Zizek means well, but his confusions over the history of our movement are legion. Here's some things I wrote a while back on this:

http://www.columbia.edu/">http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Zizek.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/">http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/zizek_lenin.htm

Louisproyect -

I've read only the first document that you wrote and I disagree with your take.

You seem to treat Zizek's approach as if he were writing a history himself which he isn't. He is attempting to bring out another dimension to historical process, not create an alternate narrative. There are other logics at work beneath the surface of those that can be observed in party documents, memoirs and journalistic accounts.

The problem here is that he is not critical enough about the historical claims upon which his arguments rest. Given that, I think there is still value to his explorations.

It is Zizek's contention that straightforward narrative doesn't actually explain anything and I agree. I think it is a failing of Marxist thinkers to recognize just how much of what we call "explanation" is really "description" We end up getting stuck on an empiricist framework which can be described as "this happened, then that happened" after which we impose a logic on it: "of course that's why it happened." You disparage his bringing in of thinkers in other fields ["Foucault, Bourdieu, and modern linguistics..."] on the basis that they have no relevant or novel insights to bear on history.

Is history writing not shot through with ideologies, assumptions, and blind spots? Why is that that only historians can be entrusted to fully explore these areas?

Here's your take on Bukharin's confession:


<blockquote>
"So why did Bukharin confess to crimes he did not commit? For an explanation of this, we have to turn to historians like Stephen Cohen, rather than psychoanalysts like Lacan, whom Zizek cites approvingly in the final sentence of his NLR article. Why Bukharin confessed is no mystery. It has nothing to do with fanatical beliefs in the Revolution. Rather it is explicable in mundane terms of physical torture, continual interrogation for weeks on end and summary executions."</blockquote>

Zizek's take:


<blockquote>
"What causes Bukharin such trauma is not the ritual of his public humiliation and punishment, but the possibility that Stalin may really believe the charges against Bukharin:

"There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge. […] I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty for me to place the question of my own person on a par with the universal-historical resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, agonizing paradox....


<blockquote>
"If I were absolutely sure that your thoughts ran precisely along this path, then I would feel so much more at peace with myself. Well, so what! If it must be, then so be it! But believe me, my heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you yourself think that I am really guilty of all these horrors. In that case, what would it mean?"[from Bukharin's alleged last letter to Stalin]</blockquote></blockquote>

In the piece I read, I see nothing that indicates that Zizek thought Bukharin was fanatical, but rather much that indicates that Bukharin was struggling to reconcile his subjective commitment to revolution with accusations that his behavior was "objectively" counter-revolutionary. How to measure his individual interest against the needs of "great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything".

Here's Zizek on the logic of that process:


<blockquote>
"...I can be "subjectively" virtuous, but this in no way guarantees my "objective" salvation in the eyes of God; the distribution of Grace which decides my salvation depends on totally "objective" laws, strictly comparable to the laws of material Nature. Do we not encounter another version of this same objectivization in the Stalinist show trial: I can be subjectively honest, but if I am not touched by the Grace of the insight into the necessity of Communism, all my ethical integrity will make me no more than an honest small-bourgeois humanitarian opposed to the Communist Cause, and, in spite of my subjective honesty, I'll remain forever "objectively guilty"?"</blockquote>

So, no it's not just a matter of Bukharin being physically tortured or even the tragedy of particular individuals, but of understanding how these trials propagated a subjectivity, a symbolic order that pervaded throughout society in which the Party was the embodiment of The Law, The Future, etc.,. Once that occurred, being accused of a crime by the Party caused an agonizing paradox. If one has not committed such a crime, it would seem logical to proclaim innocence; but to do so would be to commit a much greater crime against the forward march to communism. So how is one to find one's coordinates in such a context? In Bukharin's case, it must have seemed even more confounding since he mainly supported Stalin's policies.

In order to make his arguments arguments, Zizek does not attempt to replace Trotsky or Cohen - in fact he leaves their arguments intact. His elaborations on their histories is guided by a simple premise: people don't just act, they act with meaning and signification, which they are not always aware of so we can't understand behavior or historical events by relying on observation or taking statements at face value. To that effect, history is too important to leave to historians alone.

I won't repeat Zizek's claims at length, anyone interested in the Zizek piece under discussion can go <a href="/http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/when-the-party-commits-suicide/" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Seeing that there are many malicious or foolish intellectuals out there poisoning minds,creating even more fronts for anti-communism with their revisionist lies and distortions..from that realization I have a much greater appreciation and understanding of what Comrade Stalin had to deal with after the October Revolution. I can sympathize with Comrade Stalin and his decisions.
The truly destructive aspect-the mission of these scholarly intellectual ghouls is that they do in fact successfuly attract and create followings of naive,confused and in many cases comfortable stupid intellectuals who being in such a state are susceptible to and give credibility to what amounts to a huge pile of....

One short summation of the Great Leap Forward and the famine years of 1959-1961 is found in the MLM Revolutionary Study Group's article, "Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future." (April 2007, www.mlm.rsg)

"The Great Leap Forward in 1958 was an ambitious plan to increase industrial and agricultural production. It undertook radical social transformations and led to new levels of socialist consciousness. In one year, 750,000 collective farms were merged into 24,000 people‟s communes, each of which was composed of dozens of villages and on average 5,000 households. The communes were not just economic units but new social organizations that combined political, educational, cultural and military functions.10

The scale of the communes made it possible to mobilize large numbers of peasants to work on big irrigation, flood control and land reclamation projects. Rural industrialization leapt forward, with commune-operated shops manufacturing and repairing agricultural implements, small chemical plants producing fertilizer, and the establishment of local crop-processing industries. Tens of millions of women joined the labor force outside their homes for the first time; childcare centers were set up on the communes. The communes funded new primary schools and a network of middle schools and colleges that combined work and study.

In the industrial areas of Shanghai and the northeast, new forms of factory organization replaced the one-man management system that had been patterned after Soviet industry. The system was called the “two participations” (participation of cadres in labor and workers in management), “one reform” (reform of unneeded regulations) and “triple combinations” (of skilled workers, technicians and administrators to solve production problems).( 11) In order to train workers for new roles in their plants, a system of spare-time schools and colleges attached to factories was established. In some plants, 60 to 70 percent of the workforce was enrolled in these schools.

These were important advances. However, a combination of unrealistic production goals (e.g., doubling steel production in a year), transportation bottlenecks, wasteful “backyard” furnaces that produced low-grade steel, and the diversion of too much labor from agricultural work into other areas effectively brought the Great Leap Forward to a halt by early 1960.

Particularly in the countryside, some social transformations jumped ahead of the level of development and political consciousness at that time. Some communes were eliminating private plots for farming altogether. There was resistance among the peasants to this policy and to equalizing the income of the production teams (usually 20-30 households) throughout the communes.(12) In addition, Party leaders saw communist society as achievable within the following decade or two. All of this was later criticized as a “communist wind.”

At a party conference in 1959, Mao took responsibility for the overly ambitious goals of the Great Leap Forward and for some of errors in how it had been implemented. He described it as a “partial failure.” (13) But Mao and his supporters recognized the Great Leap‟s achievements as well as its defects, making it possible for many of its goals, especially in such fields as factory management, education and health care, to be more effectively pursued in the Cultural Revolution a decade later.

The Great Leap Forward was followed by three years of severe drought and floods, which affected 60% of China‟s agricultural land. (14) In 1960, the Soviet Union pulled out its industrial experts, disrupting production in key industries. In addition, cadre (15) in many areas inflated production figures (the “wind of exaggeration” as it was called), making it difficult to ship grain where it was needed most. While the natural calamities played the major role, these factors combined to create famine conditions in parts of the countryside in 1959-61. (16)

Footnotes

11 Stephen Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution: Politics, Planning and Management, 1949 to the Present, 1977, pp. 74-84. The “3-1-2” system was a core element of the Anshan Constitution that was codified by Mao based on the experience of advanced factories during the Great Leap Forward. The other elements were putting politics in command; utilizing mass movements; carrying out technical revolution; and strengthening party leadership. Ibid., p. 129.

12 As a result, the basic unit of accounting that determined the distribution of income was reduced from the level of the commune to that of the production team.
13 Stuart Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, Talks and Letters: 1956-1971, 1974, p. 146. This is an invaluable compilation of many previously unpublished works by Mao.

14 Meisner, p. 235.

15 “Cadre” is a term applied to both full-time party members and government officials.

16 Joseph Ball, an expert in demography, has recently analysed several well publicized studies which are based on comparisons of census figures before and after the famine years. Ball demonstrates that these censuses were unreliable, and were only released in the 1980s, when the new regime was engaged in a repudiation of China‟s socialist achievements between 1956 and 1976. (www.monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm)

Mobo Gao argues that the 1953 census is grossly inflated. It claimed that China‟s population had risen from 450 million in 1947 to 600 million in 1953, which includes the years of civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang. This, by itself, could explain the “missing” tens of millions of people between the 1953 census and the post-famine census. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China, 1999, pp. 127-128.

In his last book, Through a Looking Glass Darkly, U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution, 2006, William Hinton interviewed villagers from several different provinces who lived through these “three bad years.” They reported short rations, but no deaths due to starvation. Hinton argues persuasively that “a famine exists in a peasant country when people give up trying to survive at home, abandon their land and move out en masse....When you have land abandonment, with millions of people taking to the road and heading toward regions where they hope to find food, such vast migrations are very hard to conceal.” His conclusion is that there was real hunger and even starvation in some localities, but reports of tens of millions of death are not credible. (See Chapter 9 of his book, The State and the “Great Famine.”)

Moreover, the death total over three years of drought and floods would have been many times higher in pre-liberation China. The collectivization of agriculture and the construction of infrastructure such as dams and irrigation systems in the 1950s gave peasants new protection against natural calamities. Measured against India and Indonesia, mainly peasant countries which did not go through revolutionary transformations, the Chinese people made enormous gains in life expectancy and overall health and wellbeing during the socialist period.

&gt; DFV recently suggested a valuable source:

Well some claims made in there I'm going to have to take issue with, but let's hold off on that.

&gt; let’s just say there are many reasons to say that one is NOT to believe (or casually repeat) the often foul and unsubstantiated claims of that biography.

I think one small but very basic reason for discounting Chang is worth highlighting, even if people sometimes overlook it. On p. 438 Chang tells us in a footnote that:

"Chinese demographers have concluded that death rates in the four years 1958-61 were 1.20 per cent, 1.45 per cent, 4.34 per cent, and 2.83 per cent, respectively. The average death rate in the three years immediately before and after the famine was 1.03 per cent--1957: 1.08 per cent, 1962: 1 per cent, and 1963: 1 per cent."

Now where could Chang have gotten these numbers from? In the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986 they print a table which contains the following numbers:

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1949__________20.00
1950__________18.00
1951__________17.80
1952__________17.00
1953__________14.00
1954__________13.18
1955__________12.28
1956__________11.40
1957__________10.80
1958__________11.98
1959__________14.59
1960__________25.43
1961__________14.24
1962__________10.02
1963__________10.04

The numbers which Chang has listed as death rates for the years 1957-9 and 1962-3 seem to just be rounded or truncated versions of the numbers taken from this table, which was actually produced by Chinese demographers. But the numbers which Chang gives for 1960-1 are clearly from somewhere else.

That Patnaik article makes a reference to Ansley Coale and then mentions "the later more detailed study by Judith Banister." I don't have the Coale study before me, but I do possess Banister's text. The numbers which she gives as death rates for the same years are as follows:

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1949__________38
1950__________35
1951__________32
1952__________29
1953__________25.77
1954__________24.20
1955__________22.33
1956__________20.11
1957__________18.12
1958__________20.65
1959__________22.06
1960__________44.60
1961__________23.01
1962__________14.02
1963__________13.81

There Banister's figure for 1960 is a little bit higher (44.60 per thousand) than the one asserted by Chang (4.37 per cent) and Banister's choice for 1961 is several points lower (23.01 per thousand) than Chang's claim (2.83 per cent). Despite that discrepancy, it seems clear that Chang took the numbers for these two years, 1960-1, from a different source which the other numbers come from. The other numbers clearly originate from the officially published statistics which can be found in STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986.

Chang was mixing numbers together from separate sources with the intent of picking out and citing the lowest estimates possible for death rates immediately before and after the famine of 1960, while simultaneously using the highest possible estimates taken from a different source for 1960-1. This was clearly dishonest in a very precise way. A cut-and-paste technique used to construct a false set of statistics should have discredited Chang right away.

Now, getting back to what Patnaik claims, on p. 52 it's claimed that "even the official death rates may be overestimated." No, I disagree. Patnaik goes on to mention "A.J. Coale's much higher death rates, constructed as we shall see on the dubious assumptions..." I don't have Coale in front of me, but if Banister can be used as a standard then, yes, to some degree, I can see evidence of faulty assumptions in Banister's construct. She gives fertility rates per thousand for the years 1957-63 as 43.25, 37.76, 28.53, 26.76, 22.43, 41.02, and 49.79. Banister's assigned fertility and mortality rates assume that fertility surpassed mortality by a large margin in all years but 1960-1, and only in 1960 did mortality exceed fertility by a wide margin. That seems at least debatable.

Jasper Becker, HUNGRY GHOSTS, makes the claim that:

"Very few women were able to have children during the famine. A large proportion stopped menstruating because of the lack of protein in their diet. Some students sent down to the countryside said that they stopped menstruating for as long as five years."
-- P. 210.

Becker's style is a bit anecdotal, but he suggests something rather different than what is indicated by Banister's fertility statistics. So that could be a plausible source of error in Banister's construction. If the birth rates for 1961-5 were really substantively lower than what Banister assigns them to be, then this might also require some corresponding reduction of the death rate which Banister gives to 1960. That's a plausible argument.

Despite those qualifiers, I'd have to say that Banister's numbers are much more convincing than the those given in the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK which Patnaik repeats. The problem with the SY numbers is that they are just too low all around, not just for 1960 but for 1949 and every other year before the mid-1960s. We don't actually have real demographic statistics from China in the first half of the 20th century, but we do have them Czarist Russia. Death rates among the population of those provinces in Czarist Russia that remained within the USSR after 1917 are given by Frank Lorimer, THE POPULATION OF THE SOVIET UNION.

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1899__________33.4
1900__________32.3
1901__________33.6
1902__________33.1
1903__________31.1
1904__________31.1
1905__________33.2
1906__________31.6
1907__________30.2
1908__________30.2
1909__________31.6
1910__________33.3
1911__________29.2
1912__________28.7
1913__________30.9

You can find some books which give the number 30.2 for the year 1913 instead of Lorimer's 30.9. That has to do with the 11 other provinces of Czarist Russia which broke away from the USSR in 1917. Mortality was actually higher in the main Russian part than in the regions which declared independence from 1918 and thereafter.

I've had some people try to tell me that Czarist Russia up to 1913 was a backward state, and that therefore we should expect it to have higher natural mortality rates than China 20 years later. Compared to the west Czarist Russia was backward, but it was much more industrially developed than China ever came close to being in the first half of the last century. Local warlords did not have the same level of arbitrary power devoid of a central authority as was the case in pre-revolutionary China, and this did entail some economic advantages for Czarist Russia as a whole. Czarist Russia was never the glorious "breadbasket" which some Right-wingers like to make it out to be, but there's every reason to assume that a normal peacetime economy in Czarist Russia would give a better performance for its population than anything which would ever have been possible in pre-revolutionary China under the most optimal conditions.

If we examine the numbers which are asserted by the official data in the SY, it is claimed that death rates in 1949 were 20 per thousand. If actually true, this would imply a stark advance by Kuomintang China over the very best performance ever achieved by Czarist Russia. This would be all the more astounding as it occurs during a period when civil war still continued between the People's Army and the Kuomintang. That's not realistic. Death rates in China prior to 1949 would always have been much higher than this. The only serious basis which I could see for doubting Banister's choice of 38 per thousand as the death rate for 1949 is that this may underestimate the effects of civil war.

As John Finley puts it in the Foreword to the 1926 publication of the American Geographical Society by Walter Mallory, CHINA: LAND OF FAMINE,:

"It is a shocking fact that with all of the labor expended and virtues practiced, nearly a fourth of the people of the globe live in a land of famine--not of general famine at any one time nor of continuous famine in any one place, but of famine in one or another province or locality all the time."

This assessment was not based upon conditions caused by civil war between the People's Army and the Kuomintang. It was how western specialists diagnosed mortality conditions of China during relatively calm times. No economic developments in China over the next two decades are noteworthy enough to suggest that mortality in quiet peacetime conditions would have been much better than what it was when Mallory's study was published in 1926.

To put it another way, the death rates in the United States for some select years were as follows:

Year__________Deaths per thousand among the population
1913__________13.8
1915__________13.2
1940__________10.8
1950__________9.6
1951__________9.7
1952__________9.6
1953__________9.6
1954__________9.2
1955__________9.3
1956__________9.4
1957__________9.6

So the data from the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK OF CHINA 1986 is claiming that China by 1957 had attained a death rate which matched that of the USA in 1940. This is most unlikely. Banister's assigned number of 18.12 deaths per thousand in China for the year 1957 is much more realistic, in my opinion. That's why I say that Patnaik is wrong in suggesting that the mortality statistics given in the STATISTICAL YEARBOOK may have "overestimated" death rates. By any reasonable standards those numbers are clearly too low.

Now how one should judge a possibly modified version of Banister's constructed data (after perhaps taking into account an excess of births assumed for 1961-5, and consequently a possible excess in the estimate of deaths for 1960) is a different issue. Despite my quibbling over some specifics, I generally am satisfied with the shape of Banister's curve. If you plotted this out on a graph the picture from Banister's assigned mortalities shows a stunning drop in death rates occurring in the years 1949-57 that was unprecedented in Chinese history. The graph then shows a slight rise in the years 1958-9, while the reported death rates are still below anything which had ever been achieved in Czarist Russia, a sharp upward spike in the year 1960, and then another drop downward which continues from 1961 onward and brings China to a similar level as the USA. This general picture given by Banister is accurate, in my opinion.

The reasons for the steep upward spike in deaths in 1960 could be debated at great length, but the most central cause involved was simply the weather:

"Not surprisingly in view of the drought, most of the flooding had been due to the typhoons, more of which had hit the Chinese mainland than in any of the previous 50 years, 11 between June and October; and each typhoon had lasted longer than usual, averaging ten hours, the longest stretching to 20. Moreover, nature had played an additional trick. The typhoon did not strike north-westwards as usual, but northwards. This added to their impact because it meant that there were no high mountains to ward them off, and that less rain reached the rest of the country. In the aftermath of the drought and floods came insect pests and plant diseases."
-- Roderick MacFarquhar, THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD 1958-1960, Volume 2 of THE ORIGINS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, p. 322.

There's more which could be said about the role of weather in affecting things in these years. That said, I don't mean to discount all responsibility from Mao for failing to see the implications of natural disaster. There's been a similar debate going on over the USSR in the years 1931-3. The old claim by Robert Conquest that crops were sufficient to avoid famine and then Stalin merely created a famine by seizing the crops from people because he wanted to break a spirit of resistance has been debunked by Mark Tauger and some others. Crop failures were real and were caused by natural disaster, not by collectivization.

At the same, though, it's clear that the Soviet government in 1932-3 failed to really comprehend what was occurring with the crop failures and instead assumed that Kulaks were withholding grain from hidden reserves. This miscomprehension was not the immediate cause of famine, but it certainly aggravated the problem. There undoubtedly is room for similar criticisms of Mao. The implications of those criticisms are not really what someone like Chang or Conquest might wish them to be, but the room for valid critique is there.

Not related to Zizek or false claims about Mao, but the second document Louis links to contains a link to Lenin's speech at the 11th Party Congress, which I found fascinating:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

Lenin shows an incredible degree of honesty, humility, and especially humor which is completely at odds with John Reed's characterization of him as a "colorless and humorless man." It's incredible especially considering how poor Lenin's health was at the time.

One lesson (among many) to be drawn from Lenin's speech is that before embarking on any course of action, it is important to have a clear and sober assessment of one's starting point. This is an important lesson for us today, I think.

McNally has certainly moved the debate on to a more scientific plane, and we should be very grateful to him for this. I look forward to hearing more from him on these matters. Clearly there are no reliable population statistics for China for these periods.Wertheim(Third World:whence and whither? Pp62-63 1996 Amsterdam) reports that during his 1964 visit to Chinese communes the leaders were unable to supply any population statistics at all These were kept by district officials and "were often quite inconsistent-a normal situation in an undeveloped country." He acidly notes the absurdity of 'scholars' who claim to be able to calculate Chinese vital statistics to the nearest decimal point; noting the words of the famous French demographer Sauvy that Third World demography is akin to palaeontology.
However that may be,and despite the occasional brilliance of Zizek's
insights,his introduction to Mao's writings is an absolute scandal. Far from having done his homework as he claims,he has allowed himself to be fooled by the crudest of fascist propaganda. Was it really beyond an adherent of the materialist view of history, as Zizek claims to be, not to give credence to the proposition that the victory of the Chinese revolution was due to a dastardly plot by Mao and Stalin, and a mole in the Kuomingtang? I feel Zizek is not a genuine Marxist, but rather a Hegelian with trotskyist trappings!