“The problem in this, of course, is that sinking roots involves making an assessment of where to sink them in anticipation of future upheavals and such assessments are more likely than not to be wrong.”
This very honest comment by TNL reflects a basic lack of confidence in Marxism as a tool for social analysis. . . You have big problems if your social theory is likely to be wrong about when and where social conflicts are to occur and, in my opinion, it would make more sense to confront those problems directly than to lose yourself in labyrinths of strategic conjecture.
It is true that TNL’s “very honest comment” delineates the limits of existing social theory. Let me add to his honesty….. and then (in the second half of below) deal with some implicatoins.
No Grounds for Arrogance
Our Marxist social theory has proven to have a very limited predictive value. Certainly that is my experience. Just some salient examples:
1) In the 1970s, communists expected the next wave of rebellion to spread from the Black Liberation struggle to the industrial workers. That didn’t happen, instead the 60s upsurge essentially ended after 1973. (The RCP created a huge scandal in 1974 by saying the movement was going into an ebb. Not only was there no prediction, but few recognized the decline as it started.)
2) The eruption of the 1992 LA rebellion is an example of TNL’s point — that we can identify faultlines, but really do not have any predictive power to identify timing or specific events.
Peru's Shining Path -- armed Maoist villagers, not special elites of "heroic guerrillas"
By Mike Ely
Tell No Lies posted a criticism of the article I wrote evaluating Che Guevara. And I think he gets at some important things.
In this exchange, I hope to argue for a few core ideas:
1) We should deepen our understanding of the importance of contrasting ideological and political line.
This means examining policies and ideas in terms of where they lead — toward what? Toward revolution and communism, or somewhere else?
Che was an important revolutionary figure who became a truly unique global symbol of armed struggle and internationalism. But we should pursue a critical evaluation of the LINE he represented as well.
2) We should embrace a deeper understanding of the mass line – the principle that revolution must be the act of the people themselves (and that a socialist revolution requires an embrace of communist organization and consciousness within a larger, active, emerging “revolutionary people” — an actual section of the people.)
3) We need a renewed materialist appreciation of particularity — the relative uniqueness of each moment and place. I.e. we need to be wary of that casual universalization of strategic ideas that often burdened previous generations of revolutionaries.
It is important to study revolutionary victories (and defeats) for lessons and applicable insights. But there is a history of much too lightly declaring that the specific forms of one revolution are “models” or “universal principles” for other places. This has played a rather destructive role — both in the sense that it had real (often fatal) results, but also in the sense of deadening the creative theoretical impulses of living movements. And this kind of universalization was done by codifying both focoist theory and the Chinese experience of protracted peoples war into universal models.
As the Nepali Maoists insist, you can’t copy previous revolutions. Each struggle and victory will have a great deal of innovation and shocking particularity. Future revolutions will prove to be as startlingly different as snowflakes.
Now to return to evaluating Che Guevara and TNL’s comments.
“India has a whole lot of Maoists. We need to do our share, wherever we are, for the world revolution.”
I think there are three parts to this that demand our attention:
First, I think that it is just not widely understood just how precious it is to have a radical socialist state in the world. (Even, as Richard says, “just one!”)
It has been a long time (too long) since the world saw a socialist state like Mao’s China that was truly a “beacon of revolution” in the world — training and helping revolutionary movements, providing revolutionary theory and literature, creating a pole among states in the world outside the empires and the dominance of commodity markets, and providing the inspiration of ongoing radical social change.
In many ways it almost seems strange to a new generation when they read how captivated previous generations of communists were by the experiences of the Soviet Union and then (after the 1950s) of revolutionary China. It seems unbalanced for revolutionary movements in this country to be so closely entwined with events and movements so far away.
“One day the German industrialists will try to find bayonets (and any bayonets will do) in the hope that their loss of political power will only be temporary if their economic power can be salvaged. Is that clear?But how is it with the rest of the German people, the ninety-nine percent?Is the war in their interest too? Do they need war?
Well-meaning people are too hasty by half when they confidently answer: No. A comforting reply, but not a true one. The truth is that the war is in their interest so long as they cannot or will not shake off the system under which they live….
The idea of forcibly educating a whole people is absurd. What the German people have not learned when this war is over from bloody defeats, bombings, impoverishment, and from the bestialities of its leaders inside and outside Germany, it will never learn from history books. Peoples can only educate themselves; and they will establish popular government not when they grasp it with their minds but when they grasp it with their hands.”
Intro by Mike Ely
It is no surprise that there is controversy over how to evaluate people who support the system and its crimes — particularly in the U.S. today.
In almost a decade of global rampages after 9/11, after the torture of people worldwide, the shameless unprovoked aggression against Iraq, the escalating occupation of Afghanistan, the drone assassination, the waves of commando raids, the militarization of the border and more… after all that, there is still a void where a visible, unrepentant, strident antiwar movement should be. There is deep confusion among even people who are otherwise progressive. And there is, as we all know, a section of society that actually supports U.S. empire — and equates that imperialist exploitation with “freedom” or even “the free world.”
So how do we view this? Do we simply decide that the people are “complicit” and “guilty” of those crimes (that they are not opposing)? Are large sections of the people just willingly “drinking the koolaid”?
Do we seek to explain horrible silence by deciding that people have chosen their privilege over their humanity? Do we assume that within the U.S. people (including white working people) have no progressive interests (in common with the people of the world)? Are people fixed by relative privilege and their specific history — locked into a structure that inexorably commands their minds and loyalties — or can even the deeply complacent be shaken awake and radically transformed — by both sudden conjunctural events and long-term political work?
Are the “interests” of different sections of people fixed and simple? Or do “interests” appear in complex patterns — objective interests, subjectively perceived interests, short term interests of self and family, long term interests of humanity and class, interests in survival in the face of threat, interests in great self-sacrifice to make a new world? What is the relationship between interests and political desires?
We have been discussing the history of socialism in the twentieth century — and (within that) the question of the Great Purges in the 1937-38 period of the USSR.
Mao spoke on the question of political executions in this essay “Ten Major Relationships.” It was written in 1956, as there was great controversy over revelations about the Stalin era. The whole essay articulates Mao’s major departure from the methods and policies of the Soviet experience.
IMao mentioned that the Chinese Communist adopting their policy against political executions “in Yenan.” That is a reference to the Yenan period from 1936 through 1945. This was when the Chinese Communist Party received reports on the Great Purges from comrades exiled in the USSR, and secretly resolved amongst themselves never to adopt of similar methods of political execution.
by Mao Zedong
We must keep up the policy which we started in Yenan: “No executions and few arrests”. There are some whom we do not execute, not because they have done nothing to deserve death, but because killing them would bring no advantage, whereas sparing their lives would. What harm is there in not executing people? Those amenable to labour reform should go and do labour reform, so that rubbish can be transformed in something useful.
Besides, people’s heads are not like leeks. When you cut them off, they will not grow again. If you cut off a head wrongly, there is no way of rectifying the mistake even if you want to.
There are times when a determined, revolutionary section of the people emerges. It is a rare and precious thing.
by Mike Ely
I think that the success and development of a revolution rests heavily on the emergence of a “revolutionary people” and its development, renewal and maturation through different stages of a complex revolutionary process. By revolutionary people, we have generally meant a section of the people that is, one way or another, to one degree or another, consciously for a revolutionary change — and increasingly willing to fight for that. In the great revolutions of the past, such forces have been “militant minorities” — when viewed against the whole of the population, but they have been real popular forces of many hundreds of thousands or millions, who are the core social basis for revolutionary parties, for new revolutionary ideas and for the revolution itself.
Part of the discussion of the Soviet purges (in the 1930s) is the story of the exhaustion, cooptation, demoralization and depoliticization of what had previously constituted a “revolutionary people” within the Soviet revolution. And similarly there is a story to tell, within the Chinese Cultural Revolution, about how an enthusiastic new “revolutionary people” emerged (and was “unleashed) in the early stages of the Maoist cultural revolution (1966-68) — and how the complexities of that struggle left them dispersed, bewildered, divided and unable to act as the 70s progressed, and as the capitalist roaders tightened their garrot-hold on the revolution.
We have been discussing the importance of summing up the history of socialist revolution in the twentieth century — and the problem of silence on such events as the “Great Purges” in the 1930s Soviet Union. In that thread, a commentator “Reading You” wrote a defense of the mass executions of those times. Here is a reply.
By Mike Ely
On one level, there is a mind-numbing contradiction at play. The communist movement (justifiably!) denounces the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Oscar Grant, the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the assassination of Malcolm or King, the jailing of Peltier and Mumia, the holding of so-called “enemy combatants” without evidence or trial… These are outrages — and often the innocence of the victim is a part of that outrage.
So what does it mean, if someone like “Reading You” can (with a wave of their hand) minimize the state execution of hundreds of thousands of people (without trial and often, it must be said, without evidence)? Is it that different because those were nominally socialist cops who pulled the triggers?
There were in the 1930s quotas for arrests (just like there were quotas for other forms of production) — i.e. the cops in a particular locality were required to produce so many spies and reactionaries. Imagine what that produced? There was permission to torture signed at the highest level. Imagine what that meant for the emergence of “confessions” and new denunciations of new suspects for the machinery.
How often we rage when cops in the U.S. presume the guilt of “perps” (”They wouldn’t have been arrested if they hadn’t done something” or “I can tell a criminal just by looking at him.”) Does it suddenly become ok, to arrest and punish without evidence or public hearings if the system is socialist?
And what kind of justice would the people get from activists with such a blindspot if they got to be part of a new state power?
The essay by Rosa L. Blanc on Bhattarai’s “New Type of State” has led to an extensive discussion of forms of socialist democracy and their impact on the dangers of capitalist restoration. The following contains thoughts provoked by that discussion.
“We communists now need to creatively uncover new ways to broaden the base and mass participation in future socialist transition processes. That is one of the sharp lessons of the 20th century. It raises the need for a radically deeper appreciation and application of Mao’s concept of mass line. We should assume the need for radical departures from any ’model’ drawn from the 1930s USSR. But I don’t assume that multi-party electoral systems should be seen as universal — as if the solution to our problem is now ‘there for the taking’ before we even tried out these concepts in a new revolutionary attempt.”
by Mike Ely
Revolution often takes the form of a civil war between two sections of the people. Marxists perceive this process as the overthrow of one class by another — and seek to lead that process toward the replacement of class society by socialism and communism. But, at another level of analysis, society polarizes into those who want radical change and those who congeal around defending the old society — and they fight it out.
How that polarization goes down marks the future framework of society.
The reason the Soviet Union developed the way it did was not simply because they had an “idea” of a one-party state — but also because the polarization from which they emerged was a particularly punishing one: they seized the cities for socialism, but had little root among the majority of the population (the peasants), and in the course of the civil war, the flower of the working class’ revolutionary generation died at the front. This created particularly severe choices — and you found one part of the population arming itself to impose the socialist society on other (and rather large) parts.
How should future socialist revolutions avoid capitalist restoration? How can communists deepen the involvement of the people in decisionmaking? How we do better, building on the experience of socialism in the 20th century?
Baburam Bhattarai is a celebrated intellectual figure in Nepal and a top leader within the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) [UCPN(M)]. After years underground in a rapidly growing guerilla uprising, that revolutionary organization now may stand on the threshold of completing this century’s first socialist revolution. For that reason alone, the ideas of this distinctly non-dogmatic communist movement are of interest around the world.
The following essay discusses and defends a particularly controversial analysis made by Bhattarai in 2004 — it is called “The Question of Building a New Type of State” and is available online here on the Kasama sites. It was originally published in The Worker, organ of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, #9, February 2004.
It is, as you will see an argument for a new relationship between popular democracy and radical socialist revolution within this 21st century.
The following is lifted whole from a compilation at the University of Washington compiled by Glenda Pearson, March 1998. It is a list of dozens of movies about communism in U.S. culture. (The introductory stuff below is interesting, but can be skipped.) Thanks to Miles Ahead for suggesting this.
* * * * * *
The films produced in Hollywood before, during and after the Cold War Red Scare make for an interesting study in the response of a popular medium caught in a political firestorm. The following list is a selective filmography of motion pictures that played a role in fueling the Red Scare, in propagandizing the threat of Communism and in a few rare and rather veiled cases, in standing up to the charges of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the frightening fifties receded in memory and the political temperment gradually changed with the passing decades, Hollywood found more courage in facing up to the culpability of the film industry itself and its role in supporting gross violations of civil liberties. Several feature films and a number of documentaries exploring this painful issue round out the list below.
HUAC interrogated many film industry people. In the end, countless careers were destroyed but only ten individuals actually went to jail. This group came to be known as “The Hollywood Ten.” Alvah Bessie, Herbert J. Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo paid a huge price at the hands of HUAC. An exhaustive analysis of their films, published in 1972 by Dorothy B. Jones (who had served as chief of the film reviewing and analysis section of the U.S. Office of War Information during World War II), indicated that “none of the 159 films credited over a period of years (1929-1949) to The Hollywood Ten contained Communist propaganda.” (Cogley, p.226)
Originally written in French, after the fall of the Paris Commune, by the revolutionary exile Eugene Pottier — the Internationale has become the global anthem of the international working class.
A film history of the Internationale Part 1, Part 2
Quiz instructions:
Read the following text, then click for the questions.
For ten years, the communists and people of China waged a bitter civil war against the forces of the GMD (Guomindang – the Nationalist Party) — the political party and military that in the 1930s most represented the big landlords, reactionary warlords, corrupt bureaucrat capitalists and foreign-serving “compradors” of China.
There was the horrific massacre of workers and communists in Shanghai — as Chiang Kaishek turned his guns suddenly on his former communist allies, and sought to wipe them out. There were encirclement and suppression campaigns — where the GMD massacred the peasants who were the base of new liberated zones. There was the Long March, where Mao’s forces treked across the broad expanse of China, fighting desperate battles constantly with pursuing GMD armies.
The Maoist forces regrouped in the remote area of Yenan, on China’s distant northern border — and prepared themselves for the next stage of the revolution. The communists were organized on the basis of agrarian revolution — violent land reform that took property and wealth from the landlords and gave them to the people. Political power in the base areas was organized on the basis of rural Soviets — independent states flying the red flag with the hammer and sickle. The revolutionary forces were called the Red Army.
Then on September 22, 1937, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a manifesto. They proposed as one of the “general objectives for the common struggle of the entire people” the enforcement of “democracy based on people’s rights and the convocation of the National People’s Congress in order to enact the Constitution and decide upon the plans of national salvation.”
The Communist Party Central Committee declared:
“1) The Three Peoples Principles enunciated by Dr. Sun Yatsen [the great bourgeois democrat founder of the Nationalist Party ] are the paramount need of China today. This Party is ready to strive for their enforcement.
“2) This Party abandons its policy of overthrowing the Guomindang of China by force and the movement of sovietization and discontinues its policy of forced confiscation of land from landowners.
“3) This Party abolishes the present Soviet government and enforces democracy based on people’s rights in order to unify the national political machinery.
“4) This Party abolishes the Red Army, reorganizes it into the National Revolutionary Army [of the GMD], places it under the direct control of the Military Affairs Commission of the National Government, and awaits orders for mobilization to share the responsibility of resiting foreign invasion at the front.”
The next day, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek declared:
“The various decisions embodied in the Manifesto, such as the abandonment of a policy of violence, the cessation of Communist propaganda, the abolition of the Chinese Soviet government, and the disbandment of the Red Army are all essential conditions for mobilizing our national strength in order that we may meet the menace from without and guarantee our own national existance. “
This is Alan Wald interviewed by Graham Barnfield about leftist writers rediscovered after years of Wald’s forensic detective work. (Thanks to Jay Rothermel for sharing this. )
Part of your last book Writing from the Left reads as a pledge to rediscover the lost authors of the 1940s and 1950s. How did you become interested in these writers?
My preoccupation with ‘lost’ leftwing authors of the 1940s and 1950s is a logical extension of my research on the ‘committed’ radical writers of the 1930s.
Many of the best-known ‘left’ authors of the Depression era were, in fact, formed as writers and intellectuals in the 1920s – for example, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, and Langston Hughes. Even Michael Gold and Jack Conroy served literary apprenticeships in the 1920s.
This explains why I was particularly concerned in my first three books with the relationship of Marxism to Modernism, since ‘High Modernism’ was in full swing in the 1920s. But it wasn’t very long before I was asking myself: what was the trajectory of those who were very young in the 1930s, who perhaps did not reach their stride until after World War Two? I was also struck by the fact that so many of the ‘canonised’ texts of 1930s, such as The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, U.S.A., Native Son, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Waiting for Lefty, were by writers who later repudiated the particular kind of radicalism to which they adhered at the time when they produced their masterpieces.
There has been an ongoing discussion on Kasama Threads about Yugoslavia and the history of captialist restoration. So it seemed time to post this article looks at the history of Yugoslavia since its founding after World War 2. It was written as a background piece a decade ago– to help understand the events in the Balkans in the 1990s — and toexpose the justifications of the U.S. for their military attack on Servia. It shows that capitalist development caused tensions and inequalities within Yugoslavia and how reactionary war emerged from the power grabs of various bourgeois nationalist forces there. (It was first published in the Revolutionary Worker newspaper, April 11, 1999).
Prelude to Genocide: How Capitalism Caused the Balkan Wars
by Mike Ely (1999)
The U.S. claims that the Balkan people are gripped by irrational hatreds. And that the U.S. (the self-appointed “cop of the world”) and their allies have no choice but to step in, bomb, impose, threaten and dictate. The imperialists insist that the people of the Balkans need outside forces to dominate them–to save them from themselves! It is an imperialist self-justification–based on crudely turning history upside down. It blames the people for the suffering imposed on them by capitalism.
The Balkan region of southeastern Europe is a complex “jaguar skin” of different nationalities. The Catholic northern part of Yugoslavia–including Slovenia and Croatia–had longstanding links to Austria and Germany to the north. The southern part of Yugoslavia had long historical ties eastward toward Greece, Turkey and the northern Slavic countries of Bulgaria and Russia.
In June 2006, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) wrote a letter to RCP responding to criticisms. In the last week, attention has been given on this site to critiquing the dogmatic method of those RCP criticisms.
But we really need to focus a bit on what the Nepali Maoists are actually saying (and doing) — which in many ways is much more interesting than dissecting (yet again) the complaints of dogmatists. Our look at the Maobadi needs to be a thoughtful and critical one, not naïve cheerleading or wishful thinking. We need a clear idea of what they represent — in order that we can build broad understanding of this important revolution, and also so we can ourselves learn from the positive and negative of this experience as it unfolds.
Fresh Eyes on a Burning Issue
The CPN(M) (aka Maobadi) takes some pains to make clear what problem they are working on: how to lay the basis in the way they come to power for continuing the revolution while they are in power. They do not want to enter power with a narrow base. This is part of a larger strategy to prevent the corrosion and reversal of the revolution.
The CPN(M) writes:
“History is a witness that the proletarian class had succeeded in establishing its power in almost one-third of the globe, with the breath-taking sacrifice of millions in the twentieth century…. But questions have come up as to why those proletarian powers turned into their opposites without any bloodshed, right after the demise or capture of the main leadership? Why did Comrade Stalin fail to control the emergence of revisionists from within the Party he had led, despite that he did his best, including forceful suppression against them? Why did the CPC under Mao’s leadership, despite that it launched the Cultural Revolution, fail to stop revisionist Deng and his clique from grabbing power after his demise?…. These and alike are the questions for which we are trying to find correct answers. Only cursing the revisionists does not solve the problem.”
The Nepali communists are posing questions that all communists face — the questions handed us by the last century. What laid the basis for the reversal of the revolutions in Russia and China? How can the popular basis for socialism be more firm, more popular, more conscious, more sustained, more engaged? How do we struggle against capitalist restoration without producing a repressive atmosphere that downpresses the revolutionary people and weakens the emergence of successors?
TNL posted the important question: what is “proletarian” about communism? What is the connection between the working class and communist movement (other than vestigial markers of terminology, tradition and pretense)?
And, obviously, we know what this means (at the extreme) because we have all encountered movements that appointed themselves “vanguard of the proletariat” — often without connection, leadership, representation or even a real sense of that proletariat. We have seen circular, self-aggrandising apriori assertions.
For a year I have been thinking about a remark TNL made:
“when we debate the dictatorship of the proletariat, the real controversy is not over the word ‘dictatorship,’ but over the phrase ‘of the proletariat.’”
That is what we are engaging here. the controversy over the phrase “of the proletariat.” It is a discussion of how class is mediated through politics and ideas.
“In what real sense can you say that the proletariat led the Chinese Revolution? This seems to me a bit of doctrinaire nonsense. Certainly the CCP built up a proletarian base before the smashing of the Shanghai Uprising in 1927 and some of that base fled to the countryside to join the work amongst the peasantry. I also know that special efforts wer made to recruit “rural proletarians.” But nobody really disputes the fundamentally peasant composition of the organized forces that made the revolution. So is the claim here that the leadership of the CCP was significantly of proletarian origin or just that it “represented” the proletariat by virtue of its ideology? If its the latter, to say its metaphysical would be kind. What this stance has always signalled to me, and this was always part of my reluctance to call myself a Maoist, was a dishonest capitulation to the reigning orthodoxy of the Stalin-era Comintern in the face of obviously contradictiry facts, namely the actual class composition of the leadership and the base of both the CCP and PLA.
I’d like to take a stab at this. And to be clear from the start: I think there are real ways in which it is true to say that the Chinese revolution had proletarian leadership.
This Maoist analysis of the Spanish Civil War offers an important and scathing critique of the Communist International’s Popular Front strategy — where, after 1934, Communist Parties made the defense of bourgeois democracy (and strategic alliances with “anti-fascist” powers) the center of their political work.
This history provides a look at a living revolutionary opportunity — where things do not unfold as models, where sometimes bourgeois governments fall into the hands of left and revolutionary forces, where complex waves of struggle push the question of revolution forward and back.
It also gives an opening for a critical examination of the historic relations of anarchist, communist and other socialist forces. In the Spanish Civil War the forces of anarchists, communists and the left POUM party were in complex struggle within a loose anti-fascist coalition. And there is much to learn (and grieve) about in the way that struggle unfolded.
This article originally appeared in Revolution magazine (June 1981)
2. The Asturias Rebellion: Dress Rehearsal for Civil War
In the late 1920s, as the world crisis was beginning to hit Spain full force, the British and French imperialists, who dominated the Spanish economy, began to export their own beginning economic crisis by dumping cheap coal onto the Spanish market. Spain replied with tariff barriers, the British and French in turn cut off trade in key Spanish agricultural commodities. The bottom quickly dropped away from the Spanish economy and the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Soon after the fall of the governing military junta, Spain’s King, Alfonso XIII, resigned also – to avoid, he said, the “disaster of civil war.”[6]
On April 14. 1931, for the second time in its history, Spain was declared a Republic. The bourgeoisie hoped to draw the petty bourgeoisie – led by Republicans and Socialists – into the running of the bourgeois state, and provide the stability which the ruling class so desperately needed. Suddenly, generals and other lackeys who had served the old monarchy became enthusiastic supporters of the Republic. “The regime was changed in order not to change,” as a Socialist put it.[7]
The honeymoon lasted only two short years. The year 1933 was the hardest year of the depression in Spain, driving the proletariat and poor peasantry into open, often armed rebellion, and ruining the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie. The Republican government showed itself as repressive as any of the hated constitutional monarchies of the past.
Ka Frank expresses a view that has been common among Maoists in the U.S.:
“The Cultural Revolution is the key experience of what we need to do after power is seized and has laid the key theoretical and practical foundations for the socialist transition to communism. However, it doesn’t answer the question of how to build a revolutionary movement and seize power in the U.S. or any other country. As important as the Cultural Revolution is, that is the central task before us.”
This has previously been my own view too (particularly in those years when I was an activist within the Revolutionary Communist Party). Crudely speaking:
Before the revolution, study the October Road (i.e. the Bolshevik experience seen through the Comintern experience of “Leninist party, united front, political preparation and insurrection) and update as needed.
Then after the revolution, learn from the cultural revolution (i.e. the Maoist experience of fighting capitalist restoration, forms of popular democracy and criticism, wavelike nature of mass class struggle etc.), update as needed.
But I suspect that we need to break out of this framework quite a bit. It is far too confined — it overestimates the universality of these particular models (and of models in general).
I’m convinced that we need to take a radical new look at our own previous schema for revolutionary work (includiing the October Road itself, and its assumptions about conjuncture, crisis, “telescoping,” insurrection and civil war) — not to reject everything, but to clear away the gunk of dogma, dilletantism and lazy thinking.
In that process and that we may have a lot to learn about the whole sweep of experience within the twentieth century (including especially the GPCR).
Some contemporary Maoist forces have stressed the importance of the Cultural revolution in strategic matters before the seizure of power — there is value in looking “backwards” from our experience with socialism-in-power, to our developing plans for preparing-to-take-power.)
Thanks to the Chicago Badiou study circle for passing on these excerpts. As usual, Kasama’s posting of these thoughts does not represent endorsement, but the circulation of the thoughtful and provocative for discussion.
If we posit a definition of politics as `collective action, organized by certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apolitical procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of political or ideological convictions…
What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, `communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.
Must the artist have direct experience in order to better express and communicate their art? What role does art and culture play in society? How do we unleash the masses in this sphere? Is all art automatically stamped with a class outlook, or is there not room for various forms of expression?
Regarding the last question, and in terms of our experience within the revolutionary communist movement, I would have to say that more often than not, art and culture come under such scrutiny that most creative work is sapped of anything new, original, imaginative or even passionate.
“Socialist Realism” comes to mind full blast. Within that, often times many revolutionary organizations tail after some artist who has gained some notoriety because they appear to be rebellious.
Peasant Paintings & Campesinos
I remember having a disagreement with a comrade, as he was critical of the peasant art that came out of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. “It’s so stilted, amateurish,” etc. I wasn’t necessarily defending the art per se, but what always struck me about the development of the peasant paintings was that peasants, who had solely thought of themselves as toilers of the soil, would be encouraged to explore a whole other level of themselves and their capabilities; actually take up the brush as well as the spade.
First posted in May.
