54" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[54]</span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">
“Long Live Leninism!” in <i>The Great Debate Volume I </i>2021, 199.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn55" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref55" name="_ftn55" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[55]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Communist Party of China, “A
Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement:
The Letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in Reply to
the Letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
of March 30, 1963,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive. </i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/proposal.htm"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/proposal.htm</span></a><span class="MsoHyperlink"><span style="color: windowtext;">
; this section draws on Doug Greene, “</span></span>The final aim is nothing: The politics of revisionism
and anti-revisionism,” <i>LINKS The International Journal of Socialist Renewal</i>.
<a href="http://links.org.au/node/4677">http://links.org.au/node/4677</a> ; <br />
<br />
Mikhail Suslov, one of the chief ideologues of the CPSU condemned the CPC
polemics as Trotskyism:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
“Yes, comrades, it must be said frankly: the burden of the political views of
the CPC [sic] is on many points a repetition of Trotskyism, which was rejected
long ago by the international revolutionary movement.”<br />
<br />
Quoted in K. S. Karol, <i>The Second Chinese Revolution</i> (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1975), 101-102. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn56" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref56" name="_ftn56" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[56]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>“A Proposal Concerning the General
Line of the International Communist Movement.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn57" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref57" name="_ftn57" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[57]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn58" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref58" name="_ftn58" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[58]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn59" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref59" name="_ftn59" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[59]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn60" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref60" name="_ftn60" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[60]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn61" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref61" name="_ftn61" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn61;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[61]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>“Long Live Leninism!” in <i>The
Great Debate Volume I </i>2021, 203.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn62" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref62" name="_ftn62" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn62;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[62]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Mao Zedong, <i>On Khrushchov’s
Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World</i> (Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1964), 47.<br />
<br />
While Mao is not listed as the author in the original release, Rebecca Karl
makes a case that he was behind this work.<br />
<br />
“While the author was always given as the Editorial Committees of the <i>People's
Daily </i>and <i>Red Flag </i>(both mouthpieces of the CCP ), it is generally
agreed that Mao was the motivator behind this pamphlet and its release to the
public.”<br />
<br />
Rebecca Karl, <i>Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World: A Concise
History</i> (Durnham: Duke University Press, 2010), 110.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn63" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref63" name="_ftn63" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn63;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[63]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <i>How the Soviet Revisionists
Carry Out All-Round Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR</i> (Peking: Foreign
Languages Press, 1968), 4.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn64" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref64" name="_ftn64" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn64;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[64]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><i>Total Bankruptcy of Soviet Modern Revisionism</i> (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1968), 4. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn65" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref65" name="_ftn65" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn65;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[65]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Renmin Ribao, Hongqi, and
Jiefangjun Bao, <i>Leninism or Social-Imperialism? — In Commemoration of the
Centenary of the Birth of the Great Lenin</i> (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
1970), 14. Mao is alleged to have made that remark in May 1964. See ibid. 60.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn66" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref66" name="_ftn66" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[66]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>“On the Correct Handling of
Contradictions Among the People,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 5, 393.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn67" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref67" name="_ftn67" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[67]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Mao Tse-tung, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Critique of Soviet Economics</i> (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn68" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref68" name="_ftn68" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[68]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Renmin
Ribao, Hongqi, and Jiefangjun Bao, “Build the Party in the Course of Struggle,”
<i>Peking Review</i> Vol. 19, No. 27 (July 2, 1976): 7.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn69" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref69" name="_ftn69" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[69]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>“On the Question of Stalin,” in <i>Documents
of the Communist Party of China: The Great Debate Volume II - 1963-1964 </i>(Paris:
Foreign Languages Press, 2022), 53.<br />
<br />
In <i>On the Ten Major Relationships</i>, Mao said that the Chinese verdict on
Stalin was 70 percent good and 30 percent bad:<br />
<br />
“It is the opinion of the Central Committee that Stalin's mistakes amounted to
only 30 per cent of the whole and his achievements to 70 per cent, and that all
things considered Stalin was nonetheless a great Marxist....This assessment of
30 per cent for mistakes and 70 per cent for achievements is just about right.”<br />
<br />
However, Mao hastened to add that among the “30 percent” bad was Stalin’s
approach to the Chinese Revolution:<br />
<br />
“Stalin did a number of wrong things in connection with China. The “Left”
adventurism pursued by Wang Ming in the latter part of the Second Revolutionary
Civil War period and his Right opportunism in the early days of the War of
Resistance Against Japan can both be traced to Stalin. At the time of the War
of Liberation, Stalin first enjoined us not to press on with the revolution, maintaining
that if civil war flared up, the Chinese nation would run the risk of
destroying itself. Then when fighting did erupt, he took us half seriously,
half skeptically. When we won the war, Stalin suspected that ours was a victory
of the Tito type, and in 1949 and 1950 the pressure on us was very strong
indeed. Even so, we maintain the estimate of 30 percent for his mistakes and 70
percent for his achievements. This is only fair.”<br />
<br />
See “On the Ten Major Relationships,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 5, 287.<br />
<br />
At the Chengdu Conference in 1958, Mao said that the Chinese Revolution won by
acting contrary to Stalin:<br />
<br />
“If we had followed Wang Ming’s, or in other words Stalin’s, methods the
Chinese revolution couldn’t have succeeded. When our revolution succeeded,
Stalin said it was a fake. We did not argue with him and as soon as we fought
the war to resist America and aid Korea, our revolution became a genuine one
[in his eyes].”<br />
<br />
“Talk at the Chengdu Conference,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 8, 44-45.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn70" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref70" name="_ftn70" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[70]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “Talk at the Report Meeting of the
Politburo of the Central Committee,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 9, 299.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn71" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref71" name="_ftn71" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[71]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="color: black;">Mao
Zedong, “Speech at a CPC Cadres Meeting in Shanghai, March 20, 1957,” in <i>The
Writings of Mao Zedong: 1949-1976, Volume II: January 1956-December 1957</i>,
ed. John Leung and Michael Kau (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 465.<i> <br />
</i><br />
See <a name="_Hlk107572540">also “On the Ten Major Relationships,” <i>MSW</i>,
vol. 5</a>, 267-290.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn72" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-autospace: ideograph-numeric;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref72" name="_ftn72" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[72]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="color: black;">“On
the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 5, 373.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn73" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref73" name="_ftn73" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[73]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. 376.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn74" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref74" name="_ftn74" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[74]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “On the Ten Major Relationships,” <i>MSW</i>,
vol. 5, 281.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn75" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref75" name="_ftn75" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[75]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. 282.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn76" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref76" name="_ftn76" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[76]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn77" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref77" name="_ftn77" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[77]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn78" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref78" name="_ftn78" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[78]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. 284.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn79" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref79" name="_ftn79" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[79]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>“On the Question of Stalin,” <i>The
Great Debate Volume II</i>, 92.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn80" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref80" name="_ftn80" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[80]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The Maoist understanding of the
party being split into rival headquarters representing opposed class interests
differs markedly with the position of Trotskyism on the bureaucracy. From
Trotsky onward, Trotskyists have viewed the ruling bureaucracy as a parasitic
caste upon socialism and the agent of capitalist restoration. For Trotsky, the
whole bureaucratic caste was to be overthrown by the workers in a political
revolution. The Maoist position is that there is no single bureaucracy with
common interests. Rather, cadre in the party and state have different interests
with some committed to following either the capitalist or socialist roads.
Hence some cadres were viewed as potential allies, while the enemy were only
those taking the capitalist road.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn81" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref81" name="_ftn81" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[81]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Zhang Chunqiao, “On Exercising
All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie,” in <i>And Mao Makes Five: Mao
Tse-tung’s Last Great Battle</i>, ed. Raymond Lotta (Chicago: Banner Press,
1978), 217.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn82" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref82" name="_ftn82" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[82]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Chih Heng, “Bourgeois
Democrats to Capitalist-Roaders,” in Lotta 1978, 352-353.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn83" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref83" name="_ftn83" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[83]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <i>Maoist Economics and the
Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai </i>Textbook (New York:
Banner Press, 1994), 9.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn84" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref84" name="_ftn84" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[84]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Ibid. 63.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Mao said that much of China was already dominated by capitalist social
relations, so it would only take the seizure of power by a capitalist roader
for socialism to be overthrown: <br />
<br />
“Our country at present practises a commodity system, the wage system is
unequal, too, as in the eight-grade wage scale, and so forth. Under the
dictatorship of the proletariat such things can only be restricted. Therefore,
if people like Lin Piao come to power, it will be quite easy for them to rig up
the capitalist system. That is why we should do more reading of
Marxist-Leninist works.” Quoted in ibid. 9.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn85" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref85" name="_ftn85" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[85]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “On Contradiction,” in <i>MSW</i>,
vol. 1, 283.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn86" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref86" name="_ftn86" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[86]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Ibid. 303 and 313.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn87" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref87" name="_ftn87" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[87]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> On this philosophical debate see
Communist Party of China, <i>Three Major Struggles on China’s Philosophical
Front (1949-1964) </i>(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 31-47. E. L.
Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, <i>The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of
the Cultural Revolution</i> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 88-89.
According to Alain Badiou, the two rival headquarters during the GPCR
represented the philosophical camps of one dividing into two (Mao) and two
merging into one (Deng):<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“In
order not to be a conservative, in order to be a revolutionary activist in the
present, it is instead obligatory to desire division. The question of novelty
immediately becomes that of the creative scission within the singularity of the
situation.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In China,
particularly during 1966 and 1967, and in the midst of unimaginable fury and
confusion, the Cultural Revolution pits the partisans of these two versions of
the dialectical schema against one other. When it comes down to it, there are
those who follow Mao - at the time practically in a minority among the Party
leadership - and think that the socialist state must not be the policed and
police-like end of mass politics, but, on the contrary, that it must act as a
stimulus for the unleashing of politics, under the banner of the march towards
real communism. And then there are those who, following Liu Shaoqi but
especially Deng Xiaoping, think that - since economic management is the
principal aspect of things - popular mobilizations are more nefarious than necessary.”<br />
<br />
Alain Badiou, <i>The Century</i> (Malden MA: Polity Books, 2007), 60-61.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn88" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref88" name="_ftn88" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[88]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “Talks on Questions of
Philosophy,” in <i>MSW</i>, vol. 9, 126. By contrast, Nick Knight argues that
Mao remained an orthodox Marxist in terms of philosophy and never abandoned
“the negation of the negation.” See Nick Knight, ed. <i>Mao Zedong on
Dialectical Materialism: Writings on Philosophy, 1937</i> (New York: M.E.
Sharpe Inc., 1990), 15-24.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn89" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref89" name="_ftn89" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[89]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Slavoj Žižek, <i>In Defense of Lost
Causes</i> (New York: Verso, 2008) 188-189.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn90" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref90" name="_ftn90" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[90]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Mao Zedong 1964), 72-73.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn91" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref91" name="_ftn91" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn91;" title=""><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[91]</span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Quoted in Writing Group of the Heilungkiang Provincial
Revolutionary Committee, “Strengthen Further the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat,” <i>Peking Review</i> No.15 (April 10, 1970): 29.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn92" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref92" name="_ftn92" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn92;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[92]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Joseph Stalin, <i>Dialectical and
Historical Materialism & Concerning Questions of Leninism</i> (Paris:
Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 20.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn93" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref93" name="_ftn93" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn93;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[93]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “On Contradiction,” <i>MSW</i>,
vol. 1, 306.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn94" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref94" name="_ftn94" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn94;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[94]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “Red And Expert,” <i>MSW</i>, vol.
8, 26.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn95" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref95" name="_ftn95" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn95;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[95]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> “Decision of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive. </i>https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1966/PR1966-33g.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn96" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref96" name="_ftn96" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn96;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[96]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It is beyond our scope to discuss
the theory of “Three Worlds.” Suffice to say, once declaring the Soviet Union
to be the main danger, China pivoted toward the United States and embraced a
counterrevolutionary foreign policy. For Mao’s role in normalizing relations
with the United States see Chen Jian, <i>Mao's China and the Cold War</i>
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 238-276.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
For a Maoist criticism of the three worlds theory, see “Declaration of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement,” <i>Bannedthought.</i> <a href="http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf">http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn97" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref97" name="_ftn97" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn97;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[97]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>“Decision of the Central Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,”
<i>Marxists Internet Archive.</i> https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1966/PR1966-33g.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn98" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref98" name="_ftn98" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn98;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[98]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a> For Mao’s thoughts on the Shanghai
Commune see Mao Zedong, “Talks at Three Meetings with Comrades Chang
Ch'un-ch'iao and Yao Wen-yuan,” in <i>Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks
and Letters: 1956–1971</i>, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974),
277-279. For background on the Shanghai Commune see Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun,
<i>Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution</i> (New York:
Routledge, 1997); Neale Hunter<i>, Shanghai Journal: An Eyewitness Account
of the Cultural Revolution</i> (New York: Praeger, 1971); Victor Nee and
James Peck, <i>China's Uninterrupted Revolution: From 1840 to the Present</i> (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 348-355 and 359-363; Yiching Wu, <i>The Cultural
Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis</i> (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2014), 95-141.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn99" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref99" name="_ftn99" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn99;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[99]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> The Shengwulian’s document
“Whither China” was written in September 1967 and argued that the only way to
build communism was to overthrow the whole bureaucratic bourgeois dictatorship
in China and create a People’s Commune of China:<br />
<br />
“We publicly declare that our object of establishing the ‘People’s Commune of
China’ can be attained only by overthrowing the bourgeois dictatorship and
revisionist system of the revolutionary committee with brute force. Let the new
bureaucratic bourgeoisie tremble before the true socialist revolution that
shakes the world! What the proletariat can lose in this revolution is only
their chains, what they gain will be the whole world!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
China of tomorrow will be the world of the ‘Commune.’<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Shengwulian, “Whither China?” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1969/no037/shengwulien.htm<br />
<br />
For background on the Shengwulian see Wu 2014, 142-189; <br />
<br />
Richard Kraus argues that the Shengwulian offered the boldest attempt to
challenge class stratification in China: <br />
<br />
“Mao and his radical associates were even less supportive of Red Guard efforts
to move beyond the admitted inequalities of the work-grade stratification to
seek out an underlying system of class relationships. The boldest such attempt
was made by the Hunan group, Shengwulian (a shortened version of the
“Provincial Proletarian Revolutionaries’ Great Alliance Committee”). The few
documents which survive this radical organization date from late 1967 and
January 1968, when it was suppressed. Their tone is one of frustration at the
limitations of the Cultural Revolution, which Shengwulian faulted for holding
back from a structural solution to China's political problems. The Hunanese
radicals complained that the Cultural Revolutionary emphasis upon exposing the
crimes of individual officials left untouched the social foundation from which
these purged cadres had arisen. “Political power is still in the hands of the
bureaucrats, and the seizure of power is only a change in appearance.””<br />
Richard Kraus, <i>Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism </i>(New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981), 148.<br />
<br />
Livio Maitan from a Trotskyist position argues that despite the limitations of
the Shengwulian’s program that they represented forces who understood that the
Cultural Revolution required overthrowing the entire ruling party-state
bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
“Although we disagree with many of the authors’ political formulations and
characterizations and would criticize some of their attitudes (it is hard to
say whether they are naïve or tactical) documents of this kind show that the
cultural revolution generated forces capable of understanding its dual nature,
its contradictions and its intrinsic limitations and capable of showing the way
forward to the revolutionary struggle necessary to overthrow the rule of the
bureaucracy.” Livio Maitan, <i>Party, Army and Masses in China: A Marxist
Interpretation of the Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath</i> (London: New
Left Books, 1976),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>239.<br />
<br />
For a defense of Mao’s approach to groups like the Shengwulian, see: Philip
Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, <i><span lang="EN-GB">For Mao:
Essays in Historical Materialism</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> (London: Macmillan Press,
1979), </span>87-88.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn100" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref100" name="_ftn100" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn100;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[100]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Alain Badiou, “The Cultural
Revolution: The Last Revolution?” in <i>Polemics</i> (New York: Verso, 2006),
317.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn101" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref101" name="_ftn101" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn101;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[101]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">“Talk
at the Chengdu Conference,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 8, 41-42.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn102" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref102" name="_ftn102" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn102;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[102]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>Maria Antonietta Macciocchi,<i>
Daily Life in Revolutionary China</i> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972),
481.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn103" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref103" name="_ftn103" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn103;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[103]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Edgar
Snow, <i>The Long Revolution</i> (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 66.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn104" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref104" name="_ftn104" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn104;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[104]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>Charlies Bettelheim, <i>Cultural Revolution
and Industrial Organization in China: Changes in Management and<br />
the Division of Labo</i>r (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 119.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn105" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref105" name="_ftn105" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn105;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[105]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>“Summary of Talks with Responsible
Comrades at Various Places During Provincial Tour,” in <i>MSW</i>, vol. 9, 414-415,
418.<br />
<br />
See also “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the
Future,” (p. 61) <i>Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Revolutionary Study Group. </i>(note
252); “Talks With Responsible Comrades At Various Places During Provincial
Tour,” <i>MSW</i>, vol. 9, 411-24. See also Jaap van Ginneken, <i>The Rise and
Fall of Lin Piao (New York: Penguin, </i>1977), 61-63.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn106" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref106" name="_ftn106" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn106;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[106]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>Maurice Meisner, <i>Mao’s China and
After: A History of the People’s Republic</i> (New York: Free Press, 1999),
386-387.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn107" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref107" name="_ftn107" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn107;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[107]</span><!--[endif]--></span></a>Maitan 1976, 252-253.<br />
<br />
Ernest Mandel claimed that Mao’s theory of capitalist restoration focused on
ideology as opposed to its material sources: <br />
<br />
“Besides this contradiction is an inherent characteristic of Mao’s thought.
Insofar as he may be accorded an element of sincerity, his thought has a
clearly tragic character. Mao calls for rebellion and the seizure of power.
This must mean that the primary power no longer is an incarnation of the
dictatorship of the proletariat in its pure state. But he does not look for the
origins of its degeneration or danger of degeneration in the material
infrastructure of society, in the inadequate development of productive forces,
or the contradictions between this degree of development and the relationships
of production. No, the origins of the danger of degeneration, according to him,
are ideological. If revisionism is not extirpated at the roots on the
theoretical, scientific, artistic and literary levels, the dictatorship of the
proletariat must inevitably be overturned and the Chinese Communist Party will
become ... a fascist party. It is hard to believe that an experienced
Marxist could utter such enormities; nevertheless, they are spread in millions
of copies throughout China.”<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ernest
Mandel, “The Cultural Revolution: An Attempt at Interpretation,” <i>Marxists
Internet Archive</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;">https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/xx/cultrev.htm<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn108" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Che%20and%20Mao%20draft1.docx#_ftnref108" name="_ftn108" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn108;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[108]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Samir Amin, <i>Russia and the Long
Transition from Capitalism </i>(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 48.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere, Amin argues that Maoism never adequately theorized its strategy,
leaving a gap in its theory of revisionism:<br />
<br />
“Why hasn't the Chinese Communist Party explicitly theorized this strategy? Undoubtedly,
this is due to the fact that the Maoist model emerged spontaneously out of the
class alliances that underpinned the CCP’s rise to and consolidation of power.
The polemics which the Chinese Communists exchanged with the Soviets never
touched on this crucial theoretical issue. That they didn't explains the
Maoists’ ambiguous relationship with the Third International and Stalinism, the
de facto autonomy of their party, their apparent pragmatism, and their refusal
either to follow or forsake the Soviets. The inadequacy of the Maoist critique
of revisionism was the price paid for this silence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Even after the schism in the 1960s the Chinese did not push their critique of
revisionism to its logical limit: thus their inconsistent appraisal of the
Stalin period.”<br />
<br />
Samir Amin, <i>The Future of Maoism</i> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981),
111-112</span></p></div></div><p></p></div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-44175326103666813702023-06-15T00:00:00.029-04:002023-06-15T00:00:00.138-04:00Beyond Devils and Messiahs: On the Origin and Meaning of Stalinism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVD7dbXqbAYbl6JB01JtcSY8pqpOlRfOW9XizvwSNHuhFvxPoKbSDRhC9PusvMdPt45Ose4es7E0LhvtMPgbgFN93OPS_Z9UFru7Lc_7gaxg3N7L9vZvtyAJ1rUJG5YdDmwZ7rIYmMYQa9yxy6hMGQB4zOtaJBNKlguATDUagBj1FLwvdFtO91z3C2lg/s1024/2_Marx_Engels_Lenin_Stalin_1933Marx-Engels-Lenin-and-Stalin-Soviet-Propaganda-Poster-Gustavs-Klucis-Public-Domain.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1024" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVD7dbXqbAYbl6JB01JtcSY8pqpOlRfOW9XizvwSNHuhFvxPoKbSDRhC9PusvMdPt45Ose4es7E0LhvtMPgbgFN93OPS_Z9UFru7Lc_7gaxg3N7L9vZvtyAJ1rUJG5YdDmwZ7rIYmMYQa9yxy6hMGQB4zOtaJBNKlguATDUagBj1FLwvdFtO91z3C2lg/w665-h325/2_Marx_Engels_Lenin_Stalin_1933Marx-Engels-Lenin-and-Stalin-Soviet-Propaganda-Poster-Gustavs-Klucis-Public-Domain.jpg" width="665" /></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In any discussion on communism, the
experience of Stalinism casts a long and foreboding shadow. After all, the
Russian Revolution – like the French before it – ended in despotism, purges,
and terror. Among both its opponents and defenders, Stalinism is viewed as the
inescapable destiny of communism. For the anticommunists, Stalinism – or rather
communism since they see them as one and the same – appears out of nowhere like
a bolt from the blue as either a malignant virus, sadistic Big Brother, or
totalitarian reason that seeks to subjugate the world in godless tyranny. By
contrast, members of the Communist Parties viewed Stalinism as the inexorable
unfolding of historical necessity and the only path for humanity to reach
communism. Therefore, standing against Stalin meant one was either a fool or a
traitor to history itself. Whether Stalinism was cast as a hellish devil or a
providential messiah, both positions agree that it was the inevitable fate of
communism. However, if we conclude that communism is not condemned to be Stalinist,
then it is necessary to reject this framework to truly understand the origins
and meaning of Stalinism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Revolution in Retreat</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">The search for the roots of Stalinism lies
in the concrete material situation confronting the Russian Revolution of 1917.
When the Bolsheviks took power, they understood that Russia was too
underdeveloped to begin the construction of socialism. They gambled on the
revolution acting as a spark that would inspire the working class to take power
in the advanced capitalist countries. This was not at all an unreasonable
expectation since revolution was on the agenda in Germany, Austria, Hungary,
Italy, Spain, and Poland. Yet the bourgeoisie managed to defeat the
revolutionary onslaught in the west and Bolshevism was quarantined inside
Soviet Russia. By 1923, the Bolsheviks had to face the unenviable prospect of
taking the socialist road alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In addition, the Bolsheviks were
confronted with the worst possible situation inside Russia itself. While the
Red Army successfully defeated the forces of internal counterrevolution and
imperialist intervention, this victory came at a heavy cost. The country was
economically devastated with industrial production nearly non-existent, the
major cities were depopulated, and the peasantry was starving. Moreover, the
advanced layers of the working class were killed, dispersed, or absorbed into
the institutions of the party-state. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In this atmosphere, the soviets atrophied and
power was now concentrated in the Bolshevik Party, which was one of the few
institutions capable of holding the country together. The Communist Party was
no longer the open and democratic organ that it had been in the year 1917. Now
political power was increasingly centralized around Stalin, the party’s General
Secretary who controlled the vast bureaucratic apparatus. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">Communists were not unaware of this
development. For example, Lenin believed that the bureaucracy was saturated
with arrogance, Great Russian chauvinism, and Tsarist authoritarianism. He feared
that if the bureaucracy was allowed to grow, then it would mean the end of the
revolution. Lenin viewed Stalin as the chief representative of this
bureaucratic danger and demanded his removal from the position of General
Secretary. However, Lenin was in ill-health and at the end of his active
political life. After Lenin’s death, Stalin managed to hold onto his position
and the power of the bureaucracy continued to grow.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: times;">Socialism in One Country<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In 1924, the political ideology of
Stalinism was unveiled with the slogan of “socialism in one country.” Instead
of waiting for world revolution, Stalin proclaimed that the USSR could
construct socialism on its own. Many communists inside the Soviet Union found
this idea appealing since they were tired of the heroic élan of the civil war years. They longed for security
and stability. “Socialism in one country” also stoked latent national pride in
the special historical destiny of Russia to lead humanity into a socialist
future. By the late 1920s, “socialism in one country” became a full-fledged
program of crash course industrialization and forced collectivization to
modernize the Soviet Union. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">For Communist Party members, Stalin’s
program was considered the only realistic option for the Soviet Union. At best,
Trotsky was seen as an empty-headed dreamer with no sense of the practical
needs confronting the USSR or worse (and more commonly) a splitter and traitor
who was threatening to undermine the party with his “Menshevik” ideas. Even
anticommunists with their negative appraisal of Stalin saw “socialism in one
country” as the only path open to the USSR. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">However, these twin positions share the
assumption that no alternative to Stalinism was historically possible. This is
false since there were many different programs both inside and outside of the
Communist Party, whether semi-syndicalist (Workers Opposition) or market
socialist (Bukharin) that could have been pursued. There was also the communist
program offered by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Far from being an
abstract romantic, Trotsky offered a realistic, coherent, and consistent
program for the USSR. Beyond prioritizing international revolution, Trotsky
offered a platform for revolutionary renewal that included industrialization,
restoring soviet democracy, cultural revolution, and gradual collectivization.
While Trotsky’s program was not adopted, it could have either slowed down or
reversed the bureaucratization of the USSR. In other words, there were
communist alternatives to Stalinism.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Preemptive Civil War</span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">The political rule of Stalinism was marked
by bureaucratic governance where the Communist Party was controlled by Stalin
and the clique surrounding him who arbitrarily ruled. Yet it should be noted
that this was not unchallenged. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, various
dissident communists were silenced, expelled, and imprisoned for their real or
suspected opposition to Stalin. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">Stalin’s near-absolute political power did
not become a reality until the Great Terror of the late 1930s. The Great Terror
ravaged all aspects of Soviet society - the party, state apparatus, and Red
Army – as “enemies of the people” were imprisoned and shot <i>en masse</i>. Among
the most sensational events of the Great Terror were three show trials of
leading Bolsheviks such as Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Christian Rakovsky,
Karl Radek, and Nikolai Bukharin who confessed to fantastic crimes of sabotage,
espionage, and treason to restore capitalism in league with Trotsky and foreign
powers. <br />
<br />
At the time, a majority of foreign communists accepted the guilty verdicts of the
Moscow Trials without question. For others, the Moscow Trials raised unsettling
questions about socialism and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, if the claims
of the Moscow Trials were true then the entire Bolshevik leadership who had
worked with Lenin and led the revolution were nothing more than traitorous mad
dogs. On the other hand, if the charges were falsified then Stalin was engaged
in one of the most fantastic frame-ups in history. In both cases, the trials
seemed to confirm that socialism was bound to end in fratricidal violence and
tyranny. <br />
<br />
It is easy to guess why the Great Terror caused so much bewilderment amongst
Communists and fellow travelers. Irrationality seemed to reign in the USSR as
the hunt for “enemies” became an avalanche of accusations that escaped anyone’s
control. However, the Great Terror did have a kernel of rationality as a
preemptive strike by Stalin against real and suspected opponents. Trotsky himself was the most well-known figure with a
clearly defined program in opposition to Stalin. The trials were necessary to
discredit Trotsky by turning him into an archenemy of the Soviet Union. In the
courtroom, Trotsky was portrayed as a Judas who was grouped with fascists, bourgeois
nationalists, and other counterrevolutionaries. By amalgamating communist
opposition with counterrevolutionaries and criminals, Trotsky’s program was
transformed from a credible alternative into a conspiracy of wreckers. The
scale and ferocity of the Purges was not the product of socialism, but a
struggle between a privileged bureaucracy proactively liquidating any
opposition who remained loyal
to the ideals and program of the October Revolution that was symbolized by the
name Trotsky.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: medium;">Zigzags
</span></b><br />
<br />
While it was not explicitly
stated, “socialism in one country” in practice meant the subordination of the Communist
International and the world revolution to the needs of Soviet diplomacy. To
accomplish this, the communist parties had to orient themselves according to
the dictates of Soviet foreign policy and not the class struggle. This
strategic approach led to major defeats for the Comintern in Britain (1926) and
China (1927) that compounded the isolation of the USSR. Contrary to the claims
of Stalinist “realism,” the perspective of socialism in one country was
detrimental to the interests of both the USSR and the international revolution.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the greatest defeat suffered by the Comintern occurred in Germany.
Outside of the USSR, Germany possessed the world’s largest communist party
(KPD) which had a rich history of class struggle. The Great Depression hit
Germany hard and produced mass unemployment, governmental paralysis, and
political radicalization. While support for the Communist Party grew, so did
the base for Hitler and National Socialism. To onlookers, there was a clear
danger of Hitler coming to power and crushing the organized working class.<br />
<br />
From afar, Trotsky implored the Communists to form a united front with the
social democrats to stop the Nazis. Following the “third period” line advanced
by the Comintern, the Communists considered the social democrats to be “social fascists”
who were just as bad, if not worse, than the Nazis. The KPD launched blanket
attacks on all social democrats, making no distinction between the
rank-and-file and the leadership. This only served to widen the gap between the
two parties. The KPD did support a united front, but only one from “below”
which in practice meant no united front at all. The Communists believed that
the growth of Nazism was a symptom of capitalism’s death agony. They thought that
Hitler in power would be short-lived before the inevitable proletarian
revolution. To put it succinctly: “After Hitler, Us!”<br />
<br />
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he proceeded to outlaw all worker
parties. The Communist Party of Germany was crushed without ever firing a shot.
Rather than offer a critical balance sheet, the Comintern declared that the
KPD’s line was completely correct. For Trotsky, the defeat in Germany was a
historical test comparable to the failure of the Second International in 1914. The
third period line had the effect of leaving the Nazis alone as they grew in
power and alienated social democratic workers rather than winning them over to
a united front. The third period may not have directly led to Hitler’s rise to
power but it did next to nothing to stop it. The Comintern leadership under
Stalin should bear its share of responsibility for the disaster in Germany. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">Now the USSR faced a revanchist and anticommunist Germany rearming
for war. The needs of Soviet foreign policy dictated collective security with
Britain and France to contain the Third Reich. The Comintern shifted its line
in 1935 from the third period to the popular front. Now communist parties were
instructed to build broad fronts with not only socialists, but also bourgeois
parties on a program of antifascism and support for the USSR. The popular front
with its defense of “democracy” meant the effective abandonment of
revolutionary aspirations by the communist parties. Instead of operating as
vanguards of the proletariat, the communist parties acted as brakes on popular
struggle.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">The counterrevolutionary nature of the popular front was clearly on
display during the Spanish Civil War. Franco’s military coup sparked a massive
social revolution behind Republican lines. Yet the Spanish Communist Party,
following the lead of Soviet foreign policy, prioritized winning the war. They
believed that a socialist revolution would only frighten Britain and France
away from an alliance with the USSR. As a result, the Communist Party was instrumental
in rolling back the revolution and restoring governmental authority to the
bourgeoisie. Anarchists and Trotskyists who were determined to carry
the revolution forward were considered dangerous fifth columnists who must be
eliminated. This was most dramatically demonstrated with the torture and murder
of the radical socialist Andrés Nin in 1937.<br />
<br />
Despite all the compromises of the popular front, it did not lead to victory in
the Spanish Civil War or collective security with Britain and France. In August
1939, the USSR abandoned the popular front by signing a Non-Aggression Pact with
Nazi Germany. Communists struggled to rationalize their defense of the
USSR following the signing of the Pact with their hated fascist enemies. While
it was claimed that the Pact bought time for the USSR to prepare for war, this
was belied by Soviet actions. For one, the
USSR gave needed raw materials to the Third Reich. Two: the military purges
drastically weakened the Red Army. Third: intelligence from Soviet spies about
an imminent German invasion was willfully ignored by Stalin. When the Wehrmacht
invaded in 1941, the USSR was taken completely by surprise. While the Soviet
Union did win the war, this came at a high price and happened despite and <i>not</i>
because of Stalin’s military leadership.<br />
<br />
The Comintern itself was unilaterally dissolved by the USSR in 1943 as a gesture
of goodwill to the western allies. This did not really change
much for the communist parties, who followed the needs of the Soviet Union
throughout the war. The goal
was not world revolution but defeating fascism. Communists leading antifascist
struggles (with the notable exception of partisans in Yugoslavia who ignored
Stalin) did not fight for social revolution but restoring democracy and
national independence. At various conferences with the Allied powers, Stalin
agreed to the division of Europe into separate spheres of influence. Eastern
Europe would be dominated by the USSR while the west would remain capitalist. After
the war, the new People’s Democracies replicated the Stalinist structure of
nationalized economies and bureaucratized rule. <br />
<br />
Ultimately, Stalinist leadership of the USSR and the Comintern proved to be
devastating. By sacrificing world revolution for realpolitik, Stalin made major
blunders that threatened the existence of the Soviet Union. The leadership of
the Communist Parties followed to the zigzags of Soviet foreign policy,
ensuring that they lost many opportunities for proletarian revolution.<br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-size: medium;">Marxist Renewal</span></b> <br />
<br />
For many disillusioned communists who were repulsed by the crimes of Stalinism,
it was only natural to talk about their loss of “faith” in the “god that
failed.” As communists, they believed in a new savior but found themselves
serving a false Messiah who used the language of historical necessity to betray
their hopes and dreams of a better world. Now repentant, these former
communists embraced the anticommunist mantra where it is a secular folly to use
totalitarian reason to transform human nature. If one accepts these articles of
faith then any talk of changing the world to do away with the regime of private
property is rendered impossible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">When Stalinism is seen as either a devil or a messiah, then it can
only be explained by moralism and mysticism. Yet comprehending Stalinism is not
beyond human reason. The tools of historical materialism enable us to
understand the roots of Stalinism come from the material conditions of isolation,
backwardness, and scarcity prevailing in Russia. After the revolution and civil
war, the working
class was reduced to impotence while many of its most active members were
absorbed into the Red Army and the party-state. This historical situation
fostered the creation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Ultimately, Stalinism can
be defined as a form of bureaucratic rule over collectivized property relations
that were originally meant to foster soviet democracy. Stalinism’s governing
ideology was the nationalist idea of “socialism in one country” instead of Leninist
internationalism.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In a formal
way, Stalinism grew out of Bolshevism in the sense that one followed the other.
However, just like the Stalinist bureaucracy was parasitic upon the USSR’s
planned economy, it was parasitic upon the ideas of Bolshevism. The party
continued to call itself Bolshevik and use the same slogans, but these were a
form of camouflage while their revolutionary essence was emptied. The Stalinist
program of socialism in one country represents the repudiation of proletarian
internationalism. In fact, Stalinism grew out of Bolshevism not logically, but
as its Thermidorian negation and betrayal. The first victims of Stalinism were
Marxists and communists, who fought for the October Revolution.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: times;">In the end,
we should reject the dual claims of anticommunists and Stalinists that
communism is bound to end in bureaucratic rule and terror. We should envision
and fight for a communism free of Stalinist deformations. That means taking up
the banner of genuine Marxism with its program of international communist revolution
and a new society free of exploitation and oppression ruled by the working
class.</span></p></div><p class="Default"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">
<!--[endif]--></span><o:p></o:p></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-2896443422441880892023-06-13T00:00:00.001-04:002023-06-13T00:00:00.161-04:00The Long Shadow of Michael Harrington: A Review of A Failure of Vision<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokIeTyi0X1PzgIv3dk3MCnvPQf4ZlQeNMFZ3pK3pNetbwTHzm69_VVf_zD2O0Zu90ETHGggPvr7uTljFXy-jq0EK35XOSrXrkvz9rPlY0oBxM4pkTnidCABwDdUNfCezfNpwt4fOTUCYpRfh2qZNk76okqhtYzUge_y3Q119i6zHX1Xkpz3At6O26SQ/s544/harrington%20cover%20final.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="352" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiokIeTyi0X1PzgIv3dk3MCnvPQf4ZlQeNMFZ3pK3pNetbwTHzm69_VVf_zD2O0Zu90ETHGggPvr7uTljFXy-jq0EK35XOSrXrkvz9rPlY0oBxM4pkTnidCABwDdUNfCezfNpwt4fOTUCYpRfh2qZNk76okqhtYzUge_y3Q119i6zHX1Xkpz3At6O26SQ/s320/harrington%20cover%20final.png" width="207" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">A review of my book<i><a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism"> A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism</a></i> by Zach Frailey Escobar of <a href="https://www.puntorojomag.org/2022/08/16/the-long-shadow-of-michael-harrington-a-review-of-a-failure-of-vision/">Punto Rojo</a>.</span></p><p class="has-drop-cap" style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Doug Greene’s new biography of Michael Harrington brings crucial historical context to debates on the socialist Left today. It is essential reading for newly minted socialists and seasoned activists alike.</span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even among socialists, Michael Harrington is an obscure figure, but his work has enormous relevance today, for better and for worse. Harrington rose to national prominence as “the man who discovered poverty” with his 1962 book <em style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Other America</em>, a moving expose on poverty in the United States. In today’s context, his most important contribution is his role as the prominent founder and ideologue of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA has in the last few years become the largest self-described socialist organization in the U.S., since the heyday of the Socialist Party in the early 20th century.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Greene’s biography traces Harrington’s evolution from a young bohemian from a middle-class family into the foremost public figure of U.S.-American socialism. While the text is critical of Harrington’s philosophy of “Democratic Marxism”, Greene’s conscientiousness as a biographer and historian mean that it will be useful to those on all sides of this debate. In an environment in which so many polemicists flatten all historical debates into “good” and “bad” sides, and mistakes or crimes are read back or projected forward in to the lives of people and organizations as some fatal flaw, <em style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Failure of Vision</em> is carefully attentive to both the continuity and the evolution of Harrington’s thought as he converted from cosmopolitan atheism to left-wing Catholicism, and finally to a social democratic interpretation of Marxism. Despite any disagreements, Greene consistently recognizes the sincerity of Harrington’s desire for a better society and the talent and sophistication of his arguments (sometimes, perhaps, even going even too far in this direction!).</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some will object that any in-depth study on “another dead white man” is too esoteric and irrelevant to be bothered with. But, as Greene astutely observes, “Harringtonism” casts a long shadow across the socialist movement today. Understanding his life and thought is a way to contextualize the debates over socialist strategy taking place today and evaluate them in the light of history.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The debates recounted in the text will be familiar to many on the left today, as most of them remain unresolved. Harrington clashed with his contemporaries across a range of issues, from labor strategy to Palestine and Zionism, but ultimately, they almost always come back to the relationship of socialists to liberalism, the Democratic Party, and the capitalist state.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On one side, you have radicals and revolutionaries of various stripes arguing for a break from both major parties on the grounds that they are controlled by the owners of capital and cannot be made to serve socialist ends. On the other, you have democratic socialist reformers like Michael Harrington and his mentor Max Shachtman who argued that the only path toward relevance for socialists in the short to medium term—and toward a socialist majority in the long term—is to adapt to the present state of consciousness of the working class. This means embracing anticommunism, U.S. global hegemony, and above all, the Democratic Party.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It would be hard to overstate what a thorough victory Harrington and his allies achieved in these strategic debates. Since the destruction of the Black Panther Party and the decline of Socialist Workers Party (US) in the late 1970’s, no socialist organization of real national prominence has taken a position of principled opposition to the Democratic Party. Even the radicals of Students for a Democratic Society, who underwent an acrimonious split from Michael Harrington during his time in the leadership of SDS’s then parent organization League for Industrial Democracy, mostly found their way back to positions in the labor bureaucracy, the NGO-industrial complex, and the Democratic Party.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What has nearly half a century of reformist hegemony in the socialist movement delivered? Michael Harrington would no doubt point to the popularity of “democratic socialist” politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the growth of DSA; which despite some partial breaks from Harrington’s views, continues to embrace his overall strategy of realignment the Democratic Party as a vindication of his perspective. But there is a broader context to these gains, which casts them in a different light.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The strategy of “business unionism” (i.e., the strategy of cooperation with the bosses) pursued by the labor bureaucracy which the reformists have so loyally supported has not led to gains for the working class—but instead to decades of steady decay of organized labor. Meanwhile, the electoral successes of democratic socialists have inspired new hope among liberal and socialist voters, but has failed to actually change the trajectory of the party.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite big promises by the Biden administration, no major social democratic reforms have been passed on his watch. The bold declarations about the “death of neoliberalism” made by some socialists in the wake of emergency spending during the height of the Covid pandemic have since fallen flat. His signature achievement up until now, appointing Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, has been rendered irrelevant with the historic defeat inflicted by the court’s right-wing majority with the overturning of <em style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Roe v. Wade</em>.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Readers of <em style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Failure of Vision</em> will see that this is just the most recent of a long list of disappointing and demoralizing liberal administrations, from Lyndon Johnson’s atrocities in Vietnam to Jimmy Carter’s pre-Reagan Reaganomics.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The DSA, inheritor of the Harringtonian tradition, benefitted enormously from its association with Bernie Sanders during his first presidential run, and was subsequently well placed to act as the main political home for people politicized by the shock and horror of the Trump presidency and looking to get organized. This is a credit to Harrington’s understanding that socialists need an organization of our own. Despite his commitment to working within the Democratic Party, he did not ever advocate for socialists to completely dissolve within it. But if DSA and the wider socialist movement continue on the course that Harrington set, it will become just another liberal pressure group.</span></span></p><p style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white; border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A <em style="border: none; box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Failure of Vision</em> is a biography first and foremost, and therefore cannot be a full rebuttal to the “democratic” critics of revolutionary communism. But Greene’s historical account shows that the fate of every attempt to enact the “Realignment Strategy” that Harrington championed, from the Mississippi Freedom Democrats to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, has ended not in socialists taking over the Democratic Party, but in the Party itself absorbing and demobilizing once-promising socialist activists and organizations. That is the final legacy of Michael Harrington, which in the last analysis we must reject.</span></span></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-6619656741567545612023-06-10T08:30:00.001-04:002023-06-10T08:30:00.159-04:00Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn feat. Doug Greene<p>Interview with Daniel Tutt on Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics about my book, <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn</a></i>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eQcODyVeIv4" width="320" youtube-src-id="eQcODyVeIv4"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-54960162210448752832023-06-08T00:00:00.001-04:002023-06-08T00:00:00.145-04:00Doug Greene on "Stalinism & the Dialectics of Saturn: Anticommunism, Marxism & the Fate of the USSR"<p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;">My interview with Eric Draitser of Counterpunch Radio on <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn</a></i>.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H0AWn3ibS4A" width="320" youtube-src-id="H0AWn3ibS4A"></iframe></div><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span><p></p><p><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-16468633852244133742023-06-07T12:00:00.001-04:002023-06-07T12:00:00.140-04:00Varn Vlog: Doug Greene on the Stalin and the Dialectics of Saturn<p> An interview with C. Derick Varn of Varn Vlog on <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666930900/Stalinism-and-the-Dialectics-of-Saturn-Anticommunism-Marxism-and-the-Fate-of-the-Soviet-Union">Stalinism and the Dialectics of Saturn</a></i>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vspfhx4iu8w" width="320" youtube-src-id="vspfhx4iu8w"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-33665791388907581062023-01-20T00:00:00.001-05:002023-01-20T00:00:00.183-05:00Michael Harrington: Theoretician of American Reformism<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiARp311SekOjjKu92oZVgd-YGyOS6xPsyagKhMEFDuccJnwqKDhUmkE6azt5KNRd5EiuSPfziWGimwWp6G50NQ8h-LFnGQ5w5NAYG4ab7Qo-eNVbgrYUvdip4a-CkaK6bWkYbv1Ad-kcONFlJj5hbEAjJCe4Jks_TTtcbTmVLWIRpo3P_JdMdMbIT6SA/s1536/harrington-e1673548440635-1536x1029.jpeg.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1029" data-original-width="1536" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiARp311SekOjjKu92oZVgd-YGyOS6xPsyagKhMEFDuccJnwqKDhUmkE6azt5KNRd5EiuSPfziWGimwWp6G50NQ8h-LFnGQ5w5NAYG4ab7Qo-eNVbgrYUvdip4a-CkaK6bWkYbv1Ad-kcONFlJj5hbEAjJCe4Jks_TTtcbTmVLWIRpo3P_JdMdMbIT6SA/s320/harrington-e1673548440635-1536x1029.jpeg.webp" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The latest review of my <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism">Harrington book</a> by Tom Trottier from <a href="https://socialistrevolution.org/michael-harrington-theoretician-of-american-reformism/?fbclid=IwAR36kIA6gi0ECqUsAExaDa8_p5Pdb2melWhOgdVBA6FFjtt26wKh_QyEZMY">Socialist Revolution</a>.</span><br /><br /></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">One of the most exciting developments of the last few years has been the phenomena of large sections of youth showing support for socialist and communist ideas. It is indispensable that the new generation find a way to educate itself in these ideas. In the United States, there is no party of any significant size based on these ideas, and the IMT, though growing, remains a modest force. Given Bernie Sanders’s betrayal and the rise of Trumpism, tens of thousands of people looking for organization and ideas joined the DSA and scoured the pages of <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Jacobin</em> magazine. Unfortunately, what they found there was not revolutionary socialism, but a rehash of Michael Harrington’s American variant of reformism.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31807" class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_31807" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; float: right; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 7px -130px 0px 17px !important; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; width: 450px;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-31807 size-medium lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-450x566.jpg.webp" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-450x566.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-800x1006.jpg.webp 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-119x150.jpg.webp 119w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-768x966.jpg.webp 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-1221x1536.jpg.webp 1221w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-770x969.jpg.webp 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-20x25.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-385x484.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988.jpg.webp 1272w" decoding="async" height="566" loading="lazy" sizes="400px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-450x566.jpg.webp" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-450x566.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-800x1006.jpg.webp 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-119x150.jpg.webp 119w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-768x966.jpg.webp 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-1221x1536.jpg.webp 1221w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-770x969.jpg.webp 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-20x25.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988-385x484.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/activist-and-author-Michael-Harrington-1988.jpg.webp 1272w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin: 0px auto !important; max-width: none !important; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 0px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: 400px;" width="450" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31807" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Although Harrington died in 1989, his views continue to have wide influence, especially in the DSA, whether or not people specifically acknowledge him. / Image: Bernard Gotfryd, Library of Congress</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Doug Greene’s book, <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism</em>, is a comprehensive look at the ideas and political life of the central figure in the founding of DSA. Although Harrington died in 1989, his views were certainly influential among the reformists of the American left in the 1970s and 1980s and they continue to have wide influence, especially in the DSA, whether or not people specifically acknowledge him.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Among others, Greene seeks to tackle the following questions: Who was Michael Harrington? What was his history in the socialist movement? What were his ideas? Are they correct? Is this really Marxism? Will Harrington’s ideas lead us to a socialist future or to a dead end?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">As we will see, Harrington’s views conflicted head-on with genuine Marxism. These include his understanding of the state, his analysis of Stalinism, his approach to electoral politics, and his relationship with the “progressive” wing of the trade union bureaucracy. The foundation of these mistaken views stem in part from the environment he came from, but above all, from political mistraining.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Political education by an apostate</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Doug Greene gives the details of Harrington’s evolution: from traditional Catholicism to Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement to the Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL). The Catholic Worker movement combined Catholicism, anarchism, and what today would be called “mutual aid.” A separate article would be needed to deal with this particular movement. In the case of Harrington, he was around it for a short time before joining YPSL.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington lived a large part of his life during the post-World War II boom period. This thirty-year aberration helped fertilize many forms of revisionism and disoriented large swaths of the left—with the exception of the small forces of genuine Marxism grouped around Ted Grant in Britain. At the time, the “New Left”—along with many Stalinist, Maoist, and so-called “Trotskyist” sectarians—proclaimed that the working class in the advanced capitalist countries was no longer the agent of revolutionary change.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">We must understand that if a socialist analyzes the world in a strictly empirical way, serious theoretical mistakes will be made. Mistakes in theory lead to problems in practice. Unsurprisingly, empirical pragmatism pushed many to draw incorrect conclusions about capitalism and the prospects for socialism.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Greene describes how Bogdan Denitch recruited Harrington into the YPSL, and then brought him to Max Shachtman. Denich and Harrington became lifelong friends and comrades. However, whereas people like Kautsky and Plekhanov started out as Marxists and degenerated over time, we cannot say this about Michael Harrington. The reality is that he never was a real Marxist. Harrington mentions that Shachtman was the most important mentor that he had in his life, and he felt this way even after Harrington had broken with him. As quoted by Greene: “Even though I have some serious disagreements with him on issues of socialist strategy, I am permanently and deeply indebted to Max Shachtman, who first introduced me to the vision of democratic Marxism and whose theory of bureaucratic collectivism is so important to my analysis.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">But Shachtman was an apostate from genuine Marxism, and had broken politically and publicly with Trotsky in 1940. As a young man, Shachtman joined the Communist Party and rose to the second tier of its leadership. To his credit, he joined forces with James Cannon and a few others and was expelled from the CP in 1928 for his association with Trotsky. Trotsky and his followers were marginalized by the Stalinist bureaucracy, but history shows that repressive methods can not defeat correct ideas.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31809" class="wp-caption alignleft" id="attachment_31809" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; float: left; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 7px 17px 0px -130px !important; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; width: 450px;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-31809 size-medium lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-450x592.jpg.webp" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-450x592.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-114x150.jpg.webp 114w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-320x420.jpg.webp 320w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-20x26.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-385x507.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman.jpg.webp 589w" decoding="async" height="592" loading="lazy" sizes="400px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-450x592.jpg.webp" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-450x592.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-114x150.jpg.webp 114w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-320x420.jpg.webp 320w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-20x26.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman-385x507.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Shachtman.jpg.webp 589w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin: 0px auto !important; max-width: none !important; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 0px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: 400px;" width="450" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31809" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Harrington met Shachtman in the early 1950s, by which time Shachtman had accommodated himself to the American ruling class. / Image: fair use</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">In the late 1920s and the 1930s, Shachtman became one of the top US and international leaders trying to build the forces of genuine communism, under Trotsky’s guidance. Unfortunately, the leadership of the American Trotskyists never heeded Trotsky’s repeated urgings on the need to study Marxist theory and apply it to analysis, perspectives, political interventions, and organization building. While he was alive, Trotsky was able to correct the mistakes of Cannon and other leading Trotskyists. After Trotsky’s assassination, however, their pragmatic, mechanical methods led them into a sectarian cul-de-sac. However, Shachtman broke with Trotsky before his assassination in August 1940.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Shachtman did not truly understand dialectics—<em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">de facto</em> preferring the philosophical worldview of the American bourgeois—and felt he could be a Marxist without using Marxist methods! He was linked to the petty-bourgeois intellectual milieu and was susceptible to the pressure of “public opinion.” The outbreak of World War II deepened his own confusion and led him to seek theoretical justifications for a break with Trotsky and the majority of the Socialist Workers Party, as documented in Trotsky’s classic work, <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">In Defense of Marxism</em>.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Trotsky had observed that, while Shachtman was a talented journalist, he had not developed a theoretical understanding beyond this. As Trotsky wrote, “Everybody is aware of the facility with which Shachtman is able to weave various historical episodes around one or another axis. This ability makes Shachtman a talented journalist. Unfortunately, this by itself is not enough. The main question is what axis to select.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Marx and Engels explained that the dominant ideas of society are the ideas of the ruling class. The US ruling class was able to take power and hold on to power with the use of empirical pragmatism. But such an outlook is not sufficient to truly understand capitalism, let alone overthrow it and replace it with socialism. By default, this low theoretical level permeates the labor leadership and the left, including the various sectarian outfits. In this context, an experienced and “talented journalist” could make a big impression on somebody like a young Michael Harrington, who went to college at Holy Cross, as well as Yale and the University of Chicago.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Shachtman’s ideas</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington met Shachtman in the early 1950s, more than a decade after his break with Trotsky. History shows that when people break with Marxism, they drift inevitably in a reactionary direction. By the time they met, Shachtman’s positions on a number of issues showed he had accommodated himself to the American ruling class.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Shachtman had broken with Trotsky chiefly on the question of the USSR. Trotsky had argued that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state, and that, although Marxists opposed the Stalinist bureaucracy, the working class should defend the nationalized planned economy, <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">in its own way and with its own methods</em>. Shachtman adopted James Burham’s concept that the USSR was a “bureaucratic collectivist” society, little different from Nazi Germany, and he refused to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism and Hitler.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">At the end of World War II, US imperialism was the world’s mightiest power and it organized the remaining imperialist powers into an alliance against the USSR, which came out of the war greatly strengthened. Domestically, the postwar economic boom, coupled with the Red Scare of the McCarthy period drove Shachtman further to the right. Shachtman eventually supported US imperialism as the “lesser evil” to Stalininsm.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31815" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_31815" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; width: 640px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-31815 lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn.jpg" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn.jpg 640w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-450x308.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-150x103.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-474x324.jpg 474w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-20x14.jpg 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-385x263.jpg 385w" decoding="async" height="438" loading="lazy" sizes="750px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn.jpg" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn.jpg 640w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-450x308.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-150x103.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-474x324.jpg 474w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-20x14.jpg 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/McCarthy_Cohn-385x263.jpg 385w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: -100px; margin-right: auto !important; margin-top: 0px !important; max-width: none; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: calc(100% + 200px);" width="640" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31815" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">The postwar economic boom, coupled with the Red Scare of the McCarthy period, drove Shachtman further to the right. / Image: Library of Congress</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">This mistaken analysis led to other political errors. There was no attempt to understand the longer term perspectives of American and world capitalism and the boom’s effect on the class struggle. Marxists argued that the postwar boom was real, but an aberration. It took the edge off the class struggle, but eventually, the contradictions of capitalism would lead to a massive decline and period of crisis and sharpened class struggle. This is exactly what happened in the middle 1970s.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">None of this concerned the “talented journalist.” Shachtman gave up the perspective that the working class needed its own political party and began to adapt to the Democrats with his theory of “realignment.” He argued that labor should run candidates in the Democratic Party primaries, as this would allow labor to take the Democrats over at some point, or create a situation where labor would break with them. His idea is directly echoed by the present theory of the “dirty break”, which some tendencies in DSA support. This also led Shachtman to support the inherently conservative trade union bureaucracy, including the many committed anti-communists in it.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">In a completely mechanical way, Shachtman was simply changing his ideas to accept the present “reality.” But this is a slippery slope, and the logic of his ideas led him to support more “hawkish” Democrats like Washington state Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Eventually, he supported Republican Richard Nixon against Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 election, although Shachtman died a few days before election day. Marxists opposed both bourgeois candidates in 1972.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Trotsky warned about people who are “worshipers of the accomplished fact.” This “accommodation to the present” is opposed to a dialectical view, which sees the world as constantly changing and understands that developments that may not be apparent today will eventually lead to opportunities for radical change. Things change into their opposite. The real task of Marxists is to understand the process and build our forces today to be in a position to seize the opportunities that will emerge tomorrow.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Imperialism and Stalinism</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington basically adopted Schactman’s views and, armed with the empirical method, took a position that US imperialism was the “lesser evil” <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">vis a vis</em> Stalinism. Doug Greene shows, for example, how Harrington was dead set against working with Communists such as SDS and Port Huron in the US. Instead, Harrington supported President Lyndon Johnson’s election in 1964.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31810" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_31810" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; width: 800px;"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-31810 lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-800x535.jpg.webp" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-800x535.jpg.webp 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-450x301.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-150x100.jpg.webp 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-768x513.jpg.webp 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-391x260.jpg.webp 391w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-1536x1026.jpg.webp 1536w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-770x514.jpg.webp 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-20x13.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-385x257.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-1540x1029.jpg.webp 1540w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam.jpg 1989w" decoding="async" height="535" loading="lazy" sizes="750px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-800x535.jpg.webp" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-800x535.jpg.webp 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-450x301.jpg.webp 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-150x100.jpg.webp 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-768x513.jpg.webp 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-391x260.jpg.webp 391w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-1536x1026.jpg.webp 1536w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-770x514.jpg.webp 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-20x13.jpg.webp 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-385x257.jpg.webp 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam-1540x1029.jpg.webp 1540w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/LBJ-vietnam.jpg 1989w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: -100px; margin-right: auto !important; margin-top: 0px !important; max-width: none; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: calc(100% + 200px);" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31810" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Harrington supported Lyndon Johnson’s election in 1964. He saw Johnson as a tragic figure, rather than the leader of imperialism trying to stamp out forces of national liberation. / Image: Yoichi Okamoto, Wikimedia Commons</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Once in office, Johnson dramatically increased the US troop presence in Vietnam to more than 400,000, and oversaw a relentless bombing campaign. Harrington opposed the war, but he thought that the anti-war movement should not work with US communists and he believed both two sides—the US imperialists and the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement—were equally “to blame” for the war. As of 1968, Harrington basically tailended the policies of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, which represented the wing of the American ruling class that wanted to make an accommodation with Stalinism. This position was also based on Harrington’s false view of imperialism and his refusal to see that the nationalized planned economy, albeit deformed, was historically progressive.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Greene shows how Harrington started by rejecting Lenin’s position that imperialism was a function of capitalism and its logical outcome. Instead, Harrington argued that imperialism results from policy choices fomented by a reactionary wing of the ruling class. He saw Lyndon Johnson as a tragic figure, rather than the leader of imperialism trying to stamp out forces of national liberation. Hence, by electing democratic socialists to government on the Democratic Party ballot line, imperialism would end, as if by magic. This is where an absence of dialectics and class analysis leads.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Harrington’s adaptation regarding the state</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Michael Harrington considered himself a Marxist, but right from the start, like his mentor, he never understood the Marxist method. He started with a false theoretical foundation and continually adapted his ideas to accept the framework of American capitalism and its limitations. He said he wanted to be the “left-wing of the possible,” which was a way of convincing people to accept the limits of the capitalist system. This includes his views of the state.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Marxism explains that the state apparatus can essentially be reduced to “bodies of armed men.” The state evolved along with class society. It exists as a force to maintain order and defend the dominant class’s relationship to the means of production. Under capitalism, a numerically small ruling class exploits the mass of the population. There are many forms of bourgeois state, from a democratic republic to a fascist dictatorship. But in the final analysis, they all defend capitalism. The working class cannot simply “control it,” but must smash it and replace it with a state of another kind, a workers’ state.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington not only rejected the Marxist theory of the state, he claims that Marx himself rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat later in life and argued for the peaceful seizure of power through parliamentary means. Harrington thought that the left could win a majority in bourgeois elections and gradually change society, little by little, starting with a capitalist welfare state and eventually ending with socialism. Unsurprisingly, Harrington was an active member of the Socialist International, the remnant of the degenerate Second International. He was friends with former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, and had links with the Swedish Social Democrats and the French Socialists until he died on July 31, 1989.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Is revolution necessary? Does it need to be violent?</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington tries to justify reformism by emphasizing the question of violence in the process of revolution. His logic is essentially this: if you want to avoid violence, then change your view of the state. Instead of examining the state as it exists and has evolved in society, one should resort to “wishful thinking” to impose a predetermined view on objective reality. This is not the Marxist method and is, in fact, very dangerous—as anyone who has studied the events of Chile in the early 1970s can tell you.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">There is no evidence that Karl Marx revised his view of the state. <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Critique of the Gotha Program</em> was written only eight years before his death. Marx also collaborated with Engels on <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State</em>, although this was published after Marx’s death. In none of these works do Marx or Engels reject the need for the forcible overthrow of the old order.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Furthermore, what Marx wrote about violence in the process of the revolution should not be confused with his understanding of the class nature of the state. Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin and Trotsky, took a serious approach to revolution. They understood that the ruling class would use any means to maintain their rule, including violence. This is what happened during the Paris Commune of 1871. Violence is a tool used by the ruling class and the counterrevolution. The working class must understand this and be prepared for that.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28256" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_28256" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; width: 800px;"><img alt="Paris Commune 1871" class="size-large wp-image-28256 lazyloaded" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Barricade_Voltaire_Lenoir_Commune_Paris_1871_Image_public_domain-800x543.jpeg.webp" decoding="async" height="543" loading="lazy" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Barricade_Voltaire_Lenoir_Commune_Paris_1871_Image_public_domain-800x543.jpeg.webp" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: -100px; margin-right: auto !important; margin-top: 0px !important; max-width: none; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: calc(100% + 200px);" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-28256" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Marx and Engels understood that the ruling class would use any means to maintain their rule, including violence. This is what happened during the Paris Commune of 1871. / Image: public domain</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">If the working class is politically prepared, with the support of the mass of the population, there may be minimal or even no violence in a revolution, as the ruling class and its institutions collapse. Ultimately, the army and police are made up of people, not disconnected from the broader pressures of society. However, no serious person would assume a “pacifist ruling class.” We can hope for the best, but we must prepare for the worst. Marx always wanted to make sure that any violence that arose during a revolution would be seen as instigated by the capitalist class.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington discarded all of this and argued that simply running in elections under the direction of the bourgeois state will allow the working class to incrementally take power. Where has this ever happened?</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">The failure of European social democracy</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington pointed to the various reforms and improvements that came about for the European working class in the 1960s and the 1970s, and used this as evidence that we can gradually reform our way to socialism. This superficial, impressionistic approach is exactly what we would expect from someone trained by Shachtman, who had no use for dialectics.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">If we look at European capitalism during its period of growth in the late 1800s to 1914, or the postwar boom of 1945 to the middle 1970s, we see that when capitalism is in a period of expansion, it can provide reforms as a byproduct of the class struggle. The existence of the USSR, even though it was under the control of the bureaucracy, also created additional pressure for the world capitalist class to provide reforms for the masses.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">But this in no way meant that the capitalist state had lost its class character. When the periods of expansion end, the standard of living of the working class is driven down. The end of the postwar boom has led to a crisis of all the reformist parties in Europe. As an example, the Swedish Social Democrats were in the vanguard of the reformists when Harrington was alive. Accepting the limits of capitalism, they have now turned to counterreforms when they are in government and have lost lots of support. This, in turn, has opened up space for far-right, anti-immigrant parties, which were tiny sects in Sweden back in the 1970s.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Electoral conclusions flowing from a bad premise</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Based on his empiricism and illusions in the bourgeois state, Harrington logically linked to mainstream capitalist politics. Both Shachtman and Harrington evolved in a rightward direction. In 1958, Shachtman’s International Socialist League joined the Socialist Party of America and dissolved itself. The Socialist Party of America had become a small reformist sect after 1937.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Greene writes that Harrington joined the Village Independent Democrats, a liberal Democratic Party club in Manhattan, in 1959. Despite this, Harrington did not vote for JFK in the 1960 election, but he soon changed his position and he came to regret this. Harrington basically adopted lesser-evil politics and thought that socialists must work with the liberal wing of the Democrats. This also led him to work with the labor bureaucracy, who were also in the Democratic Party. According to Harrington, the working class does not need its own, class-independent party, it just needs to “influence” the Democrats and push them to the left.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31812" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_31812" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; width: 752px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-31812 lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy.jpg" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy.jpg 752w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-450x261.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-150x87.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-385x223.jpg 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-20x12.jpg 20w" decoding="async" height="436" loading="lazy" sizes="750px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy.jpg" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy.jpg 752w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-450x261.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-150x87.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-385x223.jpg 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/John_F._Kennedy-20x12.jpg 20w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: -100px; margin-right: auto !important; margin-top: 0px !important; max-width: none; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: calc(100% + 200px);" width="752" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-31812" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Greene writes that Harrington did not vote for JFK in the 1960 election, but he soon changed his position and came to regret this. / Image: UPI, Wikimedia Commons</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Greene quotes Harrington in the early 1960s from the Socialist Party magazine, <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">New America</em>: “American socialism must concentrate its efforts on the battle for political realignment, for the creation of a real second party that will unite labor, liberals, Negros, and provide them with an instrument for principled debate and effective action. Such a party as the Democratic Party will be when the Southern racists and certain corruptive elements have been forced out of it. Political realignment is a precondition for the resurgence of a meaningful socialist politics in America; it is also a precondition for meaningful and progressive social welfare, labor, and civil rights legislation.”</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Harrington got his wish. With Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the Republicans took over the southern segregationist wing and the northern big-city political machines. For their part, the Democrats leaned on the media-influenced “reformers,” liberals, labor leaders, and the black and Latino population.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">We must ask: how has any of this served the working class? What did the Democrats do for the workers and socialism when they controlled both the White House and Congress from 1977–1980, 1993–1994, 2009–2010, and 2020–2022? In the case of Jimmy Carter (whom Harrington supported), his policies of austerity and deregulation, coupled with the monetarist policy of his Federal Reserve chief, Paul Volcker, were merely a preview of Reaganism before Reagan.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">When Harrington was alive, there were just two members of the DSA in Congress, Ron Dellums and Major Owens. Many decades later, there are four. How has this helped the working class? Let’s not forget that three of these four voted in the fall of 2022 to make any strike by railroad workers illegal.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Identity politics and electoralism</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">The Socialist Party was dominated by Shachtman and his supporters in the late 1960s. In March 1972, the SP merged with the Democratic Socialist Federation, which was the remnants of a split from the SP in 1936. This led to a three-way split in the Socialist Party that unfolded in 1972 and 1973. In December 1972, the Socialist Party of America renamed itself “Social Democrats of the USA”. The left wing, grouped around David McReynolds, formed the Socialist Party, USA. Harrington took his group out and formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee or “DSOC.” DSOC was admitted to the Socialist International as a member in 1976 and it later merged with the New American Movement to form DSA in March 1982.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">DSOC did not claim to be a party nor was it trying to build one. Its main focus was on electoral politics. This flowed from its false theoretical understanding of the bourgeois state and its lack of understanding that the power of the working class flows from its potential to control production and distribution. In electoral politics, it was trying to “realign” the Democratic Party, reinforcing the idea that workers did not need a party of their own. On top of this, the “realignment strategy” was based on building “coalitions” among groups within the population, not class. With this, they bought into the long-standing strategy of American capitalism, which divides workers on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, and so on. It did not see that the fundamental dividing line within each of these groups is class. Well before it was called “identity politics,” this has been a trend in US politics.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Green explains how Harrington saw DSOC, and later DSA, as gaining influence in the Democratic Party, culminating with the election of Jimmy Carter. But the record shows that the Democrats actually moved even further to the right under and after Carter, as that was what was required by the capitalist system.</p><h4 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #080808; font-family: Mada, BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 22px; letter-spacing: -0.03em; line-height: 1.15; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 15px 0px 0px; text-rendering: geometricprecision;">Harrington’s legacy and the crisis of reformism</h4><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">The end of the post-World War II boom in the middle 1970s led to a crisis of reformism and this crisis is still playing out. The once-mighty parties of the Socialist International are in crisis and have lost much support. Harrington saw the beginning of this in the last 14 years of his life. When he died, DSA had a few thousand members who were mainly oriented to Democratic Party electoral politics. Over time, it declined, and eventually, quite steeply.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">However, the crisis of capitalism continued to unfold and this pushed many, especially the youth, to look for socialist ideas. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign filled this vacuum, as he claimed to be a “democratic socialist.” In the end, Bernie supported Hillary Clinton and did not provide a place for those who wanted to stay active in the fight for socialism. It was in this context that, although it was small and stagnant, DSA became the beneficiary of an influx of youth.</p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-25638" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_25638" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; width: 800px;"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-25638 lazyautosizes lazyloaded" data-sizes="auto" data-src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-800x500.jpg" data-srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-800x500.jpg 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-450x281.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-150x94.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-768x480.jpg 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-770x481.jpg 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-20x12.jpg 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-385x241.jpg 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-1540x962.jpg 1540w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959.jpg 1700w" decoding="async" height="500" loading="lazy" sizes="750px" src="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-800x500.jpg" srcset="https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-800x500.jpg 800w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-450x281.jpg 450w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-150x94.jpg 150w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-768x480.jpg 768w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-770x481.jpg 770w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-20x12.jpg 20w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-385x241.jpg 385w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959-1540x962.jpg 1540w, https://socialistrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NYC-May-Day-2021-Union-Square-Socialist-Revolution-e1620248852959.jpg 1700w" style="border-style: none; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; float: none; height: auto; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: -100px; margin-right: auto !important; margin-top: 0px !important; max-width: none; opacity: 1; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; transition: opacity 0.25s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.46, 0.45, 0.94) 0s; vertical-align: middle; width: calc(100% + 200px);" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-25638" style="box-sizing: inherit; color: #555555; display: inherit; font-size: 14.88px; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.25; margin: 0px 0px 26px; text-align: center;">Though it will not be easy, the only way forward is on the basis of class struggle and class independence. / Image: Socialist Revolution</figcaption></figure><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Unfortunately, DSA did not show them a way forward with Marxist ideas. Many of its new leaders claimed to have broken from the ideas of Michael Harrington, but in essence—such as their understanding of the bourgeois state, identity politics, electoral strategy, and the Democratic Party—their ideas were broadly similar, if not identical. Similar erroneous methods and conditions will produce similar demoralizing results, and DSA appears to have lost many of the thousands of people who joined prior to 2020. Workers and youth are looking for a way forward to socialism and they must start by avoiding the temptation of “short cuts” and adaptation to the limits of the capitalist system.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Though it will not be easy, the only way forward is on the basis of class struggle and class independence. An unsentimental and unflinching look at the history of our movement must be combined with a theoretical struggle against the reformist ideas of today. If we learn from the mistakes of the past, we can grasp the many opportunities coming our way. Greene’s meticulous analysis of Michael Harrington and his failed ideas is a welcome contribution.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "PT Sans", BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, Roboto, "Lucida Sans"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-kerning: normal; font-size: 19px !important; letter-spacing: -0.02em !important; line-height: 1.59em !important; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; word-spacing: 0.001em;">Ideas have enormous power—provided they are correct and connect with the struggles and aspirations of the masses. Genuine Marxism is growing, and under the right circumstances, these ideas will allow small forces to grow into a sizable party that can play a decisive role in future revolutionary events.</p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-27356232615661883792022-12-18T01:00:00.001-05:002022-12-18T01:00:00.170-05:00Liberalism with Extra Steps: On G.A. Cohen and Analytical Marxism<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpV46Vr_JB81GTIEbfbFgNihBCZGFzzur3Bswlil63UaCCWxBdRCRy0CdEoPhQf54HTvxUlr9cogWZBTykTrvChjualWngNKZGtX8lWdUwBlCQ8nDn1zgSUTv0w557KotZ2r0Pkb5a2nrSiL42FpmRrQ3X16c1L2Ate547Hh-MegvPkEgMuTcrH21ddQ/s1024/cohen2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpV46Vr_JB81GTIEbfbFgNihBCZGFzzur3Bswlil63UaCCWxBdRCRy0CdEoPhQf54HTvxUlr9cogWZBTykTrvChjualWngNKZGtX8lWdUwBlCQ8nDn1zgSUTv0w557KotZ2r0Pkb5a2nrSiL42FpmRrQ3X16c1L2Ate547Hh-MegvPkEgMuTcrH21ddQ/s320/cohen2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times;">Originally published at </span><a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/liberalism-with-extra-steps/"><i style="font-family: times;">Left Voice</i><span style="font-family: times;">.</span></a><p></p>
<p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">In a series of articles for the social democratic magazine <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Jacobin</em>, columnist Ben Burgis recommended the work of Gerald A. Cohen: <a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/04/marxism-materialism-history-ga-cohen-analytic-philosophy" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“If You Want to Understand Marxism, Read G. A. Cohen,”</a> Burgis said: “I sometimes find myself wishing that [Cohen’s] <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History</em> would get more love from contemporary socialist writers and thinkers, given its refreshing combination of analytical rigor and engagement with questions of historical change that lie at the heart of the socialist project.” </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Certainly, Cohen is an important figure in many academic debates on historical materialism. He was largely responsible for giving birth to Analytical Marxism that hoped to clarify Marxist theory using analytical philosophy and the modern social sciences. However, does this mean that socialists should turn to Cohen’s work to illuminate Marxist ideas?</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Coming from a Canadian working-class family that was part of the Communist Party, Cohen pursued an academic career without renouncing his socialist convictions.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_1" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">1</sup></a></span> A practitioner of analytical philosophy, Cohen sought to use its “rigor and clarity” to defend Marx’s theory of historical materialism. The fruit of Cohen’s endeavors was his magnum opus, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence</em> (henceforth <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>), first published in 1978. Upon its release, Cohen’s work was hailed as a classic in philosophy by figures such as Marx’s biographer David McLellan and the prominent leftist intellectual Perry Anderson.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_2" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">2</sup></a></span> In the anglophone academy, Cohen’s work inaugurated a whole new school of “Analytical Marxism” whose ranks included John Roemer, Jon Elster, and Erik Olin Wright. Jumping off from Cohen, these Analytical Marxists sought to reconstruct Marxism with the tools of analytical philosophy, logical positivism, rational choice theory, methodological individualism, and neoclassical economics.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />In <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>, Cohen set out to defend what he considered the “traditional” view of historical materialism where “history is, fundamentally, the growth of human productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_3" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">3</sup></a></span> Cohen based his argument on a very literalist reading of Marx’s 1859 <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy</em>:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_4" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">4</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">According to Cohen, the heart of Marx’s theory of history could be summed up by the following two points:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">(a) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history (the Development Thesis).</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">(b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the Primacy Thesis proper).<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_5" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">5</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">For Cohen, it is the development of the productive forces that is the motor of history. In effect, he is advancing a technological determinist (or more precisely: a fatalist) version of history that was defended by many leaders of the Second International, notably Karl Kautsky, Jules Guesde, and Georgii Plekhanov. Like Kautsky, Cohen believed that socialism would free the productive forces and satisfy human wants, making it the only rational choice for humanity. He claimed that this fact made socialism inevitable: “in so far as the course of history and, more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_6" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">6</sup></a></span> During the 1930s, Stalin also advanced his own form of technological determinism in what could be considered Kautsky’s revenge.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">To defend his position on historical materialism, Cohen argued that its main claims were a form of functional explanation. According to functionalists, the existence of something is explained by the effect that it has. Functionalism is often employed in evolutionary biology. For example, the most important function of lungs is to allow an animal to breathe, therefore the presence of lungs occurs from the need to breathe. This means giving breathing, rather than lungs, the explanatory priority. To explain historical materialism in functional terms, Cohen gives priority to the development of the productive forces, while the relations of production and the superstructure are explained by whether they advance the development of production. As Cohen states: “[T]he central claims of historical materialism are functional explanations,” which means “the economic structure has the function of developing the productive forces, and the superstructure the function of stabilizing the economic structure.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_7" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">7</sup></a></span> In order to tie together both the development and primacy theses, Cohen believed that functional explanations were necessary: “We have said that central Marxian explanations are functional, which means, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">very roughly</em>, that the character of what is explained is determined by its effect on what explains it. One reason for so interpreting Marx: if the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">direction </em>of the explanatory tie is as he laid down, then the best account of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">nature </em>of the tie is that it is a functional one.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_8" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">8</sup></a></span></p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cohen versus Marx</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">As we have discussed, Cohen uses Marx’s 1859 <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> as the main work in his defense of historical materialism. Undoubtedly, this is an important text since it is one of the few places where Marx succinctly discusses the materialist conception of history and the metaphor of base and superstructure. For that reason, Marx’s <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> has been committed to memory by generations of communist militants. Yet a few caveats about the work are in order. The <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> was published with the help of Ferdinand Lassalle in Berlin, where it was essential for Marx to avoid saying anything that would antagonize the Prussian censors. Marx himself lived in exile and was in no danger himself of prosecution, but if he hoped to reach German workers, then he had to be careful that the police did not confiscate his work. As he told Lassalle: “The presentation—the manner of it, I mean—is entirely scientific, hence unobjectionable to the police in the ordinary sense.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_9" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">9</sup></a></span> As a result, the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> did not make any reference to ideas essential to historical materialism such as class struggle. Marx was successful in his subterfuge and his writing was published. A few years later in 1865, Marx gave advice to Engels about how to write a preface to articles on the Prussian army that would pass the censor’s pen:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">As far as your anxiety about confiscation is concerned, what you must do is to announce quite briefly, as a foreword to the first article, that you are firstly going to throw light on the subject from the military point of view, secondly you are going to criticise the bourgeoisie and, thirdly, the reaction, etc., and the attitude of the workers’ party to the question, etc., whereby <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">the drift </em>can already be narrowly outlined or hinted at. This will, [<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">from the outse</em>t]<em style="box-sizing: inherit;"> </em>make it more difficult for the government to confiscate.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_10" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">10</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Marx was speaking from experience in this regard. Therefore, the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> must be read not in isolation, but in the totality of Marx’s wider work. In that light, a much different portrait of Marx and historical materialism emerges than in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Cohen’s reading of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> leads has him argue that Marx gave primacy to the development of the productive forces throughout history. In and of itself, no Marxist would have a principled disagreement with Cohen on this score. However, he goes much farther and transforms the productive forces into the sole determining element of history. Yet this is something that both Marx and Engels rejected as a distortion of historical materialism. In 1890, Engels wrote to Joseph Bloch: “According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in history is, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">in the final analysis, </em>the production and reproduction of actual life. More than that was never maintained either by Marx or myself. Now if someone distorts this by declaring the economic moment to be the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">only </em>determining factor, he changes that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, ridiculous piece of jargon.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_11" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">11</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Cohen’s overemphasis on the productive forces leads him to conclude that Marx was a rigid stagist. In this conception of history, every society must follow definite stages — primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and communism. Cohen’s “traditional” historical materialism is not what Marx argued. It is actually the anticommunist caricature. The only difference is that Cohen puts a plus sign where the anticommunists place a minus sign.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Furthermore, there is something dark about Cohen’s technological determinism and stagism that he fails to discuss. In the time of the Second International, some figures argued that the necessity of developing the productive forces justified a “socialist” colonial policy. According to them, advanced capitalism brought civilization and modernity to backward societies in Asia and Africa. At a meeting of the Second International, the arch-revisionist Eduard Bernstein said:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">We must get away from the utopian notion of simply abandoning the colonies. The ultimate consequence of such a view would be to give the United States back to the Indians. The colonies are there; we must come to terms with that. Socialists too should acknowledge the need for civilized peoples to act somewhat like guardians of the uncivilized.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_12" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">12</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">It is not unfair to say that Bernstein’s defense of imperialism dovetails with Cohen’s technological determinism. In fact, there is nothing in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em> that could provide a rebuttal to Bernstein. By failing to address the issues of colonialism and imperialism, Cohen leaves the door open to social imperialism. In his early writings on India, Marx toyed with the stagist idea that British colonialism could be progressive in at least developing the productive forces.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_13" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">13</sup></a></span> After viewing the problem more carefully, he saw that colonialism distorted the class struggle and held back progress. Ultimately, both Marx and Engels rejected Cohen-style stagism when it came to non-Western societies, and they supported anticolonial struggles in Ireland, China, and India.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_14" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">14</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />We do not have to look far to find more evidence that Marx does not fit the mold created by Cohen. In his correspondence with Russian populists, Marx told them that the Tsarist Empire was not necessarily fated to follow the exact same historical path as Western Europe. He warned the populists that his theory was not the stagist dogma that they championed: </p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">But this is too little for my critic. It is absolutely necessary for him to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to eventually attain this economic formation which, with a tremendous leap of the productive forces of social labor, assures the most integral development of every individual producer. But I beg his pardon. This does me too much honor, and yet puts me to shame at the same time.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_15" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">15</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Cohen knows about Marx’s letter but does not ponder its meaning. Marx seriously considered the idea that Russia, if supported by a proletarian revolution in Western Europe, could leap over capitalism entirely and go straight to socialism. Earlier, in the Revolutions of 1848, Marx also rejected stagism. He saw the possibility of the revolution developing in permanence from a bourgeois to a proletarian revolution. These are both clear examples of Marx’s anti-stagist thinking.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Ultimately, Cohen’s Second International “orthodoxy” means that he is forced to agree with the Mensheviks that the Russian Revolution was premature.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_16" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">16</sup></a></span> His stagist schema does not allow him to consider the possibility of uneven development or shortening historical stages through permanent revolution. Like Marx, the Bolsheviks were far more open to the possibility of permanent revolution. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Now we come to the most egregious fault in Cohen’s Marxism, which is the denial of the central role that the class struggle plays in history. This can be clearly seen in Marx’s main writings, most notably in the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Communist Manifesto</em>: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_17" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">17</sup></a></span> Yet Cohen’s <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em> just shoves class aside: “The focus is on the more basic concepts of the theory, those of forces and relations of production, and there will be unusually little discussion, as books on Marx and society go, of class conflict, ideology, and the state.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_18" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">18</sup></a></span> This raises the obvious question: how can anyone defend Marx’s theory of historical materialism without an extended discussion of classes and class struggle?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Strangely for a writer devoted to defending historical materialism, Cohen is uninterested in any actual history. Just a glance at Marx’s writings on France shows a different method than Cohen’s. Marx analyzes the role of class struggle, the state, and ideology in history. When it comes to the primacy and development of the productive forces, Marx spent a lot of time discussing them. The opening section of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Communist Manifesto</em> reveals that Marx was impressed with the productive and revolutionary nature of capitalism. Yet Marx was not just someone who cataloged the growth of factories in dry statistics. Marx developed his ideas because he was committed to the class struggle and the emancipation of the working class. All of this is gone from <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>, replaced by abstract definitions, thought experiments, and numbered sentences. In the end, Cohen’s Marx comes off as a harmless analytical philosopher rather than as the dedicated communist revolutionary that he really was.</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Functionalist House of Cards</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">As we have seen, Cohen resorted to functionalist explanations to provide consistency to historical materialism. However, fellow Analytical Marxists such as Jon Elster believed functionalism was an incomplete account of historical materialism unless it could specify how the different non-economic phenomena were connected to the primacy and development theses. For Elster, the methods of biological evolution did not easily transfer to a science of society: “I do not, of course, quarrel with the use of functional explanation in biology. Here natural selection provides a general mechanism that creates a presumption that beneficial consequences of structure or behaviour explain their own causes. Cohen does not, however, provide any similar mechanism for functional explanation in the social sciences, and therefore his argument cannot succeed.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_19" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">19</sup></a></span> In response to the criticisms of Elster and others, Cohen offered clarifications and revisions on the role of functional explanation in historical materialism. Many of these ideas appear in his second book, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">History, Labour, and Freedom</em> (1988).<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_20" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">20</sup></a></span> </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Here, Cohen elaborates on the differences between “inclusive” and “restricted” types of historical materialism. He claims that the “inclusive” version is more ambitious since it seeks to explain all non-economic phenomena “in their large lines” by identifying their functional places in securing and supporting the development of the productive forces.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_21" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">21</sup></a></span> Thus, inclusive Marxism can explain both base <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">and </em>superstructure. By contrast, the “restricted” variant is more defensive since it affirms <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">just</em> the development and primacy theses as central to history, while refraining from saying anything about non-economic spheres: “Unlike inclusive historical materialism, the restricted doctrine says nothing about economically irrelevant phenomena.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_22" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">22</sup></a></span> Therefore, restricted historical materialism can only explain the economic base, but not the superstructure.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />In his own self-clarification, Cohen identified <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em> with the restricted variant: </p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">The restricted construal commits historical materialism to explaining only those non-economic phenomena which have substantial material or economic consequences, they pose a challenge which must be neutralized. And the appropriately neutralizing way of explaining them … is by recourse to functional explanation. Hence my predilection for functional explanation in KMTH confirms that when I write it I was already, implicitly or incipiently, a restricted historical materialist, even though I often reproduced the traditional inclusivist formulations.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_23" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">23</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Let there be no mistake: Cohen’s restricted historical materialism is not claiming that the superstructure is “relatively autonomous” from the base. Rather, he is relegating Marxist theory strictly to the realm of the economic base. As he says: “Restricted historical materialism is defensive, since it is content to protect the story of material progress from undue spiritual intrusion.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_24" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">24</sup></a></span> For Cohen, restricted historical materialism can only explain the development of the productive forces, while all the elements of the superstructure are left floating in the clouds beyond our understanding. For Cohen, there is a base and a superstructure, but no way to connect them. It is little wonder that Cohen soon abandoned even “restricted” historical materialism since it could explain so little.</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">Analytics and Dialectics</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">At the heart of Cohen’s reconstruction of Marxism was the abandonment of dialectical materialism. Unlike most Marxists, Cohen claimed that Marxism had no distinctive philosophical method: “The fateful operation that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_25" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">25</sup></a></span> In place of dialectics, Cohen employed analytical philosophy, which emphasizes precision in language and definition by employing the tools of formal logic and mathematics.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_26" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">26</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />In the 2000 preface to <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>, Cohen acknowledged the impact of Althusser on his own work:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">But, while initially attracted to Althusserianism, I finally resisted its intoxication, because I came to see that its reiterated affirmation of the value of conceptual rigour was not matched by conceptual rigour in its intellectual practice. The ideas the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the individual as a subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, were exciting and suggestive, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations, on one of which they were all too obviously true, and, on the other, all too obviously false.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_27" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">27</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Cohen argued that the removal of dialectics allowed Analytical Marxism to practice “non-bullshit” Marxism.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_28" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">28</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Part and parcel of his rejection of dialectics, Cohen tossed aside the Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality as well. As he said: “‘analytical’ is opposed to what might be called ‘holistic’ thinking.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_29" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">29</sup></a></span> Throughout <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">KMTH</em>, Cohen employed his analytical method to break down the whole into its component parts. After this, he sought to isolate the elements and then develop appropriate definitions of phenomena. These definitions of the separate parts were done without reference to their interconnections and relationships. For Cohen, phenomena have an essential nature and they are best understood independently of their relationships and wider context. The result is an atomized, fragmented, and reified portrait of reality. Ultimately, analytics leads Cohen into a dead end when it comes to defending Marxism.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />There is a way to salvage Marxism, but it requires the dialectical method and totality. Contrary to Cohen’s claims, Marxism needs an underlying philosophy. If Marxists are committed to proletarian revolution and communism, that means being serious about ideas and what is true. Unlike Cohen’s analytical method, Marxists need a systematic, universal, and monistic view of reality to know the laws of the world and why they act. As opposed to Cohen, who restricts historical materialism, Marxists insist that reason is <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">total</em> since the natural and social worlds are an intelligible totality. Undertaking this momentous task requires the philosophy of dialectics — a universal method to comprehend all the necessary laws of thinking and being.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_30" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">30</sup></a></span> As Engels said, dialectics is “the science of interconnections.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_31" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">31</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />For Marx, the source of all dialectics lay with the Hegelian notion of contradiction.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_32" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">32</sup></a></span> Contradiction is universal to all phenomena and change comes through internal development. Another way of describing contradiction is the unity and interpenetration of opposites. Marx’s dialectical analysis postulates that material conditions ultimately determine being and consciousness. Furthermore, a dialectical analysis of reality reveals that events can be traced back to their underlying cause(s), particularly in socio-economic structures.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />For Marx, application of the dialectic explains capitalism’s inner laws of motion. Capitalist property relations compel the bourgeoisie to seek profits, compete, and revolutionize the means of production. There is a struggle and unity of opposites between the fundamental classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Marx, capitalism’s contradictions are not fixed and static, but insurmountable and pointed to their end: “if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_33" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">33</sup></a></span> Thus, economic crises do not appear out of nowhere, but they are foreseeable results inherent in capitalism’s drive for exchange value and profit. This worldview places working-class struggle on material foundations. In its struggle, the working class represents the universal interests of humanity by doing away with an irrational and exploitative system. In other words, dialectical materialism explains the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">material necessity</em> of communist revolution.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Cohen cannot see any of this since his non-dialectical view of totality means that he sees things in fixed positions. Cohen is correct that the separation of elements and their aspects is necessary for a scientific account, and no dialectician would deny this. However, dialectics insists that an analysis of a natural or social process such as capitalism look at how the parts interconnect with their own laws of motion to form a greater totality. Cohen’s standpoint does not see the totality of a real social relation, but only fragmentary bits and pieces in isolation.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />When it comes to the relationship between base and superstructure, Cohen’s account of historical materialism forgets the dialectical concept of mediation. Cohen seems to believe that the base must <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">directly</em> impact the superstructure. The parts and the whole of a dialectical totality, such as base and superstructure, condition one another through a variety of complex mediations. Religious doctrines, for example, are certainly the products of their economic environment, but attempting to reduce the specifics of theology simply and directly to economics is the most vulgar application of historical materialism. The dialectical concept of mediation prevents the crude reductionism that Cohen employs when it comes to understanding the relation between base and superstructure.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Simply put: without dialectical materialism, a defense of historical materialism is impossible. Cohen’s analytical philosophy acts as a blindfold that prevents him from seeing the connections and social relations of the world. Yet Marxists do not need to grope around aimlessly in the dark the way analytical philosophers do. As Engels said, we can use the dialectic to see: </p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause on the one hand and effect on the other. But what they fail to see is that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world such metaphysically polar opposites exist only in a crisis, that instead the whole great process takes place solely and entirely in the form of interplay — if of very unequal forces of which the economic trend is by far the strongest, the oldest and the most vital — and that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. So far as they are concerned, Hegel might never have existed.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_34" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">34</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ethical Socialism</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">It is beyond the scope of this essay to give a full account of Cohen’s ideas or the wider development of Analytical Marxism.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_35" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">35</sup></a></span> However, a few more words must be said about Cohen’s views on Marx’s critique of political economy. From an early agnosticism, Cohen came to openly reject the labor theory of value and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_36" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">36</sup></a></span> This meant that Cohen rejected Marx’s scientific understanding of how labor is exploited, capital accumulation occurs, capitalist breakdown, and the material necessity for proletarian revolution. He did not replace Marx’s political economy with a viable alternative. Finally, Cohen’s position calls into question the existence of economic classes as well, since Marx locates class in exploitative relations of production rooted in the private ownership of the means of production. Indeed, Cohen comes to conceive of political action as the role of individual choice rather than of classes.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_37" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">37</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Feeling pessimistic about prospects for socialism after the collapse of the USSR, Cohen formally abandoned Marxism. For one, he believed that the ecological crisis made the Marxist vision of developing the productive forces and a society of abundance impossible: “We can no longer sustain Marx’s extravagant, pre-Green, materialist optimism. At least for the foreseeable future, we have to abandon the vision of abundance. But, if I am right about the straitened choices posed by the ecological crisis, we also have to abandon, on pain of giving up socialist politics, a severe pessimism about social possibility which accompanied Marx’s optimism about material possibility.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_38" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">38</sup></a></span> Secondly, he no longer saw a historical agent for social change in the proletariat: “Capitalism does not produce its own gravediggers. The old (partly real, partly imagined) agency of socialist transformation is gone, and there is not, and never will be, another one like it.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_39" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">39</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Now cut off from the material necessity of working-class solidarity and revolution, Cohen saw moral appeals as the only avenue left to achieve socialism: “Socialists have to settle for a less dramatic scenario, and they must engage in more moral advocacy than used to be fashionable.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_40" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">40</sup></a></span> Cohen’s new moralistic socialism was close to the “true socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized in their works. The “true socialists” rejected an allegiance to the working class in the class struggle, in favor of general and ineffectual ethical appeals to “humanity” in general. In <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The German Ideology,</em> Marx and Engels ridiculed the ideas of “true socialism,” for its abstract moralism which was “no longer concerned with real human beings but with ‘Man’, [and] has lost all revolutionary enthusiasm and proclaims instead the universal love of mankind.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_41" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">41</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">In his final book, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Why Not Socialism?</em> (2009), Cohen maintained his belief in a non-market socialism. This stood in contrast to most Analytical Marxists, who now embraced market socialism that looked little different than capitalism.. The socialism Cohen advocated no longer had a grounding in material necessity or a social agent, but was reduced to being a good idea. While Cohen thinks socialism is moral, he questions whether it is practicable: “I do not know whether the needed refinements are possible, nor do I know, speaking more generally, whether the full socialist ideal is feasible…”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_42" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">42</sup></a></span></p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"><span style="font-size: large;">Bullshit “Marxism”</span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">At one point, Cohen claimed that if Analytical Marxism failed, then Marxism itself was beyond saving:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">I believe, moreover, that there is no viable alternative construal of the central claims of historical materialism, so that if my defence fails, historical materialism fails. Hence the cost incurred by Marxism, if I am wrong, is considerable.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-weight: 900;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79173_1_43" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">43</sup></a></span>Yet if Cohen was correct, then there is no hope for Marxism at all. Analytical Marxism represents the worst traits of academia. Alongside its obscure and obscurantist language, there is no relation between Analytical Marxism and the real life of the class struggle. In fact, Analytical Marxism was detached almost completely from any socialist or communist political movement and safely insulated inside academia. No effort was made to overcome this division. Minor exceptions aside, Analytical Marxism seemed oblivious to the major questions that have dogged Marxists for the last century: on the development of imperialism, socialist revolution, national liberation, and anti-fascism.</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px;">Regarding Cohen’s value, Burgis said: “<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History</em> [is] a useful book for anyone who wants to think carefully about how history progresses — a subject of enduring relevance to anyone who wants to lose their chains.” To return to our opening question of whether socialists should consult Cohen to understand Marxism, we can offer a definitive <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">no</em>. It is little wonder that writers at <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Jacobin</em> are attracted to Cohen’s stagist distortion of Marxism, since they advocate a long-term strategy of supporting the Democrats before ever engaging in socialist politics. It is very unlikely that anyone was ever radicalized by reading Cohen or the Analytical Marxists. Those wanting a defense of the revolutionary heart and soul of Marxism would do better to read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and others. They understood that Marxism was the theory and practice of proletarian revolution — something Analytical Marxists can never understand.</p><div class="speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; break-inside: avoid; color: #181818; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-top: 24px !important; max-width: 100%;"><div class="footnote_container_prepare" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%; padding-top: 24px !important;"><p style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170) !important; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; line-height: 1.3 !important; margin-block: 0.83em !important; margin: 1rem 0px; padding: 0px !important; vertical-align: middle;"><span class="footnote_reference_container_label pointer" role="button" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.5em !important;" tabindex="0">Notes</span></p></div><div id="footnote_references_container_79173_1" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%;"><table class="footnotes_table footnote-reference-container" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; caption-side: bottom; width: 865px;"><caption class="accessibility" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; height: 1px !important; margin-top: -2px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding-bottom: 0.5rem; padding-top: 0.5rem; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap !important; width: 1px !important;">Notes</caption><tbody style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_1" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>1</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">For background on Cohen’s life see Jim Farmelant, <a href="https://mronline.org/2009/08/08/g-a-cohen-1941-2009/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“G. A. Cohen, 1941-2009,”</a> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Monthly Review Online</em>, August 8, 2009. On a personal note, I’ve appreciated Jim’s help with research avenues for this essay.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_2" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>2</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">David McLellan, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Karl Marx: A Biography</em> (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1995), 454; Perry Anderson, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Arguments Within English Marxism</em> (London: New Left Books, 1980), 40 and 72.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_3" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>3</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">G.A. Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000,), x. All quotes are from the updated 2000 edition.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_4" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>4</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Preface to <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy</em>,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marx and Engels Collected Works</em>, vol. 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 263. (henceforth <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>)</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_5" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>5</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, 134.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_6" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>6</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid. 147.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_7" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>7</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">G.A. Cohen, “Functional Explanation, Consequence Explanation, and Marxism,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Inquiry </em>25 (1982): 27 and G.A. Cohen, “Functional Explanation: Reply to Jon Elster,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Political Studies </em>28:1 (1980): 129. See Fabien Tarrit, “A Brief History, Scope, and Peculiarities of “Analytical Marxism,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Review of Radical Political Economics </em>38 (2006): 604.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_8" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>8</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, 278.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_9" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>9</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Marx to Lassalle. 22 February 1858,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 40, 270. For a seminal scholarly account of the circumstances surrounding the writing of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Preface</em> see Arthur M. Prinz, “Background and Ulterior Motive of Marx’s ‘Preface’ of 1859,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Journal of the History of Ideas</em> 30, no. 3 (July-September 1969): 437-450.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_10" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>10</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Marx to Engels. 30 January 1865,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 42, 70.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_11" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>11</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Engels to Bloch. 21-22 September 1890,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 49, 34.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_12" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>12</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Quoted in John Riddell, ed., <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, Documents: 1907-1917; The Preparatory Years</em> (New York: Monad Press, 1984), 10-11.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_13" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>13</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">An important caveat is that even in his 1853 writings on India, Marx still described British colonialism as a form of barbarism: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_14" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>14</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">For Marx’s evolving views on non-European societies see Kevin B. Anderson, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies</em> (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); On the charge that Marx was an “orientalist,” Aijaz Ahmad says:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“What one wishes to emphasize here is that the writings of Marx and Engels are indeed contaminated in several places with the usual banalities of nineteenth century Eurocentrism, and the general prognosis they offered about the social stagnation of our societies was often based on unexamined staples of conventional European histories. Despite such inaccuracies, however, neither of them portrayed resistance to colonialism as misdirected; the resistance of the ‘Chinese coolie’ was celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communard.” Aijaz Ahmad, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">In Theory:</em> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Nations, Classes, Literatures </em>(New York: Verso Books, 2008), 229.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_15" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>15</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Letter from Marx to Editor of the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Otecestvenniye Zapisky</em> – November 1877,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 24, 200.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_16" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>16</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, 389-395.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_17" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>17</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Manifesto of the Communist Party</em>,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 6, 482.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_18" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>18</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, x.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_19" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>19</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Jon Elster, “Review Article: Cohen on Marx’s Theory of History,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Political Studies </em>28:1 (1980): 125-126.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_20" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>20</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">G.A. Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx</em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 158-159.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_21" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>21</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, 367.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_22" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>22</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 1988, 174.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_23" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>23</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_24" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>24</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid. 161.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_25" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>25</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, xvii.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_26" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>26</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">An immediate theoretical precursor to Analytical Marxism in the rejection of Marxism’s Hegelian legacy was the French philosopher Louis Althusser. There were three important ways Althusser prefigured Analytical Marxism’s project. The first was Althusser’s argument that historical materialism was incompatible with Hegelian philosophy. Two: like Cohen, Althusser emphasized the need to systematically interrogate the basic components of theory. Finally: Althusser’s failure acted as a negative proof that encouraged others to view that there was nothing distinctive about the Marxist method. See Alex Callinicos, “Introduction: Analytical Marxism,” in A. Callinicos, ed., <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxist Theory </em>(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_27" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>27</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, xxi-xii.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_28" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>28</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid. xxv-xxvi.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_29" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>29</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid. xvii.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_30" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>30</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">For more on the importance of dialectical materialism, see my <a href="https://blanquist.blogspot.com/2018/06/introduction-to-materialist-dialectics.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Introduction to Materialist Dialectics and Historical Materialism,”</a> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Blanquist</em>, June 2, 2018. The best recent defense of the importance of philosophy to Marxism declared:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“Philosophical knowledge is for everyone; it’s not the private reserve of an academic elite. Precisely because monism is <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">true</em>, and reflects the actual organization of our shared reality, it is accessible to all. Clarifying our daily experience tends towards a dialectical understanding of the world as not governed by supernatural or spontaneous forces, but by what’s real, rational, and necessary.”<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />See Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, <a href="https://spectrejournal.com/reason-is-red/?" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Reason is Red: Why Marxism Needs a Philosophy,”</a> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Spectre Journal</em>, August 29, 2022.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_31" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>31</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“The Dialectics of Nature,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 25, 356.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_32" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>32</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Karl Marx, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume One</em> (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 744.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_33" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>33</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Karl Marx, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Grundrisse</em> (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 159.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_34" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>34</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“Engels to Schmidt. 27 October 1890,” in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 49, 63.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_35" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>35</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">In addition to the sources cited here, other critical works worth consulting on Analytical Marxism include: Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">New Left Review</em> vol. 177, no. 1 (Sept-Oct. 1989): 41-88; Alex Callinicos, “Having Your Cake and Eating it,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Historical Materialism</em> vol. 9 (2001): 169–195; Daniel Bensaïd, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique</em> (New York: Verso, 2002),<em style="box-sizing: inherit;"> </em>40-68 and 164-73; Alex Callinicos, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory</em> (Brill: Boston, 2004), 69–102, 111, 129–36, and 225–38.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_36" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>36</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">On Cohen’s agnosticism about the labor theory of value, see Cohen 2000, 352. On his rejection of the labor theory of value, see Cohen 1988, 209-238 and 255-285. On the rate of profit, see ibid. 110. For a criticism of Cohen’s views on political economy, see Alex Callinicos, “G. A. Cohen and the Critique of Political Economy,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Science & Society</em> vol. 70, no. 2 (Apr. 2006): 252-274; and Paul Warren, “In Defense of the Marxian Theory of Exploitation: Thoughts on Roemer, Cohen, and Others,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Social Theory and Practice</em> vol. 41, no. 2 (April 2015): 286-308. For a recent series of essays defending the validity of Marx’s ideas on the falling rate of profit to explain the modern world, see Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, ed., <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability</em> (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018). For an in-depth discussion of the problems of Analytical Marxism and political economy, see Marcus Roberts, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Analytical Marxism: A Critique</em> (New York: Verso Books, 1996), 137-178. For a defense of the breakdown theory to Marxist political economy see Henryk Grossman, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Henryk Grossman Works, Volume 3. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, Being also a Theory of Crises</em> (Boston: Brill, 2022). See also my overview on breakdown in <a href="http://links.org.au/marxism-crisis-breakdown" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 900; text-decoration-line: none;">“Crisis and Breakdown,”</a> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal</em>, August 10, 2017.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_37" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>37</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">See Cohen 1988, 51-82.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_38" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>38</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">G.A. Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality</em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10. Elsewhere, Cohen blamed Hegel for Marxism’s scientific pretensions. See G.A. Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?</em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 64. For a thorough Marxist critique of this sort of eco-pessimism, see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism</em> (New York: Anthem Press, 2022).</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_39" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>39</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 2000, 112.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_40" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>40</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_41" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>41</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">“The German Ideology,” in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MECW</em>, vol. 5, 457.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_42" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>42</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">G.A. Cohen, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Why Not Socialism?</em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 75.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79173_1_43" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: var(--secondary2); cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>43</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Cohen 1980, 129.</td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn42" style="mso-element: footnote;">
</div>
</div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-12161845217368756252022-12-10T01:00:00.039-05:002022-12-10T01:00:00.181-05:00One Way Out: The Revolutionary Hero of Andor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAYaiyt6Jl8e4P9QCEsmrfy59BYxlJ_Stgyns0wGL6IFHDsf6WgheemIr1Pi_30UzebxE8MIBwKf9NMGGNoa0GRyHY9k2Mukb355Ekfrip30qdyQ84hVNgXufdXhSwiMdweNmncdd5Wb4LHzvUttRypPMcJc9H-WSP_F0G8Vb4FXCb8W69BPJlQzVTg/s1800/andor%20poster.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1185" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAYaiyt6Jl8e4P9QCEsmrfy59BYxlJ_Stgyns0wGL6IFHDsf6WgheemIr1Pi_30UzebxE8MIBwKf9NMGGNoa0GRyHY9k2Mukb355Ekfrip30qdyQ84hVNgXufdXhSwiMdweNmncdd5Wb4LHzvUttRypPMcJc9H-WSP_F0G8Vb4FXCb8W69BPJlQzVTg/s320/andor%20poster.jpg" width="211" /></a></div><p>Originally published at <i><a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/one-way-out-the-revolutionary-hero-of-andor/">Left Voice</a></i>.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The surprise hit for leftwing science fiction fans in 2022 has been the release of the Star Wars TV series <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> with its themes of political radicalization, revolutionary struggle, fascism, and collective solidarity among the oppressed. This is a marked change from the majority of the Star Wars franchise, which relies heavily on nostalgia, fantasy, and myth to tell stories about the struggle between the Jedi and Sith in a galaxy far, far away. While Star Wars seems relatively innocuous in its message, there were some implicit leftist ideas on rebellion and imperialism in George Lucas’ original conception that have now been fully realized with <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em>. Instead of a mythic story about a chosen hero, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> uses the backdrop of Star Wars to show how a collective revolutionary hero emerges. </p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">George Lucas, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Star Wars</em>, and Disney<span style="box-sizing: inherit;"> </span></span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">In the early 1970s when George Lucas began developing Star Wars, he drew upon many diverse elements: Flash Gordon serials, World War II dogfights, Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey, Clint Eastwood westerns, and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa (particularly the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Hidden Fortress</em> and <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The</em> <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Seven Samurai</em>). In addition, one of the central conflicts in Star Wars of beleaguered rebels fighting a galactic-spanning empire was inspired by contemporary political events. As Lucas told James Cameron in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv9Jq_mCJEo" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; text-decoration-line: none;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Story of Science Fiction</em></a> (2018), Star Wars emerged from his opposition to the Vietnam War:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Cameron: So it was a very anti-authoritarian, very kind of sixties against the man kind of thing. That’s the deep inside…</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Lucas: It’s colonial. [referring to the American War of Independence] We’re fighting the largest empire in the world, and we’re just a bunch of hay seeds in coonskin hats that don’t know nothing. It was the same thing with the Vietnamese. The irony is that, in both of those, the little guys won. The highly technical empire — the English Empire, the American Empire — lost. That was the whole point.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">While conservatives such as Ronald Reagan would later use the language of Star Wars to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” they missed Lucas’ point completely. Rather, the Galactic Empire was modeled on the United States and other imperial powers throughout history (Rome, Britain, France, etc). To further emphasize that the Galactic Empire was the antagonist, Lucas modelled its imagery on Nazi aesthetics. For example, Imperial Stormtroopers share the same name as the Nazi’s paramilitary wing, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Sturmabteilung</em> who violently fought the Communist-led <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Roter Frontkämpferbund</em> in the streets of Weimar Germany. In addition, the uniforms of the Imperial Army are modeled upon those of the German Wehrmacht during World War II.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">While there are clear parallels between the series’ antagonist Emperor Palpatine and Adolf Hitler, the direct inspiration for the Emperor was actually the American President Richard Nixon. During the 1970s, Lucas saw Nixon as a dangerous and charismatic figure like Caesar or Hitler, who cleverly turned a democracy into a dictatorship: “Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy and he was really evil. But he pretended to be a nice guy.” <span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_1" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">1</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The twin themes of rebellion against imperialism and the decline of democracy were at the center of the two Star Wars trilogies that Lucas produced. The struggle of the rebels in the original trilogy of Star Wars was filled with exciting action and defined by clear good versus evil archetypes. The prequel trilogy told the story of how Palpatine corrupted and transformed the Old Republic into the Galactic Empire. Yet the overall politics of Star Wars was rather simplistic. The rebels never fight a popular insurgency against the Empire. Nor do they possess a clear-cut political program.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_2" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">2</sup></a></span> That is something that actual guerrilla leaders like Võ Nguyên Giáp would have found unbelievable. Moreover, the prequels’ overarching story about the fall of democracy were marred by a clumsy execution, poor writing, and a focus on special effects over substance. Yet none of this stopped the Star Wars franchise from becoming one of the most beloved and financially successful in film history. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">In 2012, Lucas handed over the rights of Star Wars to the Walt Disney Company. While Disney has made billions on Star Wars, their productions have been very uneven in terms of quality. The sequel trilogy (with the partial exception of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Last Jedi</em>) was based more on nostalgia and fan service than telling a meaningful story. <br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Yet Disney has produced a few hits such as the television series <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Mandalorian</em> and the film <a href="https://www.leftvoice.org/may-the-4th-international-be-with-you/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; text-decoration-line: none;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rogue One</em></a> (2016), with the latter written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy. In a break from previous iterations of the franchise, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rogue One</em> tells the story not of Force-gifted Jedi and Sith fighting over destiny, but ordinary and nameless rebels who steal plans for the Death Star, the Empire’s planet-killing weapon. In the end, these rebels sacrifice their lives in order to strike a blow against the Empire. It was the critical and commercial success of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rogue One </em>that spawned the spin-off series based on one of its characters, Cassian Andor.</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tony Gilroy</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The main writer for <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> is Tony Gilroy. Aside from <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rogue One</em>, he is known for his work on the original <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Bourne</em> trilogy, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Bourne Legacy</em>, along with writing and directing <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Michael Clayton</em> (2007). A recurrent theme in Gilroy’s work is the politicization of former insiders within powerful institutions, who become rebels.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_3" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">3</sup></a></span> Furthermore, Gilroy is an amateur student of history and revolutionary struggles. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">This background means that Gilroy tells a much more politically mature and grounded story than is typical in the Star Wars universe. The characters are complex and compelling. There are few aliens or droids. Nor are there any Jedi or Sith, since Gilroy believes most ordinary people in the Galaxy are not interested in the Star Wars elite: “I don’t think they know about the royal family. I don’t think they pay much mind to that. I mean, how many beings are in that gigantic galaxy? I think the vast majority of all of the creatures and beings and sentient things that are in the galaxy, I think the knowledge of the Jedi and the lightsaber is a pretty small number.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_4" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">4</sup></a></span> Nevertheless, the universe feels expansive with various planets such as Ferrix, Aldhani, Morlana One, Kenari, Narkina Five, and Coruscant all possessing their distinct appearances, cultures, and people. The Galactic Empire feels like a living fascist regime with its ever-present bureaucracy and military power. In addition, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor </em>shows the myriad ways that people compromise and resist the Galactic Empire’s oppression. Ultimately, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> seems more informed by the bottom-up historical work of Fernand Braudel or E.P. Thompson than the mystical elitism of Joseph Campbell.</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cassian Andor: The Making of a Rebel</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">At the center of the series is the titular character, Cassian Andor and his journey from a thief to a rebel in the years leading up to <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rogue One</em>. For Gilroy, the appeal of the series was showing how a revolutionary is made: “And the idea that we can do a story that takes him literally from his childhood origins and walk him through a five-year history of an odyssey that takes him to that place, during a revolution, during a moment in history in a place where huge events are happening, and real people are being crushed by it, the fact that we could follow somebody as an example of a revolution all the way through to the end, that was the walk-in for me.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_5" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">5</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Diego Luna, who plays Cassian Andor, explains that this is a story about radicalization:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">And for me, it’s quite relevant today to tell the story of what needs to happen for a revolutionary to emerge, to exist, to come to live, you know. What gives meaning in the life of someone to be willing to sacrifice everything for a cause, you know? What needs to happen? That journey matters to me. <span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_6" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">6</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Unlike the main heroes in the Star Wars franchise (Anakin and Luke Skywalker), Cassian Andor is not a chosen one nor does he possess a deep connection to the Force. He has no powerful bloodline, but is an ordinary human being who is poor, obscure, and with no pretensions to royalty or greatness. Originally named “Kassa,” he was a native of the planet Kenari who lived with a tribe that included his sister Kerri. Kenari was environmentally devastated by mining operations caused by the Republic. After encountering a crashed Republic ship, Kassa was adopted by smugglers Clem and Maarva Andor. He was given a forged identity and took the name Cassian Andor, eventually moving to the planet Ferrix. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Yet life remained a constant struggle for Cassian. When the Empire was formed, Cassian and his adoptive father Clem protested the new regime. Stormtroopers arrested Clem and hung him in public view on Rix Road as an example. Later, Cassian ended up assaulting Imperial officers and spent some time in prison. While caring deeply about those close to him, Cassian is a cynic about political involvement. He mostly lives in the underworld and makes money by stealing from the Empire.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">When the series begins, Cassian is looking for his sister Kerri on Morlana One. However, he runs afoul of two Pre-Mor security officers and ends up killing them. This makes Cassian into a fugitive who is sought by the zealous Pre-Mor officer Syril Karn. Cassian manages to escape from Karn, but is permanently on the run from the Empire.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />At the same time, Cassian hopes to pay off his debts and start a new life. To that end, he meets a buyer named Luthen Rael to sell valuable Imperial equipment. Yet Rael is a rebel operative who is only posing as a buyer. Luthen wants to know if there is something more to Cassian than just making money:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Cassian: What? To steal from the Empire? What do you need? A uniform, some dirty hands and an Imperial tool kit. They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. They’re so fat and satisfied, they can’t imagine it.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Luthen: Can’t imagine what?</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Cassian: That someone like me would ever get inside their house, walk their floors, spit in their food, take their gear.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Luthen: The arrogance is remarkable, isn’t it? They don’t even think about us.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Cassian: Us? I don’t know you.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Luthen: Fair enough. But I know you. These days will end, Cassian Andor. The way they laugh. The way they push through a crowd. The sound of that voice telling you to stop, to go, to move. Telling you to die. Rings in the ear, doesn’t it? (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Reckoning</em>)</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Seeing that Cassian is not only skilled, but already hates the Empire, Luthen hopes to recruit him into the rebellion. He believes that Cassian could fight better as part of an organized force than just by looking out for himself: “Wouldn’t you rather give it all at once to something real than carve off useless pieces till there’s nothing left?” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Aldhani</em>)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">After escaping Ferrix together, Cassian joins a rebel cell on Aldhani at Luthen’s behest. The cell is planning to steal millions from an Imperial garrison to fund the rebellion. Originally, Cassian only participates for money so he can get away from the Empire, but is clearly affected after listening to the other rebels. Following a successful heist, Cassian kills one rebel who just plans on stealing the money from the group and going out on his own. Yet Cassian is still uncommitted and leaves the rebels with his share. He travels to Niamos planning to start anew. However, he is arrested by the Empire for doing nothing. The scene of Cassian being choked by a KX droid and struggling for air recalls the image of Eric Garner saying “I can’t breathe” as he was murdered by the police. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">After escaping from prison (more later), Cassian returns to Ferrix where he encounters Luthen again. Now Cassian tells him that he wants to join the organized fight against the Empire: “No game. Kill me. Or take me in.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rix Road</em>) So far, the first season has given a compelling portrait of Cassian’s overall radicalization and a different kind of hero’s journey. It remains for season two of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> to show what Cassian’s commitment to the rebellion will look like. </p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">Working Towards Palpatine</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Throughout most of the Star Wars films, the Galactic Empire has come off as an amorphous evil ranging from the extremes of superweapons and star destroyers to bumbling officers and Stormtroopers who can’t shoot straight. Yet <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> changes this perception of the Empire by making it appear as a functioning fascist government that people have to live under. <span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_7" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">7</sup></a></span> There is a bureaucracy to streamline administration, an Imperial Senate that gives the pretense of popular representation, and the need to find workers to build its vast military machine. The Empire also shows colonial contempt for local customs and the people on Aldhani and Ferrix, viewing them as backward natives. Like capitalist expansion through colonialism, the Empire views these peoples as cheap labor that is easy to exploit. On Aldhani, the Imperial officers discuss how they cleared the valley, creating enterprise zones with factories and new housing, forcing people to relocate, and thus clearing out native lands to be able to construct their own military bases.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />While the Empire is powerful, it does not have total control over the Galaxy. For instance, the Pre-Mor security forces on Morlana One are independent contractors who serve Imperial interests. Only after the Pre-Mor officers fail to capture Cassian Andor does the Empire abolish their autonomy.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Alongside its fleet and army, the Empire utilizes the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) to maintain control of the Galaxy. The ISB acts as a law enforcement and intelligence agency charged with matters of internal state security and ensuring the loyalty of citizens to the Empire. The vast reach and ruthless efficiency of the ISB recalls the examples of other secret police forces such as the FBI and the Gestapo. The officers at the ISB are not your typical over-the-top Star Wars villains with lightsabers and Force powers, but are committed bureaucrats. For example, Lieutenant Blevin is ambitious in advancing his career and jealously guards his own bureaucratic turf from rivals. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">However, the ISB bureaucrats are not an example of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” used to describe figures like SS colonel Adolf Eichmann. According to Arendt, the perpetrators of the Holocaust like Eichmann were ordinary people with no ideological commitment who were just “following orders.” Yet this is not true of Eichmann (who was a dedicated Nazi) nor is it true of the ISB. While the motives of the ISB officers are complex, they are ideologically dedicated to the Empire and want to root out subversion. The following exchange explaining the purpose of the ISB illustrates this:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Partagaz: What do we do in this building? Why are we here? Anyone?<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Dedra Meero: We’re here to further security objectives by collecting intelligence, providing useful analysis, and conducting effective covert action, sir.</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Partagaz: Very good, Dedra. That is verbatim from the ISB mission statement, and wrong. Security is an illusion. You want security? Call the Navy. Launch a regiment of troopers. We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness. We identify symptoms. We locate germs whether they arise from within or have come from the outside. The longer we wait to identify a disorder, the harder it is to treat the disease. (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Aldhani</em>)</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Partagaz’s words recall the opening scene of Costa-Garvas’ 1969 film <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Z</em> where Greek fascist police officers attend a lecture on the dangers of ideological “mildew” that sap the health of the nation. <span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_8" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">8</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The most developed ISB character is Dedra Meero, who is an ambitious and talented young woman. As one of the few women at the ISB, Meero has to constantly prove herself in a machismo and cut-throat world. Unlike the rest of her peers, Meero takes seriously the threat of an organized rebellion. Like her colleagues, Meero wants more power, but not for its own sake or even to advance her career, but to serve the Empire. She wants to locate Cassian Andor to prove her theory that there is an organized rebel network stealing Imperial equipment. To serve her ends, Meero engages in clever intelligence, tortures suspected rebels, and bureaucratically outmaneuvers her rivals. According to Denise Gough, who plays Meero, her character is a dedicated and competent fascist, making it frightening for the audience to identify with her:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">At first you have to root for her, you feel like you’re rooting for her, but then you realize that no matter how strong a woman she is in a world of men, you realize that she is just a fascist in a world of fascists. Power corrodes everyone, men and women: she never apologizes, believes in everything she does and truly believes that she will save the galaxy, so she is credible and frightening.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_9" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">9</sup></a></span> </p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Meero is a far more terrifying antagonist than Darth Vader, since she has no Force powers, but is a regular human being who truly believes in fascism and uses her ruthlessness skill to enforce Imperial rule. Finally, Deedra Meero also shows the hollowness of cheering an ambitious “girl boss” simply based on their gender. After all, why are fascist women something worth celebrating?</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor’s</em> portrayal of the ISB and fascism is not an example of Arendt’s apolitical bureaucrats but more in line with what Hitler’s biographer, Ian Kershaw called “Working towards the Führer.” According to Kershaw, there was no unified government administration in the Third Reich, but different groups scrambling to win Hitler’s favor since he was the only source of legitimacy. Those who wanted to get ahead and advance their careers did not need to wait for Hitler’s orders, but could anticipate the Führer’s desires by taking initiatives to realize them. Therefore, Nazi functionaries attempted to outdo one another by promoting ever more extreme measures that led to the Holocaust as the fulfillment of Hitler’s wishes. Similarly, it can be observed that Dedra Meero and other ISB agents attempting to outdo each other with the best methods to destroy the rebellion are “Working Towards Palpatine.”</p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Exasperated Petty-Bourgeois</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">While the Empire employs brute force, draconian laws, and arbitrary arrest to maintain control of the Galaxy, this does not mean it relies solely on coercion. There are plenty of citizens of the Galaxy who identify with the Empire and its pursuit of order. They want a sense of belonging and community by placing themselves at the Empire’s service. None more so than the Pre-Mor officer Syril Karn. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Unlike Meero, Karn is not good at his job. Nor is he particularly charismatic, but is an awkward speaker. We are given the impression that Karn did not have a happy childhood and resents his mother, who constantly belittles him as a failure. What drives Karn is his passionate desire for order, success, and validation. After his Pre-Mor superior ignored Cassian’s murder of two officers, Karn takes the initiative and leads a squad to arrest Andor on Ferrix. Yet the mission is a complete failure and Karn is fired, returning home to his mother in disgrace.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Without any hope for a future career, Karn developed a Javert-like obsession with finding Cassian Andor and vindicating himself. Reluctantly, he takes a position at the Imperial Bureau of Standards, but his fixation remains. He makes false reports about Cassian which catch the attention of the ISB and Dedra Meero is sent to interrogate Karn. He tells Meero that he wanted to use his limited powers to not only track down a criminal and clear his name, but serve the forces of order: “I was a good deputy inspector! I was very good. I solved a double murder and found the killer in two days. I was overly ambitious, yes, but time was slipping away, and the opportunity was real. Service to the Empire, you just said it. Can one ever be too aggressive in preserving order? I didn’t deserve what happened.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Narkina 5</em>)<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />After the interrogation, Karn returned to the Bureau of Standards, where he received a promotion for “service rendered to the Empire.” However, the meeting with Meero changed Karn who felt he had found a kindred spirit who was equally committed to order. Karn developed a new preoccupation with Meero and waited outside of ISB headquarters in the hope of seeing her again. Upon seeing Meero, who is visibly shaken, Karn expresses his sincere thanks: </p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">“I thought I had ruined my life. I thought I was done. After meeting you and discovering, you understood how dangerous Cassian Andor was. Just… Just being in your presence, I… I’ve realized that life is worth living. I realized that if nothing else, there was justice, and beauty in the galaxy and if I just kept going… Perhaps my deranged belief that there was something better fated for me in the future was a dream worth clinging to.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Nobody’s Listening!</em>)</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Later, Karn went back to Ferrix in the hope of finally apprehending Andor, who he hoped would return for his mother’s funeral. Instead, he ended up saving Dedra who was nearly killed by rioters. His reason for saving her: “You were in trouble.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rix Road</em>) For Karn, saving Meero was not about rescuing a damsel in distress, but rather protecting a symbol of Imperial order and justice from the demons of anarchy.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Syril Karn’s story of radicalization operates as a fascist parallel to that of Cassian Andor. Unlike Andor who is driven to take up arms in the rebellion, Karn yearns for order. Despite witnessing Imperial brutality, he identifies with their struggle to maintain control. He wants to put himself at the service of the Imperial machine and to be recognized for it. As Kyle Soller, who plays Karn, explained:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />So Cyril [sic] Karn is working for the corporate security sector at the outer reaches of the galaxy and where there’s not much Imperial presence at all. And he’s desperate for Imperial presence. He is … As he is with Cassian Andor, he is a dog with a bone to get into the Empire’s good books. He would be a perfect little SS officer for them. But he really has a strong moral core, which is just misguided. He’s drunk the wrong Kool-Aid, and all the freedom and the messiness and the kind of complexity that Cassian represents, just fills him with such anger that he can’t exist within that within his own world.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_10" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">10</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />In the end, Syril Karn is also a representative of the legions of petty-bourgeois who enthusiastically support fascist regimes. They yearn for recognition, order, and belonging from the new fascist order while detesting the untamed mob. As Trotsky said: “Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_11" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">11</sup></a></span> </p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">Without a People’s Army, the People Have Nothing</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> not only wants to tell the story of how one man is radicalized, but the emergence of an organized rebellion. Throughout the series, Gilroy draws from the history of many revolutionary struggles, particularly the Russian Revolution, for inspiration:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">But the one that has the most—I mean, forget the French revolution or places where you have a whole bunch of really intellectual people with different ideas about how it should be [fought]. The Russian revolution, the 30 years, it leads up to it, the amount of infighting and the number of groups and the amount of people who end up hating each other more than they even hate the Czar, and the difficulties that they have in organizing and what Lenin does to pull them together or slap them into shape, all of that. I mean, that’s just fascinating. We’re going to get to do all of that. We get to do it.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_12" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">12</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">We get to see what spontaneous revolt looks like on the planet Ferrix. The people of Ferrix are fiercely loyal to their families, communities, and traditions. Bells are rung to warn everyone when police and other dangerous outsiders arrive. On the whole, the people of Ferrix want to be left alone. They were mostly willing to tolerate Pre-Mor, but the heavy-handed nature of the Empire produced an almost immediate response. At the funeral for Cassian’s mother, a prerecorded message from Maarva calls upon the people to rise up:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">“The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness, it is never more alive than when we sleep. It’s easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it’s true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it’s too late. But I’ll tell you this…If I could do it again, I’d wake up early and be fighting these bastards …from the start. Fight the Empire!” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rix Road</em>)</p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Maarva’s speech turns a peaceful procession into a riot with Imperials massacring the people. The history of Bloody Sunday in 1905 comes to mind.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The Ferrix riot shows the cauldron of revolt brewing under Imperial rule and the sparks of wider rebellion. This was something recognized by Nemik in his Manifesto: “There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward…” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rix Road</em>)<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_13" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">13</sup></a></span> Events on Ferrix are mostly localized and not part of a larger rebellion. Ultimately, the only hope for overthrowing the Empire is for an organized rebellion to take shape. In Russia, many revolutionaries understood that the scattered outbreaks of resistance had little chance of toppling the old regime without a party to coordinate and lead them.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Similar to the Russian revolutionaries, the rebels of Andor are organizationally and politically divided. The rebels are all opposed to the Empire, but little else unites them. For instance, there is Mon Mothma, a wealthy senator from Chandrilla who is secretly funding the rebels, but struggles for reform in the powerless Imperial Senate. A more extreme faction is represented by Partisan leader Saw Gerrera (based in part on Che Guevara), a self-proclaimed anarchist. Some rebels such as Karis Nemik join for idealistic motives, others such as Arvel Skeen are individualistic mercenaries. Furthermore, the rebels come from every conceivable class background.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />To portray the rebel cell on Aldhani, Gilroy uses images from many real life struggles. The rebels are armed with blasters that closely resemble AK-47s that have long been the stable of leftist guerrilla movements. The rebels also wear versions of the budenovka and ushanka hats which were part of the Red Army uniform. Their raid on the Imperial garrison to steal money for the rebellion is based on the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery partly organized by Joseph Stalin to fund the Bolshevik Party. According to Gilroy: “They needed money. This shit all costs money. People gotta eat, they gotta get guns. You gotta get stuff.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_14" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">14</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">The rebels in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor </em>are not the morally pure heroes of the original Star Wars. Rather, they must make compromises for the sake of the cause. For example, when Mon Mothma’s illicit funding of the rebellion threatens to be exposed, she makes a deal with a shady banker to marry her daughter off. Mothma is even willing to set up her husband as the guilty party to keep ISB suspicion off her. Like real life underground revolutionaries, the rebels fear informants destroying their networks. Saw Gerrera is driven to paranoia when he suspects that his organization is compromised. One of the storylines is that the rebels plan to eliminate Andor as a potential snitch.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />No one better exemplifies the shadowy world of the rebellion where all means are permissible than Luthen Rael. He leads a double life as a wealthy antiques dealer and rebel operative. Luthen keeps different factions together, cultivates assets, and distributes resources. A meticulous planner, Luthen stays several steps ahead of the Empire. He is not above being ruthless and is willing to eliminate Andor. Seeing the struggle as a long game, Luthen willingly sacrifices 50 rebels to protect a highly placed source in the ISB. In one of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor’s</em> best scenes, Luthen reveals the human cost of what his commitment to the rebellion means:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything! (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">One Way Out</em>)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">These words recall Bertolt Brecht’s poem “To those born after” (1939) where he pondered the same question of ends and means: </p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">And yet we know: </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Hatred, even of meanness </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Makes you ugly. </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Anger, even at injustice </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Could not ourselves be friendly. </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">You, however, when the time comes </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">When mankind is a helper unto mankind </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Think on us </p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">With forbearance.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_15" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">15</sup></a></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">For all its grittiness and realism about the struggle, Andor’s rebels have no program that they are fighting <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">for</em>. For example, Mon Mothma wants to restore the type of democracy that existed in the corrupt Old Republic. Saw Gererra is an anarchist, but his vision seems limited to just rejecting authority without advocating anything constructive. The dominant ethos of the rebellion seems to be a popular front devoid of a revolutionary program.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Since the rebels of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> lack a theory of what they are fighting <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">for</em>, their popular front logic leads them to yield power to the liberal bourgeoisie. Luthen is no Lenin with a working class ideology dedicated to the transformation of society. Thus, the political leadership of the rebels falls to wealthy senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa who want to restore the hollow democracy of the Old Republic without addressing the conditions – the Senate being beholden to capitalist interests – that originally led to the rise of Palpatine. Arguably the New Republic of the sequel trilogy just repeats the failings of its predecessor and succumbs to the fascist First Order.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">What Andor and Gilroy miss from the history of revolutions is that an organization is not enough, but it needs a coherent worldview. Nor does the knowledge of revolutionary philosophy just arise on its own. Nemik in his Manifesto believes that consciousness of freedom just spontaneously arises: “Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rix Road</em>) Contrary to Nemik, real life revolutionaries have understood that consciousness does not just appear on its own. An organization needs a scientific program and to disseminate it amongst the oppressed. As Lenin said: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_16" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">16</sup></a></span> Gilroy should know that in the Russian Revolution, Marxism was the working class’s indispensable theoretical weapon. </p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">A <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">weltanschauung</em><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: bolder;"> </span>also matters when it comes to revolutionary warfare. Historically, Marxists have recognized that the soldiers of a red army must be conscious that they are fighting for a society free of exploitation and oppression. As Trotsky said: “So, each warrior, whether he be worker or peasant, must know and understand that at the basis of the world lies the law of change of matter, that everything living is the product of a long process of change, that man has behind him an immense chain of ancestors, reaching back to the first, elementary living organism, and that this same man has, in his subsequent development, taken his destiny into his own hands, that he is going forward, opening up new worlds, casting down all rulers from their thrones both heavenly and terrestrial, and saying: ‘No, I do not need any sovereign lords – I am man, organised in socialism, I am the master and the ruler of all things . .’”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_17" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">17</sup></a></span> The knowledge that the Red Army was fighting for socialism ensured their popular support and provided its soldiers with the will to win.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />However, the rebels in Andor do not operate like the Red Army or a people’s army organizing the masses for liberation. The rebels are largely divorced from the people. Instead, they are akin to a Guevarist foco or urban terrorism found in the IRA or the Algerian FLN. As Luthen Rael notes, the rebel strategy is accelerationist since it hopes to provoke a heavy-handed Imperial response to radicalize the people: “Whatever our final version of success looks like, there’s no chance any of us can make it real on our own. We need the Empire to help. We need them angry. We need them coming down hard. Oppression breeds rebellion.” (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Narkina 5</em>)<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_18" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">18</sup></a></span> Ultimately, rebel ruthlessness shows them aping the approach of the Empire in their struggle.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />However, history shows that the methods of the oppressed must be different than those utilized by the oppressors. The ruling class employs methods such as torture, murder, and humiliation to maintain their rule. Yet these methods are forbidden to a revolutionary army. One can see an alternative revolutionary ethos in the film <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Spartacus</em> (1960) when some of the freed gladiators want their former owners to be put in the ring to kill each other for sport. Yet Spartacus stops this practice since the revolt will accomplish nothing if the slaves simply become like the masters. By fighting war in a different way than the oppressors, a revolutionary army shows it is committed to emancipating all of humanity and transcending the methods of the past.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_19" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">19</sup></a></span> Ultimately, the knowledge that a different military strategy must be inspired by a revolutionary worldview remains out of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor’s</em> reach. </p><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">One Way Out</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">While <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor’s</em> portrayal of revolutionary war falls short, the prison revolt is the clearest example of a collective revolutionary hero. After Cassian is arrested, he is sent to the Imperial prison facility on Narkina 5 (shaped like the Imperial emblem). The immaculately clean prison is different and a more insidious method of Imperial control than normally shown in Star Wars. The few guards keep thousands of prisoners obedient with electrified floors. Yet the Empire also practices divide and rule where the prisoners work with Taylorist efficiency to produce components for the Death Star. Each day, the most productive laborers are rewarded with flavor in their food while the least productive are given electric shocks. Most prisoners endure this, hoping to just get through their sentences and be released. According to Diego Luna, the Empire’s “prisoner dilemma” is meant to break the inmates and leave them unable to envision revolt:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />This idea of a prison goes against every image you’ve made of prisons. It’s perfectly clean. They need you healthy, strong. They need you to believe. They need to lie to you. They need you to believe in that little number you see there every day, [your release date]. They build this fantasy of a way out that doesn’t exist; therefore, you’re always working for them. That whole place shows you how much can you be dead while you’re alive.<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_20" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">20</sup></a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Narkina 5 is a perfect metaphor for capitalism and its methods of domination.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Yet there is a dirty secret behind the Empire’s “game theory.” After the Aldhani heist, Imperial laws were tightened and nobody was released at the end of their sentences. Instead, the inmates were simply transferred to another prison to continue working there. Yet the Empire made a crucial mistake when one prisoner was accidentally sent back to his old level. To keep the secret of the rigged game, the Empire killed all inmates on that level.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />While Cassian was already planning to escape, others such as the day shift manager Kino Loy planned to just serve out his sentence. After learning about the massacre, Kino’s hopes are shattered and he helps Cassian to organize a breakout. Using makeshift tools to sabotage equipment and cutting off electricity, Cassian and the prisoners are able to reach the command center and take control of the facility. Before the Empire can regain control, Loy goes on the intercom and makes an impassioned speech for all the prisoners to rise up:</p><blockquote class="wp-block-quote" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; color: #383838; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.45; margin: 0.25em 0px; padding: 0.25em 40px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don’t have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it’ll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want. We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what’s happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who’s confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we’ve been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! One way out! One way out! (<em style="box-sizing: inherit;">One Way Out</em>)</p></blockquote><h2 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Bold); line-height: 1.2; margin: 2rem 0px 1rem;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Revolutionary Hero</span></h2><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Loy’s plea is successful and the prisoners succeed in escaping (although his fate is left unknown). Andy Serkis, who played Loy, came up with his own unique backstory for the character. No doubt inspired by his own history in the socialist movement, Serkis envisioned Loy as an imprisoned labor activist just trying to survive: “What I imagined of Kino’s backstory, before he was in prison, was that he was a union leader. He’s used to working as a foreman. I wanted him to come from a place where he was put in prison for, perhaps, standing up for workers’ rights, and then put into a position of authority because that’s what he does. He is a natural leader. But he really just wants to serve his time.”<span class="footnote_referrer" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit;"><a role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: inherit; cursor: pointer;" tabindex="0"><sup class="footnote_plugin_tooltip_text" id="footnote_plugin_tooltip_79052_1_21" style="border-bottom: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f1284e; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px !important; line-height: 0; position: static; top: -0.35em !important;">21</sup></a></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />It is Kino Loy, Cassian Andor, and the other prisoners who represent a revolutionary hero. They are all ordinary people who are suffering under Imperial oppression. No single character acts as a chosen savior, but it takes their collective strength to win. This does not negate the need for leadership since it is Cassian Andor and Kino Loy who are the key organizers, but they cannot succeed alone. It is Kino Loy’s speech that expresses this message of the revolutionary hero: that collective solidarity and struggle is the <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">one way out</em> of capitalism.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; color: #181818; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Part of the resonance of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor </em>is that it gives expression to the anti-capitalist ideas and movements that have grown in popularity in recent years. While not without its flaws and political limitations, as should be expected from a Disney production, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> is a serious portrayal of political rebellion, fascism, and imperialism. <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> is also a subversion of the hero’s journey at the center of Star Wars where salvation comes from a Jedi “chosen one.” Instead, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Andor</em> portrays a revolutionary hero as ordinary working people struggling together for a new world. </p><div class="speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; break-inside: avoid; color: #181818; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-top: 24px !important; max-width: 100%;"><div class="footnote_container_prepare" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%; padding-top: 24px !important;"><p style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170) !important; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; line-height: 1.3 !important; margin-block: 0.83em !important; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px !important; vertical-align: middle;"><span class="footnote_reference_container_label pointer" role="button" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-size: 1.5em !important;" tabindex="0">Notes</span></p></div><div id="footnote_references_container_79052_1" style="box-sizing: inherit; max-width: 100%;"><table class="footnotes_table footnote-reference-container" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; caption-side: bottom; width: 865px;"><caption class="accessibility" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) !important; height: 1px !important; margin-top: -2px !important; overflow: hidden !important; padding-bottom: 0.5rem; padding-top: 0.5rem; text-align: start; white-space: nowrap !important; width: 1px !important;">Notes</caption><tbody style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_1" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>1</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ben Hardwick, “How the Vietnam War Inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars Vision,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Comic Book Resources</em>, April 9, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.cbr.com/george-lucas-vietnam-war-star-wars-inspiration/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_2" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>2</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">There is a partial exception with the Ewoks who fight the Empire in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Return of the Jedi </em>(1983).</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_3" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>3</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">I owe this observation on Tony Gilroy’s work to my friend and comrade Aarón Lázaro.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_4" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>4</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Maggie Lovitt, “‘Andor’: Tony Gilroy Explains Why Cassian and His Friends Don’t Know About Jedi and Lightsabers,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Collider</em>, November 21, 2022. <a href="https://collider.com/andor-jedi-lightsabers-tony-gilroy-comments/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://collider.com/andor-jedi-lightsabers-tony-gilroy-comments/</span></a>; According to Gilroy, the absence of aliens was a deliberate creative choice to show the xenophobia that permeates the Empire: “You’ll see more as we go along, but it’s a legit question and one we’ll be answering as we go along. There is a more human-centric side of the story and the politics of it. There’s certainly no aliens working for the Empire, so that kind of tips it one way, automatically.” See Brian Davids, “‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Talks Luthen Rael’s Future and Being Surprised by Certain Easter Eggs,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 2022. <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-tony-gilroy-talks-luthen-rael-monologue-easter-eggs-1235258961/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/andor-tony-gilroy-talks-luthen-rael-monologue-easter-eggs-1235258961/</span></a></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_5" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>5</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Alexander Navarro, “Andor Creator Tony Gilroy and Lead Star Diego Luna Discuss the Development of the Star Wars Series,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">MovieWeb</em>, October 5, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://movieweb.com/andor-creator-tony-gilroy-diego-luna-discuss-development-of-star-wars-series/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_6" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>6</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Ibid.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_7" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>7</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">The ruling Sith have a reactionary philosophy that expresses aristocratic disdain for ordinary people. The founder of the modern Sith, Darth Bane expresses his Nietzschean contempt for equality in the Star Wars non-canon novel, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Darth Bane: Rule of Two</em>:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“Equality is a lie” Bane told her. “A myth to appease the masses. Simply look around and you will see the lie for what it is! There are those with power, those with the strength and will to lead. And there are those meant to follow‐those incapable of anything but servitude and a meager, worthless existence.<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“Equality is a perversion of the natural order!” he continued, his voice rising as he shared the fundamental truth that lay at the core of his beliefs. “It binds the strong to the weak. They become anchors that drag the exceptional down to mediocrity. Individuals destined and deserving of greatness have it denied them. They suffer for the sake of keeping them even with their inferiors.”<p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;"></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;">Drew Karpyshyn, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rule of Two: Star Wars Legends (Darth Bane)</em> (New York: Del Ray Books, 2008), 40-41</p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: var(--font_body_Regular); font-size: var(--body_text); letter-spacing: 0.32px; margin: 1rem 0px 1.5rem;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></p></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_8" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>8</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">The full lecture in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Z</em> reads as follows:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“An ideological illness is alike and requires preventive measures. Like mildew, it is due to septic germs and various parasitic agents. So the treatment of men with appropriate solutions is indispensable. The first stage occurs in the schools where, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, the sprouts are still very young. The second treatment occurs when they begin to bloom as college students or young workers. The draft is the best time to spray and save the sacred tree of national liberty from the disease of ideological mildew. Air-dropped leaflets are telling our peasants of a new kind of ideological mildew beginning to ravage our land. This new variety is spreading insidiously. It’s a sly enemy pushing us away from God and the Crown. It’s against this enemy that our action is aimed. Don’t take notes! It’s all in our pamphlet. With the outbreak of isms, like socialism, anarchism, imperialism or communism, sunspots start to multiply on the face of the golden orb. God refuses to enlighten the Reds! Scientists forecast an increase in sunspots due to the arrival of the beatniks and pacifists from certain countries such as Italy, France and Scandinavia! As head of Law and Order here in the north, I wish to tell you, who are high civil servants, we must preserve the healthy elements of our society and heal those that are ill. Tonight the enemy’s holding a meeting on our city. But we are not an ism! We are a democracy! We won’t forbid the meeting. Nor will we forbid the opposition from demonstrating! With these healthy anti-bodies, we must fight all diseases of both the vine as well as Society! That’s all I have to say. Bear it in mind during the days to come!”</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_9" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>9</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Mark Newbold, “Denise Gough talks Dedra Meero in Star Wars: Andor,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Fantha Tracks</em>, October 31, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/denise-gough-talks-dedra-meero-in-star-wars-andor/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_10" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>10</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Steve Weintraub, ‘Andor’s Kyle Soller and Denise Gough on Creating an All-New Section of the ‘Star Wars’ Universe,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Collider</em>, September 30, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://collider.com/andor-kyle-soller-denise-gough-interview-star-wars-dedra-meero-syril-karn/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_11" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>11</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Leon Trotsky, “What is National Socialism?” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxists Internet Archive.</em> <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_12" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>12</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Rodrigo Perez, “Andor: Tony Gilroy Talks The Importance Of Saw Gerrera, Luthen Rael & The “Original Gangsters & Maniacs” Of The Rebel Alliance,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Playlist</em>, September 22, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://theplaylist.net/andor-tony-gilroy-talks-the-importance-of-saw-gerrera-luthen-rael-the-original-gangsters-maniacs-of-the-rebel-alliance-20220922/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_13" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>13</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">This passage recalls Lenin who said that revolutionaries must fan the flames of revolt wherever they appear:<br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“We do not and cannot know which spark—of the innumerable sparks that are flying about in all countries as a result of the world economic and political crisis—will kindle the conflagration, in the sense of raising up the masses; we must, therefore, with our new and communist principles, set to work to stir up all and sundry, even the oldest, mustiest and seemingly hopeless spheres, for otherwise we shall not be able to cope with our tasks, shall not be comprehensively prepared, shall not be in possession of all the weapons and shall not prepare ourselves either to gain victory over the bourgeoisie (which arranged all aspects of social life—and has now disarranged them—in its bourgeois fashion), or to bring about the impending communist reorganisation of every sphere of life, following that victory..” V. I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxists Internet Archive</em>. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch10.htm</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_14" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>14</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Brian Hiatt, “How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? Plus: Inside Season 2 of the Revolutionary Star Wars Show,” The Rolling Stone, November 10, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/andor-explained-season-1-finale-season-2-preview-1234626573/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_15" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>15</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Bertolt Brecht, “To those born after,” in <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht</em>, ed. David Constantine (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 736.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_16" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>16</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">V. I. Lenin, “What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement.” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxists Internet Archive.</em> <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.html</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_17" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>17</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Leon Trotsky, “Listen and Get Ready, Red Army!” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Marxists Internet Archive.</em> <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/military/ch08.html</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_18" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>18</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">In one interview, Gilroy describes Luthen’s political strategy as accelerationist: “And in a classic political sense, he’s an accelerationist. He believes in the fact that you have to make it hurt really bad in order to bring people to change.” Brian Davids, “‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Talks Luthen Rael’s Future and Being Surprised by Certain Easter Eggs.” ; For a thorough Marxist exposé on the underlying political pessimism of accelerationism see Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Prometheus and Gaia: Technology, Ecology and Anti-Humanism </em>(New York: Anthem Press, 2022).</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_19" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>19</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">I owe observations in this section to conversations with friend and comrade Michael Nugent.</td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_20" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>20</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Erik Amaya, “Diego Luna Reveals How Andor’s Prison Story Offers a Pivotal Moment for Cassian,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Rotten Tomatoes</em>, November 11, 2022. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/diego-luna-discusses-andor-episode-10/</span></td></tr><tr class="footnotes_plugin_reference_row" style="border-style: solid; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit;"><th class="footnote_plugin_index pointer" id="footnote_plugin_reference_79052_1_21" scope="row" style="background-color: inherit !important; border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: unset !important; cursor: pointer; max-width: 100px; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; text-align: start !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: 2.5em;"><a class="footnote_plugin_link" role="button" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; cursor: pointer; white-space: nowrap;" tabindex="0"><span class="footnote_index_arrow" style="box-sizing: inherit;">↑</span>21</a></th><td class="footnote_plugin_text" style="border: none !important; box-sizing: inherit; padding: 5px 6px 10px 0px !important; vertical-align: top !important; width: unset;">Anthony Breznican, “Meet Kino Loy: Andy Serkis Unveils His New Star Wars Character,” Vanity Fair, October 26, 2022. <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/10/andy-serkis-andor-kino-loy" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; color: #c4144a; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/10/andy-serkis-andor-kino-loy</span></a> ; During the Thatcher years, Serkis was a member of the British Socialist Workers Party. See Simon Hattenstone, “Andy Serkis: From Gollum to Ian Dury,” The Guardian, January 2, 2010. <span class="footnote_url_wrap" style="box-sizing: inherit; overflow-wrap: anywhere; word-break: break-all;">https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jan/02/interview-andy-serkis</span></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><div class="speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; break-inside: avoid; color: #181818; font-family: GTAmericaLight, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 24px; max-width: 100%;"></div><div><div id="ftn21">
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</div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-56506281235459236172022-09-20T22:37:00.001-04:002022-09-20T23:08:46.742-04:00Reason in Revolt<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHU7YK2CHKHdOwkqtTp7EK5lCTgeDIU9InZ78yWXv_r67v3xviflHnYqz3C1l2fOsysb3AJzihqP19NOPXJNqMS1nL81cUYWN5W7B3NMQx3iJCa9mGzXXR8ClLgFvxxdlOmmP7BTe1VWXZQ305W4KINMQ2SQ-HFVReum4s1xBIwMXyzj3obVL5MQxCpw/s263/spinoza%20marx.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="192" data-original-width="263" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHU7YK2CHKHdOwkqtTp7EK5lCTgeDIU9InZ78yWXv_r67v3xviflHnYqz3C1l2fOsysb3AJzihqP19NOPXJNqMS1nL81cUYWN5W7B3NMQx3iJCa9mGzXXR8ClLgFvxxdlOmmP7BTe1VWXZQ305W4KINMQ2SQ-HFVReum4s1xBIwMXyzj3obVL5MQxCpw/s1600/spinoza%20marx.jpg" width="263" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">These were my opening remarks to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1gU4i3KkNk">discussion</a> on September 20, 2022 devoted to the article "Reason is Red" by Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim. </span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">“Arise
ye workers from your slumbers<br />
Arise ye prisoners of want<br />
For reason in revolt now thunders<br />
And at last ends the age of cant.<br />
Away with all your superstitions<br />
Servile masses arise, arise<br />
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition<br />
And spurn the dust to win the prize.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">-L’Internationale<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Good evening, friends and comrades. I am happy to give
these opening remarks for our event on the recently published <i>Spectre</i>
essay by Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim entitled “</span><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/reason-is-red/"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Reason is Red,”</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
which discusses the necessity of philosophy for Marxism. I hope to give a brief
overview of their main arguments in my remarks. To highlight the theme of the
essay, I’d like to share a brief </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch14.htm"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">account</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
by the American socialist George Novack. In early 1937, Novack visited Leon
Trotsky in Mexican exile. At the time, Trotsky was confronting the immense task
of rebuilding the revolutionary movement in the face of dangers from Stalinism,
fascism, social democracy, and the gathering clouds of world war. During these
discussions, Novack recalled how Trotsky urged revolutionaries to defend
Marxist philosophy from figures such as Max Eastman who rejected its
essentials:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Upon going back to the States… you comrades must at
once take up the struggle against Eastman’s distortion and repudiation of
dialectical materialism. There is nothing more important than this. Pragmatism,
empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought. You must inoculate
younger comrades against its infection.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">To lead the struggles ahead, Trotsky wanted to ensure
that party militants had a firm grounding in Marxist theory and philosophy.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">While our times are different in many respects than
confronted by Trotsky in 1937, the need for Marxists to defend philosophy
remains ever-present. A cursory view of the broad left shows that there is
ignorance, agnosticism, eclecticism, and downright hostility when it comes to
the importance of philosophy in our politics. Considering these conditions, we must
enthusiastically welcome an essay like “Reason is Red.” In their work, Fluss
and Frim confidently, concisely, and clearly affirm that Marxists require a
firm monistic, coherent, and rationalist philosophy.<br />
<br />
As opposed to the movementists who say that philosophy is a distraction from
the “immediate concerns” of political struggle, Fluss and Frim argue that this approach
is short-sighted. Rather, a focus on struggle alone leaves certain questions unanswered.
These are not trivial questions, but should be of concern to every communist: “What
kind of struggle is worth our efforts? What goals should we aim for? Whom
should we build solidarity with, and why?” Neither author denies that changing the world is vital for revolutionary politics. However, if Marxists are
serious about achieving a communist future, then our practice cannot be left to
happenstance. Great practice will require an equally great theory. Therefore,
revolutionary politics must be based on an accurate conception of reality that also
knows what is objectively good for humanity. There can be no fence-sitting on
this point: the question of a correct philosophical doctrine is of decisive significance
to revolutionaries.<br />
<br />
The typical American disdain for theory with its focus on the pure and simple
“facts” is not enough. Everyone can turn on the television or read the news to
see the misery in the world. As Fluss and Frim note, the facts do not speak for
themselves, otherwise just watching the six o’clock news would be enough to
make one a class-conscious Marxist. They argue that we need not just the facts,
but a coherent and intelligible view of the world: “More than just a daily
stream of facts, we need a systematic and total appreciation of our condition.
We need to know why we are acting and for what ends. And for this, we need an
adequate conception of human flourishing, nature, and the nature of the world
in which we are acting; in short, we need philosophy.”<br />
<br />
This affirmation on the need for philosophy by itself is insufficient. After
all, this inevitability raises the question of <i>which</i> philosophy Marxists
should embrace? There are those who have attempted to reconstruct or combine Marxism
with any manner of philosophies such as structuralism, irrationalism,
analytics, pragmatism, mysticism, and postmodern obscurantism. Yet Fluss and
Frim state </span><a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/05/radical-enlightenment-philosophy-spinoza-materialism-marxism"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">elsewhere</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
that not all ideas are equal which we can merely pick and choose from: “Either
we accept an intelligible universe or reject it; either we affirm a common
humanity or deny it; either we see social revolution as necessary or remain
blind to this fact.” They argue that Marxists need to adopt the philosophy of
Spinozist-Hegelian rationalism to understand the world: “However, if we are to
be confident in our politics, it is imperative that we are also confident in
the theoretical outlook that underlies them. In this, we disdain to conceal our
views: Marxism not only requires philosophy in general, but demands a specific
kind of philosophy. It demands monism, the idea that the entire universe is an
intelligible Whole.”<br />
<br />
At the center of the arguments in “Reason is Red” is a defense of monism. For monists,
the world is not composed of separate and unrelated parts or governed by
aleatory chance. Rather, nature is intelligible since it is governed by
rational laws. A monist worldview provides a coherent and intelligible portrait
of the world since it implies cause and effect, natural laws, etc. Whereas
dualists see a disconnect between nature and society, monists see a single
integral system. This means that human history is also located within a
rational and lawful conception of nature. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">How then does monism relate to international working
class solidarity? For monists, it is necessary to ask why we are acting and toward
what goals? In answering the question about why anyone should care about ending
exploitation and oppression, we need to posit a common human nature. It is true
that human beings are historical since we exist under different modes of
production with particular customs and behaviors. However, these differences
and the changes in modes of production do imply something constant. This is a
common human nature where people have needs for well-being, comfort, and
flourishing. In addition, there is a drive to satisfy these human needs through
labor and cooperation. Yet in order to realize the true potential of our
“species-being,” we must, as Marx </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">said</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">,
“overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned,
despicable essence.” <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">In other words, we must abolish systems of
exploitation and oppression to create the social conditions where our latent human
capabilities can be fully realized. It is our common human nature that transcends
all particular differences and provides the positive basis for universal
solidarity. As Fluss and Frim state: “Beyond the Christian imperative to “love
thy neighbor as thyself,” the monist understands that their neighbor
literally is, in some substantial sense, themselves. They desire their
welfare and flourishing just as immediately and directly as they desire their
own. What could be a surer footing for international solidarity?” Thus,
“workers of the world, unite” is not a Kantian categorical imperative, but
the beating heart of dialectical monism.<br />
<br />
In addition, the monist position supports international solidarity by noting
that the natural world is in a constant state of change, movement, and
development. As Fluss and Frim argue: “But since everything is part of an
integrated whole, these changes are never spontaneous or miraculous. Instead,
change is governed by natural laws that condition the mutual interactions among
finite things.” In other words, human beings are not the unwitting puppets of
God or other forces beyond our control. Human beings are not condemned to
suffer due to the mysterious threads of fate. Rather, the monist position
necessitates the removal of the supernatural as explanations for material
events. If the world is governed by rational laws, then they can be understood.
Thus, monism requires materialism. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">For dialectical monists, capitalism operates according
to rules of causality and an understanding of history locates the source of
events in socio-economic material origins. For instance, the contradictions of
capitalism are not fixed and static, but follow inner laws of motion that lead
to crisis and breakdown. This means capitalism’s end does not appear out of
nowhere as either a divine calamity or a miraculous event but has material
causes. The monist grounds the transition to socialism not on the spontaneous
will or supernatural deliverance, but on materialist foundations. Due to
capitalism breakdown, it is a material necessity for the working class to
overthrow bourgeois society. As Fluss and Frim say: “Instead, the working class is
unique because it represents the <i>universal </i>interests of
humanity. In its struggle against capitalist exploitation, the proletariat have
the historical mission of abolishing class society, and inaugurating a new
world based on common material interests and flourishing.” Ultimately, the
monist worldview provides a rational and material foundation to working class
struggle and the necessity of communism.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet some socialists eschew rationalism and materialism
claiming that they deprive human beings of agency and turn revolution into a
fatalistic historical schema. Fluss and Frim argue that rationalism provides
the philosophical basis to understand revolutionary change as rooted in
necessity: “Instead, rationalism only asserts that all events, whether natural
or man-made, whether good or bad, can in principle be understood. Everything
has some determinate cause. This is no barrier to activism. To the contrary,
all hope for deliberate action rests upon the intelligibility and
predictability of the world around us. Without this, political tactics, let
alone long-term strategies involving international coordination, would be
totally unthinkable.” By understanding the laws of the world, we can undertake
deliberate political action. Thus, if we can understand necessity, then it is
possible to act freely. Unlike the anarchists, who see freedom as the removal
of constraints, a dialectical monist views freedom as the ability to act since
we can rationally comprehend the world. For monists, a revolutionary’s strength
lies in reason and philosophy. This provides the working class with knowledge
so that we can both know and change the world. Without knowledge of necessity,
then rational action and freedom is replaced by faith with groundless hope in
miracles and the will.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">It is not possible here to give a complete summary of all
the philosophical and political arguments found in “Reason is Red.” I hope that
these brief remarks have highlighted why philosophy is essential to Marxism. For
my final word, I’d like to return to </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch8.htm"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Trotsky</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">.
He knew that if Marxists were serious about revolution, then it was imperative
for every communist to learn philosophy:<br />
<!--[endif]--><span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">What is the
Bolshevization of Communist parties? It is giving them such a training, and
effecting such a selection of the leading staff, as would prevent them from
drifting when the hour for their October strikes. “That is the whole of Hegel,
and the wisdom of books, and the meaning of all philosophy ...”</span></p><p></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-58683629024405048522022-08-27T08:03:00.005-04:002022-08-27T08:03:00.174-04:00A Unity of Opposites: The Dengist and the Red Guard<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimDXVJjDJgb03d6eUYjQIxtkQI6yo9-3QPVNYHsZMSPAwDoeMMvFuPm8EWwkos-RIT-PF9zgSTFcR_VxQr_DIQ5gqSExJNdxaYzHjtp7nEFO-z3810VQmAO13NVY0j5gKdDdTJqd0F7Gz5x8KljwIeCV13SzxsJQLxicau0r5-BssdT7yozPxwmf6R6A/s1412/mao7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1412" data-original-width="1058" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimDXVJjDJgb03d6eUYjQIxtkQI6yo9-3QPVNYHsZMSPAwDoeMMvFuPm8EWwkos-RIT-PF9zgSTFcR_VxQr_DIQ5gqSExJNdxaYzHjtp7nEFO-z3810VQmAO13NVY0j5gKdDdTJqd0F7Gz5x8KljwIeCV13SzxsJQLxicau0r5-BssdT7yozPxwmf6R6A/s320/mao7.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Originally published at </span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="https://mronline.org/2022/08/19/a-unity-of-opposites-the-dengist-and-the-red-guard/">Monthly Review Online</a>.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">According to Mao Zedong, the principal law of
materialist dialectics is the unity of opposites. Thus, it is quite fitting to
observe that we can find the unity of opposites on display in evaluations of
Mao himself as represented by Domenico Losurdo and Alain Badiou. For Losurdo,
Mao is praised for his realism, nationalism, and attention to economic
modernization. By contrast, Alain Badiou sees Mao as an eternal rebel, a symbol
of the communist idea, and a universalist. These positions could not be more
opposed. Even in their judgements of what Mao did wrong in the Cultural Revolution,
both provide different answers. On the one hand, Losurdo condemns Mao for going
too far with mass rebellion; while on the other, Badiou faults Mao for not
going far enough. Yet as we shall see, even though Losurdo and Badiou form a
yin and a yang, they both end up short when it comes to Mao.</span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
<br />
</span><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Domenico
Losurdo</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The late Domenico Losurdo (1941-2018) was one of the
foremost Marxist writers of his generation. He was the author of acclaimed
studies on liberalism, Gramsci, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marxism. Losurdo was not
simply an academic but a militant in the Italian Maoist movement of the 1960s.
When it came to Marxist-Leninism, Losurdo was forthright about his allegiance: “This
is the tradition in which I recognize myself.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> By
the 1980s, Losurdo joined the Italian Communist Party and after its dissolution
in 1991, he was a member of the Communist Refoundation Party followed by the
Party of Italian Communists. The last organization that Losurdo joined was the
anti-revisionist Communist Party of Italy (PCI). At the 6th congress of the PCI
in 2011, Losurdo wrote: “It is the coexistence of promising prospects and
terrible threats that makes the construction and strengthening of the communist
parties urgent. I sincerely hope that the party we are rebuilding today will be
up to its tasks.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><br />
<br />
In order to situate Losurdo’s view of Mao, we need to grasp how he understood
the different camps of “Western” and “Eastern” Marxism. According to Losurdo,
Western Marxism was born as a reaction against imperialism, the slaughter of
World War One, and the aura of the Bolshevik Revolution: “In the West, the
radical, indeed apocalyptic, historical turning point is undoubtedly
represented by the outbreak and flare-up of the First World War. The tiredness,
the disgust, the indignation at the interminable carnage, all this promotes the
rapid spread of the communist movement.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> Furthermore,
he argues that Western Marxism was shaped not only by material circumstances,
but also the cultural tradition of “Judeo-Christian messianism.” Early Western
Marxists like Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin all viewed the
Russian Revolution through an apocalyptic lens as a utopian and universalist event
that would deliver humanity from all the vices of bourgeois society. In the
ranks of Bolshevism, Losurdo singles out Leon Trotsky as the embodiment of this
messianic spirit of Western Marxism: “If one can ever speak in Russia of
Western Marxism, this is represented by Trotsky…”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
However, Western Marxists were bound to be disappointed once their hopes of the
USSR achieving a classless society did not come to pass. Losurdo argues that Western
Marxism could not comprehend the mundane need to develop the productive forces
and reckon with “realism.” Since figures like Trotsky refused to deal with this
reality, they condemned efforts to do so by “realists” like Stalin as betrayals
of the revolution: “Any political programme that fell short of demanding a social
order without a state and military apparatus seemed wholly inadequate.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
Losurdo claims that since Western Marxists were detached from the material
realities of imperialist encirclement and economic backwardness, they made a
virtue of poverty and authenticity that was akin to a religious belief: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">In the eyes of these “Communists,” the imperialist
encirclement of “real, existing socialism” and the socialist revolution are
simply as irrelevant as the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the Jewish national
revolution were for the assembly of Jewish early Christians. From this
perspective every effort to analyze the concrete historical conditions is a
distraction and immoral; the only thing that really matters is the authenticity
and the purity of the gospel of salvation.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">In turn, this leads Western Marxists to disavow the
experience of “actually existing socialism” as inauthentic. Losurdo argues that
this position plays into anticommunist prejudices and makes Western Marxism
acceptable to the bourgeoisie: “They passionately deny the accusation that they
are in any way connected to the history of “real, existing socialism.” At the
same time they reduce this history to a simple series of horrors in the hope
that this will lend them credibility especially in the eyes of the liberal
bourgeoisie.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Instead of taking this approach, Losurdo argues that
socialism must purge itself of the “abstract utopianism,” messianism,
internationalism that are the hallmarks of Western Marxism. In its place, he
advocates the embrace of “realism” which includes normalizing the market,
nationalism, the bureaucracy, the rule of law, and the promotion of material
incentives. According to Losurdo, twentieth century socialism failed because it
was too permeated with Western Marxist abstractions, as a result, it was unable
to connect with its material environment: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">What has been defeated, in the Third World and in the
“socialist camp” itself, is a Western Marxism that, having failed to take into
account the national and religious identity-religion is often an essential
constituent element of national identity-of the countries in which it operated,
has failed to orientalize itself, so to speak.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">By contrast, Losurdo says that Eastern Marxism had
much different concerns than Western Marxism. In the East, it was the reality
of colonialism that provided the immediate environment that shaped the
reception of Marxism after 1917. As Losurdo says, what spoke loudest to Eastern
Marxists such as Mao was the Leninist theory of imperialism: “Marxism-Leninism
is the truth finally found after a long search; the ideological weapon capable
of putting an end to the situation of oppression and ‘contempt’ imposed by
colonialism and imperialism, the ideological weapon which ensures the victory
of the revolution in China.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><br />
<br />
While Western Marxists were cosmopolitans separated from reality, Eastern
Marxists like Mao both understood and integrated into national life. Losurdo
praises Mao’s efforts to “nationalize” Marxism, arguing that the “Sinification”
of Marxism was the unification of “East and West, general characteristics and
national peculiarities.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In other words, Mao
(along with Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh) fused together internationalism with
patriotism: “they never contradicted patriotism and internationalism, indeed,
they always saw in the struggle for the liberation of oppressed nations an
essential moment in the march of internationalism and universalism, of what
Gramsci defines as “integral humanism”.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> He notes that Western
Marxism with its “pure vision of the universal” could only view these national
liberation struggles with utter contempt.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <br />
<br />
In addition, Mao’s thoughts on the productive forces were markedly different
from those found in Western Marxism. Losurdo observed that the Long March and
the Anti-Japanese Resistance was an “epic endeavor.” During the war, the
Japanese targeted the whole population for subjugation, which meant that the “class
struggle and national resistance tended to merge in China.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> To fight Japan, the
Communist Party of China (CPC) sought to build a united front that included not
only workers and peasants, but also the national bourgeoisie. In this fight for
national survival, the CPC’s commitment to production became inseparable from
the greater war effort: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">From this moment [at the beginning of the
Anti-Japanese War], the commitment to the production and development of the
economy becomes, especially in the liberated areas controlled by the Communist
Party, at the same time an integral part of the national class struggle. It is
clear then why, even in the midst of the war effort, Mao called communist
leaders to pay close attention to the economic dimension of the conflict.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Unlike Western Marxists with their grand disdain for
the ‘vulgar’ productive forces, Eastern Marxists saw the economic front as even
more important than the class struggle and national liberation.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
According to Losurdo, this focus on increasing production did not change after
the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. For one, China
endured embargos and economic attacks from the United States, who made no
secret of their efforts to overthrow the new regime. China might have secured
national unity, but it faced the continued threat of imperialist aggression and
neocolonial subjugation. Therefore, China’s economic development had the twin
tasks of social transformation and modernization.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
Recognizing the economic problems of the Soviet Union, but still wanting to
continue the revolution, Mao turned to a “Western Marxist” solution. As Losurdo
observes: “Mao Zedong believed that these problems could be solved through the
uninterrupted mobilization of the masses. This led to the “Great Leap Forward,”
and then to the “Cultural Revolution.” A new stage of the revolution was called
upon to guarantee both economic development and progress in the direction of
socialism. This new stage of socialism had the mission of liberating the
initiatives of the masses from all bureaucratic obstacles even from the
bureaucratic obstacles of the Communist Party and the state that it controlled.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In other words, Losurdo
senses in Mao the same Western Marxist abstract universalism found in figures
such as Trotsky.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
Losurdo believes that both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
created unrealistic millenarian moods to mobilize the people. In these
campaigns, Mao undermined the authority of both the party and state. Since these
two institutions could no longer ensure stability, this meant that China was
only held together by the prestige and power of Mao’s personality buttressed by
the army: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Because the mediating roles of the Party and the state
had been swept away, there really only existed, on the one hand, the immediate
relationship to the charismatic leader, and on the other hand, the immediate
relationship to the masses (though these were in fact manipulated and
fanaticized by means of the news media and controlled by an army prepared to
intervene in emergencies). These were truly the years of a triumphal
Bonapartism.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">For Losurdo, Mao’s fundamental mistake was relying on
mass mobilization and revolutionary utopias. This was completely at odds with
the requirements of realism: “The “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural
Revolution” took no account of the need to normalize the process of
transformation. No one can call upon the masses to be heroes all the time, to
endure being continuously and eternally mobilized, always ready to sacrifice,
to do without, to deny oneself. The call to heroism must always remain the
exception and never become the rule.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Despite Mao’s desire to
increase the productive forces and overcome inequality, Losurdo concludes that his
efforts were unsustainable in the long-term.<br />
<br />
After Mao’s death, the leadership of China passed to Deng Xiaoping. A noted
“realist” in the CPC, he was not interested in ideological purity, but
increasing production through any means. As Deng famously said in 1962: “It
does not matter if it is a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches
mice.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Under Deng, the Cultural
Revolution was formally ended and politics were “normalized.” Market socialism
was introduced, leading to the rapid increase of the productive forces, along
with inequality, corruption, and a degradation of social solidarity. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Losurdo believes that China’s return to the realism of
“Eastern Marxism” is something to be celebrated. He argues that Deng’s policies
were successful in advancing the cause of socialism: “And even with the
attendant high costs, the outcomes of undertaking this new course are generally
visible: a rapid expansion in the development of productive forces; an economic
miracle of European proportions; access like never before to economic and
social opportunities for hundreds of millions of Chinese. All of this adds up
to a liberation process of enormous proportions.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It is safe to assume that
Losurdo believes Deng’s China proves the superiority of Eastern over Western Marxism
with its focus on organizing the mechanisms of normalcy and not utopian dreams.
<br />
<br />
Yet this does not mean Losurdo completely repudiates Mao’s legacy. Deng made a
change of course by rejecting Mao’s radicalism, but without repeating
Khrushchev’s approach to Stalin of “demonizing those who preceded him in
holding power.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Deng himself bluntly acknowledged this: “We will not do to Chairman Mao what
Khrushchev [sic] did to Stalin.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> He knew that Mao was a
source of legitimacy in China who could not be dismissed in one blow without
irrevocably harming the CPC: “Comrade Mao Zedong was not an isolated
individual, he was the leader of our Party until the moment of his death. When
we write about his mistakes, we should not exaggerate, for otherwise we shall
be discrediting Comrade Mao Zedong, and this would mean discrediting our Party
and state.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
This led China to adopt a formal verdict on Mao of being 70% good and 30% bad.
Ironically, this was the same verdict Mao had on Stalin. <br />
<br />
In 1981, the CPC approved a resolution on Mao’s historical role. Ultimately,
Mao was praised for his correct “Eastern Marxism” before 1956, but afterward he
pursued the incorrect “Western Marxist” policies of the Great Leap Forward and
Cultural Revolution: “Chief responsibility for the grave “Left” error of the
“cultural revolution”, an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in
duration, does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong. But after all it was the
error of a great proletarian revolutionary.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> For Losurdo, Deng and
CPC’s defense of the “realist” as opposed to the “utopian” side of Mao
successfully preserved the validity of socialism in China and allowed for its
continued advance: “The procedure chosen by the new Chinese leadership, in any case,
avoided a delegitimation of revolutionary power. Above all, it made possible a
genuine debate about the conditions and characteristics of the construction of
a socialist society, because it did not shift all the difficulties,
uncertainties, and objective contradictions onto one person as scapegoat.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
</span><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Alain
Badiou</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><br />
<br />
Alain Badiou appeared destined for a quiet career as an academic and a writer. However,
he became politically active during the 1960s. Originally a member of the leftist
</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: FR;">Parti Socialiste Unifié, it was the student-worker
protests of May 1968 that transformed Badiou into a Maoist revolutionary. He
describes this moment of political awakening as a religious conversion: </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">“I
admit without any reticence that May 68 was for me, in the order of philosophy
as in everything else, a genuine road – to – Damascus experience...it is the
masses who make history, including the history of knowledge.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Afterwards, Badiou was
active in the Maoist organization Union des communistes de France
marxiste-léniniste (UCFml) and then the non-Maoist L’Organisation Politique.
In addition, Badiou has combined his political activism with a prodigious
output of plays, philosophical works, literature, and political polemics. He is
currently one of the most prominent public intellectuals in France.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Before explaining how Badiou views Mao, we must
discuss his understanding of communism. According to Badiou, communism is a
Platonic idea that has existed since the emergence of class society: “Every
historical event is communist, to the degree that ‘communist’ designates the
transtemporal subjectivity of emancipation, the egalitarian passion, the Idea
of justice, the will to break with the compromises of the <i>service des biens</i>,
the deposition of egoism, an intolerance of oppression, the wish to impose a
withering away of the state.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[29]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> For Badiou, communism itself
was an idea that was not connected to any specific class whether workers,
serfs, peasants, or slaves. Instead, communism possessed an invariant and
transhistorical character: “The communist invariants have no defined class
character: they synthesize the universal aspiration of the exploited to topple
every principle of exploitation and oppression.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[30]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <br />
<br />
Since all communist invariants emerge from similar political Events, they take
on shared characteristics. In <i>Logics of Worlds</i>, Badiou lists four common
traits found in any political truth that aims at communism: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">All these truths articulate four determinations: will
(against socio-economic necessity), equality (against established hierarchies
of power or wealth), confidence (against anti-popular suspicion or fear of the
masses), authority or terror (against the ‘natural’ free play of the
competition). This is the generic kernel of a political truth of this type.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[31]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The communist invariant not only shares these four
attributes, but they are also symbolized by proper names. Among those names highlighted
by Badiou are Spartacus, Blanqui, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, and,
of course, Mao. As Badiou says, for the unnamed masses who fight for
emancipation, these proper names stand for the idea and truth of communism: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">The anonymous action of millions of militants, rebels,
fighters, unrepresentable as such, is combined and counted as one in the
simple, powerful symbol of the proper name. Thus, proper names are involved in
the operation of the Idea, and the ones I just mentioned are elements of the
Idea of communism at its various different stages.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[32]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">While communism is an eternal idea, Badiou – at least
in his more Marxist days – argued that the proletariat was not doomed to simply
go through the same past struggles repeatedly. Rather, the proletariat is a
universal class and now the communist program can finally be realized: “With
the proletariat, ideological resistance becomes not only the <i>repetition</i>
of the invariant but also the mastery of its <i>realization</i>.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[33]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> This is true because Marxism
is the accumulation of knowledge from all the past popular struggles carried out
by other communist invariants. For the proletariat, Marxism now becomes the key
instrument to its ultimate victory: “We must conceive of Marxism as the
accumulated wisdom of popular revolutions, the reason they engender, and the
fixation and precision of their target.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[34]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> When Badiou wrote these
words in 1976, he undoubtedly saw Mao Zedong Thought as the highest synthesis
of Marxist knowledge for the proletariat. However, since the 1980s at least,
Badiou has retreated from an identification of the proletariat as a universal
class.<br />
<br />
Badious looks at communism as a political truth which undergoes periodic sequences
of emergence, growth, and exhaustion: “I will begin by saying that a political
truth can, after all, be described in a purely empirical way: it is a concrete,
time-specific sequence in which a new thought and a new practice of collective
emancipation arise, exist, and eventually disappear.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[35]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> According to Badiou,
there have been two separate sequences of modern communism. The first came with
the French Revolution in 1792 and lasted until 1871. He argues that the major
characteristics of the first sequence were combining a mass movement of workers
with the conquest of power: “This sequence combined, under the sign of
communism, the mass popular movement and a thematic of the seizure of power.
The object was to organize the popular movement, in multiple forms -
demonstrations, strikes, uprisings, armed actions, and so on - in preparation
for an overturn, evidently meaning an insurrectional overturn such as went by
the name of ‘revolution’.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[36]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> This sequence ended with
the Paris Commune which Badiou identifies as “the supreme form of this
combination of popular movement, working-class leadership and armed
insurrection.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[37]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><br />
<br />
The second sequence lasted from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the end of
the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Badiou argues that this sequence was dominated
by the question of how to escape the defeat of the Paris Commune and achieve
victory. Lenin’s vanguard party provided these answers: “This obsession with
victory and the Real was focused on problems of organization and discipline,
and entirely contained, from Lenin's <i>What is</i> <i>to Be Done? </i>of 1902,
in the theory and practice of the centralized and homogeneous class party.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[38]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> While the vanguard party
allowed communists in the second sequence to take power, it created the new
problem of the terroristic and bureaucratic party-state. As Badiou put it: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">The party, in fact, appropriate for insurrectionary or
military victory over weakened reactionary powers, proved ill-adapted for the
construction of a state of proletarian dictatorship in Marx’s sense, in other
words a state organizing the transition towards a non-state, a power of
non-power, a dialectical form of the withering away of the state. The form of
the party-state, on the contrary, involved an experiment with an unprecedented
form of authoritarian or even terroristic state, one that in any case was
entirely separate from people’s practical life.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[39]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The main attempt to break out of the party-state
impasse was provided by Mao Zedong. Badiou argues that Mao was opposed to the
depoliticization and ossification of the Stalinist state: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Similarly, Mao rises up against Stalin’s objectivism.
He argues that Stalin ‘wants only technology and cadres’ and only deals with
the ‘knowledge of the laws’. He neither indicates ‘how to become the masters of
these laws’, nor does he sufficiently illuminate ‘the subjective activism of
the Party and the masses’. In truth, Mao indicts Stalin for a veritable
depoliticization of the will…This depoliticization must be envisaged in terms
of its most remote consequences: the transition to communism, the only source
of legitimacy for the authority of the socialist state. Without a political
break, without the will to abolish ‘the old rules and the old systems’, the
transition to communism is illusory.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[40]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The way out of the Stalinist deadlock for Mao was the
politicization of the masses and an assault on the party-state. This took the
form of the Cultural Revolution and the resurrection of the Paris Commune: “We
can therefore say without fear that, in the current phase of revolutionary
politics, the Cultural Revolution plays the role that the Paris Commune played
in its Leninist sequence. The Cultural Revolution is the Commune of the age of
Communist Parties and Socialist States….”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[41]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> For Badiou, the Cultural
Revolution was a historic attempt to break through the deadlock of the party-state
and renew the idea of communism.<br />
<br />
Yet Badiou identifies a contradiction in the Cultural Revolution between the
needs of order and rebellion: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">On one hand, the issue is to arouse mass revolutionary
action in the margins of the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or
to acknowledge, in the theoretical jargon of the time, that even though the
state is formally a ‘proletarian’ state, the class struggle continues,
including forms of mass revolt. Mao and his followers will go so far as to say
that under socialism, the bourgeoisie reconstitutes itself and organizes itself
within the Communist Party itself. On the other hand, with actual civil war
still being excluded, the general form of the relation between the party and
the state, in particular concerning the use of repressive forces, must remain
unchanged at least in so far as it is not really a question of destroying the
party.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[42]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">While Mao and his supporters told the masses that it
is “right to rebel” against the party-state, there was also the need to
maintain stability. Despite the Cultural Revolution’s invocation of a new state
based on the Paris Commune, Badiou notes that Mao wanted to maintain the
party-state by insisting that most cadres were basically good. <br />
<br />
For Badiou, the seizures of power, particularly the Shanghai People’s Commune
of 1967, reveal the failures of the self-imposed limits of the Cultural
Revolution. Mao ended up retreating from the commune-form, instead supporting
the creation of “three-in-one” revolutionary committees composed of cadre from
the party, army, and mass organizations. This amounted to the restoration of
the party-state’s power and authority. Furthermore, the workers’ movements and
Red Guards were disbanded. Badiou concludes that the Cultural Revolution proved
that the party-state cannot serve as a means to reach communism:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">[The Cultural Revolution] marks an irreplaceable
experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path,
to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of the workers’ struggle
under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted
with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of
civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[43]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">In terms of Mao himself, Badiou says that he played a
contradictory role in the Cultural Revolution as both a rebel and a
restorationist: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">We can clearly see that Mao, by bringing in the
workers, wanted to prevent the situation from turning into one of ‘military
control’. He wanted to protect those who had been his initial allies and had
been the bearers of enthusiasm and political innovation. But Mao is also a man
of the party-state. He wants its renovation, even a violent one, but not its
destruction. In the end he knows full well that by subjugating the last outpost
of young rebellious ‘leftists’, he eliminates the last margin left to anything
that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural
Revolution: the line of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned.
Because he holds no alternative hypothesis - nobody does as to the existence of
the state, and because the large majority of people, after two exalted but very
trying years, want the state to exist and to make its existence known, if
necessary with brute force.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[44]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Ultimately, Badiou claims that the Cultural Revolution
proves that the next sequence of communism must dispense with the vanguard party:
“We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of
the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’,
and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which
has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the
shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or
the shadow of the red flag.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[45]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Despite his denials,
Badiou’s communism is effectively a form of speculative anarchism with its
celebration of miraculous Events. However, his concept of the invariant allows
Badiou to avoid disillusionment like other former Maoists. Instead, he can
argue for the revival of communism since it will always exist as a form of mass
rebellion: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0.5in 8pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">I maintain the expression [of communist invariants],
against that of the ‘death of communism’. And that - at the very moment in
which a monstrous avatar, literally disastrous (a ‘State of communism’!) is
falling apart - it thus be a matter of the following: any event which is
foundational of truth exposes the subject it induces to the eternity of the
equal. ‘Communism’, in having named this eternity adequately serve to name a
death.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46;" title=""><sup><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><sup><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[46]</span></sup><!--[endif]--></span></sup></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Even now, Badiou refuses to disavow Mao. On the
fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in 2016, Badiou upheld Mao as a
representative of the communist idea: “You might say that what I first saw in
Mao and the Chinese Communist Party was a “left” critique of Soviet politics.
Mao’s major grievance was as follows: Stalin’s vision isn’t dialectical. He
represents congealed, immobilized state socialism, whereas Mao, as is clear in
all his great texts, thinks in an almost infinite way.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[47]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> In the end, Badiou holds
true to his youthful Red Guard beliefs by affirming Mao as the proper communist
name of an eternal rebel. <br />
<br />
</span><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Two
Halves that Don’t Make a Whole</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> <br />
<br />
What would Losurdo and Badiou say about each other’s views on Mao? Losurdo
would likely consider Badiou to be infected with Western Marxist abstractions
and anarchism in his celebration of mass rebellion and disregard for the needs
of realism. By contrast, Badiou would no doubt consider Losurdo to be a
Stalinist cop with his defense of order, normalcy, and the bureaucratic
party-state. Between them, no resolution could be possible. Yet this
contradiction does not add up to a coherent picture of Mao.<br />
In Mao, there is an antinomy without resolution between the opposed dialectic
of the Dengist and the Red Guard. The source of this unresolvable conflict is
built into Mao’s dialectics since he rejects any reconciliation or negation of
the negation. Instead, there is an eternal struggle between opposites.
According to Mao, there are always rival positions in politics representing
different roads such as bourgeois and proletarian, capitalist or socialist, or
Dengism and the Red Guard. Depending on the requirements of the situation at
hand, Mao himself oscillates between opposed positions. This ambiguity was most
clearly on display during the Cultural Revolution where Mao was the source of both
ultimate authority and rebellion. In religious terms, it could be said that Mao
was both God and Lucifer. Ultimately, the Dengist and Red Guard fail to
understand Mao since neither are willing to conclude an identity between their
unity of opposites.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Domenico
Losurdo, “Domenico Losurdo interviewed by Matteo Gargani (2016),” <i>Red
Sails</i>. https://redsails.org/losurdo-and-gargani/<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%;">Domenico
Losurdo, “Intervention at the 6th PdCI National Congress,” <i>Domenico Losurdo.</i>
https://domenicolosurdo.blogspot.com/2011/10/intervento-al-6-congresso-nazionale-del.html</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, <i>Il marxismo
occidentale Come nacque, come morì, come può Rinascere</i> (Bari: Laterza<b>, </b>2017),
33. [my translation]</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, <i>Antonio
Gramsci dal liberalismo al “comunismo critico”</i> (Rome: Gamberetti, 1997),
242. [my translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, <i>Class
Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History</i> (New York: Palgrave, 2016),
229.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from
History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt,” <i>Nature,
Society and Thought</i> Vol. 13, no. 3 (October 2000): 461.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid.<br />
<br />
For a thorough refutation of Losurdo on Stalin, see the appendix of Doug
Greene, <i>The Dialectics of Saturn: On the Question of Stalinism</i>.
(forthcoming)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 1997, 242. [my
translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, “World War I,
the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East,” in <i>Cataclysm
1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics</i>, ed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alexander Anievas (Boston: Brill, 2015), 263.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 1997, 242. [my
translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[11]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Domenico Losurdo, “Como Nasceu e
como Morreu o "Marxismo Ocidental",” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>.
</span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/portugues/losurdo/2008/mes/nasceu.htm"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">https://www.marxists.org/portugues/losurdo/2008/mes/nasceu.htm</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> [my translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[12]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. [my translation]<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[13]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 2016, 160.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[14]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 2015, 266-267.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[15]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Ibid. 267.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[16]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 2000, 494. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[17]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 494-495.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[18]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> It is absurd for Losurdo to
compare Trotsky with Mao as falling under the same species of voluntarism. For
more on Trotsky’s anti-voluntarist politics, see <i>The Dialectics of Saturn</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[19]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 495.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[20]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[21]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Deng Xiaoping, “Restore
Agricultural Production,” <i>in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping - Volume I
(1938-1965)</i> (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1992), 318. (henceforth <i>SWD</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[22]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 2000, 497.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[23]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 496.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[24]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> “Answers to Fallaci,” <i>SWD</i>,
vol. 2, 344.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[25]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> “On Drafts of Resolution on CPC
History,” <i>SWD</i>, vol. 2, 300.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[26]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Communist Party of China, “June
27, 1981- Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the
Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” <i>Wilson Center</i>, p. 16. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/121344.pdf?v=d461ad5001da989b8f96cc1dfb3c8ce7</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[27]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Losurdo 2000, 497.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[28]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Quoted in Peter Hallward,<i>
Badiou: A Subject to Truth</i> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 33.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[29]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Quoted in ibid. 241.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[30]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Quoted in Bruno Bosteels, <i>Badiou
and Politics (</i>Durnham: Duke University Press, 2011), 277. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[31]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Alain Badiou, <i>Logics of Worlds:
Being and Event, 2</i> (New York: Continuum, 2009), 27.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[32]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Alain Badiou, <i>The Communist
Hypothesis</i> (New York: Verso, 2010), 250-251.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[33]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Quoted in Bosteels 2011, 279.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[34]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Quoted in ibid. 280.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[35]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Badiou 2010, 231.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[36]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Alain Badiou, <i>The Meaning of
Sarkozy</i> (New York: Verso, 2008), 106. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[37]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[38]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 108. By “passion for the
real,” Badiou is referring to a term from Lacanian psychoanalysis that refers
to a desire for what can be done in the here and now in a sense of immediate
material urgency. In terms of politics, Badiou views the Real as making the
impossible possible:<br />
<br />
“And in particular, this conception of the real as being, in a situation, in
any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility,
which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole, according to its
real. Part of what I said a moment ago could be resaid as follows: emancipatory
politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from
within the situation, is declared to be impossible.”<br />
<br />
Peter Hallward and Alain Badiou,” Politics and philosophy an interview with
Alain Badiou,” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>Angelaki</i> 3.3
(1998): 124.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">Alain
Badiou, <i>The Century</i> (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), 32.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[39]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Badiou, 2008, 109.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[40]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Badiou 2009, 22.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[41]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Badiou 2010, 278.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn42" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[42]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 113-114.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn43" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[43]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 155.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn44" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[44]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 148.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn45" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[45]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Ibid. 155.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn46" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[46]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Alain Badiou, <i>Infinite Thought:
Truth and the Return to Philosophy</i> (New York: Continuum, 2003), 131.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn47" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span style="color: black;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Doug%20Greene/Documents/Documents/Maoism%20on%20Stalinism/Losurdo%20and%20Badiou%20Draft.docx#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[47]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;"> Alain Badiou, “Mao thinks in an
almost infinite way,” <i>Verso Books</i>, May 16, 2016.
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2033-alain-badiou-mao-thinks-in-an-almost-infinite-way<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><o:p> </o:p></p>
</div>
</div>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-47253073549284561322022-07-15T10:15:00.006-04:002022-07-15T10:15:00.144-04:00Biography of Michael Harrington exposes his ‘Failure of Vision’<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn3e9Rxgrfi4l20GOuydMKpkAHNPTFwyPSblufJaDF63Tpb44hwc17WijOW73GMT6v9x8ualyLilAfPq-K61Gtbn_a_5xAfbticHeam_IIK8eYPkInMuxii1r_MO2QlBIgXj6mMQK2S_8OibBxOdpod60OuUAHmYm1T3ZiQRTZ_-2fPlrpxOK3OdY3Lw/s653/harrington1988.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="653" data-original-width="519" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn3e9Rxgrfi4l20GOuydMKpkAHNPTFwyPSblufJaDF63Tpb44hwc17WijOW73GMT6v9x8ualyLilAfPq-K61Gtbn_a_5xAfbticHeam_IIK8eYPkInMuxii1r_MO2QlBIgXj6mMQK2S_8OibBxOdpod60OuUAHmYm1T3ZiQRTZ_-2fPlrpxOK3OdY3Lw/s320/harrington1988.png" width="254" /></a></div><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thank you to Chuck Chairns and <i>Workers' Voice</i> for the positive <a href="https://workersvoiceus.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/">book review</a>.</span></span><p></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Review of Greene, Douglas, “A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism” (Zero Books, Alresford, England, 2021).</em></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene’s book is a valuable tool for revolutionary socialists. It traces the political life of one of the most influential American socialists of the 20<sup style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">th</sup> century, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Harrington" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">Michael Harrington</a> (1928-1989). Harrington was a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is now the largest socialist organization in America, and it is growing rapidly. As Greene says, “Since 2016, members swarmed into DSA as ‘democratic socialism’ gained in popularity with the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. In just 3 years, DSA has gone from an older-aged paper membership of 6500 to a vibrant and younger one approaching an impressive 60,000, and it is now the largest socialist organization in the United States in over 60 years.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">According to the <a href="http://dsausa.org/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">DSA website</a> as of this writing, it has grown to over 92,000 dues-paying members since Greene wrote. It is obvious that there is a large reservoir of young people fed up with a government that is unable to govern while the world is going to hell in a basket, and who are energetically looking for ways to take matters into their own hands. Many of these youth consider themselves socialist and they quite naturally flock to the DSA. However, as Greene explains, the DSA has neither the political program nor the leadership cadre to lead a transition from capitalism to socialism. This is tragic; the world needs a socialist revolution, yet the largest socialist party in America is not up to the job. Revolutionary socialists should use Greene’s book as an educational tool to help recruit for building a party that is capable of leading the human race from capitalism to socialism.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene’s book has 11 chapters and an appendix. The main body of the book traces Harrington’s life from his Jesuit education as an Irish Catholic in St Louis, Mo., to his commitment to Democratic Socialism and the founding of DSA. The appendix is an evaluation of Harrington’s interpretation of Marxism; not only can this be read independently of the first 11 chapters but it is an excellent primer of the Marxist political tradition, including the essential contributions of Lenin and Trotsky, in the form of a critique of Harrington’s thinking.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene describes how Harrington’s politics never rose above those of a petty bourgeois radical. He was unable to make a firm choice between support of a revolutionary program and catering to the liberal bourgeoisie; he was comfortable with the middle-class values of his upbringing and never adopted a proletarian political perspective. He arrived at his socialism not through any personal experiences in the class struggle, but through his Jesuit-trained intellectual reasoning and debating skills. He enjoyed the company of intellectuals and middle-class liberals more than that of militant youth and rank and file; he was never able to penetrate deeply into workers’ struggles, but rather catered to the labor bureaucracy who had been, essentially, bought off by the capitalists.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">The main political idea that guided Harrington throughout his political career was the Realignment Strategy (RS) that he proposed in the 1960s. Despite the fact that RS has been an “unmitigated disaster for democratic socialism and the wider left” (p. 13), MH stuck with it until his dying day. Although the DSA has technically dropped RS, the party’s practices remain well within the confines of that strategy, a point made not only by Greene, but also by Kim Moody in “Breaking the Impasse.”<a href="https://socialistresurgence.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/?fbclid=IwAR2cS--RTo4FuIcep0oicVK2FXEk-ekRkyoqLSiMRmA9QxAG1JjFMtlA7so#_edn1" id="_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[i]</a> RS holds that socialists should work within the Democratic Party because its major “constituents” are “labor unions, blacks, women and farmers,” and that socialists should drive “out its racist, conservative and wealthy elements so that the party would truly represent the interests of the ordinary people.” The realigned Democratic Party can then be used to push for strengthening welfare, passing the Green New Deal, instituting universal health insurance, and building a just and efficient democracy here in the metropolis of the empire, a democracy like those in most of the rest of the capitalist world. All this would “lay the foundations for democratic socialism.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Many of the fallacies of RS that Greene points out apply to the current DSA. First and foremost is the idea that socialist forces could somehow capture the Democratic Party and convert it into an instrument to replace capitalism with socialism. The Democratic Party is a sophisticated tool that has been used by the capitalists and imperialists since Roosevelt to thwart, co-opt or otherwise head off any serious challenges to their rule. The capitalists, who hold a firm hegemony within the Democratic Party, are very experienced at using this tool. It is pure hubris to think that socialists could somehow hoodwink the capitalists into ceding their party to socialists so that we could weaken their hold on power. The Democratic Party has a set of very effective strategies for becoming the graveyard of all progressive social movements, including labor, civil rights, environmental movements, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, etc. It stretches plausibility to think that we could somehow convert the Democratic Party into an instrument for transitioning from capitalism into socialism.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">The American ruling class in the 1930’s was faced with a working class that was showing unprecedented combativity as it flocked by the millions into the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). The question of the day was whether this heralded an organization of the workers into political organizations, independent of the capitalist class, where they might be able to develop a program of mounting a serious challenge to capitalist rule. President Roosevelt managed to reform the Democratic Party into an instrument that was able to restructure the instruments of class rule so as to absorb this discontent into traditional political norms. That is where the leaders of the Democratic Party, a section of the ruling class, learned to co-opt, decapitate and comfortably absorb any social movements that have the vaguest hope of challenging capitalism. And that is why the Democratic Party is poison for any socialist movement. Not only are they far too crafty for us to snatch their party away from them, it wouldn’t be a useful tool even if we did; the Democratic Party is designed for capitalist rule, not for proletarian rule.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Another fallacy that Greene points out is that RS is doomed to failure because “it refused to develop an independent socialist organization,” (p. 68) a flaw that persists into the current DSA. DSA is a membership, dues-paying organization, but it is hardly independent of the Democratic Party. A perusal of their website reveals that a major focus of their activity is running their own candidates on the Democratic ticket. Whenever any of their candidates fail an election, DSA usually ends up supporting a Democrat as “a lesser evil” candidate. As an inheritor of Harrington’s RS, the DSA is hardly “an independent socialist organization.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">A third fallacy that Greene points out with RS is that “the liberal-labor alliance was an illusion of Harrington’s own imagination.” Citing Kim Moody,<a href="https://socialistresurgence.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/?fbclid=IwAR2cS--RTo4FuIcep0oicVK2FXEk-ekRkyoqLSiMRmA9QxAG1JjFMtlA7so#_edn2" id="_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[ii]</a> he argues that liberalism was “mostly a middle class phenomenon” that not only could never gain sufficient traction to challenge capitalist property relations but was even unable to expand Roosevelt’s New Deal programs such as a national health-care system. Even though liberals were not effective allies for social change, Harrington nevertheless argued that winning and maintaining liberal support was absolutely necessary for transitioning from capitalism to socialism; socialists therefore had to “practice moderation and respectability by playing nice in the Democratic Party” (p. 68). The proper arena for political actions by socialists was in the Democratic Party, not in the streets. Greene says “… RS forced socialists to maintain good relations with liberals in the hopes of reform at the expense of revolutionary militancy from below” (p. 69).</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">This is an important point: because Harrington’s road to socialism requires not antagonizing labor bureaucrats, liberals and other allies in the Democratic Party, radical activity must be carefully reined in. Chapter 8 of Greene’s book, entitled “The Tightrope,” gives revealing examples of how Harrington would consistently subordinate political independence and a revolutionary program to coalitions with liberal capitalist politicians. Harrington’s stance on the imperialist assault on Vietnam is particularly revealing because it illustrates typical petty bourgeois vacillations—an inability to make a firm choice between the camps of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, of revolution and imperialism. As long as Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat was in the White House, Harrington counterposed the moderate slogan “Negotiations Now” against the increasingly popular antiwar demand “Out Now”<a href="https://socialistresurgence.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/?fbclid=IwAR2cS--RTo4FuIcep0oicVK2FXEk-ekRkyoqLSiMRmA9QxAG1JjFMtlA7so#_edn3" id="_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[iii]</a> because he did not want to “actually offend the sensibilities of Democratic Party Liberals or anticommunists in the AFL-CIO.” However, when Nixon, a Republican, became president in 1968, MH abruptly switched and favored an American withdrawal without prior negotiations.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington’s utter lack of a revolutionary program is revealed by an incident that Greene recounts in Chapter 9, which describes the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. By 1976, DSOC had managed to “become part of the mainstream Democratic Party, just as our theory said we should, and had even won the approval of voters in one congressional district in the process. Our only problem was, we didn’t know what to do.” One must marvel at his lack of program such that he didn’t know what his next step would be upon winning a major political “victory.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">I propose that revolutionary socialists use Greene’s book in an educational campaign aimed at the young workers and students who are attracted to the current DSA. It not only exposes the fatal flaws of DSA and its commitment to the Democratic Party, it also provides, in the Appendix, a very useful introduction to the revolutionary thought of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky.</span></p><hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; height: 2px; margin: 50px auto; max-width: 60%; width: 128px;" /><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box;">NOTES:</strong></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black;"><a href="https://workersvoiceus.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/#_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[i]</a> Moody, Kim, “Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States.” (Chicago: Haymarket Books) 2022.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black;"><a href="https://workersvoiceus.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/#_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[ii]</a> Moody, Kim, “On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War” (Chicago: Haymarket Books) 2017.</span></p><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Quattrocento Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 17px; line-height: 28.9px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black;"><a href="https://workersvoiceus.org/2022/07/07/book-review-biography-of-michael-harrington-exposes-his-failure-of-vision/#_ednref" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out 0s;">[iii]</a> Fred Halstead’s book “Out Now,” describes the important role of revolutionary socialists in the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam and it holds important lessons for contemporary socialists. Halstead, Fred, “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. against the War in Vietnam.” (New York: Pathfinder Press) 1978, 1991.</span></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-73453220261808717802022-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:002022-06-27T00:00:00.184-04:00Michael Harrington and the Origins of DSA: An Interview with Doug Greene<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWnqKgsrzh9QV6t5Y1Eq6_iuzp19u3XTgcYzV16SYNKGUVqF-cFmEVjo6pdh8s9bRRWVqq_so5IMqdaUrJ6ACw1VRv18dpa16MVLE_6p0BqQF8REy0klmpe25tytSc5uIe3pPNb2hsNT0EWajwHdcs23xHBNEfWskXdWVjlh3NE1mufV_dMYAxralp7g/s225/all%20thats%20left.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWnqKgsrzh9QV6t5Y1Eq6_iuzp19u3XTgcYzV16SYNKGUVqF-cFmEVjo6pdh8s9bRRWVqq_so5IMqdaUrJ6ACw1VRv18dpa16MVLE_6p0BqQF8REy0klmpe25tytSc5uIe3pPNb2hsNT0EWajwHdcs23xHBNEfWskXdWVjlh3NE1mufV_dMYAxralp7g/s1600/all%20thats%20left.png" width="225" /></a></div><p></p><p>In the past few months, I have done a number of interviews on my new book <i><a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism">A Failure of Vision</a></i>. However, I think that the podcast I did with <i>All That's Left</i> is probably the best. I hope you'll give it a listen and buy a copy of the book while you're at it. </p><p><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/michael-harrington-and-the-origins-of-dsa/id1607835194?i=1000567169229">Listen here.</a></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-44803272937268601882022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:002022-06-09T00:00:00.178-04:00Running Aground: The RCP and Stalinism<p> </p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY-7_dyDsyO8IWgg5IYc6lQpZQNUb0PgmQZv9A_6UWUu5YGwbj4SKiY88wMxiMLh03F5eULEZ3R2zw8OWleOesOLNUkfzB4WMQwzRraSk96p5NT_8PaMPw4TLPK5CVoKQgmmwo77nLH16fX_37eFstM-fH1w_beHCGIYyrD41ZFc9pK-99dwPeRymEWQ/s1760/rcp%20may%20day.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1356" data-original-width="1760" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY-7_dyDsyO8IWgg5IYc6lQpZQNUb0PgmQZv9A_6UWUu5YGwbj4SKiY88wMxiMLh03F5eULEZ3R2zw8OWleOesOLNUkfzB4WMQwzRraSk96p5NT_8PaMPw4TLPK5CVoKQgmmwo77nLH16fX_37eFstM-fH1w_beHCGIYyrD41ZFc9pK-99dwPeRymEWQ/s320/rcp%20may%20day.png" width="320" /></a></div></span></h3><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Originally published at <i><a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c">Cosmonaut</a></i>.</span></span></h3><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;">I. Introduction</h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Emerging from the social upheavals of the 1960s, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) counted many dedicated organizers in its ranks who were inspired by the ideas and the example of Maoist China. The party used Maoist theory not only to plan for a future socialist revolution, but also to grapple with the complicated history of Stalinism and its impact on the international communist movement and the USSR. While the RCP did confront some of the dogmas and myths of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, in the end they were unwilling and unable to effectively understand Stalinism.</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The RCP’s roots can be traced back to the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU), formed in 1968, which was led by Bob Avakian, Bruce Franklin, Stephen Hamilton, and Leibel Bergman. At the center of the BARU was Avakian, who had worked with the Black Panthers and in the anti-war movement. Hamilton was a former member of Progressive Labor who had been active in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Bergman was a veteran of both the Communist Party (CPUSA) and Progressive Labor. The BARU was a dynamic group involved in organizing, most notably providing strike support for oil workers in nearby Richmond.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-1-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-0" data-hasqtip="0" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-1-6274" oldtitle="Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, <i>Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 </i>(Washington: Zer0, 2014), 12-33. See also Max Elbaum, <i>Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che</i> (New York: Verso, 2002), 95-100. See also Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part One),” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton1.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton1.htm</a> ; Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part II),” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton2.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton2.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">1</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In addition, the BARU was aggressive in promoting communism as championed by Mao Zedong.</span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;">II. <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</em></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In the spring of 1969, the now-renamed Revolutionary Union (RU) published </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, an early manifesto of the New Communist Movement. According to historian Max Elbaum, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> was one of the most influential radical texts of the </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">period.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-2-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-1" data-hasqtip="1" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-2-6274" oldtitle="“Within a year of its publication, <i>Red Papers 1</i> had gone through several printings and 20,000 copies were in circulation. The document made its way to every large city and college town and became “must reading” among Marxist-leaning activists. <i>Red Papers 1</i> combined an accessible writing style with a skill at elaborating Marxist-Leninist doctrine that was unusual for the time.”</span></p>
<p>Elbaum 2002, 99. Mike Ely, then a young activist describes the impact that reading <i>Red Papers</i> had on him:</p>
<p>“When I received (from afar) a copy of Red Papers 1, I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I read it over and over until the print started to fade — and until the many strange and difficult concepts were burned into my brain. It left me as a fierce partisan of its proposals. And I worked to circulate Red Papers 1 and 2 with everyone I met.” Mike Ely, “Red Papers 1: Calling for communist collectives,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, September 6, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/red-papers-1-calling-for-communist-collectives/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/red-papers-1-calling-for-communist-collectives/</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">2</span></a></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> elaborated a statement of unity centered on Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. The document also argued that radicals should create new communist collectives to engage in common study and practice. For its long-term goal, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> wanted to lay the foundations for a new communist party to replace the pro-Soviet CPUSA that was widely reviled by activists.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">When it came to the question of Stalin, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> considered him to be the “bridge” linking Lenin and Mao tog</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ether.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-3-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-2" data-hasqtip="2" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-3-6274" oldtitle="“The Stalin question: Stalin is the bridge between Lenin and Mao theoretically, practically, and organizationally. The successes of the world proletarian and people’s movements are a part of our history, and they are our successes, they are the successes of our class. The mistakes and errors must also be ours. We admit the mistakes of our class and its leaders, try to correct them or, failing that, try to avoid repeating them. But we will not disassociate ourselves from these errors in the opportunist manner of many bourgeois intellectuals and armchair “revolutionaries.””</span></p>
<p>Bay Area Revolutionary Union, “Red Papers 1,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-1/against.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-1/against.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">3</span></a></span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The RU considered their defense of Stalin to be based upon “Marxist (materialist) and (working) class standards” as opposed to others who utilized “bourgeois criteria of his imperialist, Trotskyite, and revisionist assailants.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-4-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-3" data-hasqtip="3" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-4-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">4</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In general, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> repeated China’s positive evaluation on Stalin, commending his leadership for developing the USSR’s planned economy, collectivizing agriculture, purging enemies of socialism, and defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. When it came to Stalin’s mistakes, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> saw his chief error was combating bureaucracy through administrative and coercive means rather than by mobilizing the masses. This neglect by Stalin meant that the Soviet people were left ideologically disarmed and politically passive. Furthermore, Stalin’s approach failed to stop the entrenchment of revisionists in the USSR, who managed to restore capitalism after </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">his death.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-5-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-4" data-hasqtip="4" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-5-6274" oldtitle="“Although information and propaganda were carried to the masses, and their approval won, mass ideological struggle did not progress to that necessary degree so that the masses could recognize, and thus prevent, the revisionist takeover.” Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">5</span></a></span></span></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> asserted that the majority of Stalin’s mistakes were inevitable since the Soviet Union had no prior socialist experience to draw upon. They concluded that the failure of Stalin and the USSR to stop the restoration of capitalism proved the necessity for a cultural revolution under socialism.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Almost immediately, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers’</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> defense of Stalin elicited controversy inside the RU, particularly in the East Bay branch.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-6-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-5" data-hasqtip="5" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-6-6274" oldtitle="</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">An official RCP document by Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas described the dissenters as follows:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
“A handful of petty-bourgeois radicals who had joined up with the RU because it seemed like “the thing to do,” argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat was fine in backward countries, filled with ”ignorant peasant masses” like Russia and China–where you had to have a “forced march” to achieve rapid economic development. But it was unnecessary in an already developed country like the United States and would be rejected by the “more cultured” people of this country. In other words, they put forward the theory of the productive forces and really saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship over the people. And they “couldn’t support” Joseph Stalin–“that butcher.”” Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, “Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive.</i> <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-history.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-history.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">6</span></a></span></span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The ensuing struggle with anti-Stalinists dissenters helped to consolidate the RU around </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> and its defense of Stalin. According to Aaron Leonard, the RU’s subsequent position was strident and involved “a great deal of posturing, even machismo, in invoking Stalin, which seems to have stood in for (or stood in the way of) a more critical understanding of his role and legacy.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-7-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-6" data-hasqtip="6" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-7-6274" oldtitle="Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 77." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">7</span></a></span></span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;">III.<em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Red Papers 7</em></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The next major RU statement that dealt with Stalin was </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7: How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What It Means for the World Struggle</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (1974). Since the Cultural Revolution, the People’s Republic of China and Mao claimed that the Soviet Union had restored capitalism and was now social-imperialist. However, they had presented little in the way of historical or theoretical evidence to flesh out these claims. </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> attempted to fill this gap by explaining both how the USSR restored capitalism and providing a Maoist analysis of the Stalin era.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">According to </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, under Stalin the Soviet Union was socialist since the proletariat ruled society. Stalin’s errors were said to be “far outweighed” by his achievements, which included the “building of socialism and strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat through a very complicated series of struggles inside and outside the Party, the step-by-step collectivization in agriculture, a monumental task carried out successfully with no historical precedent, the heroic defeat of the Nazis and the many contributions to the cause of world revolution.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-8-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-7" data-hasqtip="7" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-8-6274" oldtitle="<i>Red Papers 7: How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What It Means for the World Struggle</i> (Chicago: Revolutionary Union, 1974), 22." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">8</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In addition, opposition groups such as the Trotskyists and Bukharinists were condemned as “traitors and wreckers.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-9-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-8" data-hasqtip="8" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-9-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 16." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">9</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> While </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> stated that the purges had some “weaknesses and excesses,” they defended them overall as a “greater victory for [Stalin’s] proletarian line.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-10-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-9" data-hasqtip="9" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-10-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">10</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">While Stalin had built socialism, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> said that a new bourgeoisie emerged from the ranks of managers, technicians, army officers, and intellectuals. This new bourgeoisie were not old Tsarists, but originated from among the working class and peasantry, who were promoted into new positions. While they were loyal to the revolution, these social groups were “trained by the very bourgeois experts they replaced, picking up not only their expertise, but often their world view as well.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-11-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-10" data-hasqtip="10" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-11-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">11</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> For instance, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7 </i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">noted that the Stakhanovite movement – which they defend on the whole – was motivated by material incentives. This had detrimental effects on working class s</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">olidarity.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-12-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-11" data-hasqtip="11" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-12-6274" oldtitle="“Not only did this tend to cultivate bourgeois ideas of self-interest among the Stakhanovites themselves, but also had the effect of setting the more advanced Stakhanovites apart from the masses of workers. In a few instances this even created a certain degree of hostility toward the Stakhanov [sic] movement among the workers.” Ibid. 10." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">12</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">As time wore on, trends toward bourgeois relations gained ground and were not combated by the party which grew complacent and feeling that “they could now rest a bit on past laurels.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-13-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-12" data-hasqtip="12" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-13-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 17." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">13</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> By the late 1940s, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> claimed that Soviet planning was more bureaucratic and that the party failed to exercise control over administrators. This was due in part to Stalin’s focus on developing the productive forces, which caused him to make concessions to economic administrators. At the same time, workers were shut out of the planning process. As a result, Stalin and the CPSU failed to effectively fight these bureaucratic and revisionist tendencies. For </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, this weakened the USSR’s proletarian character and set the stage for the “more or less peaceful restoration of capitalism.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-14-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-13" data-hasqtip="13" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-14-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 12." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">14</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> argued that Stalin did oppose these revisionist ideas on the primacy of productive forces in </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (1952). In this work, Stalin said that it was necessary to not only develop the productive forces, but to transform the relations of production to overcome capitalist survivals and the old division of labor. Yet Red Papers 7 observed that Stalin failed to locate the proper means to accomplish this task, which was to </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“mobilize the masses in a great campaign of criticism and struggle. This, however, was not done…. Nevertheless, no movement did emerge, and during the entire post-war period the struggle basically remained within the upper reaches of the Party leadership. When Stalin died in March 1953, the wolves were still loose.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-15-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-14" data-hasqtip="14" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-15-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 20." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">15</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">For </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Stalin did not launch a mass campaign against the emergent bourgeoisie because he failed to understand that class struggle continued under socialism. Instead, Stalin believed that socialism contained no internal contradictions. Rather, he viewed the main danger to socialism coming from foreign agents, spies, and individual traitors who must be fought with police methods. This left him unable to recognize that forces of capitalist restoration came from </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">within</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> socialism.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> concluded that the sources for capitalist restoration in the USSR came from the internal contradictions of socialism, noting the survival of bourgeois ideas and social relations. The persistence of bourgeois ideas and culture created both the subjective and the objective conditions for a capitalist restoration. In the Soviet Union, several groups formed the basis for this new bourgeoisie: (1) the kulaks; (2) the new managers, intellectuals, and technicians; (3) party members who adopted bourgeois and revisionist ideas.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-16-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-15" data-hasqtip="15" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-16-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 12-13." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">16</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> It was the last category who were decisive in overthrowing Soviet socialism since party leaders were “the only ones in a position to lead society back down the capitalist road, and to actually organize production along capitalist lines.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-17-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-16" data-hasqtip="16" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-17-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 13." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">17</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> According to </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, this was exactly what happened when Khrushchev came to power and he proceeded “toward a fascist dictatorship without many of the difficulties associated with the transition from a “democratic” bourgeois republic.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-18-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-17" data-hasqtip="17" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-18-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 103." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">18</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Avakian hailed </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> as a pioneering work: “In some important ways </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> broke new ground for the movement and put the criticism of the Soviet Union on a much more materialist footing.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-19-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-18" data-hasqtip="18" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-19-6274" oldtitle="Bob Avakian, <i>From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist</i> (Chicago, Insight Books, 2005), 304." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">19</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> However, a more sober analysis notes that </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> contained an unresolved tension. On the one hand, the USSR was considered socialist under Stalin, but also observed that the working class had no control over the planning process. Martin Nicolaus, a rival Maoist argued that “on the basis of these and similar evaluations given in the text, it would be justified to conclude that Soviet socialism failed to meet… the authors’ definition of socialism.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-20-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-19" data-hasqtip="19" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-20-6274" oldtitle="Martin Nicolaus, “Critique of <i>Red Papers 7</i>: Metaphysics Cannot Defeat Revisionism &#8211; RU Document Fails to Show Essence of Capitalist Restoration,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ol-rp-7.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ol-rp-7.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">20</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> This led Nicolaus to conclude that the RU had adopted Trotskyism instead: “[</span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers’</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">] basic approach is very near in spirit and method to the Trotskyist view of Soviet socialism.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-21-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-20" data-hasqtip="20" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-21-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">21</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Contrary to Nicolaus’ rhetoric, there was nothing Trotskyist about </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">. Its understanding of Soviet history is, by and large, a simple retelling of old Stalinist orthodoxy.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-22-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-21" data-hasqtip="21" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-22-6274" oldtitle="In a self-criticism written years later, RCP supporter Mike Ely acknowledged that <i>Red Papers 7</i> was marred by its acceptance of official Soviet verdicts on the Moscow Trials: “The RCP’s Red Papers 7 (“How capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union and what this means for the world struggle” written 1974)— did some state-of-the-art communist analysis of Soviet social imperialism. But one of the truly disappointing parts of it was the crudely uncritical insertion of official Soviet verdicts on the line struggles of the 1930s. This stuck out like a sore thumb — as a lapse in both scientific methodology and integrity.” Mike Ely, “Nando on Kasama: Engagement and Audience,” Kasama Project, January 5, 2009. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/nando-a-maoist-on-engaging-trotskyism/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/nando-a-maoist-on-engaging-trotskyism/</a> ; Later RCP discussions on Trotsky were little better than cheap caricatures. See Lenny Wolff, <i>The Science of Revolution: An Introduction</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1983), 200." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">22</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> By adopting this Stalinist view, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> failed to provide a distinctive </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Maoist</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> account of the USSR’s internal contradictions and the material basis for the different political lines in the CPSU. Lastly, the restoration thesis advanced by </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7 </i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">does little more than repeat the basic Maoist premise that the dictatorship of the proletariat can only be preserved or destroyed in the ideological realm, placing the emphasis on ideas and not socio-economic relations. This leads them to ignore that, despite the differences between Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, social allocation in the USSR was done by the plan and not according to the dictates of the market or profit-motives.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-23-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-22" data-hasqtip="22" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-23-6274" oldtitle="Spartacus League, <i>Trotskyism versus Maoism Why the U.S.S.R. Is Not Capitalist</i> (New York: Spartacus Youth Publishing Co., 1977), 66-76. For more background on the Soviet economy see Alec Nove, <i>An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991</i> (New York: Penguin Books, 1992)." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">23</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Despite its efforts, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> is not a serious historical materialist understanding of the USSR, but superficial, idealistic, and sometimes downright false. </span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">IV. Charting the Uncharted Course?</span></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Over the course of the 1970s, the RU continued to grow and implanted its members among the industrial working class, most notably in the coal fields of West Virginia.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-24-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-23" data-hasqtip="23" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-24-6274" oldtitle="For more background about the RCP work in the coalfields, see Mike Ely, “Miners Right to Strike Committee,” <i>Against the Current</i> No. 217 (March/April 2022). <a href="https://againstthecurrent.org/atc217/miners-right-to-strike-committee/">https://againstthecurrent.org/atc217/miners-right-to-strike-committee/</a> ; Mike Ely, “Communists and the Miners’ Upsurge with Mike Ely,” <i>Cosmopod</i>. <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/communists-and-the-miners-upsurge-with-mike-ely/">https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/communists-and-the-miners-upsurge-with-mike-ely/</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">24</span></a></span> </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In September 1975, the RU officially transformed itself into the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, proclaiming itself to be the true vanguard party of the working class. At a certain level, there was some legitimacy to this claim since the RCP outdistanced its Maoists rivals with a membership of 1200-1500 by 1978, and could mobilize many more.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-25-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-24" data-hasqtip="24" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-25-6274" oldtitle="Figures in Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 221." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">25</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> As if proving true Mao’s dictum that “to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing,” the FBI declared that the RCP was one of the greatest dangers to national security: “The RCP, RSB, and its front groups, identified as the VVAW, UWOC, and USCPFA, represent a threat to the internal security of the United States of the first magnitude.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-26-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-25" data-hasqtip="25" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-26-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 183." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">26</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">After the death of Mao in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the RCP was thrown into crisis. For Avakian, these events were signs of a capitalist coup, leading him to oppose the new Chinese leadership of Deng Xiaoping.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-27-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-26" data-hasqtip="26" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-27-6274" oldtitle="See Bob Avakian, <i>Revisionists Are Revisionists And Must Not Be Supported, Revolutionaries Are Revolutionaries and Must Be Supported</i> (RCP, 1977). <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Avakian/Avakian-RevisionistsAreRevisionists-1977.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Avakian/Avakian-RevisionistsAreRevisionists-1977.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">27</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Other leaders inside the RCP, notably Bergman and Mickey Jarvis took their stand with Deng. The existence of these two lines inside the RCP proved untenable and the organization split in early 1978. Forty percent of the membership left to form the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, while Avakian remained in control of most of the RCP.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-28-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-27" data-hasqtip="27" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-28-6274" oldtitle="Elbaum 2002, 233." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">28</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In line with their rejection of post-Mao China, the RCP protested Deng’s visit to Washington DC in January 1979. The resulting protests led to dozens of injuries and the arrest of seventy-eight demonstrators. Avakian faced major felony charges and fearing political persecution, he fled into French exile.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-29-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-28" data-hasqtip="28" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-29-6274" oldtitle="See Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 224-228; Mike Ely, Miles Ahead and Land, “1979 Maoist streetfighting: We waved the Red Book in Deng Xiaoping’s face,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, March 2, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/1979-maoist-streetfighting-we-waved-the-red-book-in-deng-xiaopings-face/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/1979-maoist-streetfighting-we-waved-the-red-book-in-deng-xiaopings-face/</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">29</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Following the Deng demonstrations, the RCP changed its political strategy. They ended efforts to form a bastion in the industrial proletariat, instead believing it was necessary to go “lower and deeper” into the working class, immigrants, and the youth under the slogan “create public opinion, seize power.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-30-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-29" data-hasqtip="29" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-30-6274" oldtitle="Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 228-229. See also Revolutionary Communist Party, “New Programme and New Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” Marxists Internet Archive. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-new-pro/">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-new-pro/</a> ; Among those whom the RCP did not seek to liberate were homosexuals, which the party considered a form of “bourgeois decadence.” On this shameful history of gays in the RCP and other homophobic left groups, see “Out of the Red Closet: Gay and Lesbian Experiences in the Previous Communist Movement,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, January 2012. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-Group-OutOfTheRedCloset-GayAndLesbianExperiencesInPreviousCommunistMovement.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-Group-OutOfTheRedCloset-GayAndLesbianExperiencesInPreviousCommunistMovement.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">30</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the RCP’s later political strategy at length. However, a few words here will suffice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the RCP made a series of shifts toward developing base areas among the oppressed in the hopes of organically fusing with the people. Drawing upon the Peruvian Maoist experience in urban dwelling of Raucana, they hoped to develop mass combativity among the people. While the RCP was active and did mobilize people around many short-term campaigns, they never succeeded in creating a durable social base among the people of any appreciable size.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-31-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-30" data-hasqtip="30" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-31-6274" oldtitle="For more on these efforts, see Mike Ely, “Nine Letters to Our Comrades,” <i>Kasama Project</i>: 11-18. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-M.Ely-NineLettersToOurComrades-2007.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-M.Ely-NineLettersToOurComrades-2007.pdf</a> ; On the Peruvian Maoists and Raucana, see Simon Strong, <i>Shining Path: Terror and Revolution in Peru</i> (New York: Random House, 1992), 260-263." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">31</span></a></span></span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In the 1980s, the RCP also began fostering a cult of personality around Avakian. This was partly to build broad-based support for Avakian’s legal defense, but also served as a new source of legitimacy for the party to replace Mao. It seems that Avakian was a driving force behind these efforts at self-pro</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">motion.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-32-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-31" data-hasqtip="31" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-32-6274" oldtitle="“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.’”Avakian 2005, 393." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">32</span></a></span></span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In time,</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> the Avakian personality cult would consume the RCP itself.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Considering the major political shift in China, Avakian believed it was necessary to systematically defend Mao as a banner for revolutionaries to rally around. This was the main point of Avakian’s work, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mao Tse-tung’s Immortal Contributions </i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(1979), which claimed that “Mao Tse-tung was the greatest revolutionary, the greatest Marxist-Leninist leader, of our time.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-33-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-32" data-hasqtip="32" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-33-6274" oldtitle="</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bob Avakian, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mao Tse-tung’s Immortal Contributions</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1979), 1. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Later, Avakian described Mao to be an irreplaceable leader and genius who should not be subject to the whims of democracy: </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">“To give an extreme example, if the masses in socialist China had had the right to vote Mao out of office, and if they had exercised that right foolishly and voted him out, they would have been confronted with the stark fact that there wouldn&#8217;t have been another Mao to take his place. In reality, they would find themselves in a situation where someone would have to play a role which, from a formal standpoint, would be the same as that of Mao; that is, someone would have to occupy leading positions like that, and the division of labour in society &#8211; in particular between mental and manual labour &#8211; would mean that only a small section of people would then be capable of playing such a role. Voting Mao out of office would only mean that somebody less qualified &#8211; or, even worse, someone representing the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat &#8211; would be playing that leadership role. You can&#8217;t get around this, and adhering to the strictures of formal democracy would be no help at all.”</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bob Avakian, “Democracy: More Than Ever We can and Must Do Better Than That,” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A World to Win</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> 17 (1992). </span><a href="http://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1992-17/bob_avakian.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">http://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1992-17/bob_avakian.htm</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to Mike Ely, Avakian thought about himself in a comparable manner to Mao as a special leader:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
“And Avakian is (in such discussions of Mao) laying a foundation for his own ascension to “special, rare, unique, and irreplacable” and of the “caliber” reserved only for Marx, Lenin and Mao. It was a theory trotted out first in regard to Mao, but certainly (already then in his own mind) applicable to himself.”</span></p>
<p>Mike Ely, “A Defense of the Party-State, Part 3: Limits of Formal Democracy &amp; Popular Will,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, October 5, 2010. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/a-maoist-defense-of-the-party-state-part-3-more-on-limits-of-the-commune-form/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/a-maoist-defense-of-the-party-state-part-3-more-on-limits-of-the-commune-form/</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">33</span></a></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In this book, Avakian performs the double task of explaining and upholding Mao’s contributions to philosophy, economics, military doctrine, and his leadership of both the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution. Regarding Stalin, Avakian repeated both Mao’s criticisms and those of </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-34-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-33" data-hasqtip="33" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-34-6274" oldtitle="Avakian 1979, 88-93 and 146-9, 264-80." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">34</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> He concluded that Stalin was a great Marxist-Leninist who made significant errors, but these were corrected by the experience and insights of Mao.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In lookin</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">g to a future revolution, Avakian argued that it would be imperative for revolutionaries to move beyond mechanically following previous formulas whether from Marx, Lenin, or Mao:</span></span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; display: table; float: none; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 1.1em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 2em auto 0px; padding: 2em; position: relative; quotes: none; width: auto;"><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">It can further be said that it is even a law of revolution, and especially of proletarian revolution, that in order for it to succeed in a particular country, the struggle in that country and those leading it will have to depart from and even oppose certain particular conceptions or previous practices which have come to be invested with the stature of ‘established norms’ in the revolutionary movement. This is an expression of materialist dialectics, because every revolution arises out of the concrete conditions (contradictions) in the country (and the world) at the time it is occurring, and every new revolution inevitably involves new questions, new contradictions to be resolved. It is the basic principles and the method of Marxism-Leninism that must be applied as a universal guide for revolution – but these, too, are constantly being developed and enriched, just because scientific knowledge is constantly being deepened, including the Marxist-Leninist comprehension of reality in the fullest sense and because reality is constantly undergoing change, which requires and calls forth the continuous deepening of this knowledge.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-35-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-34" data-hasqtip="34" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-35-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 312." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">35</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Therefore, it was necessary for the RCP to “chart the uncharted cours</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">e” since the previous communist movement had not solved the strategic questions about how to make a revolution in an imperialist country like the USA. Instead, communists needed to be creative in their approach since the future remained to be unwritten.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-36-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-35" data-hasqtip="35" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-36-6274" oldtitle="See RCP, <i>Charting the Uncharted Course: Proletarian Revolution in the US!</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1981). <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/RCP-ChartingTheUnchartedCourse-1980-English-OCR-sm.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/RCP-ChartingTheUnchartedCourse-1980-English-OCR-sm.pdf</a> ; See also Bob Avakian, “The Question of Stalin and “Stalinism”,” <i>Revolution</i> 60, (Fall 1990): 13-17." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">36</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">While the RCP “opened the door” in certain respects to theory and practice, this should not be exaggerated. As we shall see, the RCP’s rethinking of previous conceptions stayed closely within the boundaries of Marxism-Leninism. As time passed, the RCP advanced a “new synthesis of communism” that became identified with the promotion of Avakian’s work itself.</span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">V.<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Conquer the World</i></span></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">After Avakian moved to Paris, he began a major study of the communist movement from the Bolshevik Revolution to the death of St</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">alin.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-37-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-36" data-hasqtip="36" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-37-6274" oldtitle="According to his memoir: “My approach was, in a real sense, to look at this history anew, applying a critical approach to everything I was studying, even those things written by communists, while at the same time applying the fundamental outlook and methodology of communism to draw, from all this, the most essential lessons, positive and negative.” Avakian 2005, 421." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">37</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> The f</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">ruit of his efforts were two major works: </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will </i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(1981) and </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (1984).</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Avakian stated that after Lenin died, “Stalin represented the most correct and principally the correct position at that time.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-38-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-37" data-hasqtip="37" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-38-6274" oldtitle="Bob Avakian, “Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will,” <i>Revolution</i> 50 (December 1981): 17. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-50.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-50.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">38</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> He observed that Stalin’s conception of socialism was based on a “mechanical approach to the economic transformation of ownership as being the alpha and omega of socialist transformation” which neglected the task of transforming social relationships. When it came to the collectivization of agriculture, Avakian said Stalin’s approach was done by “soaking the peasantry.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-39-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-38" data-hasqtip="38" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-39-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 19." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">39</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> By the 17</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">th</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> party congress in 1934, there was “political exhaustion, on the part of the advanced elements inside the Soviet Union.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-40-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-39" data-hasqtip="39" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-40-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 20." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">40</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Afterwards, Stalin’s leadership amplified erroneous tendencies that resulted in the political demobilization of the people. By the end of the 1930s, Avakian concluded that “large sections even among the advanced in the Soviet Union were confused, demoralized and somewhat passive politically.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-41-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-40" data-hasqtip="40" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-41-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 21." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">41</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">From the mid-1930s onward, Avakian said that “wrong lines and policies were increasingly in command in the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement” most especially following the Comintern’s Seventh Congress of 1935. The rightist character of this political line only deepened during the Second World War. Avakian declared that the Soviet pursuit of collective security and the united front against fascism were “frankly a rationalization for and an attempt to make the communist movement’s policy an extension of the international policy and line of the Soviet Union.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-42-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-41" data-hasqtip="41" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-42-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 22." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">42</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> He criticized the Soviet Union’s political strategy in World War II where “internationalism was flushed down the drain on a pragmatic and nationalist basis in order to defend the nation and beat back the attacks on it at all costs.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-43-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-42" data-hasqtip="42" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-43-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">43</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Avakian noted that the experience of the USSR and the Comintern proved that there is a contradiction between the interests of socialism in a single country and the world revolution. He explained this contradiction as follows: “Well, the position of the proletariat is that it has nothing to lose but its chains, but if it has a country does it have nothing to lose but its chains?”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-44-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-43" data-hasqtip="43" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-44-6274" oldtitle="</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ibid. 17. According to Mike Ely, Avakian was likely quoting the Chilean Maoist Jorge Palacios. See Mike Ely, “The RCP’s Debt to Louis Althusser: Why It Matters,” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kasama Project</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, January 13, 2009. https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/sidenote-on-the-rcps-intellectual-debt-to-louis-althusser/</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
Maoist Internationalist Movement argues that <i>Conquer the World</i> was proof that Avakian was a Trotskyist. See Maoist Internationalist Movement, “The Revolutionary Community Party-USA and Trotsky: A Literal Comparison,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/mim-rcp-trot.pdf</span></p>
<p>In his memoirs, Avakian claims that he saw a similar contradiction between state power and the world revolution playing out when it came to China and the Three Worlds Theory. See Avakian 2005, 304-309." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">44</span></a></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In almost heretical words for a Marxist-Leninist, Avakian argued that “socialism in one country” is not a settled question since “it’s been possible to do it in certain countries in certain times doesn’t prove it’s possible to have socialism in every “one country” at all times.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-45-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-44" data-hasqtip="44" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-45-6274" oldtitle="Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 37." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">45</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Avakian continued his critique of Comintern strategy under Stalin. Much more strongly than before, he said that the popular front strategy “was an attempt to rally that section of the workers who were more bourgeoisified and…still maintained a lot of the bourgeois-democratic prejudices and a longing for a more privileged position based on the historical position of their countries as imperialist exploiters and plunderers.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-46-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-45" data-hasqtip="45" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-46-6274" oldtitle="Bob Avakian, “Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation,” <i>Revolution</i> 51 (Spring 1984): 8. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-51.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-51.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">46</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Avakian believed that the adoption of the popular front entailed an abandonment of Leninist positions of internationalism and revolutionary defeatism. During World War II, he argued that the popular front between communists and bourgeois democracies served to ignore the crimes of imperialism since they were both united against the main enemy of Nazi Germany:</span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“To justify the kind of all-encompassing alliance that was built with the “democratic” imperialist states in World War 2, you would have to show that even without changing their </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">nature</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> it was possible to change the essence of the </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">actions</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> of these imperialists for a certain period. But that did not happen, and in fact it is not the case that it was possible to do so.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-47-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-46" data-hasqtip="46" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-47-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 11." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">47</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Avakian concluded that this wartime popular front alliance was based on a fundamental error of “subordinating the interests of the world revolution to the defense of the Soviet Union.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-48-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-47" data-hasqtip="47" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-48-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">48</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Additionally, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> criticized the export of revolution into Eastern Europe as not creating a foundation for socialism. Avakian does not dismiss the possibility of exporting socialism from without, but asks: “with that view of imposing a social system by that means, what kind of social system can be in fact imposed?”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-49-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-48" data-hasqtip="48" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-49-6274" oldtitle="Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 25." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">49</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> He stated that “socialism </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">never </span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">existed in these Eastern European countries (Albania is a different case whose history needs to be looked at separately) and it was never created through class-conscious struggle of the masses there with a proletarian vanguard, and that’s the only way it’s possible—without that it obviously couldn’t exist.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-50-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-49" data-hasqtip="49" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-50-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 28. See also “Mao comments (in two separate places) in his <i>Critique of Soviet Economics</i> that, although the People&#8217;s Democracies in Eastern Europe were established as the outcome of class struggle internationally (that is. World War 21, a good job was not done in leading class struggle there in the period after the war. Thus, no solid basis for socialism in those countries was ever laid, even though significant steps were taken in transforming the ownership system. As a result of all this, the socialist camp, even as it was reaching its &#8220;height&#8221; in the early and mid-50s was already disintegrating from within. And in general the conditions were ripening for the triumph of revisionism in most of this camp and more broadly for the complete degeneration of the majority of the parties that had been part of the Third International.” Quoted in “Outline of Views on the Historical Experience of the International Communist Movement and the Lessons for Today,” <i>Revolutio</i>n 49 (June 1981): 6-7." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">50</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> For Avakian, this showed that the socialist camp was already in advanced decay before Stalin died.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In 2006, Avakian described </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> as an “epistemological rupture with a lot of the history of the [International Communist Movement]” and providing a Marxist look at the history of Marxism itself.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-51-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-50" data-hasqtip="50" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-51-6274" oldtitle="See Bob Avakian, “On Epistemology: On Knowing and Changing The World,” <i>A World to Win</i> 32 (2006): 26. <a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/2006-32/32BobAvakian.htm">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/2006-32/32BobAvakian.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">51</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Clearly, Avakian does not merely repeat Stalin’s verdicts from the 1930s and even questions the doctrine of socialism in one country and Soviet foreign policy. However, his epistemological “rupture” is very superficial. Far from providing a materialist analysis of the communist movement and the USSR under Stalin, Avakian’s explanations are impressionistic at best. His insights may be innovations to those who operate within his milieu, but far more profound analyses of Soviet history were offered decades earlier by Leon Trotsky, Victor Serge, Isaac Deutscher, E. H. Carr, and Fernando Claudín</span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">to name just a few figures.</span></span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">VI. Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, or a New Synthesis?</span></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In both </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> and </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Avakian asserted the necessity of defending Leninism as the main element tying together Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. In echoes of </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, he considered Leninism to be the bridge between Marx and Mao: “By that I mean that in today’s situation Leninism is the key link in upholding and applying Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung Thought. To put it somewhat provocatively, Marxism without Leninism is Eurocentric social-chauvinism and social democracy. Maoism without Leninism is nationalism (and also, in certain contexts, social-chauvinism) and bourgeois democracy.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-52-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-51" data-hasqtip="51" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-52-6274" oldtitle="Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 38. The Indian Maoist Ajith says that Avakian’s emphasis on Leninism meant he undermined the advanced nature of Maoism: “Avakianism’s demand to take Leninism as the key link in upholding and applying MLM, his understanding that Leninism is what makes the synthesis of MLM possible today, denied Maoism its position as the cutting edge.” See Ajith, <i>Against Avakianism</i> (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press 2017), 49." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">52</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> For Avakian, Leninism with its ideas on the vanguard party and the state provided a revolutionary thread tying together the contributions of both Marx and Mao.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Avakian’s defense of Leninism was directed in part against the philosopher Alain Badiou and les Maoïstes in France, who claimed that a vanguard party had been superseded by the experience of the Cultural Revolution.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-53-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-52" data-hasqtip="52" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-53-6274" oldtitle="“…there are those so-called and pretended “Maoists” who think that because of the experience of the Cultural Revolution in China the basic principle of the Leninist party, of democratic centralism and so on, has been superseded and surpassed and is no longer correct and applicable, and that some new form, that is, a new bourgeois-democratic form, can be found in which to eliminate in fact the role of the party.”Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 41. According to Mike Ely, les Maoïstes were the UCFML which Alain Badiou belonged to. See Mike Ely introduction, “Defense of the Party-State, Part 1: Leninism as the Bridge,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, October 1, 2010. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/avakians-critique-of-badiou-on-party-state-part-1-leninism-as-the-bridge/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/avakians-critique-of-badiou-on-party-state-part-1-leninism-as-the-bridge/</a> ; Of late, the RCP has condemned Badiou as a Rousseauist. See RCP, “Why Alain Badiou is a Rousseauist… And Why We Should Not Be,” <i>Revcom.</i> <a href="https://revcom.us/a/159/Badioupolemic.pdf">https://revcom.us/a/159/Badioupolemic.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">53</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> For Avakian, a defense of Lenin and Stalin as bridges to Mao was essential to maintain the revolutionary character of Marxism-Leninism. By contrast, Badiou advanced a rival understanding of Mao, seeing the Cultural Revolution as an anti-Stalinist rebellion against the Leninist party-state.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-54-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-53" data-hasqtip="53" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-54-6274" oldtitle="Badiou described Mao’s position in Cultural Revolution as contradictory since he championed both insurgency and stabilization. It was a situation that Mao could find no means to escape from: “[Mao]wants [the party-state’s] renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. He knows full well in the end that by subjecting the last outpost of young revolting “leftists,” he liquidates the last margin left to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural Revolution: a line of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis—nobody does—as to the existence of the state, and because the large majority of people, after two exalted but very trying years, want the state to exist and to make its existence known, if needed with rude force.” Alain Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?” in <i>Polemics</i> (New York: Verso, 2006), 317." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">54</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Avakian offered an alternative self-designation to “Maoism,” coining the clunky “revolutionary communist/proletarian internationalist trend.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-55-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-54" data-hasqtip="54" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-55-6274" oldtitle="Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 47. See also Mike Ely, “RCP Constitution: Control, Cult of Personality &amp; Revealing Silences,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, August 12, 2008. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/cult-of-personality-purges-and-silence-on-struggle-details-of-rcps-constitution/?fbclid=IwAR2oMMkvJQ_TikDEc6LIInlPcuPsDga8TnlaiRaitq5a2-DN5w5P2ZF4Dl8">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/cult-of-personality-purges-and-silence-on-struggle-details-of-rcps-constitution/?fbclid=IwAR2oMMkvJQ_TikDEc6LIInlPcuPsDga8TnlaiRaitq5a2-DN5w5P2ZF4Dl8</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">55</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> This label did not find much support in either the RCP or among anti-revisionists internationally. Many pro-Mao parties insisted that Maoism was a new and higher stage of Marxism-Leninism. For example, the Communist Party of Peru (aka the Shining Path), under the leadership of Abimael Guzmán, said in 1982: “we are before a third stage of the ideology of the international proletariat, and therefore it has transformed into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-56-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-55" data-hasqtip="55" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-56-6274" oldtitle="See Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 1 – 1969-1987 (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press, 2016), 364. In 1988, the PCP formalized their synthesis of Maoism. See Communist Party of Peru, “Fundamental Documents: On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” <i>Foreign Languages Press</i>. library.redspark.nu/1988_-_Fundamental_Documents On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism <a href="https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PCP-Fundamental-Documents.pdf">https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PCP-Fundamental-Documents.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">56</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In addition, Guzmán’s defense of Stalin was far more rigid and orthodox than found in Avakian. In the October 21, 1983, issue of the </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolutionary Worker</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, the RCP disagreed with the Peruvians on Maoism, stating that there was no new stage:</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> “We have stressed the importance of learning from and advancing on the basis of Mao’s qualitative advances in that science, which represent, in that sense, a new stage in the development of Marxism-Leninism. We think Maoism is fine and necessary. But as Mao himself emphasized, we are still living in the era of Leninism, of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Without a Leninist understanding of imperialism and revolution, Maoism is ultimately distorted and turned into its opposite.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-57-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-56" data-hasqtip="56" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-57-6274" oldtitle="&#8220;Revolutionary Warfare in Peru,” <i>Revolutionary Worker</i> 227 Vol. 5, #25, October 21, 1983, 8. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/RW/1983/RW227-English-poor.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/RW/1983/RW227-English-poor.pdf</a></span></p>
<p>Many of the other parties that would joined the RIM had their own contending versions of Maoism or Marxism-Leninism distinct from the PCP and RCP. For instance, the Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist insisted on unity around Marxism-Leninism not Maoism. See “On the Joint Communiqué”, Open Letter to the Coordinating Committee of the International Journal <i>A World to Win,</i>” <i>A World to Win</i> Preliminary Issue #2 (May 1982): 36-38. <a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1982-P2/AWTW-P2-TKPML.pdf">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1982-P2/AWTW-P2-TKPML.pdf</a> ; Mohan Bikram Singh, writing on behalf of the Communist Party of Nepal (Masal) condemned Avakian’s approach to Mao and Stalin. See CPN (MASAL), “Note of Dissent presented to the 2nd International Conference of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations held in 1984,” in Mashal’s Struggle Against Trotskyism within RIM. (Kathmandu: CPN (Masal) Central Office, 1996), 16.</p>
<p>In addition, the Chilean RCP preceded the PCP by adopting Maoism in 1972. See Mike Ely, “PCR de Chile in the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement pt 2,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, September 24, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/pcr-de-chile-in-the-formation-of-the-revolutionary-internationalist-movement-pt-2/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/pcr-de-chile-in-the-formation-of-the-revolutionary-internationalist-movement-pt-2/</a> ; For more on the PCP and the “codification” of Maoism via the RIM see Joshua Moufawad-Paul, <i>Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain</i> (Washington: Zer0, 2016), 1-16." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">57</span></a></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Yet in </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Harvest of Dragons</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (1983), Avakian found himself defending a more orthodox version of Mao Zedong Thought than he had a few years previously. This was likely done as an ideological concession to Guzmán and the PCP to convince them to join the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). The RIM was a new communist international meant to regroup Maoist forces internationally around a common banner. Considering that the PCP was waging its own guerrilla war and was one of the leading Maoist parties in the world, it would significantly boost the prestige of the RIM if they joined. However, Guzmán refused to join any international that did not adopt his formulation of Maoism. Avakian and others in the RIM ended up conceding on this point.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-58-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-57" data-hasqtip="57" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-58-6274" oldtitle="See Ely, “RCP Constitution: Control, Cult of Personality &amp; Revealing Silences.” See also Strong 1992, 245." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">58</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In 1984, the RIM was formed and counted both the PCP and the RCP among its membership. Later the RIM’s 1993 statement </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!</span></i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> announced its adherence to Maoism as the highest stage of Marxism: “Today the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement declares that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism must be the commander and guide of the world revolution.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-59-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-58" data-hasqtip="58" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-59-6274" oldtitle="</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, “Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!” </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A World to Win</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> 20 (1995).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1995-20/ll_mlm_20_eng.htm">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1995-20/ll_mlm_20_eng.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">59</span></a></span></span><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">However, the capture of Guzmán in 1992 did not mean Avakian reverted to his earlier semi-heterodoxy. Over the coming years, Avakian developed the idea that a new synthesis of communism was needed beyond Maoism. In 2003, Avakian launched a “self-coup” inside the RCP to transform the party into an organ devoted to promoting his own cult of personality and his “new synthesis of communism.” Now, the RCP presented Avakian as a leader on a level comparable to Lenin and Mao, who basically held the salvation of humanity in his hands. His “new synthesis of communism,” however, was characterized by incoherence and banality that provided no pathbreaking insights on Marxism, Stalinism, or socialist revolution.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-60-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-59" data-hasqtip="59" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-60-6274" oldtitle="See Ajith 2017 and Ely, “Nine Letters to Our Comrades.”; On the self-coup, see RCP, “A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” <i>Revcom</i>. September 2008. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/Manifesto/Manifesto.html">https://revcom.us/en/Manifesto/Manifesto.html</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">60</span></a></span></span></span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">VII. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back</span></h3><h4 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.52em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A. Spanish Civil War</span></i></h4><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Following the “opening” in </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, the RCP showed a greater willingness in scrutinizing many periods of communist history. In 1981, the party’s journal </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution </i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">looked at the Spanish Civil War with a critical eye. The RCP elaborated on a 1964 philosophical discussion between Mao and Kang Sheng that touched on the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) and the Civil War. In the conversation, Kang tells Mao that the PCE followed a rightist poli</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">cy.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-61-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-60" data-hasqtip="60" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-61-6274" oldtitle="“In their country, they did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all.’) … ‘They say the Communist Party organized an army, and then turned it over to others.’).” Mao Zedong, “Talks on Questions of Philosophy,” in <i>Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung Volume IX</i> (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 118." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">61</span></a></span></span> <span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mao was aghast and voiced agreement with Kang’s criticism of the PCE.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The article follows Kang and Mao by arguing that revolutionary opportunities in Spain were sacrificed for the sake of the Soviet Union’s pursuit of an alliance with Britain and France against Nazi Germany.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-62-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-61" data-hasqtip="61" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-62-6274" oldtitle="“The strategy of the Soviet leadership called for an alliance with the Anglo-French bloc against Germany. Nothing, including revolution, could be allowed to jeopardize the possibility of that alliance, as a Soviet-backed revolution in the British junior-partner Spain certainly would.” “The Line of the Comintern on the Civil War in Spain,” <i>Revolution </i>vol. 6, #1 (June 1981): 4. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/Spain/CivilWar/CominternOnCivilWar-RCP1981.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/Spain/CivilWar/CominternOnCivilWar-RCP1981.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">62</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Not only does the article observe that the popular front was a repudiation of Leninism, but blame was laid at the feet of Stalin himself for the defeat in Spain: “Stalin had more than a little to do with the eventual triumph of counter-revolution.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-63-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-62" data-hasqtip="62" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-63-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 61." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">63</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">While the RCP’s analysis on the Spanish Civil War does break with certain myths surrounding the conflict, when it comes to the quasi-Trotskyist organization Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), their view is decidedly Stalinist. The suppression of the POUM and radical anarchists following the May Days of 1937 marked the end of the Spanish Revolution. However, the RCP discussed the May Days in an almost agnostic manner and appeared willing to believe the falsehood that the POUM was in the pay of </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Franco: “We cannot here settle the argument as to whether [the May Days] was a deliberate provocation by the PCE to create an excuse to wipe out the forces opposed to it in Catalonia, as anarchists and Trotskyites claim down to today, or whether it was a provocation by a section of the anarchists who sought the immediate overthrow of the Republic and especially the POUM, with some egging on by Franco agents.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-64-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-63" data-hasqtip="63" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-64-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 42." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">64</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Th</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">e RCP repeated the Stalinist slander that both the POUM and anarchists were not in the revolutionary camp: “The point is this: the anarchist and POUM line (for similar reasons) was counterrevolutionary.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-65-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-64" data-hasqtip="64" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-65-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">65</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In the end, the RCP is unwilling to admit that the PCE was on the wrong side of the barricades (even if it is implied at times) and denied that the party was actively involved in quashing the Spanish revolution. For all its criticisms of the PCE and the Comintern, the RCP’s perspective remained that of a friendly critic counseling how the PCE should have acted differently.</span></p><h4 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.52em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">B. General Crisis</span></i></h4><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">It was not only in the realm of history, but also in political economy that the RCP challenged Soviet dogma on capitalist dynamics. In </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">America in Decline</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (1984) by Raymond Lotta and Frank Shannon, the Comintern’s “general crisis theory” was subjected to heavy criticism. The general crisis theory was adopted at the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928 claiming that capitalism was moribund, decadent, and on the verge of collapse. If the claims of the general crisis theory were correct, then reforms of capitalism were no longer possible, making every proletarian struggle inherently revolutionary.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-66-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-65" data-hasqtip="65" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-66-6274" oldtitle="Raymond Lotta and Frank Shannon, <i>America in Decline: An Analysis of the Developments Toward War and Revolution, in the U.S. and Worldwide, in the 1980s, Volume 1</i> (Chicago: Banner Books, 1984), 241-265. Avakian himself criticized the general crisis theory in “Conquer the World?” 18-19." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">66</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> In fact, the general crisis theory condemned any reformist strategy as both sterile and counterrevolutionary. According to Lotta and Shannon, the general crisis theory was not only mechanical and anti-Leninist, but “fed an evolutionist (and economist) political strategy; the forces of revolution would gradually accumulate against the backdrop of a static environment and, the general crisis. The system would break down and the working class would more or less ‘step into the breach.’”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-67-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-66" data-hasqtip="66" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-67-6274" oldtitle="Lotta and Shannon 1982, 262." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">67</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mike Ely of the RCP looked at the impact of the general crisis theory on the CPUSA’s political strategy in a 1981 article </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Slipping Into Darkness: “Left” Economism, the CPUSA and the Trade Union Unity League (1929-1935)</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">. Ely argued that the CPUSA saw capitalism in such a deep crisis that it was incapable of granting any reforms. This caused the CPUSA to view every economic struggle as revolutionary. Moreover, the CPUSA’s political line fostered economism which “assumes that workers don’t care about anything that doesn’t touch them personally, and don’t aspire to anything more than a full belly and a secure, peaceful life, even the line of the CP in this period where it was expecting revolution any minute, led to political work that viewed the world through the grimy windows of the factory.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-68-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-67" data-hasqtip="67" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-68-6274" oldtitle="Mike Ely, “Slipping into Darkness: ‘Left’ Economism, the CPUSA and the Trade Union Unity League (1929-1935),” <i>Revolution</i> 47 Vol. 5, #2-3, February-March 1980): 46. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-V5N0203-English-OCR-sm.pdf">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-V5N0203-English-OCR-sm.pdf</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">68</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> The CPUSA’s approach meant they ignored how social democrats and liberals still had roles to play as reformists. To combat social democrats, the CPUSA saw their task as “being the most militant and consistent defenders of the economic needs of the masses.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-69-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-68" data-hasqtip="68" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-69-6274" oldtitle="Ibid. 44." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">69</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> As a result, the Communists mimicked the social democrats, albeit sounding more “left” and militant. Ely concluded that the CPUSA abandoned Leninism since “the only way communists can successfully compete head to head with reformists within the limits of the trade-union struggle is by becoming reformists themselves-and even there, the old, original, proven reformists often have the advantage.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-70-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-69" data-hasqtip="69" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-70-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">70</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> After the turn to the popular front, the CPUSA dropped “left” from its “left economism” and became nearly indistinguishable from other reformists.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The RCP’s rejection of the general crisis theory went so far that they edited it out of </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shanghai Textbook</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (a Chinese work on political economy originally published in several editions in the mid-1970s) in 1994. In their version of </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shanghai Textbook</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, the RCP only published the second part dealing with socialism and left out the first part on capitalism since it was based on the general crisis theory.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-71-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-70" data-hasqtip="70" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-71-6274" oldtitle="“Maoism (even at its best) <i>never </i>had a sophisticated theory of capitalist political economy — and some Maoists even dredged up the worst of Comintern theory (like the General Crisis theory) to fill that gap. When we published the <i>Shanghai Political Economy textbook </i>we deliberately <i>didn’t </i>publish the second [sic] volume (on the political economy of capitalism) — because it was terrible and our intention was allow [sic] it to drift away forgotten.” Mike Ely, “Finding our own communist symbolism &amp; presentation,” <i>Kasama Project</i>, December 7, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/finding-communist-symbolism-that-says-what-we-mean/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/finding-communist-symbolism-that-says-what-we-mean/</a> ; See also <i>Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai </i>Textbook (New York: Banner Press, 1994), i." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">71</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In its criticism of the Comintern’s general crisis theory, the RCP correctly noted that capitalism is not in a state of permanent crisis and was not only capable of expansion, but often flexible enough to provide reforms. Their analysis was innovative in noting the connection between the general crisis theory and the reformist politics of the CPUSA. Yet in discarding the general crisis theory, Lotta and the RCP adopted their own flawed apocalyptic “spiral/conjuncture” theory that said World War III between the USSR and USA in the 1980s was inevitable.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-72-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-71" data-hasqtip="71" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-72-6274" oldtitle="Lotta and Frank Shannon 1984, 127-137, 148-149 and 162-169. It was only in 1999 long after the predicted World War III did not occur that Lotta criticized the spiral/conjuncture theory. See Raymond Lotta, “Notes on Political Economy,”<i> Revcom</i>. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/a/special_postings/poleco_e.htm#Section:%201">https://revcom.us/en/a/special_postings/poleco_e.htm#Section:%201</a> ; According to Mike Ely, the ideas of Louis Althusser were an unacknowledged theoretical debt in <i>America in Decline</i>. See Ely, “The RCP’s Debt to Louis Althusser: Why It Matters.”" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">72</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span></p><h4 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.52em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">C. National Nihilism</span></i></h4><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Another aspect of the popular front that the RCP criticized was its abandonment of internationalism. In the August 1980 article, “On the Question of So-Called “National Nihilism”: You Can’t Beat the Enemy W</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">hile Raising His Flag,” the RCP condemned the CPUSA for their embrace of American patriotism. The RCP said that this rot extended far beyond the CP leadership of Earl Browder: “It would be nice to pretend that revisionism started and stopped with Earl Browder. But this “easy target” method of struggle leaves too much dirt in the old CP unwashed and, even more importantly, leaves untouched many of the roots of revisionism and decay that have damaged all and destroyed some of the international communist movement over the past 50 years.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-73-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-72" data-hasqtip="72" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-73-6274" oldtitle="RCP, “On the Question of So-Called “National Nihilism”: You Can’t Beat the Enemy While Raising His Flag,” <i>Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/rcp-national.htm">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/rcp-national.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">73</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> According to the RCP, the source of this rightist turn could be found in George Dimitrov who said at the Comintern’s Seventh Congress that in the interests of anti-fascism, communists must take up the mantle of patriotism from the bourgeoisie.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In his report, Dimitrov condemned “national nihilism” whereby communists cut themselves off from the people by belittling patriotic sentiments and ignoring national achievements. The RCP argued that the deviation of “national nihilism” did not exist, but served as an excuse for the Comintern to embrace reformism by denigrating previous commitments to proletarian internationalism: “When all is said and done “national nihilism” is a straw man; the real danger has historically been shown to be falling into siding with one’s own bourgeoisie, especially when war approaches. In the imperialist countries, the banner of the nation can lead you there and nowhere else, no matter if, on the surface, this flag is raised in competition with the imperialists.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-74-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-73" data-hasqtip="73" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-74-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">74</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> For the RCP, the turn to patriotism in imperialist countries meant tailing liberals and forsaking internationalism.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In the United States, the RCP concluded that Browder’s slogan of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” proved that the CPUSA had “completely taken up the program and outlook of bourgeois democracy.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-75-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-74" data-hasqtip="74" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-75-6274" oldtitle="Ibid." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">75</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> This patriotic line was entwined with a number of rightist and anti-Leninist turns within the CPUSA that included the following: indifference to black liberation; support for American imperialism during the Second World War; a capitulation to the Democratic Party and liberalism; curtailing labor militancy in the interests of the union bureaucracy; and downgrading of any vision for socialism that involved revolution. The RCP correctly observed that the CPUSA’s defense of the stars and stripes effectively marked the death of the party as a revolutionary organization: “Such a stand may be American and definitely is bourgeois, but for a communist it is a thoroughly counter-revolutionary one, especially here in the imperialist USA in this, the era of proletarian revolution.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-76-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-75" data-hasqtip="75" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-76-6274" oldtitle="Ibid.</span></p>
<p>Criticism popular front found its way into the 1984 <i>Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement</i> (1984) that seemed to bear a decided RCP influence:</p>
<p>“First the distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy in the imperialist countries, while certainly of real importance for the Communist Parties, was treated in a way that tended to make an absolute of the difference between these two forms of bourgeois dictatorship and also to make a strategic stage of the struggle against fascism. Secondly, a thesis was developed, which held that the growing immiseration of the proletariat would create in the advanced countries the material basis for healing the split in the working class and its consequent polarisation that Lenin had so powerfully analysed in his works on imperialism and the collapse of the Second International. While it is certainly true that the depth of the crisis undermined the social base of the labour aristocracy in the advanced capitalist countries and led to real possibilities that the Communist Parties needed to make use of to unite with large sections of the workers previously under the hegemony of the Social Democrats, it was not correct to believe that in any kind of a strategic sense the split in the working class could be healed. Thirdly, when fascism was defined as the regime of the most reactionary section of the monopoly bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries, this left the door open to the dangerous, reformist and pacifist tendency to see a section of the monopoly bourgeoisie as progressive.” “Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement,” <i>Bannedthought.</i> <a href="http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf">http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf</a>. Recently, the RCP has embraced the same politics of liberal tailism that they once condemned by supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections. See Bob Avakian, “On the Immediate Critical Situation, the Urgent Need to Drive Out the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime, Voting in This Election, and the Fundamental Need for Revolution,” <i>Revcom,</i> August 1, 2020. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/a/659/bob-avakian_statement-on-the-immediate-critical-situation-en.html">https://revcom.us/en/a/659/bob-avakian_statement-on-the-immediate-critical-situation-en.html</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">76</span></a></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">While RCP forcefully rejected many of the policies associated with the popular front, their approach was not particularly new or original. Going back to the 1930s, one need only read oppositional Marxists who exposed the CPUSA’s counterrevolutionary behavior. During the 1960s, segments of the New Left along with the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society offered their own challenges to the “respectable” legacy that saturated the Old Left. Yet the biggest failing of the RCP’s approach was what they left unsaid. While Dimitrov and the Comintern were denounced for the popular front, Stalin was not indicted.</span></span></p><h4 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.52em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 400; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">D. USSR</span></i></h4><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">While the RCP continued to uphold the Soviet Union under Stalin, they did deepen some of their criticisms. In 1984, during a debate over whether the Soviet Union was socialist or social-imperialist between Raymond Lotta and Albert Szymanski, new criticisms of Stalinism were advanced. For example, Lotta criticized the adoption of Taylorism by both Lenin and Stalin. He said that Stalin was motivated by the idea of a “fortress socialism” where socialism was identified with developing the productive forces in order to overtake the advanced capitalist countries. Lotta observed that this idea of socialism meant that “mass mobilization and revolutionary politics were subordinated to that approach and that orientation.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-77-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-76" data-hasqtip="76" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-77-6274" oldtitle="Raymond Lotta, “Concluding Remarks,” in <i>The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social Imperialist? Part II: The Question Is Joined</i>, <i>Raymond Lotta vs. Albert Szymanski</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1983), 80." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">77</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> He concluded that “Stalin was actually attempting to secure socialism, but the means and methods used to do that actually had the effect of disarming large sections of the masses.”</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Implicit in Lotta’s remarks is a much more critical view of the Stakhanovite movement than was found in </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In his introd</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">uction to </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shanghai Textbook</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, Lotta argued that Mao broke with Stalin on the primacy of productive forces in constructing socialism:</span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; display: table; float: none; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 1.1em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 2em auto 0px; padding: 2em; position: relative; quotes: none; width: auto;"><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The mere increase in productive forces (economic development) will not in and of itself eliminate exploitative relations and other oppressive social and ideological relations (like patriarchy). There is, Mao emphasized, a dialectical relationship between economic development and ongoing and deep-going social and ideological transformation: “if a socialist society does not promote socially collectivistic aims, then what of socialism remains.” The key issue confronting socialist society, and what determines its overall character, is the road on which it is traveling.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-78-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-77" data-hasqtip="77" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-78-6274" oldtitle="<i>The Shanghai Textbook</i> 1994, xxv. Lotta’s introduction contains an extensive Maoist criticism of Soviet/Stalin methods of planning. In addition, see Raymond Lotta, “Socialist Planning or “Market Socialism”?” <i>Revolutionary Worker</i> 1166, September 15, 2002. <a href="https://revcom.us/a/v24/1161-1170/1166/lotta1.htm">https://revcom.us/a/v24/1161-1170/1166/lotta1.htm</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">78</span></a></span></span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Yet the RCP’s overall approach to Soviet history was fearful. They were reluctant to hear anything that would overturn their received wisdom on Stalin. During the 1980s, Mike Ely planned to write a Maoist analysis of the Soviet Purges but was “shut down” by the party for pursuing the “wrong line.”<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-79-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-78" data-hasqtip="78" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-79-6274" oldtitle="Mike Ely, “How Communists Do Their History: With Truth or Myth?” <i>Kasama Project</i>, July 12, 2009. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">79</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> After the Soviet archives were opened, the RCP refused to view any of the documents or reassess their views on the USSR. In fact, Avakian suggested that documents in the Soviet archives detailing crimes under Stalin were forgeries!<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-80-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-79" data-hasqtip="79" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-80-6274" oldtitle="“I know someone who studies these things who told me that now that they have Putin in there [heading up the Russian government], and now that they’ve dropped the mask of socialism altogether, and the Soviet Union is no longer in existence, well, now we’re supposed to believe that everything that these people claim to dig out of the archives from the old Soviet Union is the gospel truth. Before when they were KGB agents, everything they said was a lie. Somehow now they’re “disinterested” people and everything they say about the past—which they’re interested in discrediting themselves to a significant degree—somehow that’s the gospel truth and shouldn’t be questioned or looked at critically. So we need a more critical approach than that, and it is difficult to sort out, but we need to sort out more what actually did happen.” Bob Avakian, “On Communism, Leadership, Stalin, and the Experience of Socialist Society – June 21, 2009,” <i>Revcom</i>. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/avakian/on_communism-en.html">https://revcom.us/en/avakian/on_communism-en.html</a>." style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">80</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> As Ely said years later, the RCP’s understanding of Soviet history was </span></p><blockquote style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; display: table; float: none; font-family: Georgia, "Bitstream Charter", serif; font-size: 1.1em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 2em auto 0px; padding: 2em; position: relative; quotes: none; width: auto;"><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">…focused heavily on the ideas, motives and ideological/philosophical shortcomings behind Stalin’s actions. (Is the problem with Stalin really that he suffered from mechanical thinking?) The overall assessment of real living revolutions (where classes collide, where people act, where consequences are measurable) is replaced by a schematic chronology of conflicts and ideologies at the very top of the state. Meanwhile, all the insights, methods and controversies of modern history-writing have gone unacknowledged and unexplored — however much some of us tried to raise or pursue them.<span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-81-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><span class="easy-footnote" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a aria-describedby="qtip-80" data-hasqtip="80" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-bottom-81-6274" oldtitle="Ely, “How Communists Do Their History: With Truth or Myth?”" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" title=""><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">81</span></a></span></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></p></blockquote><h3 style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Playfair Display"; font-size: 1.79em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">VIII. Aground</span></h3><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">As we have seen, there were moments when the RCP appeared willing to debate and throw down the historical gauntlet. This did produce a few genuine works of insight. Yet why were these first steps by the RCP not taken any further?</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The main reason was the RCP’s adherence to the dead weight of their inherited Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Genuine debate and inquiry within the party about many topics, including Stalinism, was discouraged. Rather, discussion stayed within strict boundaries and never seriously challenged most of the sacred cows of Stalinism. This ensured that no </span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">serious Maoist analysis of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era could ever be produced. Ultimately, the RCP’s approach reeked of theoretical and historical poverty leaving them unable to understand Stalinism.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"> </p><div class="cb_p6_patreon_button" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center !important;"><div class="cb_p6_message_over_post_button" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: 20px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px;">Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.</div><a href="https://www.patreon.com/cosmonautmagazine?utm_content=post_button&utm_medium=patron_button_and_widgets_plugin&utm_campaign=&utm_term=&utm_source=https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/" rel="nofollow" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;" target="_blank"><span style="color: black;"><img src="https://cosmonautmag.com/wp-content/plugins/patron-button-and-widgets-by-codebard/images/become_a_patron_button.png" style="border: none; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; height: auto; margin: 10px 0px; max-width: 200px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle; width: 200px;" /></span></a></div><ol class="easy-footnotes-wrapper" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Muli; font-size: 16px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px;"><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-1-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists The Revolutionary Union / Revolutionary Communist Party 1968-1980 </i>(Washington: Zer0, 2014), 12-33. See also Max Elbaum, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che</i> (New York: Verso, 2002), 95-100. See also Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part One),” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton1.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton1.htm</a> ; Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part II),” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton2.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/hamilton2.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-1-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-2-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“Within a year of its publication, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 1</i> had gone through several printings and 20,000 copies were in circulation. The document made its way to every large city and college town and became “must reading” among Marxist-leaning activists. <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 1</i> combined an accessible writing style with a skill at elaborating Marxist-Leninist doctrine that was unusual for the time.”<p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">Elbaum 2002, 99. Mike Ely, then a young activist describes the impact that reading <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers</i> had on him:</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">“When I received (from afar) a copy of Red Papers 1, I was a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I read it over and over until the print started to fade — and until the many strange and difficult concepts were burned into my brain. It left me as a fierce partisan of its proposals. And I worked to circulate Red Papers 1 and 2 with everyone I met.” Mike Ely, “Red Papers 1: Calling for communist collectives,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, September 6, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/red-papers-1-calling-for-communist-collectives/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/red-papers-1-calling-for-communist-collectives/</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-2-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-3-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“The Stalin question: Stalin is the bridge between Lenin and Mao theoretically, practically, and organizationally. The successes of the world proletarian and people’s movements are a part of our history, and they are our successes, they are the successes of our class. The mistakes and errors must also be ours. We admit the mistakes of our class and its leaders, try to correct them or, failing that, try to avoid repeating them. But we will not disassociate ourselves from these errors in the opportunist manner of many bourgeois intellectuals and armchair “revolutionaries.””<p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">Bay Area Revolutionary Union, “Red Papers 1,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-1/against.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-1/against.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-3-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-4-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-4-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-5-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“Although information and propaganda were carried to the masses, and their approval won, mass ideological struggle did not progress to that necessary degree so that the masses could recognize, and thus prevent, the revisionist takeover.” Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-5-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-6-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">An official RCP document by Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas described the dissenters as follows:</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“A handful of petty-bourgeois radicals who had joined up with the RU because it seemed like “the thing to do,” argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat was fine in backward countries, filled with ”ignorant peasant masses” like Russia and China–where you had to have a “forced march” to achieve rapid economic development. But it was unnecessary in an already developed country like the United States and would be rejected by the “more cultured” people of this country. In other words, they put forward the theory of the productive forces and really saw the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship over the people. And they “couldn’t support” Joseph Stalin–“that butcher.”” Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, “Important Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive.</i> <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-history.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-history.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-6-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></span></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-7-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 77.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-7-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-8-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7: How Capitalism Has Been Restored in the Soviet Union and What It Means for the World Struggle</i> (Chicago: Revolutionary Union, 1974), 22.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-8-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-9-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 16.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-9-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-10-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-10-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-11-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-11-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-12-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“Not only did this tend to cultivate bourgeois ideas of self-interest among the Stakhanovites themselves, but also had the effect of setting the more advanced Stakhanovites apart from the masses of workers. In a few instances this even created a certain degree of hostility toward the Stakhanov [sic] movement among the workers.” Ibid. 10.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-12-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-13-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 17.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-13-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-14-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 12.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-14-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-15-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 20.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-15-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-16-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 12-13.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-16-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-17-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 13.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-17-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-18-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 103.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-18-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-19-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Bob Avakian, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist</i> (Chicago, Insight Books, 2005), 304.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-19-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-20-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Martin Nicolaus, “Critique of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i>: Metaphysics Cannot Defeat Revisionism – RU Document Fails to Show Essence of Capitalist Restoration,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ol-rp-7.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ol-rp-7.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-20-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-21-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-21-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-22-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>In a self-criticism written years later, RCP supporter Mike Ely acknowledged that <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Red Papers 7</i> was marred by its acceptance of official Soviet verdicts on the Moscow Trials: “The RCP’s Red Papers 7 (“How capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union and what this means for the world struggle” written 1974)— did some state-of-the-art communist analysis of Soviet social imperialism. But one of the truly disappointing parts of it was the crudely uncritical insertion of official Soviet verdicts on the line struggles of the 1930s. This stuck out like a sore thumb — as a lapse in both scientific methodology and integrity.” Mike Ely, “Nando on Kasama: Engagement and Audience,” Kasama Project, January 5, 2009. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/nando-a-maoist-on-engaging-trotskyism/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/nando-a-maoist-on-engaging-trotskyism/</a> ; Later RCP discussions on Trotsky were little better than cheap caricatures. See Lenny Wolff, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Science of Revolution: An Introduction</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1983), 200.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-22-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-23-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Spartacus League, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Trotskyism versus Maoism Why the U.S.S.R. Is Not Capitalist</i> (New York: Spartacus Youth Publishing Co., 1977), 66-76. For more background on the Soviet economy see Alec Nove, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">An Economic History of the USSR 1917-1991</i> (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-23-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-24-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>For more background about the RCP work in the coalfields, see Mike Ely, “Miners Right to Strike Committee,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Against the Current</i> No. 217 (March/April 2022). <a href="https://againstthecurrent.org/atc217/miners-right-to-strike-committee/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://againstthecurrent.org/atc217/miners-right-to-strike-committee/</a> ; Mike Ely, “Communists and the Miners’ Upsurge with Mike Ely,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Cosmopod</i>. <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/communists-and-the-miners-upsurge-with-mike-ely/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/communists-and-the-miners-upsurge-with-mike-ely/</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-24-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-25-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Figures in Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 221.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-25-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-26-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 183.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-26-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-27-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Bob Avakian, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revisionists Are Revisionists And Must Not Be Supported, Revolutionaries Are Revolutionaries and Must Be Supported</i> (RCP, 1977). <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Avakian/Avakian-RevisionistsAreRevisionists-1977.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Avakian/Avakian-RevisionistsAreRevisionists-1977.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-27-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-28-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Elbaum 2002, 233.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-28-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-29-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 224-228; Mike Ely, Miles Ahead and Land, “1979 Maoist streetfighting: We waved the Red Book in Deng Xiaoping’s face,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, March 2, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/1979-maoist-streetfighting-we-waved-the-red-book-in-deng-xiaopings-face/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/1979-maoist-streetfighting-we-waved-the-red-book-in-deng-xiaopings-face/</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-29-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-30-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Leonard and Gallagher 2014, 228-229. See also Revolutionary Communist Party, “New Programme and New Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” Marxists Internet Archive. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-new-pro/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/rcp-new-pro/</a> ; Among those whom the RCP did not seek to liberate were homosexuals, which the party considered a form of “bourgeois decadence.” On this shameful history of gays in the RCP and other homophobic left groups, see “Out of the Red Closet: Gay and Lesbian Experiences in the Previous Communist Movement,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, January 2012. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-Group-OutOfTheRedCloset-GayAndLesbianExperiencesInPreviousCommunistMovement.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-Group-OutOfTheRedCloset-GayAndLesbianExperiencesInPreviousCommunistMovement.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-30-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-31-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>For more on these efforts, see Mike Ely, “Nine Letters to Our Comrades,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>: 11-18. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-M.Ely-NineLettersToOurComrades-2007.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-M.Ely-NineLettersToOurComrades-2007.pdf</a> ; On the Peruvian Maoists and Raucana, see Simon Strong, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Shining Path: Terror and Revolution in Peru</i> (New York: Random House, 1992), 260-263.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-31-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-32-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“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.’”Avakian 2005, 393.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-32-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-33-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bob Avakian, </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mao Tse-tung’s Immortal Contributions</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1979), 1.</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Later, Avakian described Mao to be an irreplaceable leader and genius who should not be subject to the whims of democracy:</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“To give an extreme example, if the masses in socialist China had had the right to vote Mao out of office, and if they had exercised that right foolishly and voted him out, they would have been confronted with the stark fact that there wouldn’t have been another Mao to take his place. In reality, they would find themselves in a situation where someone would have to play a role which, from a formal standpoint, would be the same as that of Mao; that is, someone would have to occupy leading positions like that, and the division of labour in society – in particular between mental and manual labour – would mean that only a small section of people would then be capable of playing such a role. Voting Mao out of office would only mean that somebody less qualified – or, even worse, someone representing the bourgeoisie instead of the proletariat – would be playing that leadership role. You can’t get around this, and adhering to the strictures of formal democracy would be no help at all.”</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bob Avakian, “Democracy: More Than Ever We can and Must Do Better Than That,” </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A World to Win</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> 17 (1992). </span><a href="http://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1992-17/bob_avakian.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">http://bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1992-17/bob_avakian.htm</span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" /></span></a><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">According to Mike Ely, Avakian thought about himself in a comparable manner to Mao as a special leader:</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />“And Avakian is (in such discussions of Mao) laying a foundation for his own ascension to “special, rare, unique, and irreplacable” and of the “caliber” reserved only for Marx, Lenin and Mao. It was a theory trotted out first in regard to Mao, but certainly (already then in his own mind) applicable to himself.”</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">Mike Ely, “A Defense of the Party-State, Part 3: Limits of Formal Democracy & Popular Will,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, October 5, 2010. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/a-maoist-defense-of-the-party-state-part-3-more-on-limits-of-the-commune-form/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/a-maoist-defense-of-the-party-state-part-3-more-on-limits-of-the-commune-form/</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-33-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-34-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Avakian 1979, 88-93 and 146-9, 264-80.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-34-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-35-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 312.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-35-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-36-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See RCP, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Charting the Uncharted Course: Proletarian Revolution in the US!</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1981). <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/RCP-ChartingTheUnchartedCourse-1980-English-OCR-sm.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/RCP-ChartingTheUnchartedCourse-1980-English-OCR-sm.pdf</a> ; See also Bob Avakian, “The Question of Stalin and “Stalinism”,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution</i> 60, (Fall 1990): 13-17.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-36-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-37-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>According to his memoir: “My approach was, in a real sense, to look at this history anew, applying a critical approach to everything I was studying, even those things written by communists, while at the same time applying the fundamental outlook and methodology of communism to draw, from all this, the most essential lessons, positive and negative.” Avakian 2005, 421.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-37-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-38-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Bob Avakian, “Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Must and Will,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution</i> 50 (December 1981): 17. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-50.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-50.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-38-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-39-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 19.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-39-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-40-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 20.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-40-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-41-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 21.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-41-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-42-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 22.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-42-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-43-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-43-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-44-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Ibid. 17. According to Mike Ely, Avakian was likely quoting the Chilean Maoist Jorge Palacios. See Mike Ely, “The RCP’s Debt to Louis Althusser: Why It Matters,” </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, January 13, 2009. https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/sidenote-on-the-rcps-intellectual-debt-to-louis-althusser/</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br style="box-sizing: inherit;" />Maoist Internationalist Movement argues that <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Conquer the World</i> was proof that Avakian was a Trotskyist. See Maoist Internationalist Movement, “The Revolutionary Community Party-USA and Trotsky: A Literal Comparison,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/mim-rcp-trot.pdf</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">In his memoirs, Avakian claims that he saw a similar contradiction between state power and the world revolution playing out when it came to China and the Three Worlds Theory. See Avakian 2005, 304-309.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-44-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-45-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 37.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-45-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-46-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Bob Avakian, “Advancing the World Revolutionary Movement: Questions of Strategic Orientation,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution</i> 51 (Spring 1984): 8. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-51.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-51.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-46-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-47-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 11.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-47-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-48-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-48-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-49-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 25.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-49-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-50-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 28. See also “Mao comments (in two separate places) in his <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Critique of Soviet Economics</i> that, although the People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe were established as the outcome of class struggle internationally (that is. World War 21, a good job was not done in leading class struggle there in the period after the war. Thus, no solid basis for socialism in those countries was ever laid, even though significant steps were taken in transforming the ownership system. As a result of all this, the socialist camp, even as it was reaching its “height” in the early and mid-50s was already disintegrating from within. And in general the conditions were ripening for the triumph of revisionism in most of this camp and more broadly for the complete degeneration of the majority of the parties that had been part of the Third International.” Quoted in “Outline of Views on the Historical Experience of the International Communist Movement and the Lessons for Today,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolutio</i>n 49 (June 1981): 6-7.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-50-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-51-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Bob Avakian, “On Epistemology: On Knowing and Changing The World,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A World to Win</i> 32 (2006): 26. <a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/2006-32/32BobAvakian.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/2006-32/32BobAvakian.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-51-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-52-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 38. The Indian Maoist Ajith says that Avakian’s emphasis on Leninism meant he undermined the advanced nature of Maoism: “Avakianism’s demand to take Leninism as the key link in upholding and applying MLM, his understanding that Leninism is what makes the synthesis of MLM possible today, denied Maoism its position as the cutting edge.” See Ajith, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Against Avakianism</i> (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press 2017), 49.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-52-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-53-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“…there are those so-called and pretended “Maoists” who think that because of the experience of the Cultural Revolution in China the basic principle of the Leninist party, of democratic centralism and so on, has been superseded and surpassed and is no longer correct and applicable, and that some new form, that is, a new bourgeois-democratic form, can be found in which to eliminate in fact the role of the party.”Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 41. According to Mike Ely, les Maoïstes were the UCFML which Alain Badiou belonged to. See Mike Ely introduction, “Defense of the Party-State, Part 1: Leninism as the Bridge,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, October 1, 2010. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/avakians-critique-of-badiou-on-party-state-part-1-leninism-as-the-bridge/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/avakians-critique-of-badiou-on-party-state-part-1-leninism-as-the-bridge/</a> ; Of late, the RCP has condemned Badiou as a Rousseauist. See RCP, “Why Alain Badiou is a Rousseauist… And Why We Should Not Be,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revcom.</i> <a href="https://revcom.us/a/159/Badioupolemic.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/a/159/Badioupolemic.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-53-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-54-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Badiou described Mao’s position in Cultural Revolution as contradictory since he championed both insurgency and stabilization. It was a situation that Mao could find no means to escape from: “[Mao]wants [the party-state’s] renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. He knows full well in the end that by subjecting the last outpost of young revolting “leftists,” he liquidates the last margin left to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural Revolution: a line of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis—nobody does—as to the existence of the state, and because the large majority of people, after two exalted but very trying years, want the state to exist and to make its existence known, if needed with rude force.” Alain Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?” in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Polemics</i> (New York: Verso, 2006), 317.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-54-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-55-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Avakian, “Conquer the World?” 47. See also Mike Ely, “RCP Constitution: Control, Cult of Personality & Revealing Silences,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, August 12, 2008. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/cult-of-personality-purges-and-silence-on-struggle-details-of-rcps-constitution/?fbclid=IwAR2oMMkvJQ_TikDEc6LIInlPcuPsDga8TnlaiRaitq5a2-DN5w5P2ZF4Dl8" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/cult-of-personality-purges-and-silence-on-struggle-details-of-rcps-constitution/?fbclid=IwAR2oMMkvJQ_TikDEc6LIInlPcuPsDga8TnlaiRaitq5a2-DN5w5P2ZF4Dl8</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-55-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-56-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Collected Works of the Communist Party of Peru: Volume 1 – 1969-1987 (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press, 2016), 364. In 1988, the PCP formalized their synthesis of Maoism. See Communist Party of Peru, “Fundamental Documents: On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Foreign Languages Press</i>. library.redspark.nu/1988_-_Fundamental_Documents On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism <a href="https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PCP-Fundamental-Documents.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PCP-Fundamental-Documents.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-56-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-57-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“Revolutionary Warfare in Peru,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolutionary Worker</i> 227 Vol. 5, #25, October 21, 1983, 8. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/RW/1983/RW227-English-poor.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/RW/1983/RW227-English-poor.pdf</a><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">Many of the other parties that would joined the RIM had their own contending versions of Maoism or Marxism-Leninism distinct from the PCP and RCP. For instance, the Communist Party of Turkey Marxist-Leninist insisted on unity around Marxism-Leninism not Maoism. See “On the Joint Communiqué”, Open Letter to the Coordinating Committee of the International Journal <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A World to Win,</i>” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A World to Win</i> Preliminary Issue #2 (May 1982): 36-38. <a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1982-P2/AWTW-P2-TKPML.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1982-P2/AWTW-P2-TKPML.pdf</a> ; Mohan Bikram Singh, writing on behalf of the Communist Party of Nepal (Masal) condemned Avakian’s approach to Mao and Stalin. See CPN (MASAL), “Note of Dissent presented to the 2nd International Conference of Marxist-Leninist parties and organizations held in 1984,” in Mashal’s Struggle Against Trotskyism within RIM. (Kathmandu: CPN (Masal) Central Office, 1996), 16.</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">In addition, the Chilean RCP preceded the PCP by adopting Maoism in 1972. See Mike Ely, “PCR de Chile in the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement pt 2,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, September 24, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/pcr-de-chile-in-the-formation-of-the-revolutionary-internationalist-movement-pt-2/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/pcr-de-chile-in-the-formation-of-the-revolutionary-internationalist-movement-pt-2/</a> ; For more on the PCP and the “codification” of Maoism via the RIM see Joshua Moufawad-Paul, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain</i> (Washington: Zer0, 2016), 1-16.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-57-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-58-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Ely, “RCP Constitution: Control, Cult of Personality & Revealing Silences.” See also Strong 1992, 245.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-58-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-59-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, “Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!” </span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">A World to Win</i><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> 20 (1995).</span></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1995-20/ll_mlm_20_eng.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1995-20/ll_mlm_20_eng.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-59-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></span></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-60-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>See Ajith 2017 and Ely, “Nine Letters to Our Comrades.”; On the self-coup, see RCP, “A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revcom</i>. September 2008. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/Manifesto/Manifesto.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/en/Manifesto/Manifesto.html</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-60-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-61-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“In their country, they did not concern themselves with the three points: army, countryside, political power. They wholly subordinated themselves to the exigencies of Soviet foreign policy, and achieved nothing at all.’) … ‘They say the Communist Party organized an army, and then turned it over to others.’).” Mao Zedong, “Talks on Questions of Philosophy,” in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung Volume IX</i> (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 118.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-61-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-62-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“The strategy of the Soviet leadership called for an alliance with the Anglo-French bloc against Germany. Nothing, including revolution, could be allowed to jeopardize the possibility of that alliance, as a Soviet-backed revolution in the British junior-partner Spain certainly would.” “The Line of the Comintern on the Civil War in Spain,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution </i>vol. 6, #1 (June 1981): 4. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/Spain/CivilWar/CominternOnCivilWar-RCP1981.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/Spain/CivilWar/CominternOnCivilWar-RCP1981.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-62-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-63-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 61.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-63-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-64-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 42.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-64-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-65-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-65-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-66-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Raymond Lotta and Frank Shannon, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">America in Decline: An Analysis of the Developments Toward War and Revolution, in the U.S. and Worldwide, in the 1980s, Volume 1</i> (Chicago: Banner Books, 1984), 241-265. Avakian himself criticized the general crisis theory in “Conquer the World?” 18-19.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-66-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-67-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Lotta and Shannon 1982, 262.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-67-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-68-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Mike Ely, “Slipping into Darkness: ‘Left’ Economism, the CPUSA and the Trade Union Unity League (1929-1935),” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolution</i> 47 Vol. 5, #2-3, February-March 1980): 46. <a href="http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-V5N0203-English-OCR-sm.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Journals/Revolution/Revolution-V5N0203-English-OCR-sm.pdf</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-68-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-69-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid. 44.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-69-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-70-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-70-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-71-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“Maoism (even at its best) <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">never </i>had a sophisticated theory of capitalist political economy — and some Maoists even dredged up the worst of Comintern theory (like the General Crisis theory) to fill that gap. When we published the <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Shanghai Political Economy textbook </i>we deliberately <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">didn’t </i>publish the second [sic] volume (on the political economy of capitalism) — because it was terrible and our intention was allow [sic] it to drift away forgotten.” Mike Ely, “Finding our own communist symbolism & presentation,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, December 7, 2011. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/finding-communist-symbolism-that-says-what-we-mean/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/finding-communist-symbolism-that-says-what-we-mean/</a> ; See also <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai </i>Textbook (New York: Banner Press, 1994), i.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-71-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-72-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Lotta and Frank Shannon 1984, 127-137, 148-149 and 162-169. It was only in 1999 long after the predicted World War III did not occur that Lotta criticized the spiral/conjuncture theory. See Raymond Lotta, “Notes on Political Economy,”<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Revcom</i>. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/a/special_postings/poleco_e.htm#Section:%201" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/en/a/special_postings/poleco_e.htm#Section:%201</a> ; According to Mike Ely, the ideas of Louis Althusser were an unacknowledged theoretical debt in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">America in Decline</i>. See Ely, “The RCP’s Debt to Louis Althusser: Why It Matters.”<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-72-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-73-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>RCP, “On the Question of So-Called “National Nihilism”: You Can’t Beat the Enemy While Raising His Flag,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxists Internet Archive</i>. <a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/rcp-national.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/rcp-national.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-73-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-74-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-74-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-75-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-75-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-76-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Ibid.<p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;"></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">Criticism popular front found its way into the 1984 <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement</i> (1984) that seemed to bear a decided RCP influence:</p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; text-indent: 0em;">“First the distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy in the imperialist countries, while certainly of real importance for the Communist Parties, was treated in a way that tended to make an absolute of the difference between these two forms of bourgeois dictatorship and also to make a strategic stage of the struggle against fascism. Secondly, a thesis was developed, which held that the growing immiseration of the proletariat would create in the advanced countries the material basis for healing the split in the working class and its consequent polarisation that Lenin had so powerfully analysed in his works on imperialism and the collapse of the Second International. While it is certainly true that the depth of the crisis undermined the social base of the labour aristocracy in the advanced capitalist countries and led to real possibilities that the Communist Parties needed to make use of to unite with large sections of the workers previously under the hegemony of the Social Democrats, it was not correct to believe that in any kind of a strategic sense the split in the working class could be healed. Thirdly, when fascism was defined as the regime of the most reactionary section of the monopoly bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries, this left the door open to the dangerous, reformist and pacifist tendency to see a section of the monopoly bourgeoisie as progressive.” “Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bannedthought.</i> <a href="http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/Docs/RIM-Declaration-1984-A.pdf</a>. Recently, the RCP has embraced the same politics of liberal tailism that they once condemned by supporting Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections. See Bob Avakian, “On the Immediate Critical Situation, the Urgent Need to Drive Out the Fascist Trump/Pence Regime, Voting in This Election, and the Fundamental Need for Revolution,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revcom,</i> August 1, 2020. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/a/659/bob-avakian_statement-on-the-immediate-critical-situation-en.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/en/a/659/bob-avakian_statement-on-the-immediate-critical-situation-en.html</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-76-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></p></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-77-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Raymond Lotta, “Concluding Remarks,” in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Soviet Union: Socialist or Social Imperialist? Part II: The Question Is Joined</i>, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Raymond Lotta vs. Albert Szymanski</i> (Chicago: RCP Publications, 1983), 80.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-77-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-78-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Shanghai Textbook</i> 1994, xxv. Lotta’s introduction contains an extensive Maoist criticism of Soviet/Stalin methods of planning. In addition, see Raymond Lotta, “Socialist Planning or “Market Socialism”?” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revolutionary Worker</i> 1166, September 15, 2002. <a href="https://revcom.us/a/v24/1161-1170/1166/lotta1.htm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/a/v24/1161-1170/1166/lotta1.htm</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-78-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-79-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>Mike Ely, “How Communists Do Their History: With Truth or Myth?” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kasama Project</i>, July 12, 2009. <a href="https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/are-we-serious-about-communist-history-or-not/</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-79-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-80-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span>“I know someone who studies these things who told me that now that they have Putin in there [heading up the Russian government], and now that they’ve dropped the mask of socialism altogether, and the Soviet Union is no longer in existence, well, now we’re supposed to believe that everything that these people claim to dig out of the archives from the old Soviet Union is the gospel truth. Before when they were KGB agents, everything they said was a lie. Somehow now they’re “disinterested” people and everything they say about the past—which they’re interested in discrediting themselves to a significant degree—somehow that’s the gospel truth and shouldn’t be questioned or looked at critically. So we need a more critical approach than that, and it is difficult to sort out, but we need to sort out more what actually did happen.” Bob Avakian, “On Communism, Leadership, Stalin, and the Experience of Socialist Society – June 21, 2009,” <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Revcom</i>. <a href="https://revcom.us/en/avakian/on_communism-en.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.2s ease-out 0s;">https://revcom.us/en/avakian/on_communism-en.html</a>.<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-80-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li><li class="easy-footnote-single" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="easy-footnote-margin-adjust" id="easy-footnote-bottom-81-6274" style="border-color: initial; border-image: initial; border-style: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; box-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></span></span>Ely, “How Communists Do Their History: With Truth or Myth?”<a class="easy-footnote-to-top" href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/running-aground-the-rcp-and-stalinism/?fbclid=IwAR3givCRbnXy7KFfKD07TS0LmIdBNDkk8nj1mxJGqsku8IDZDSEXXfBrc4c#easy-footnote-81-6274" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; color: #f95252; display: inline-block; font: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none;"></a></li></ol>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-32517206189394632682022-05-28T00:00:00.001-04:002022-05-28T00:00:00.219-04:00Review: A Failure of Vision<p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEjQsPxgS28lWSMJvFXSqkYP_H3LvEzm_5w849pcQNGKv5gL3SNnp7X9je8gQwlKYXIA3ndxBSsqVUQ8zQD5pbOa4v9TpxUJMyEHRAwOy7su7OpCez9qNxs4M8J5eqs1FRSa6De1xdI1-yjQFNSZOBSfaITs0tLREkI-dFZT5cUOADwJmLlrgKzsJN7w/s544/harrington%20cover%20final.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="352" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEjQsPxgS28lWSMJvFXSqkYP_H3LvEzm_5w849pcQNGKv5gL3SNnp7X9je8gQwlKYXIA3ndxBSsqVUQ8zQD5pbOa4v9TpxUJMyEHRAwOy7su7OpCez9qNxs4M8J5eqs1FRSa6De1xdI1-yjQFNSZOBSfaITs0tLREkI-dFZT5cUOADwJmLlrgKzsJN7w/s320/harrington%20cover%20final.png" width="207" /></a></span></div><span style="background-color: white;"><br /><span style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px;">My friend and comrade Wayne Rossi wrote an overall positive review of my book for his <a href="https://booksfromtheleft.wordpress.com/2022/05/21/review-a-failure-of-vision/?fbclid=IwAR3vzjd3hRyJSH1Fkzty8K4J6kDMG02caeIPyYcp8f8ey3BHK4wS2IgeGHw">new blog</a>. <br /><br />Marxist historian Doug Enaa Greene’s second book is a biography of democratic socialist Michael Harrington. Profiling the author of</span><span style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px;"> </span><em style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px;">The Other America</em><span style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px;">, Greene is particularly able to glance at civil rights, antiwar, labor, and socialist movements of his time while providing a critical look at democratic socialist politics.</span></span><p></p><span style="background-color: white;"><span id="more-13" style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"></span><span style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px;"></span></span><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene’s previous book, <em>Communist Insurgent</em>, profiled the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. It is hard to imagine a starker contrast: Blanqui was a conspiratorial revolutionist who was jailed by every French state from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic, while Harrington was a thoroughgoing reformist who served on a task force for Lyndon Johnson. It is clear from both books that Greene’s sympathies lie much closer to Blanqui.</span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">A biography of Harrington is necessary in no small part because he was the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA has become the largest socialist organization in the United States since the 1930s, and in many important ways Harrington’s legacy continues through it. Indirectly, much of Greene’s commentary on Harrington’s politics is also a discussion of the role the DSA is playing today.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">The great strength of <em>A Failure of Vision</em> is that its treatment, while not sympathetic, is fair and honest in its presentation of Harrington’s life. Greene disagrees strongly with his subject, and occasionally gives voice to this; but he ably discusses his milieu and shows how Harrington’s commitments, particularly to anticommunism and Realignment, led him down a path into an ultimately ineffective reformism.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">Realignment – the idea that socialists should work to make the Democratic Party into something of a coalition party between labor, African Americans, and liberals – is the thread that leads Harrington through his time in the Socialist Party, Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, and DSA. Greene is clear that the current electoral strategy embraced by DSA, including the election of politicans like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is not fundamentally different from Realignment.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">In many ways the great irony of Harrington’s life came in the 1984 Democratic primaries, where he failed to support Jesse Jackson, whose Rainbow Coalition was in many ways exactly what Realignment was meant to capture. Greene notes that this arose from tailing the AFL-CIO leadership, which preferred more conservative candidates such as Walter F. Mondale. Harrington’s anticommunism and support of Israel put him to the right of many left-wing figures in his last decade, as they supported revolutionaries in Central America and liberation struggles in Palestine.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">The book looks with some sympathy on <em>The Other America</em>, a book on poverty that made Harrington a household name during the 1960s and helped inspire the War on Poverty under the Johnson administration. At the same time Greene shows how Harrington’s support for Johnson led him to the right of the 1960s antiwar movement. Likewise there is empathy for Harrington’s subsequent mental breakdown and his need for therapy. But he is also unafraid to show Harrington’s disgraceful treatment of SDS’s Tom Hayden and Alan Haber.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">As an appendix, Greene critically examines Harrington’s idea of “democratic Marxism.” He shows that there is not much of Marx in Harrington’s revisionist reading, trying to make a reformist of the great theorist. Many readers will probably disagree with Greene’s orthodox Trotskyist discussion of imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy, but this detracts little from a book that shows, overwhelmingly, the perils of a socialist strategy that relies upon the Democratic Party.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;">My hope is that, by presenting a fair but critical account, Greene’s book is able to show that an orientation to the Democrats is not a viable path forward for socialists. As a cautionary tale it is a necessary read.<br /><br /></span></p><p style="font-family: Newsreader, serif; font-size: 20.8px; margin-block-end: 0px; margin-block-start: var( --wp--style--block-gap ); margin-left: auto !important; margin-right: auto !important; max-width: 650px;"><span style="background-color: white;"><em><a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism">A Failure of Vision</a> </em>by Doug Greene. Zero Books, 2022.<br />ISBN 978-1-78904-723-3</span></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-8812270057957236812022-05-19T11:23:00.001-04:002022-05-19T11:23:00.161-04:00The left wing of the possible?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXr782ImHd41Sk6ytrgZEXc9pOBTJMgGreWgeZ4mAA171PCXyK5ONcpxF0i1KpQkeSGhVhKwJz1_EkXabmL3MbAOzVJw90wu8pwYKfAGw9eWd8bc_0Ym9eCagUa3-rlsUSveCyotJqjXHCPVRadFhTefoF6pLgkcy9vuQxOlOQGkNutCbJa8AY2LMAfw/s500/keach.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="258" data-original-width="500" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXr782ImHd41Sk6ytrgZEXc9pOBTJMgGreWgeZ4mAA171PCXyK5ONcpxF0i1KpQkeSGhVhKwJz1_EkXabmL3MbAOzVJw90wu8pwYKfAGw9eWd8bc_0Ym9eCagUa3-rlsUSveCyotJqjXHCPVRadFhTefoF6pLgkcy9vuQxOlOQGkNutCbJa8AY2LMAfw/s320/keach.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>Bill Keach's reviewed my <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism">Michael Harrington biography</a> for <i><a href="https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/05/the-left-wing-of-the-possible/?fbclid=IwAR2Xm6VwLrMRiqC-IDXOG5wC1lDYNAHUiazZzYJetVBvogJZg0i4Ht8AErA">Tempest Magazine</a></i>.<br /><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span class="dropcap" style="box-sizing: inherit; float: left; font-family: Raleway, sans-serif; font-size: 5.5rem; line-height: 0.75; margin: 0.12em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="background-color: white;">M</span></span><span style="background-color: white;">ichael Harrington (1928–89) is mainly known on the US Left today for two reasons. First, his 1962 book <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Other America</em> was, as Doug Greene says, “a groundbreaking and moving exposé of poverty in the United States” (60). Its “call to enlightened liberals for action to rescue the poor” (63) exerted a significant influence on the Kennedy administration and then, more consequentially, on Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” By 1965 <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Other America</em> had sold more than 70,000 copies and was in its fifth edition. Secondly, in March 1982 Harrington was instrumental in founding, and became chairman of, the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA brought together the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee that Harrington had led since its founding in 1973 (DSOC brought some 4000 of its members into DSA) and the New American Movement (which had roughly 2000 members at the time).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington’s Reagan-era DSA was different in several respects from today’s DSA—and not only in terms of its size (the financial report submitted to the 2021 DSA national convention claimed almost 95,000 members). As a member of the Rutgers-New Brunswick DSOC/DSA “local” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I never once heard members call each other “comrade.” Nor was I aware of DSA working groups with the word “revolutionary” in their titles. Although there were student-based contingents at some college campuses around the country, the overall membership of DSA was considerably older then than it is now. Despite these differences, however, the fundamental questions about DSA’s politics remain the same. Although DSA has moved to the left on some issues in recent years, its “overwhelming priority,” as Greene argues, “remains electoral politics”—and ultimately its influence on the Democratic Party. Having voted at its 2019 convention not to support any presidential candidate other than Bernie Sanders, the DSA national leadership ended up endorsing and campaigning for Joe Biden. The “dirty break” from the Democrats articulated in a resolution passed at the DSA convention remains, two years into Biden’s presidency, mainly “dirty” and no real “break.” This is the case despite radical activist interventions by local DSA working groups around the country.</span></p><aside class="pullquote" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(255, 238, 0); border-image: initial; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: 6px solid rgb(255, 238, 0); box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Raleway, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5rem; font-style: italic; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 3rem 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 3rem; position: relative;"><span style="background-color: white;"><em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A Failure of Vision</em> helps us understand what it will take to contend with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and the depressing acceptance of lesser-evilism, and to build a diverse, multiracial, defiant socialism from below…</span></aside><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">It’s clear from the title that Greene’s political biography of Harrington is openly critical—not only of Harrington himself but also of DSA and the entire tradition of social democratic reformism. The book is forcefully written and impressive in its integration of history and political analysis. It deserves to be read not only by revolutionary socialists who will for the most part share Greene’s critical perspective, but by reform socialists and liberals open to learning from the questions he raises about Harrington’s accomplishments and influence. Greene acknowledges Harrington’s abilities as a writer, his astonishing energy as an organizer and polemicist, and his stature within the Socialist International. <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A Failure of Vision</em> shows that socialists today have much to learn from the contradictions and limitations of Harrington’s career as the best-known U.S. socialist from the early 1960s until his death in 1989.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington was born in St. Louis in 1928, the only child of staunchly Catholic, Irish American, and Democratic parents. He went to Jesuit schools in St. Louis and then to the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Following his father’s wishes he entered Yale Law School, which had become “a bastion of unabashed liberalism.” He wasn’t politically active at Yale—though he did become an avid supporter of the Zionist cause in Palestine, a commitment he would retain for the rest of his life. Harrington eventually dropped out of law school and joined the graduate program in English at the University of Chicago. His main ambition at this time in his life was to become a writer. He initially kept his distance from the intense political environment of Chicago of the late 1940s and was, as he acknowledges in his 1973 autobiography <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Fragments of the Century</em>, drawn to the “Bohemian” culture of the city and a worldview that he himself saw as “distinctively aesthetic and elitist.” (65)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">By 1949, when Harrington received an MA in English from the University of Chicago, he had lost his faith in the Catholic Church. He returned to St. Louis and took a job for several months as a social worker in the Public Welfare Department of the public schools. It was this experience, he later said, that drew him into anti-poverty activism. Still restless and attracted to the life of an avant-garde artist, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York, where he took a variety of temporary jobs, wrote poetry, and took part in radical political discussions for the first time. In retrospect, he described this moment in his life as a “spiritual crisis.” Harrington decided to return to the Catholic Church on terms that would substantially influence his subsequent political direction. He took a job writing for <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Catholic Worker</em>, founded in 1927 by the socialist Dorothy Day and, as part of the Catholic Worker Movement, a notable force on the U.S. Left. This was Harrington’s first opportunity to write for a mass audience. He came to know other prominent New York writers on the Left, such as critic and <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Partisan Review</em> editor Dwight Macdonald, and began to read seriously in the Marxist tradition.</span></p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6453" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_6453" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 2rem 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 800px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-6453" data-attachment-id="6453" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-caption="<p>Michael Harrington, 1988. <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg#/media/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg">Photo</a> by Bernard Gotfyrd. </p>
" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="490px-Michael_Harrington,_author" data-large-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/490px-Michael_Harrington_author.jpg" data-medium-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/490px-Michael_Harrington_author-204x300.jpg" data-orig-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/490px-Michael_Harrington_author.jpg" data-orig-size="490,720" data-permalink="https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/05/the-left-wing-of-the-possible/490px-michael_harrington_author/" height="450" loading="lazy" src="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/490px-Michael_Harrington_author-204x300.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; float: none; font-size: 0.75rem; height: auto; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px auto 0.375rem; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-6453" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.75rem; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;">Michael Harrington, 1988. <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg#/media/File:Michael_Harrington,_author.jpg" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;">Photo</a> by Bernard Gotfyrd.</span></figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">At a March 1952 protest Harrington met Bogdan Denitch, a Yugoslavian exile from the Nazis who was then a student at the City University of New York and a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth organization attached to the Socialist Party of America (SPA). Harrington soon joined the YPSL. He and Denitch, along with other YPSL members, opposed the Socialist Party’s support for the Korean War. Denitch was a strong supporter of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League (ISL), which also opposed the war. In August 1953, along with 37 other members of the YPSL, Harrington and Denitch voted to leave the SPA. The following February they joined forces with Shachtman’s ISL under the banner of the “Young Socialist League” (YSL). According to Greene, despite the ISL/YSL’s small numbers, “Harrington was optimistic that they would lead the forthcoming socialist revolution.” (25)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington credited Shachtman with “introduc[ing] me to the vision of democratic Marxism” and to the “theory of bureaucratic collectivism.” Some fifteen years earlier, Shachtman had broken with the mainstream Trotskyist movement’s perspective that the Soviet Union was “a degenerated workers’ state” or “a worker’s state with bureaucratic distortions.” He insisted instead that Joseph Stalin had created “a bureaucratic collectivist evil empire” (the latter phrase is from Harrington’s book <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Socialism</em>, published in 1970) that had to be opposed at all political costs. Shachtman and the ISL/YSL saw World War II as “a struggle between different warring empires” and insisted that “Marxists should support none of them” (28).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the case of the Shachtmanite movement that Harrington joined in 1954, this “third camp” position had also come to mean moving away from revolutionary Marxism (34) altogether rather than advancing its original vision. As Greene demonstrates, many of the basic tenets of Harrington’s “democratic socialism”—especially the priority given to Democratic Party “Realignment”—had their roots in Shachtman’s move to the right.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the 1950s, with the U.S. Communist Party in disarray and the SPA shrinking in size and influence, regroupment was inevitably on the agenda. The Socialist Party, reduced to under 700 dues-paying members and threatened with losing its formal affiliation to the Socialist International, decided to merge with the tiny Social Democratic Federation to form the Socialist Party of America-Social Democratic Federation (SPA-SDF). At the same time, Shachtman pronounced the ISL/YSL vanguard project no longer viable and argued “that the American left needed a Debsian style broad-tent social-democratic party that would be untainted by communism.” (43) In 1958, when the ISL dissolved itself, its members were able to take over the new but aimless SPA-SDF and fashion it into a revived Socialist Party. Harrington, although now approaching thirty, became leader of the SPA’s reconstituted youth wing (YPSL). He spoke widely on college campuses in the hope of recruiting students to the new version of the Socialist Party.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the 1960s realignment became the central focus of Harrington’s political work. In the first issue of a biweekly paper he edited called <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">New America</em>, Harrington offered the following definition of “realignment”:</span></p><blockquote style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: none; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Open sans", sans-serif; font-size: 0.9rem; font-style: italic; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; line-height: 1.75; margin: 1.5rem 1.5rem 1.5rem 3rem; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; position: relative;"><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">“American socialism must concentrate its efforts on the battle for political realignment, for the creation of a real second party that will unite labor, liberals, Negros, and provide them with an instrument for principled debate and effective action. Such a party as the Democratic Party will be when the Southern racists and certain corruptive elements have been forced out of it.” (52–53)</span></p></blockquote><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the speeches I heard Harrington give in the late 1970s and 1980s, his main way of invoking—and defending—this vision of realigning the Democrats was to refer to “the left wing of the possible,” or sometimes to “the left wing of reality.” The “democratic left,” according to Harrington, works within the Democratic Party not “to maintain that institution but to transform it.’” (56; quoted from <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Towards a Democratic Left</em>, 1968, 294).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene shows persuasively that Harrington’s vision of realigning the Democrats along these lines, “[f]or all its theoretical sophistication,” mistakenly assumed that the Democratic Party was “a loose coalition of diverse interest groups” that could be “captured” by socialists, rather than “a capitalist-controlled party” of the ruling class that cultivated the support of the working class and minorities but ultimately subordinated the real interests of these groups to its own agenda. (57–58)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington’s orientation towards the Democratic Party was reinforced by the reception of <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Other America</em> in the years following its publication in 1962. The Kennedy administration was already planning an anti-poverty campaign, and when an anti-poverty task-force was created in early 1963, Harrington’s book was central to its thinking. This continued to be the case when Johnson assumed the presidency following Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was formally launched in the State of the Union Address in February 1964 ahead of his landslide win over the reactionary Barry Goldwater. Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps, was asked to form a new taskforce and invited Harrington to be part of it. Harrington accepted. He insisted that Johnson’s version of the welfare state was “a necessary stepping stone on the road to socialism” (70).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">With the intensification of campus-based activism led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the early 1960s, Harrington saw a vital new left arena in which the YPSL could intervene. He participated actively in the 1962 SDS conference at Port Huron, Michigan, under the banner of its forerunner, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), and made the case that student activists needed to see the civil rights and labor movements as crucial allies. The <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Port Huron Statement</em> issued by the conference rejected “the kind of virulent anticommunism favored by Harrington” (81), but in other respects it reflected the interventions of Harrington and his fellow SLID members</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">When it came to the civil rights movement, some on the left saw the emergence of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in the months leading up to the 1964 Democratic Convention as an affirmation of Harrington’s realignment strategy. But the Democrats refused to seat the MFDP’s primarily Black alternative slate of delegates and instead offered a demeaning compromise, which Harrington accepted on the grounds of “political practicality.” So much for realigning the Democratic Party.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In the months following Johnson’s election in 1964 the growing U.S. military intervention in Vietnam fueled a serious antiwar movement. Prior to the election, Harrington argued that though Johnson was heading towards war in Vietnam, he was a significantly lesser evil than Barry Goldwater, who was likely to lead the country into World War III. From his work with Shachtman and the ISL/YSL, Harrington inherited an increasingly critical attitude toward Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh because of their perceived Stalinism. When SDS and other antiwar groups called for a march in Washington DC on April 21, 1965, Harrington criticized “SDS’s willingness to work with communists and Trotskyists” and argued that such involvement would “alienate liberals and moderates.” (94) The march turned out to be the biggest antiwar protest to that point in US history: instead of the 3,000 participants SDS predicted, 25,000 took part. For SDS and other antiwar radicals, Greene observes, “democratic socialists like Michael Harrington were no longer seen as allies but were part of the Establishment [that SDS was] fighting against.” (100)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">On March 31, 1968, largely because of the growing momentum of the antiwar movement, Johnson surprised everyone by announcing that he would not run again for president. Harrington was quick to back the new frontrunner, antiwar Congressman Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. But when Robert Kennedy entered the race, Harrington switched his support. Speaking at a campaign stop with United Farmworkers leader Cesar Chavez and SNCC leader John Lewis, Harrington saw “a socialist [himself] together with organized labor and a civil rights activist” as “the realization of Realignment” (102). When Kennedy was assassinated following his June 5 primary victory in California, Harrington’s hopes “lay in ruins” (102). His subsequent support for the eventual Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was “straight lesser-evilism” (103; Greene’s quotation is from Harrington’s 1985 book <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">Taking Sides: The Education of a Militant Mind</em>, 149).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington’s ascendancy represented a victory for the growing conservatism of Shachtman’s influence inside the Socialist Party. Greene calls his chapter on Harrington’s politics during the mid-1960s “The Tightrope,” and with good reason. Harrington shared Shachtman’s hatred for New Left radicalism, but he wouldn’t dismiss the movement <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">in toto</em>.” (109) He also came to see Shachtman’s support for the most conservative layer of the labor bureaucracy as a threat to the cause of realignment. Yet in the 1968 strike of New York teachers, when United Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker blamed “black antisemitism” for a spate of recent firings and turned a majority of Black New Yorkers against the union, Harrington organized support for Shanker. Though the UFT won almost all its demands, its victory strengthened the right, damaged the liberal-labor-Black alliance, and seriously threatened both Harrington’s and Shachtman’s increasingly divergent approaches to a strategy of realignment.</span></p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6454" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_6454" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 2rem 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 800px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-6454" data-attachment-id="6454" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-caption="<p>Police intervene to separate striking teachers from Black community members during the infamous 36-day 1968 strike, supported by Harrington. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicknormal/51007997208/in/photolist-5YK2Je-9rVTvP-9rV48c-2hYGzFr-82S8yq-8svPsD-6z2eiq-boA4g9-21FXzkw-2kHpjtJ">Photo</a> by Nick Normal.</p>
" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="1968 teacher strike" data-large-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1968-teacher-strike.jpg" data-medium-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1968-teacher-strike-300x225.jpg" data-orig-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1968-teacher-strike.jpg" data-orig-size="800,600" data-permalink="https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/05/the-left-wing-of-the-possible/1968-teacher-strike/" height="450" loading="lazy" src="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1968-teacher-strike-300x225.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; float: none; font-size: 0.75rem; height: auto; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px auto 0.375rem; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-6454" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.75rem; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;">Police intervene to separate striking teachers from Black community members during the infamous 36-day 1968 strike, supported by Harrington. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nicknormal/51007997208/in/photolist-5YK2Je-9rVTvP-9rV48c-2hYGzFr-82S8yq-8svPsD-6z2eiq-boA4g9-21FXzkw-2kHpjtJ" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;">Photo</a> by Nick Normal.</span></figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">By 1969 “the hostility between Shachtman and Harrington in the Socialist Party was boiling over.” (112) It reached a peak during the 1972 election, when the SP’s faint support for George McGovern, whom the Shachtman faction accused of being soft on communism, was at odds with Harrington’s belief that “McGovern is the closest thing to a Socialist to run for President since Norman Thomas.” (116) Harrington resigned as co-chairman of the SP before the election, on October 22. The SP renamed itself the Social Democrats,USA in December, and the following June Harrington resigned from the party.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Even before his resignation, Greene says, Harrington “was laying the foundations for a new socialist organization.” (119) In February 1973, he headed a weekend conference at New York University called, “The Future of the Democratic Left.” A few months later he and five hundred of his associates met in New York to found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), with Harrington as chair.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">With only 250 “solid” members and a tiny budget, DSOC faced an uphill battle. It grew modestly but steadily during the 1970s, created a youth wing in 1975, and by 1980 could claim around a thousand members. DSOC supported reforms and worked to move the Democrats to what it regarded as the left. But to an important degree DSOC remained isolated from the liberal and labor allies it worked hard to cultivate. In the run-up to the 1976 election Harrington ended up supporting Jimmy Carter. He later argued that the party’s platform that year “was probably the most liberal in the history of the Democratic party” (127; quoting <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography</em>, 104). Harrington’s hopes were boosted when Carter won the election and the Democrats gained large majorities in both the House and the Senate. But then, in the wake of the severe recession of 1974–75, the Carter administration delivered not New Deal reforms “but cutbacks and austerity.” (130) Carter was nominated again in 1980 and lost catastrophically to Ronald Reagan.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Out of the frustrations of the Carter years came a plan by Harrington and other founding DSOC members to expand by joining forces with the New American Movement (NAM), created in 1971 by former SDS and New Left activists. In March 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America was founded. Harrington was elected chair, along with a national board dominated by former DSOC members such as Irving Howe, William Winpisinger (president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers), feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich, and Manning Marable (distinguished professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University). With some 6,000 members, DSA was “the largest democratic socialist organization in the United States since the Socialist Party in the 1930s” (137)—a significant but sobering reality.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Reagan’s attacks on the working class during his first term—especially his firing in 1981 of striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)—showed that the AFL-CIO leadership was unwilling to mobilize a serious rank-and-file fightback. Harrington and DSA were aware of the problem but reluctant to go against their allies in the union bureaucracy. Similarly, when the Reagan administration began to provide support for right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua and for Islamic fundamentalist fighters in Afghanistan, Harrington was verbally critical but insisted that he was being so “in the name of the national security of the United States” (140; quoting Harrington and Howe, “Voices from the Left,” <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">New York Times</em>, 17 June 1984).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">My strongest memory of being a DSA member during the Reagan years was traveling by bus to Washington D.C. with other Rutgers DSA members on August 27, 1983 for the twentieth anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington. More than 250,000 civil rights activists were on the mall that blistering day. The most vivid of the speakers was Jesse Jackson, who told those of us in the crowd, “Our day has come.”</span></p><figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-6449" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_6449" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 2rem 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 800px;"><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-6449" data-attachment-id="6449" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-caption="<p>Jesse Jackson at a 1984 voter rally at Howard University. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckp/33049225/in/photolist-3Vooe-dDZ46u-dDZ1SE-dDZ22W-dDTFyR-63GpHd-dEgyQ5-2d4CKq8-5785mB-5Xt1vF-xxEYsW-5TMPyT-auzLuy-auzLBd-qUrJ21-TVqWej-9unZwk-TznajJ-5r2Ato-26owYes-NRwByF-2exQq5Z-cwYRfJ-ootkCq-TXLiqr-SVELAH-28XJ9rh-SVELzk-Tznbf1-U6HVey-U6HVzy-TXLiVp-iHeXxu-8cnakb-TXLjW2-c2KasW-vtsdV8-TznaWf-TXLj4F-TznbmU-SSWKkU-SSWHuu-TznaWA-TznbnW-27LofK6-c2Kkuh-8qbksJ-U6HVDw-c2Kk5m-c8EX7L">Photo</a> by Chuck Patch.</p>
" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="jessejackson" data-large-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/jessejackson.jpg" data-medium-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/jessejackson-300x198.jpg" data-orig-file="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/jessejackson.jpg" data-orig-size="800,528" data-permalink="https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/05/the-left-wing-of-the-possible/jessejackson/" height="450" loading="lazy" src="https://www.tempestmag.org/v01_2020/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/jessejackson-300x198.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; display: block; float: none; font-size: 0.75rem; height: auto; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px auto 0.375rem; max-width: 100%; position: relative;" width="800" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-6449" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.75rem; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.75; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white;">Jesse Jackson at a 1984 voter rally at Howard University. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckp/33049225/in/photolist-3Vooe-dDZ46u-dDZ1SE-dDZ22W-dDTFyR-63GpHd-dEgyQ5-2d4CKq8-5785mB-5Xt1vF-xxEYsW-5TMPyT-auzLuy-auzLBd-qUrJ21-TVqWej-9unZwk-TznajJ-5r2Ato-26owYes-NRwByF-2exQq5Z-cwYRfJ-ootkCq-TXLiqr-SVELAH-28XJ9rh-SVELzk-Tznbf1-U6HVey-U6HVzy-TXLiVp-iHeXxu-8cnakb-TXLjW2-c2KasW-vtsdV8-TznaWf-TXLj4F-TznbmU-SSWKkU-SSWHuu-TznaWA-TznbnW-27LofK6-c2Kkuh-8qbksJ-U6HVDw-c2Kk5m-c8EX7L" style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out 0s;">Photo</a> by Chuck Patch.</span></figcaption></figure><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">In 1984 Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition mounted a presidential primary campaign that, as Greene puts it, “had all the hallmarks of [Harrington’s] Realignment with a social-democratic program and support from labor unions, blacks and progressives” (141). Jackson also spoke out against US intervention in Central America, met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and Cuban president Fidel Castro, and broke with the Democrat’s persistent Zionism [by] supporting the formation of an independent Palestinian state.” Jackson’s primary run offered “everything that Michael Harrington expected from a Realignment campaign,” Greene argues. Yet Harrington “willfully ignored it”—despite Manning Marable’s support for Jackson. The eventual Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, moved to the right in response to Reagan’s popularity instead of to the left as represented by the Jackson campaign. The result? Reagan carried every state except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Greene provides a trenchant overview: “Just a scant four years before, Michael Harrington had predicted that a Reagan victory would open the Democratic Party to the left. Now the opposite was occurring as the party swung to the right and ditched its commitment to New Deal liberalism” (143).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">When Jackson ran again in the 1988 Democratic primaries he toned down what most Democrats regarded as his “extreme” positions. This earned him Harrington’s and DSA’s support. He even asked for Harrington’s advice in writing some of his speeches. But the nomination went to a more cautious, low-key white liberal, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Harrington was quick to support Dukakis. As a comment on this outcome Greene quotes Lance Selfa’s 2008 Haymarket book <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Democrats: A Critical History</em>: “Instead of DSA influencing the Democrats, the Democrats influenced DSA” (148).</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Less than a year after the 1988 election, Michael Harrington died of cancer. Green’s “Conclusion: The Legacy” notes that by this time DSA had moved even further away from its previous realignment strategy: “If we once positioned ourselves as the left wing of the possible, there is now no ‘possible’ to be the left wing of” (DSA’s “Where We Stand,” www.dsausa.org/about/where.html, quoted in Selfa, 229 and 283 n.).</span></p><aside class="pullquote" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(255, 238, 0); border-image: initial; border-left: none; border-right: none; border-top: 6px solid rgb(255, 238, 0); box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Raleway, sans-serif; font-size: 1.5rem; font-style: italic; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 3rem 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 3rem; position: relative;"><span style="background-color: white;">Harrington’s Marx…“bears little relation to the actual one since [Marx’s] revolutionary vision is effaced and he is transformed into a mild-mannered reformer . . . strikingly similar to Michael Harrington himself.” (177)</span></aside><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">With discerning insight Greene follows developments in DSA from the break with Harrington’s vision of realignment in the 1990s through the debates around a “dirty break” from the Democrats during the period leading up to and through the 2020 election. Greene insists that “[a]ll the factions in DSA are formally committed to the democratic socialist road to power that Michael Harrington would have felt quite comfortable with.” This generalization overlooks DSA working groups organized around revolutionary perspectives that Harrington wouldn’t have tolerated, such as the Afro-Socialist Caucus. But Greene is convincing when he argues: “When it comes to an orientation to the Democratic Party and ‘democratic-socialist’ reformism, Michael Harrington’s politics remain the ‘common sense’ of DSA.” (159)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Greene’s book ends with an “Appendix: The Meaning of Democratic Marxism” that evaluates Harrington’s considerable body of theoretical writing on a “real” Karl Marx who was “the foe of every dogma, champion of human freedom and [a] democratic socialist” (165, quoting Harrington’s 1976 book <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Twilight of Capitalism</em>, 2). Harrington’s Marx, Greene demonstrates, “bears little relation to the actual one since [Marx’s] revolutionary vision is effaced and he is transformed into a mild-mannered reformer . . . strikingly similar to Michael Harrington himself.” (177)</span></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; font-family: "Merriweather Sans", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: no-discretionary-ligatures; margin: 0px 0px 1.2rem; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><span style="background-color: white;">Today the US left, reformist as well as revolutionary, is confronted with challenges greater even than those faced by Harrington and his contemporaries. <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">A Failure of Vision</em> helps us understand what it will take to contend with the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and the depressing acceptance of lesser-evilism, and to build a diverse, multiracial, defiant socialism from below that can contend with the ravages of global capitalism in all its forms. The fight for reforms needs socialists who take reforms seriously but also insist on looking beyond them to the real possibility of creating a society free of systemic oppression and exploitation.</span></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6767427751079606754.post-55749822162922723892022-03-28T15:20:00.001-04:002022-03-28T15:20:00.148-04:00A Failure of Vision Book Review<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsZ19Jir3obBBUMTBiHDoNhQOJhHttDIGgP3FmG5QtCj_-ZSJzt7uJEeCez15FM8HPJwJIEuWHkQ8f2NH-RVbkKs5QhckPnoSOhrQ80EmYc-63PRVCHUSCSf4rJbQmnp-uYiJhGo6vNRkMlH4bKH3bH2THk8MHozh2bkXVSCFhs-cOg3PHYbQxaC9hLA=s680" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="680" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgsZ19Jir3obBBUMTBiHDoNhQOJhHttDIGgP3FmG5QtCj_-ZSJzt7uJEeCez15FM8HPJwJIEuWHkQ8f2NH-RVbkKs5QhckPnoSOhrQ80EmYc-63PRVCHUSCSf4rJbQmnp-uYiJhGo6vNRkMlH4bKH3bH2THk8MHozh2bkXVSCFhs-cOg3PHYbQxaC9hLA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Shalon van Tine wrote first book (positive!) review for my upcoming biography of Michael Harrington for <i><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/13/a-failure-of-vision/">Counterpunch Plus</a>.</i></span><p></p><div class="post_content" style="font-family: "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 16.781px; margin: 0px; max-width: 680px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Doug Greene. <a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism" style="color: #333333; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><em style="color: #111111; font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism</em></a>. London: Zero Books, 2022. 280 pages. Paperback. ISBN 9781789047233.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) currently boasts being the largest socialist organization in the United States with over 92,000 members. According to its website, the DSA focuses on four key issues: healthcare, labor unions, environmentalism, and electoral strategy. However, that last goal has arguably been the main focal point since DSA supported the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders. That electoral politics have been the center of attention for DSA is no accident: it is the core vision of its founder, Michael Harrington. For Harrington, the only way socialists could make waves in American politics would be to work within the established party system. If socialists could move members of the Democratic Party to the left, then the party would make meaningful reforms that would help working and oppressed people. Unfortunately, this strategy of realignment has continually failed to push the party leftward. In his book, <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">A Failure of Vision</em>, Doug Greene traces the genealogy of Harrington’s thought and its fundamental impact on the DSA today.<a href="https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/failure-vision-michael-harrington-democratic-socialism" style="color: #333333; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-236537" height="266" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 170px) 100vw, 170px" src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-08-at-10.45.23-AM.png" srcset="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-08-at-10.45.23-AM.png 462w, https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Screen-Shot-2022-03-08-at-10.45.23-AM-403x630.png 403w" style="border: 0px; display: block; float: right; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;" width="170" /></a></p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Harrington is largely remembered for his 1962 book on poverty in the United States, <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">The Other America</em>. Despite being known as “the man who discovered poverty,” Harrington grew up in an upper-middle-class Irish American family and was sheltered from directly experiencing the worst effects of the Great Depression. Influenced by his mother’s volunteer work with the Catholic Church, Harrington pursued a Jesuit education at the College of the Holy Cross. His father hoped he would become a lawyer like him, so after graduating, he enrolled in Yale Law School. Once there, his Catholic conservatism would be challenged by his left-liberal and socialist professors and colleagues. But Harrington’s politics remained influenced by the anticommunism of his day. It would take Harrington moving to Chicago to begin to see the exploitative effects of capitalism firsthand. Choosing not to finish his law degree, he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study writing instead. After graduating in 1949 with his master’s degree in literature, Harrington took a job as a social worker. During his first assignment in a sharecropper district, he recalled the horrible smells of backed-up toilets, rotting food, and decaying buildings, compelling him to spend the rest of his life “trying to obliterate that kind of house and to work with the people who lived there.”</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Harrington decided to become a writer, so he moved to Greenwich Village, the intellectual and artistic hub that had boasted well-known communists and anarchists, such as John Reed, Emma Goldman, and Max Eastman. He landed a writing gig with <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Life</em> that kept him afloat, but with the onset of the Korean War, he received a much-dreaded draft notice. Despite being a pacifist, he could not register as a conscientious objector since he had abandoned his religious membership with the Catholic Church. Trying to avoid taking up arms, he enlisted in the Army Medical Reserve. This spiritual crisis he faced during the war prompted him to return to the Church where he felt he could put his fledgling leftist ideas in practice by getting involved with the Catholic Worker Movement, an organization dedicated to both nonviolence and alleviating poverty. He quickly landed a job writing on left-leaning topics for the <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Catholic Worker</em>. In 1952, Harrington was finally able to reach a widescale audience in a public debate with conservative William F. Buckley, who considered him a formidable adversary. However, after many debates between Harrington and his colleague Dorothy Day about atheism, socialism, and Marxism, Harrington began to feel that the Catholic Worker Movement did not have a strong working-class base (not to mention he was losing his religious faith). He decided to join the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and break with the Church for a second time.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">In 1953, the Workers Defense League (WDL) hired Harrington to handle the organization’s correspondence and newsletter. The WDL mainly focused on the infringement of civil liberties under McCarthyism. The WDL also had ties to the Socialist Party of America (SPA). When the SPA openly supported the Korean War, Harrington found himself “leading the charge against the Socialist Party’s pro-war position.” In 1954, after some debate, the YPSL formally cut ties with the SPA and fused with Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League (ISL) to form the Young Socialist League (YSL). Shachtman was an important political influence on Harrington’s thought. As Greene points out, Harrington adopted Shachtman’s “deep-rooted anticommunism” and his view that “the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist evil empire.” Harrington also took from Shachtman “an adaptation to social democracy, alliances with the labor bureaucracy, and support for ‘realignment’ in the Democratic Party.” While Harrington’s views did not always align with Shachtman, his strong political influence could be seen throughout Harrington’s political evolution.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Throughout the 1950s, Harrington continued to write and make connections with other distinguished left-leaning thinkers and writers. Most notable of these was Irving Howe, a key figure in the New York Intellectuals, a loose affiliation of former communists who became disillusioned by Stalinism and tried to adapt their Marxism to a more liberal-adjacent, American-friendly kind of socialism. Howe founded the magazine <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Dissent</em>, which sought a middle ground between the prevailing liberalism in the United States and the communism of the Soviet Union. Howe argued for a “long-range socialist perspective,” one that aligned well with Harrington’s worldview, but not Shachtman’s, prompting Shachtman to forbid ISL members from writing for <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Dissent</em>. Harrington was not dissuaded, however, and YSL passed a resolution embracing <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Dissent</em> as a much-needed forum for the evolving socialist politics of their particular strain. The magazine allowed Harrington to refine his own political positions, and he would continue to write for <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Dissent</em> for many years.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">In 1957, the SPA, then headed by longtime socialist and pacifist Norman Thomas, merged with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and absorbed Shachtman’s ISL after its dissolution a year later. This reinvigorated Socialist Party (SP-SDF) sent Harrington around the country to recruit students. Harrington noted that the country was experiencing a “mood of change” and that, even though the Democrats supported capitalism, socialists had to accept that the Democratic Party was “the only game in town.” As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Harrington felt that socialists should prioritize civil rights activism to widen the left’s base. These changing social conditions provided the groundwork for Harrington’s key theoretical position: realignment. Having seen the ways the labor movement had become allied with the Democratic Party, he figured that the best route for socialists would be to work within this established institution rather than to fight against it, calling the strategy “the left wing of realism.” However, Harrington miscalculated the impact that leftwing interest groups would have on the Democratic Party once elected to office. Greene argues that Harrington’s failure to direct the left to develop its own independent socialist organization doomed his realignment strategy from the start.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Despite his overconfidence in the Democratic Party, Harrington made an important contribution to the bigger discussion on poverty in the United States with his seminal text, <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">The Other America</em>. In the early 1960s, the mainstream narrative presumed that postwar affluence meant that the problem of American poverty would soon be solved. However, <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">The Other America</em> demonstrated that, contrary to these assumptions, almost 50 million people were still living in poverty, nearly a third of the country’s population at the time. Rather than using these discoveries as a platform for socialists, however, Harrington called upon enlightened liberals to take up the poor’s cause by expanding social programs and civil rights legislation. The book might have gone unnoticed had it not been for Dwight Macdonald’s favorable review in the <em style="font-family: SSit; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">New Yorker</em>, which came to the attention of the Kennedy administration’s anti-poverty task force. When Sargent Shriver (the director of the Peace Corps) reached out to Harrington to be a part of the task force, Harrington viewed his participation as a pragmatic opportunity to make some change, even though he admitted that the program did not go far enough. Harrington worried, though, that if Republicans took power, the attention to the War on Poverty would disappear, so he encouraged leftists to delay their revolutionary hopes and continue to vote for Democratic candidates so that these social programs would not be abandoned.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">The rise of the New Left presented a unique set of challenges for Harrington’s thought. On one hand, he welcomed student radicalism as a vehicle for reviving the left. But, on the other hand, he worried that their ideological optimism might succumb to the “totalitarian” form of communism he wanted to avoid. To prevent these perceived pitfalls, Harrington wanted a broad organization to attract youthful activists that was not explicitly connected to any particular party. What emerged was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). SDS grew out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a student-centered activist group founded in the 1940s as the youth wing of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), an organization with which Harrington worked closely. SDS cemented their ideological stance in their manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Even though the manifesto advocated for civil liberties and ending poverty, Harrington still took issue with its leniency on communism, despite the fact that the statement claimed to be in opposition to the Soviet system. After Harrington raised objections to the statement at the Port Huron conference and advised LID to cut off SDS’s funding, SDS toned down the language in the Port Huron Statement, making it less critical of liberalism and solidifying their anticommunist stance. For Harrington’s realignment to work, he needed these new radicals to abandon any residual revolutionary attitudes that would hinder his vision for slower, more moderate reforms.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">By the mid-1960s, opposition to the Vietnam War became a crucial focus of activism for the left, and SDS organized an antiwar march in Washington, D.C., which would be one of the largest protests in United States history up to that point. While Harrington agreed with the sentiment, he did not approve of SDS’s cooperation with communists out of a fear that their inclusion would alienate liberals and moderates. He argued that an antiwar movement in America would only be effective if it “disassociates itself from any hint of being an apologist for the Vietcong.” He also took issue with the burning of draft cards and any kind of militant antiwar action, insisting that change should come from within established “democratic forms” and claiming that these protesters had developed a “radical chic.” SDS eventually tired of Harrington’s anticommunism and cut ties. Harrington stuck by his conviction that realignment was the best way for the left to achieve its goals, so during the 1968 presidential election, he supported the Democratic Party, even though nominee Hubert Humphrey supported the Vietnam War. While he admitted that Humphrey was not an ideal candidate, he reasoned that he would still be better for the poor and for minorities than “four years of Nixon,” and he said that his decision in supporting him was “straight lesser-evilism.”</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Disagreements about the Vietnam War and electoral candidates caused tensions between Harrington and other Socialist Party members. The Socialist Party decided to stop running independent socialist candidates in presidential elections and, hoping to shed the baggage that came with its name, changed their name to the Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Harrington no longer felt at home with the organization, so he resigned from the Socialist Party and quickly formed a new group, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). At its start, the DSOC had about 250 members with connections to students, labor unions, and, of course, the Democrats.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">During the 1970s, DSOC membership reached 4000 members and had links to prominent liberal politicians within the Democratic Party. However, the group needed members who stemmed from more radical roots to ensure its socialist vision. Harrington decided to reach out to these former comrades with the hope of creating a broader unity among the left. One group that particularly interested him was the New American Movement (NAM), a socialist organization that stemmed from the ideologies of the 1960s New Left. The DSOC began working closely with NAM, and the two organizations considered a merger. However, some ideological tensions remained, as NAM members were wary of Harrington’s anticommunism and support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. After much debate, the two groups finally agreed to support a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In 1982, the organizations officially merged, forming the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Despite the fact that realignment had not yet worked, Harrington still felt the best way to gain an advantage was to support the Democrats, claiming that “everyone on the left agrees that the Democratic Party, with all its flaws, must be our main political arena.” This approach should have fit well with Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. Jackson had been an influential civil rights leader and wished to expand the welfare state. His Rainbow Coalition had a strong black and working class base, plus he eschewed much of the Cold War rhetoric that had become commonplace in American politics at the time. Yet, Harrington ignored his campaign and instead stuck with the safer choice of Walter Mondale. But support for the Mondale campaign proved shortsighted. As Greene notes, “The AFL-CIO and DSA’s entire lesser evil strategy of ‘Anybody But Reagan’ had failed.” Reagan beat Mondale in a landslide victory, winning 525 electoral votes and nearly 60 percent of the popular vote, one of the largest electoral victories in the country’s history.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Immediately after Mondale’s defeat, the Democrats blamed “special interest groups” as the cause of their loss. To gain support from corporate and wealthy donors for his 1988 campaign, Jackson had to tone down his progressive stance and distance himself from “far left” associations. Harrington worried that DSA support this time around may actually harm Jackson’s chances, so they approached him cautiously as to not draw too much attention to the fact that he had support from a socialist organization. Despite receiving 30 percent of the vote, Jackson lost the primary to Michael Dukakis. Even though Jackson had watered down his positions to be friendlier to mainstream Democrats, it did not matter in the end. Many Democratic politicians interpreted the Republican wins in 1980, 1984, and 1988 as proof that voters were moderate. Thus, Democrats further distanced themselves from any “far left” elements. Like Greene points out, Harrington’s realignment strategy depended on the notion that the Democrats could be persuaded to move leftward, but since the party already viewed socialists as a liability, realignment was turning out to be a nonstarter.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">Harrington died in 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. For many, the end of the Cold War seemed like a death knell for the left and a triumph for capitalism. This new and uncertain political landscape left the DSA struggling to find its footing. For instance, in the 2000 election, DSA members were split on whether to support Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, SPUSA candidate David McReynolds, or Democratic Party candidate Al Gore. When Barack Obama ran for president, the DSA supported his campaign, admitting that “they knew a Democratic victory would not bring any significant reforms,” but, as Greene explains, they insisted that “an Obama presidency would be amendable to ‘consistent pressure from below’ since the Democrats in power would provide more space for the left to organize.” In actuality, the DSA had little influence on the Obama administration, and despite claims from the right of Obama’s “socialism,” Obama’s policies remained aligned with mainstream Democratic positions.</p><p style="color: #111111; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;">DSA’s membership had stagnated, but the Bernie Sanders campaign and the 2016 election stimulated a renewed interest in the organization. After the election of Donald Trump, DSA membership jumped from 6500 in 2014 to more than 28,000, and then doubled again by the end of 2019. In some ways, one could argue that the group has moved slightly leftwards again. Some branches now have Marxist study groups. Other branches hold protests in support of Palestinian liberation. However, despite these small pockets of leftwing activity, attempting to reform the Democratic Party from within remains the DSA’s number one initiative. Even by running “democratic socialist” candidates in local, state, and federal elections, those candidates have thus far not altered the composition of the Democratic Party to be more “socialist” in character. Instead, these candidates who break into the Democratic Party sphere often end up making concessions rather than making waves. Greene argues that, ultimately, if any lesson is to be learned from Harrington’s legacy, it is that realignment, while optimistic, is bound to backfire, and that the left cannot win by compromising with the very system it seeks to upend. For those who want to understand the man who shaped the DSA, this book is a first-rate primer on the development and legacy of Harrington’s ideas.</p></div><div style="font-family: "Source Serif Pro", serif; font-size: 16.781px; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><p class="author_description" style="color: #111111; font-family: SSit; font-size: 1.125em; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; max-width: 680px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px 0px 1em; word-break: break-word;"><em style="line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;"><strong style="margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; word-break: break-word;">Shalon van Tine</strong> is a cultural historian who specializes in American and world history. You can visit her website at <a href="https://www.shalonvantine.com/" style="color: #dd0000; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; word-break: break-word;">https://www.shalonvantine.com/</a>.</em></p></div><p><br /></p>Enaahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16451394999869826806noreply@blogger.com0