Posted on

The Founding of the Haitian Communist Party

Translation and introduction by Matthew Strupp. 

The following text is a translation of sections from Schematic Analysis 1932-1934, the founding document of the original Haitian Communist Party (1934-1936). The document was written by Jacques Roumain, a renowned Haitian writer whose 1944 novel, Masters of the Dew, was translated into English by Black U.S. communist poet Langston Hughes. The Schematic Analysis attempts to answer the burning questions of Haitian politics in the years immediately following the brutal US occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism. The main issues dealt with in the translated sections are the character of Haitian nationalism and the relationship between color prejudice and class struggle. The introduction reproduced here was not published with the pamphlet and was instead found among Roumain’s manuscripts. Regardless, it makes a bold and concise defense of the scientific character of Marxist theory and is therefore worthwhile reading. Excluded from the translation is the analysis of the Manifesto of the Democratic Reaction, a petty-bourgeois political trend of the time. This section dealt with issues of such specificity that it is unlikely to be of interest to a non-specialist present-day reader. 

Roumain characterizes Haitian nationalism as “a shameless exploitation of the Anti-imperialism of the masses, to particular ends, by the bourgeois politician.” He says that its popular support was born out of a genuine mass movement that drove out the American occupiers and anti-imperialist sentiment with deep psychological roots, but that the bourgeois nationalists, because of their class position, were incapable of being truly loyal to this mass anti-imperialism and the economic demands of the proletariat and peasantry. The conclusion of this section is that the masses will more and more realize the necessity of a resolute struggle against both imperialism and its accomplice: the national bourgeoisie. 

The thrust of the section on color prejudice and class struggle is similar. Roumain recognizes that color prejudice in Haiti has deep roots in slavery and the colonial period and that it was being accentuated in his time by the poverty of the Black proletariat, the proletarianization of the majority-Black petty-bourgeoisie, and the scorn of the majority-mulatto bourgeoisie for these subordinate classes. However, he warns that the question of color prejudice will be exploited by Black members of the bourgeoisie for political gain, while they remain loyal to the interests of their class as a whole. He demands instead a “proletarian front without distinction of color”, fighting under the Communist Party’s watchword “color is nothing, class is everything”, as the only thing that can “annihilate, at the same time as color prejudice, [the] social, economic, and political debasement” of the masses. Given the cynical use of popular resentment for the mulatto elite by the resolutely anti-communist Duvalier dictatorships later in Haiti’s history, this section is prophetic. 

The original Haitian Communist Party ultimately failed to become a mass organization and did not survive its banning by the government in 1936. Despite the early demise of the party, this document is incredibly interesting as an object of communist study. It offers an approach to questions of theory, imperialism, nationalism, and prejudice within an imperially oppressed country in the aftermath of a crushing and exploitative occupation that is extremely lucid and resolute in its insistence on the importance of class struggle. Hopefully the historical example set by Roumain in this relatively understudied chapter of the history of our movement can serve to inspire future communist theoretical practice.

Jacques Roumain

Introduction: The Necessity of Theory

Can the workers’ movement be progressive if it neglects theory? Even today we often meet practical workers who consider theoretical questions as side issues that are no doubt interesting, but devoid of real importance; sometimes, going farther still, they disdain theory as a waste of time.

It is certainly not impossible that someone who shares these views might pick up this little book and carelessly leaf through the first pages. If that is the case, it will be necessary to note that highly “theoretical” questions are dealt with here, and wishing to dissuade such a person from closing the book with impatience, we should attempt at the beginning a sort of justification of our aims. To be honest, we need to respond to the questions of this “practical” man: “What good is theory?” and “How can it help a practical worker carry out their work better?”

The best response will be to follow our friend “the practical worker” in their day to day struggle. In that which is their own field of activity, they soon discover, at each bend they run into that very theory that they so look down upon. They will find themself subject to the question “What is to be done now?” And the response always contains that other question: “What goal are you trying to attain?” In order to justify workplace action (a strike, for example) they are forced to appeal to general reasons (in this case: the general aim envisaged and the general experience of the strike tactic). But such general facts as these are linked precisely with that which we call theory, and if moreover, they show the characteristic of having been verified by experience, we call them scientific theory. 

The theory which is at the base of all conscious socialist activity is scientific socialism (Marxism). This theory understands before anything else the strategy and the tactics of the class struggle in the strict sense. (The strike tactics mentioned above are one such detail). It requires equally an understanding of the historic economic roots of the class division of capitalist society, and of those laws of development of capitalist society whose weight was assessed for the first time by Marx in his great work: Capital. 

The Proletarian Conception of the World

That which we seek, is a comprehensive worldview which will have its roots in scientific fact, and not only in those which are called the “natural sciences” (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), but equally in the sciences of society and human thought. 

Without such a comprehensive view, Scientific Socialism would not know how to complete itself, and would not be able to stand on its own legs. The elaboration of such a “conception of the world” or philosophy is of vital importance, because Scientific Socialism does not enjoy in contemporary society (bourgeois) universal approval. Well to the contrary, these essential theses are in conflict with the general concepts which dominate bourgeois society.

The bourgeois conception of the world is first of all conservative, and for this reason hostile to the scientific study of human society with all its revolutionary consequences. Second of all, it is commonly religious from the formal point of view, at the very least – looking at the existing order as if it had received some sort of divine sanction. Even when it is not overtly religious, it possesses these traits.

The Collapse of the Nationalist Myth

The most considerable fact, the one most rich in lessons is, between 1932 and 1934, the collapse of the Nationalist myth in Haiti. First of all: what is Haitian Nationalism?

Haitian Nationalism was certainly born of the American Occupation. But we misled ourselves in not seeing in it a sentimental attitude. Haitian Nationalism was born of the corvée reestablished in our countryside by the invading troops; of the massacre of over 3.000 protesting Haitian peasants; of the expropriation of peasants by the big American companies.

That is how Haitian Nationalism got its roots in the suffering of the masses, in their economic misery augmented by American imperialism and their struggles against forced labor and dispossession. Whatever the sentimental superstructure of these struggles, likely a historical relic, they remain no less profoundly and consciously an anti-imperialism based on economic demands: they are a mass movement.

The Haitian bourgeoisie, while the peasants of the North, the Artibonite and the Cental Plateau were massacred, received joyously the leaders of the killers in the salons of its society circles and in its families. Conscious accomplice of the Occupation, it put itself at its service, groveling at the feet of the masters for spoils: the presidency of the Republic, civil service positions! Some were content with this, others were not. In this way, a bourgeois opposition was born.

The parallel is striking between the class relations in Saint-Domingue and in today’s Republic of Haiti. French Colonists and American Imperialists. Freedmen and the contemporary bourgeoisie. Slaves and the Haitian proletariat.

A later work will explain the question in its smaller details. Today, we will keep ourselves to this: in 1789, the freedmen couldn’t think of the freedom of the slaves because they lived off their exploitation. They did not demand the extension of their rights. In 1915, the Haitian bourgeoisie, living off the exploitation of the masses, couldn’t make common cause with them: it contented itself, the historical and natural accomplice of imperialism, to call for the continuation of its privileges and for new benefits under the protection of the Occupier. The satisfied fraction collaborated “frankly and loyally”, the other revolted.

Once again, we reason here in terms of classes and not in terms of persons. There was, from one part and the other, traitors and sincere combatants. But considered generally, or better, in terms of classes: the bourgeoisie betrayed; the proletariat resisted.

On what was this underwhelming bourgeois opposition based? The masses, they had serious economic demands. To the bourgeoisie, economic demands are pillage. Naturally, they could not base themselves on them. Their nationalism was consequently only verbal. Their newspapers raised vehement complaints and drew on thousands of examples of well known patriotic clichés such as: “Our Ancestors, the noble va-nu-pieds of 1804 etc., etc.”

Some fines and imprisonments put all in good order. So it turned to the anti-imperialist masses, made it look as if it were defending their rights, as if it would take up their protestations against taxes and dispossessions, spoke with solemnity about the destiny of our race (that race that it looked down on and for which it had shame). The masses listened and followed. Haitian Nationalism was born, a fact unheard of: the bourgeoisie the vanguard of the proletariat!

So we define this nationalism: a shameless exploitation of the Anti-imperialism of the masses, to particular ends, by the bourgeois politician.

Between 1915 and 1930 the battle against the occupation and its Haitian underlings was engaged incessantly, in spite of massacres, bludgeonings, and incarcerations. It attained in 1930 its culminating point. President Borno “frank and loyal collaborator” stepped down from power. The masses, a mighty lever, hoisted the Nationalists into power. 

With the arrival of the Nationalists into power, the process of decomposition of nationalism commenced. The explanation of this phenomenon is simple: at the base, the anti-imperialist, so anti-capitalist, movement. At the top, the opportunist movement of the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois management. Nationalism contained internal contradictions which broke it up. The nationalist movement was incapable of fulfilling its promises, because the promises of bourgeois nationalism collided, as soon as power was taken, with their class interests, and revealed themselves to be electoral trickery.

So the trade law was promptly buried for the reason that the interests of the minority exploiting class, consequently the Haitian state, are linked to those of international Capitalism. The project of the Jolibois-Cauvin legislation suffered the same fate. The small producers of alcohol continued to shut down their guildives; the agricultural workers were to work 10 to 12 hours a day for wages of 1 piastre, 50; merchants to be squeezed by market taxes; the workers to be exploited without recourse. As for returning the peasants dispossessed by the big American companies to the enjoyment of their land, it was totally out of the question. In this way, Haitian Nationalism collapsed. The great majority of the working class now understands the falsehood of bourgeois nationalism. More and more, it ties tightly the notion of the anti-imperialist struggle to that of the class struggle; more and more it takes into account that to combat Imperialism is to combat Capitalism, foreign or native, is to combat vigorously the Haitian bourgeoisie and the bourgeois politicians, servants of imperialism, cruel exploiters of the workers and peasants.

Color Prejudice and Class Struggle

Color prejudice is a reality that it is in vain to want to evade. And it is jesuitism that seems to consider it a moral problem. Color prejudice is the sentimental expression of the opposition of classes, of the class struggle: the psychological reaction to a historical and economic fact, the unimpeded exploitation of the Haitian masses by the bourgeoisie. It is symptomatic to note, at the moment when the poverty of the workers and peasants is at its height, when the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie proceeds at an accelerated pace, the awakening of this more than age-old question. The Haitian Communist Party considers the problem of color prejudice to be of exceptional importance, because it is the mask under which black politicians and mulatto politicians would like to evade the class struggle. These days, different manifestos where the problem is solved circulate clandestinely. One may gather from these manifestos that they expose 1.) sentimentally truths which are in reality economic and consequently social and political; 2.) the pauperization of the middle class, the reasons for which are explained in the critique of the Manifesto of the “Democratic Reaction.” But here it is a matter of specifying that the social, economic, and political debasement of blacks is by no means due to a simple opposition of color. The concrete fact is this one: a black proletariat, a majority-black petty bourgeoisie, is oppressed mercilessly by a tiny minority, the bourgeoisie (mulatto in its majority) and proletarianized by big international industry.

It is a matter, as we see it, of an economic oppression which translates itself socially and politically. So the objective foundation of the problem is therefore the class struggle. The P.C.H. poses the problem scientifically without by any means denying the validity of the psychological reactions of blacks wounded in their dignity by the imbecile disdain of the mulattoes, an attitude which is nothing but the social expression of bourgeois economic oppression.

But the duty of the P.C.H., a party which is incidentally 98% black because it is a workers’ party, and where the question is systematically cleared of its surface-level content and placed on the terrain of the class struggle, is to warn the proletariat, the poor petty bourgeoisie and the black intellectual workers against the black bourgeois politicians who wish to exploit to their profit their justified anger. They should be imbued with the reality of the class struggle, which color prejudice tends to evade. A black bourgeois is not worth more than a mulatto or white bourgeois. A black bourgeois politician is as ignoble as a mulatto or white bourgeois politician. The slogan of the Haitian Communist Party is:

AGAINST BLACK, MULATTO, AND WHITE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST SOLIDARITY: A PROLETARIAN FRONT WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF COLOR!

The petty bourgeoisie should come over to the side of the proletariat, because bourgeois and imperialist exploitation more and more rapidly proletarianizes it.

The Haitian Communist Party, applying its watchword: “Color is nothing, Class is everything”, calls the masses to the class struggle under its banner. Only against the national capitalist bourgeoisie (majority yellow, minority black) and the international capitalist bourgeoisie, is an implacable combat, combat cleared of its surface level content and situated on the terrain of the class struggle, susceptible, in destroying privileges owed to oppression and exploitation, to annihilate, at the same time as color prejudice, their social, economic, and political debasement.

Posted on

Was Mao a Bukharinist?: The “Three-Line Struggle” in Economic Debates Preceding the Great Leap Forward

Matthew Strupp examines economic debates in China during the leadup to the Great Leap Forward and assesses comparisons made between Mao and Bukharin. 

Depiction of a People’s Commune in Mao-era People’s Republic of China

A common understanding of the political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is that it underwent a grand “two-line struggle” in the years from the completion of “socialist transformation” with the nationalization of industry in 1956 up to Mao’s death in 1976. The two sides between which this supposed struggle took place were the Liuists, or capitalist-roaders, and the Maoists, the genuine Marxist-Leninists. This view is still common among Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and until Liu’s rehabilitation under Deng1 this was the official verdict of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its own history. It was replaced by a view that attributed to Mao the great merit of having revolutionarily unified the country but no longer asserted the correctness of his line in these struggles, no doubt since his line, posed against capitalist-roaders, had uncomfortable implications for the new leadership.

The problem with the original “two-line struggle model” is that it washes away much of the complexity of the actual politics and virtually ignores the competing bureaucratic interests involved in the decision-making process of the Chinese state, though this is also true of the view that replaced it and in questioning the one the author by no means intends to endorse the other. The effect is to thoroughly reduce the economics and politics of this attempt at socialist construction to a caricature, replacing political and historical analysis with a confession of faith.

An interesting alternative framing to these ways of understanding the politics of the PRC is the approach of R. Kalain. In a 1984 paper, Kalain argued that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” phase in the late 1950s, coming to similar politics as the Bolshevik revolutionary, statesman, and economist Nikolai Bukharin despite a lack of a direct influence from him. Bukharin is known for advocating for the continuation of a modified version of the New Economic Policy. He opposed the early ’20s “super-industrializers”, as well as the late ’20s forced collectivization of the peasantry and the first Five-Year Plan.2 Kalain argues that Mao criticized the “Soviet Model” of development for its promotion of heavy industrial construction at the expense of light industry and agriculture along Bukharinist lines. At first glance, Kalain provides a compelling wrench to throw into the “two-line struggle” argument. However, he fails to provide a useful explanation for the developments in Chinese economic policy in the years he describes. In particular, why would Mao have gone from a “Bukharinist” position in 1956 to launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958? 

This article will advance an argument for an understanding of Chinese economic debates, and particularly those between 1956 and 1962, in terms of a “three-line struggle.” This is a notion borrowed from David M. Bachman in Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System. This framing is opposed to the model of “two-line struggle” and to understanding Mao as a Bukharinist. It will particularly highlight the figure of Chen Yun as one whose role is especially illustrative to understand this period. This approach will reveal the Great Leap Forward to not have been simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but a case of his intervention into an existing bureaucratic struggle. The aim is a treatment of the dynamics of an “Actually Existing Socialist” society that goes beyond the standard focus on big personalities, or treating the state and ruling parties of such societies as either monoliths or as engaged in struggles limited to those between defenders of the communist faith and heretics. Rather, we will emphasize the conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state, both to correct one-sided historical narratives, and to stress the importance of questions of state and civil institutional arrangements to future attempts to realize the emancipated society of communism.

The “Three-Line Struggle” Model

We will begin with a summary of the “three-line struggle” model. In his 1985 China Research Monograph, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System, David M. Bachman lays out the ideas as well as the bureaucratic support groups of the “three lines” in Chinese economic debates preceding the Great Leap Forward. Bachman refers to the three groups as the “planning-heavy industry coalition”, the “extraction and allocation coalition”, and the “social transformation group.” The latter is referred to as a “group” rather than a coalition because its support was concentrated in the Party rather than across a handful of ministries.

The planning-heavy industry coalition was represented in speeches at the 8th Communist Party Congress in 1956 by Li Fuchun, Chairman of the State Planning Commission and Bo Yibo, Chairman of the State Economic Commission. It had a base of support in the heavy industrial ministries.3 The extraction and allocation coalition was represented at the Congress by Chen Yun, fifth-ranking member of the CCP and first Vice-Premier of the People’s Republic, Li Xiannian, Minister of Finance, member of the Politburo, and Vice-Premier, and Deng Zihui, head of the Party’s Rural Work Department and Vice-Premier. This coalition had its base of support in the ministries of Finance, Commerce, and Agriculture.4 The social transformation group was primarily based in the Party. It favored mass mobilization as a method for solving social and economic problems and was ideologically opposed to the divide between mental and manual labor, city and countryside, and worker and peasant. Its views were frequently espoused by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party.

The planning-heavy industry coalition tended to favor higher rates of investment in heavy industry, direct allocation of goods by the ministries, and higher rates of extraction from the peasantry to finance capital construction. This policy served the bureaucratic interests of the ministries who supported the coalition. This was because it maintained their control over a larger portion of the social product, and created a closed loop in which the products of factories operated by a ministry would be allocated by that same ministry for new construction.5 These policies were a far cry from the policy favored by the extraction and allocation coalition, who controlled the taxation system, the budget drafting process, and the distribution of the products of agriculture and light industry.6 Due to its role in the distribution process and its contact with the working-class, and especially with the peasantry, the extraction and allocation coalition was highly sensitive to the new problems in the Chinese economy that had come along with the completion of “socialist transformation,” the previous focus of most bureaucrats, and shifted their focus toward these new issues. These problems included the over-extraction of grain from the peasantry, the supply problems related to the disorganization of production, and disproportion in investment that favored heavy industry over light industry and agriculture which led to shortages of agricultural products. They also pointed to the availability of too few consumer goods to satisfy the increased worker purchasing power that had come with recent wage increases, which threatened inflation in the short run.7 The extraction and allocation coalition thought that these problems had to be paid special attention, and that above all, rashness should be avoided. They tended not to think of the benefits of a planned economy in terms of rapid industrialization, although they affirmed the goal of a “strong, socialist country.” Instead, they focused on its ability to avoid the irrationality, disproportion, and destructive instability of capitalism. They thought that uses of the planning system that resulted in such instability and did not meet the needs of the population were abuses of this system. As Li Xiannian put it at the 8th Communist Party Congress, due to the existence of the planned economy in China: 

…it is possible for us to pay attention to the connection between one year and another in a planned way, and to regulate the range of the year to year fluctuations, so as to avoid, as best we can, excessive fluctuations …. Had we been a bit more conservative last year and thus saved some raw materials and commodities, it would be helpful for working out the plan for 1957 …. We should gradually expand our material reserves . . . and thus ensure the even, smooth progress of our national construction, thereby further exploiting the superiority of a planned economy.8 

This was a view that stressed evenness in development, rationality in planning, and the avoidance of a destructive level of fluctuation.

The extraction and allocation coalition favored moderate levels of grain extraction and increased investment in agriculture and light industry. They believed in the “three balances” of budgets, loans and repayments, and material production and allocation. They also advocated use of the market in distribution where the planning system did not yet have the requisite capacity to distribute all products, increased prices for grain to increase peasant standards of living and incentives for production, and larger private plots for peasants. They favored cutting investment in heavy industry in the short term, but thought that the increased revenue provided by the quick turnaround of investments in light industry would put heavy industry on a more solid basis in the long term.9 This was a far-reaching alternative to the policies that the CCP had hitherto followed. It stood in clear opposition to the program of the planning-heavy industry coalition.

Bachman argues that while this debate was raging through the state ministries, much of the Party, and therefore the social transformation group which included Mao himself, were too distracted by the ongoing Hundred Flowers campaign to pay much attention to economic matters.10 When they did pay attention, it was the planning-heavy industry coalition that was able to successfully make the case to Mao and the Party that its policies were superior. It promised to resolve what the CCP had declared to be the principal contradiction in Chinese society: the contradiction between the advanced “socialist” relations of production and the backward “underdeveloped” forces of production, while also addressing the inequalities in Chinese society that had persisted since the completion of “socialist transformation.” These inequalities had begun to worry Mao more and more.11 

It was State Economic Commission Chairman Bo Yibo and State Planning Commission Chairman Li Fuchun who pioneered the approach that synthesized the preoccupations of the social transformation group with the policies of the planning-heavy industry coalition. This approach involved embracing the construction of small and medium-sized enterprises in the localities funded by the localities themselves; calling for greater efficiency in production through sheer voluntarism to make up for proposed cuts in light industry investment, and making up for cuts in the central investment in agriculture by relying on peasant labor mobilization and additional investment in heavy-industrial fertilizer plants. This would allow them to achieve their desired results of greatly increasing investment in large heavy-industrial plants while decreasing the external demands for heavy industrial goods by the localities. The localities would now be supplied by the small and medium-sized enterprises. The fears of Mao and the social transformation group about the divide between city and countryside, a divide which was growing as China industrialized, would be assuaged by bringing industry to the countryside, and the concerns about neglect of agriculture would be assuaged by advocating peasant labor mobilization. Mao rallied to this program at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September-October 1957. There, he summed up its ethos as “more, faster, better, and more economical,” and the Great Leap Forward was set in motion.12

Backyard Steel Furnace during the Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was not simply a whim of Mao Zedong, but the program of an alliance of bureaucratic interest groups. These were the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group, who had come together in the course of the “three-line struggle” in the Chinese state and the Communist Party. Their battle against Chen Yun and the extraction and allocation coalition would continue over the course of the Great Leap Forward. Chen conveniently claimed to have fallen ill between the Third Plenum and late summer-early fall of 1958, the period of the initial offensive of the Great Leap. He then gained Mao’s full favor between March and May of 1959, a period when Mao was more critical of the Leap.  He supposedly fell ill again during the renewed radical phase of the Great Leap Forward between May 1959 and the fall of 1960. Chen only returned to prominence in 1961 as a leader of the economic recovery effort after the extent of the damage caused by the Great Leap Forward was undeniable.13

Assessing Mao’s “Bukharinist Phase”

After having undertaken a survey above of the “three-line struggle” in the economic debates occurring in the PRC before the launch of the Great Leap Forward, it should now be easier to assess the merits of R. Kalain’s argument in their 1984 paper, Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Bukharinist’ Phase. Kalain argues that Mao had a distinct “Bukharinist” period in the late 1950s that he abandoned by the time of the Great Leap Forward. According to Kalain, Mao’s views in this period were characterized by a preference for “a more balanced relationship between agriculture and industry in contrast to the Soviet model’s emphasis on heavy industry” and he “viewed agriculture and light industry as the foundation for the development of heavy industry and the economy in general.”14 Kalain claims that the core of Mao’s “Bukharinist” case can be found in his 1956 speech On the Ten Major Relationships, and in his works critiquing Soviet books on economics: Concerning Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1958), Critique of Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1959), and Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy (1961-62).15

One problem with this claim should be immediately clear. With the exception of the 1956 speech, all of these works in which Mao supposedly argues for a position which he had abandoned by the time of the Great Leap forward were written during the period of the Great Leap itself, that is, in the period 1958-1962. Kalain mitigates this problem by only using quotes from the 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships16, in their paper. However, it is undeniable that the purpose of these later texts was to provide theoretical underpinnings for the Great Leap Forward. By looking at the text this picture becomes even starker. In Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “The vast majority of China’s peasants [are] ‘sending tribute’ with a positive attitude. It is only among the prosperous peasants and the middle peasants, some 15 percent of the peasantry, that there is any discontent. They oppose the whole concept of the Great Leap and the people’s communes.”17 It is difficult to see how this statement by Mao can be reconciled with Kalain’s claim about this text: that it represented a position that was opposed to the Great Leap Forward.

This should not prevent us from acknowledging that Kalain is not totally off base in including Mao’s early critiques of Soviet economics as examples of his “Bukharinism.” At points Mao’s critique does seem to line up pretty well with what Kalain describes as a “Bukharinist” perspective insofar as Mao criticizes the prioritization of heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry as well as the inequalities between the city and countryside. For example, in his 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships, Mao indeed offered a more “Bukharinist” solution to some of these problems. He states that “The emphasis in our country’s construction is on heavy industry,” but claims that in the Soviet Union and in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe, “there is a lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry.” He claims that if more importance is attached to agriculture and light industry and a greater proportion of investment made in them “there will be more grain and more raw materials for light industry and a greater accumulation of capital. And there will be more funds in the future to invest in heavy industry.” On the subject of the extraction of grain from the peasantry he stated: 

The Soviet Union has adopted measures which squeeze the peasants very hard. It takes away too much from the peasants at too low a price through its system of so-called obligatory sales and other measures. This method of capital accumulation has seriously dampened the peasants’ enthusiasm for production. You want the hen to lay more eggs and yet you don’t feed it, you want the horse to run fast and yet you don’t let it graze. What kind of logic is that!18 

This should not be seen, however, as a new and distinct proposal for sweeping changes to the policies of the PRC or an argument for the abandonment of a whole economic model. Although Mao points out some problems with the economic policies of the PRC, in this speech he mostly counterposes China as a positive case against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as negative cases because of the PRC’s already prevailing lower rates of grain extraction in comparison with these other countries. 

While Mao’s concerns on the balance in investment between agriculture and industry could indeed be called “Bukharinist,” because Bukharin paid considerable attention to similar problems in the early Soviet Union, and his early approach to these problems bore some resemblance to Bukharin’s, Mao’s ultimate solution to these problems in the Great Leap Forward was anything but “Bukharinist.” Again in Reading Notes on the Soviet Text Political Economy, Mao writes: “If we want heavy industry to develop quickly everyone has to show initiative and maintain high spirits. And if we want that then we must enable industry and agriculture to be concurrently promoted, and the same for light and heavy industry.”19 Unlike Bukharin, who advocated investing a greater share of revenue into light industry and agriculture, and using the faster turnover time on these investments to finance heavy industry; Mao proposed solving the disproportion in development between agriculture and industry and between light industry and heavy industry through initiative and high spirits.  If we follow David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates in the Chinese state and Communist Party, it becomes clear that Mao’s critiques in these later texts represent his social-transformationist concerns about the inequalities baked into the “Soviet Model” of development. And this mobilizational approach to the problem was precisely the program of the alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group that formed in opposition to the more “Bukharinist” extraction and allocation coalition.

Mao’s overall trajectory in economic matters in the late 1950s should not be seen solely in terms of individual innovation, that is, from an innovative Bukharinist policy to the innovative Great Leap Forward. Rather, it should be thought of in terms of Mao coming to actively intervene in an already existing bureaucratic struggle taking place within the state and the Communist Party. His position was initially closer to that of Chen Yun, one of his highest ranking economic advisors, and soon to be one of the leaders of the extraction and allocation coalition. Once the “three-line struggle” heated up and Chen became known as a partisan of the extraction and allocation coalition, though, Mao shifted his position to be in favor of the side that he felt had the superior program for industrialization and social transformation, that of planning-heavy industry coalition leaders Bo Yibo and Li Fuchun, in the Great Leap Forward, justifying this policy in his critiques of Soviet economics written between 1958 and 1962.

Chen Yun: Conservative Marketizer or Communist?

The departures Mao makes from the Soviet Model should not be understood as unique to him. Rather, as David M. Bachman argues, departures from the Soviet Model were precisely the sort of thing that Chen Yun had already been saying for years, beginning in 1954 in speeches he gave on the PRC’s first Five-Year Plan.20 The figure of Chen Yun is a relatively neglected one in the standard narratives of the PRC’s history. This is unfortunate because, in the actual political struggle that preceded the Great Leap Forward, the program of his bureaucratic coalition, the extraction and allocation coalition, was the only alternative proposed at the heights of the party leadership to the new course. It was also aimed at solving the broader problems that the Chinese economy faced after the successful completion of “socialist transformation.” At least in the English language literature, Chen Yun seems to have hitherto only attracted interest from supporters of China’s capitalist restoration. These tend to downplay his differences with Deng Xiaoping. They value him both as a leading champion of the market in the CCP for many decades and as a moderating influence on a process of marketization that ran into difficulties when it proceeded too rashly. This is certainly true of David M. Bachman, as well as of Nicholas R. Lardy and Kenneth Lieberthal, authors of the introduction to a collection of Chen’s speeches from 1956-1962 translated into English, titled Chen Yun’s Strategy for China’s Development: A Non-Maoist Alternative; and of Ezra Vogel, who wrote a biographical paper on Chen titled Chen Yun: his life.21

Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1978

For example, Bachman stipulates in a number of places that Chen Yun was categorically not a “market socialist” of even the Yugoslav variety, and that he saw the market solely as a supplement to the plan. Bachman stipulates that in all cases Chen thought it should be subordinated to the needs of a socialist society, becoming the leading internal opponent of the Deng marketization after it went far beyond the measures he recommended.22 Yet, Bachman does not consistently portray Chen as someone with serious communist commitments that might lead him to come at the problem from a totally different perspective than that which motivated this latter process.23 Bachman makes an open-ended process of “reform” one of the key tenets of Chen’s economic thought and refers to him as on the conservative end of a spectrum of reformers that ends with Zhao Ziyang, the most aggressive of China’s marketizers. 

However, Chen Yun’s economic thought offers something to those of us interested in the project of a planned economy as well. He offered a serious assessment of the problems that the Chinese economy faced after “socialist transformation” and proposed measures he thought would strengthen the overall planning system even if it required making limited use of the market. In both the Mao era and the Deng era he opposed every round of “overheating” forced on the Chinese economy, which usually carried detrimental consequences. This was in accordance with an overall view of the benefits of a planned economy which insisted that the goal of socialist planning was to serve the needs of the population in a way that avoided the violent disproportion and irrationality of capitalism. Lastly, he had a “bird-cage” model of the relationship between planning and the market, in which the bird is the market and the cage is the plan. If the cage is too small, the bird will suffocate, if there is no cage the bird will fly away. This metaphor offers an interesting light in which to view the plan-market relationship.24

Reflections

David M. Bachman’s “three-line struggle” model of the economic debates taking place in the CCP and in the state bureaucracy of the PRC preceding the Great Leap Forward is a useful lens for understanding the bureaucratic interests involved in the debate. It holds that the policies at the heart of the Great Leap Forward came into being as a result of an alliance between the planning-heavy industry coalition and the social transformation group in opposition to the extraction and allocation coalition. We have applied this model to assess the veracity of R. Kalain’s claim of a novel “Bukharinist” approach coming from Mao. We found this model to be insufficient because it confuses Mao’s social-transformationist concerns in his writings critiquing Soviet economics with earlier proposals that were in line with recommendations made in 1954 by one of his highest-ranking economic advisors, Chen Yun. We have also reassessed Chen’s legacy in light of scholarship that has cast him as simply a “conservative marketizer.” In contradistinction to this portrayal, we ought to emphasize his communist convictions and the usefulness of his thought to those attached to the project of a planned economy today. 

Overall, this article has looked to explore the nexus of politics and economics in the PRC, going beyond cardboard cutout narratives of capitalist-roaders and genuine Marxist-Leninists still popular today, and to refine our understanding of the complex interplay of the two, taking into account conflicting bureaucratic interests and economic outlooks internal to the party-state. This has been carried out in the interest of correcting one-sided historical narratives of “Actually Existing Socialist” societies and for the benefit of future attempts at the realization of a communist project, stressing the importance of questions of the arrangement of state and civil institutions to the course of such projects.

Posted on

Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature

The Cosmonaut team inaugurates the ecology series by discussing John Bellamy Foster’s seminal book Marx’s Ecology on its twentieth anniversary. Join Niko, Ian, Matthew, and Remi as they discuss the context of this work, and how it started a rediscovery of Marx’s ecological politics. They discuss how ecology informed Marx’s understanding of the world since his doctoral thesis, the relationship between Marx, Darwin, and Malthus and the concept of metabolic rift.

For early access to our podcasts and other perks, sign up for our Patreon.

 

 

Posted on

Christopher Caudwell and the Crisis in Physics: A Discussion

To continue our series on the relation of Marxism to science, we read and discussed Christopher Caudwell’s Crisis in Physics. Join Donald, Matthew, Rudy, and Remi for a conversation that covers the life of Caudwell, the relevance of his thought to topics such as ecology and the meaning of freedom, theoretical physics, and the possibility/impossibility of “proletarian science”.

For early access to episodes of our podcast, subscribe to our Patreon.

Posted on

The Practical Policy of Revolutionary Defeatism

Matthew Strupp lays out the politics of revolutionary defeatism in contrast to the approaches of third-campism and third-worldism. 

Reads ‘Aha Sorrow to the Capitalist, We Will Drive Him Into the Black Sea’. Soviet Union, 1920

In April 1964, at a luxury hotel overlooking Lake Geneva, a young Jean Ziegler, at that time a communist militant, asked Che Guevara, for whom he was serving as chauffeur, if he could come to the Congo with him as a fighter in the commandante’s upcoming guerilla campaign. Che replied, pointing at the city of Geneva, “Here is the brain of the monster. Your fight is here.”1 Che Guevara, though certainly not a first-world chauvinist, recognized the crucial role communists in the imperialist countries would have to play if the global revolutionary movement were to be successful. How then, as communists in close proximity to the brain of the monster, or in its belly, as Che is reported to have put it on another occasion, can we effectively stand against the interests of “our” imperialist governments? The answer to that question is the policy of revolutionary defeatism. This article will go over the origins and meaning of defeatism, take a look at its complexities with the help of some examples, and take up the challenge posed to it by the politics of both third-worldism and third-campism. 

Origins of Defeatism

The logic of revolutionary defeatism flows from the basic Marxist premise that the proletariat is an international class, and that in order to triumph on a global scale it needs to coordinate its political struggle internationally. This means that when workers in one country are faced with actions by “their” state that pose a threat to the working class of another country, they must be loyal to their comrades abroad rather than their masters at home. Rather than be content with simple condemnations, they must also pursue an active policy against their state’s ability to victimize the members of their class in the other country. This means strike actions in strategic industries, dissemination of defeatist propaganda in the armed forces, and organizing enlisted soldiers against their officers. In the case of a particularly unpopular or difficult war, all politics tends to be reoriented around the war question, and, if the state has been destabilized by the demands of the war and the ongoing defeatist activity of the workers’ movement, this can lead to an immediate struggle for power and the possibility of proletarian victory. If no such conditions are present, the defeatist policy can serve to train the proletariat and its political movement to oppose the predatory behavior of its state and, in practical terms, blunt the business-end of imperialism and mitigate its devastating consequences for the working class abroad. 

This policy of defeatism developed alongside the growth of mass-working class politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the proletarian movement grew to the point where its international policy became a live and important question. There were many positions bandied about in this period, some more or less defeatist, others placing the workers’ movement squarely behind national defense. Many individual socialists, including Marx and Engels, varied in their advocacy of one or another. An early expression of a policy of revolutionary defeatism can be seen in Engels’ 1875 letter to August Bebel, in which he criticizes the newly drafted Gotha Unification Program of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) for downplaying the need for international unity of the workers’ movement. Engels writes:

“…the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! And what is left of the internationalism of the workers’ movement? The dim prospect — not even of subsequent co-operation among European workers with a view to their liberation — nay, but of a future ‘international brotherhood of peoples’ — of your Peace League bourgeois ‘United States of Europe’!”2

Engels is congratulating the German workers’ movement for their internationalist behavior in war but chiding them for retreating from this internationalism in their political program. The war he is referring to is the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Marx had actually initially been German defensist in this war but changed his position after German troops went on the offensive.3 The German workers’ movement as a whole, though, mostly opposed the war in an admirable fashion, and Engels claims this was the reason for their esteem in the international movement. Not only did its political leaders condemn the war, but its organizations also carried out strikes in vital war industries in the Rhineland. This active stance of opposition to the war and active coordination of international political activity by the working class is what Engels thought was missing from this part of the Gotha Program, and he thought it was a step down from the truly international perspective of the International Workingmens’ Association. Its drafters included the vague internationalist language of the “Peace League bourgeois”, but made no mention of the practical tasks of the movement in this respect. Engels argued that the workers’ movement needed to coordinate its activities on an international scale, and that included acting in an internationalist fashion during war-time.

Nor did Engels limit his expression of a precursor to revolutionary defeatism to wars within Europe, where there was a developed working-class movement that could be destroyed in another country by an invasion from one’s own. He thought it was also applicable in matters of “colonial policy”, and that workers in imperialist countries had the political task of organized opposition to imperialist exploitation. He believed that if they failed in this task they would become political accomplices of their bourgeoisie. In an 1858 letter to Marx he wrote: 

“the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent.”4

These writings of Engels’ express two important features of Lenin’s revolutionary defeatist policy in World War I and that of the Communist International after the war. Namely, the importance of active, organized efforts to hamper the ability of one’s own state to carry out the business of war and imperialism, and the applicability of the policy to both inter-imperialist wars and to colonial and semi-colonial/predatory imperialist wars.

The Second Socialist International received the first major test of its ability to pursue a defeatist policy with the onset of World War One– and it failed spectacularly. Up until that point, the German SPD, the model party of the International, had followed an admirable policy of voting down all state budgets of the German Empire in the Reichstag under the slogan “For this system, not one man and not one penny!”, as Wilhelm Liebknecht declared at the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich.5 This policy allowed the German party to think of its parliamentary activity with a lens of radical opposition, through which they saw themselves as infiltrators in the enemy camp, intent on causing as much trouble for the state and its ability to rule as possible and securing whatever measures they could to benefit the movement outside the parliament. They made use of all the procedural stops they had at their disposal along the way, and used their parliamentary immunity to decry abuses like violence against the workers’ movement and German colonial wars in ways that would otherwise be illegal, though this didn’t keep August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknect, for many years the SPD’s two representatives in the Reichstag, from being convicted of treason and imprisoned for two years for their opposition to the Franco-Prussian War, particularly for linking opposition to German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to support for the Paris Commune.6 This was not a revolutionary defeatist policy in itself and the behavior of socialists in relation to the armed forces in wartime remained untheorized, but it was an important attitude for a party of revolutionaries to adopt towards their own state and its warfighting capacity. Politicians the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has elected in the United States, unfortunately, do not seem to see their activity in the legislature in this way and seem to think they are there more to “get things done” than to “hold things up” for the benefit of the movement. The DSA has also failed to adopt a “not one penny” position on the military budget. A resolution to do so was introduced at the 2019 convention, but was not championed by either of the main factions there.

Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel on trial, Holzstich, 1872

In August 1914 the SPD’s anti-militarist discipline broke down, as many of its representatives in the Reichstag voted for German war credits and much of the movement fell in line behind the war effort. The same happened in all the other parties of the International in the belligerent countries, with the exception of Russia and Serbia. The divide between those who supported the war and those who opposed it did not follow the existing pre-war political divisions. War socialists were drawn from the right, left, and center of the International. Some made the decision on the basis of “national defense” or out of an unwillingness to become unacceptable to bourgeois politics when they were winning so many reforms for the working class, others to defend French liberty from the Kaiser, or German liberty from the Tsar, still others to defeat British finance capital’s grip on the world, or to spark a revolution, or to train the proletariat in the martial spirit for the waging of the class struggle.7 No matter how they justified it though, these socialists were all feeding the proletariat into the meat grinder of imperialist war. There were no progressive belligerents in the First World War. Categories of “aggressor” and “victim” did not apply. It was, as Lenin put it, an “imperialist war for the division and redivision” of the spoils of global exploitation.8

The immediate reaction of those in the socialist movement opposed to the war after the capitulation of so many of the national parties was to organize a series of conferences at Zimmerwald (1915), Kienthal (1916), and Stockholm (1917), to work out a socialist peace policy. At Zimmerwald there soon emerged a left, who favored a policy of class struggle against the war, essentially a revolutionary defeatist position, since carrying it out would detract from the coherence and fighting ability of the armed forces. Lenin sided with this left but said they hadn’t gone far enough, not only did a policy of class struggle against the war, or as he put it: revolutionary defeatism, need to be put forward, but socialists loyal to the international proletariat had to organize themselves separately in order to be able to carry it out.9 This struggle would be a political one, directed at the armed forces of the capitalist state and aiming for their breakup under the pressure of defeatist propaganda and fraternization between the troops of the belligerent countries. On the concrete form of this struggle Lenin wrote, in November of 1914, in The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International: 

“War is no chance happening, no “sin” as is thought by Christian priests (who are no whit behind the opportunists in preaching patriotism, humanity and peace), but an inevitable stage of capitalism, just as legitimate a form of the capitalist way of life as peace is. Present-day war is a people’s war. What follows from this truth is not that we must swim with the “popular” current of chauvinism, but that the class contradictions dividing the nations continue to exist in wartime and manifest themselves in conditions of war. Refusal to serve with the forces, anti-war strikes, etc., are sheer nonsense, the miserable and cowardly dream of an unarmed struggle against the armed bourgeoisie, vain yearning for the destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or a series of wars. It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations.”10

Lenin did not think that the adoption of a revolutionary defeatist position by communists in the imperialist countries was only applicable to the specific conditions of World War I, where the conflict was reactionary on all sides and the proletariat had well developed political organizations in all the belligerent countries who could turn the struggle against the war into an immediate struggle for power. In response to the objection of the Italian socialist leader Serrati to a resolution proposed by the Zimmerwald left that advocated a class struggle against the war, that such a resolution would be moot because the war was likely to end quickly, Lenin said: “I do not agree with Serrati that the resolution will appear either too early or too late. After this war, other, mainly colonial, wars will be waged. Unless the proletariat turns off the social-imperialist way, proletarian solidarity will be completely destroyed; that is why we must determine common tactics.”11 Here, the revolutionary defeatist policy is not simply a path to the immediate struggle for power, as it indeed was in the case of WWI, rather it’s related to the adoption of a particular attitude to the activities of one’s own state in general. For communists in the imperialist countries, this means fighting against the wars your country wages to maintain its grip over its colonies and semi-colonies, using the same tactics you would use in the case of a “dual defeatism” scenario, where communists in all the belligerent countries are defeatist in relation to their country’s war effort, in an inter-imperialist war that is reactionary on all sides.

In a war between imperialist powers, a dual defeatist policy is the correct path forward for communists

However, these two scenarios should not be confused. Although Lenin claimed the policy pursued in response to one should be put forward in the case of the other, this should not be extended to the communists in the oppressed country. There is no question of being “defeatist” in relation to a progressive war for national liberation. The Communist International made this clear in condition 8 of its 21 conditions for affiliation: 

“Parties in countries whose bourgeoisie possess colonies and oppress other nations must pursue a most well-defined and clear-cut policy in respect of colonies and oppressed nations. Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its “own” country, must support—in deed, not merely in word—every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, inculcate in the hearts of the workers of its own country an attitude of true brotherhood with the working population of the colonies and the oppressed nations, and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples.”12

The important point here is that revolutionary defeatism in a predatory imperialist war is only a prescription for communists and proletarian movements in the imperialist countries. Today this means those that benefit from a flow of value coming from global wage arbitrage and the super-exploitation of newly proletarianized former peasants in the former colonial and semi-colonial world. In such a war, the question of defeatism or defensism in the oppressed countries, in the realm of practical policy, is precisely a question for communists in the oppressed countries themselves. This question should be decided on the basis of how best to serve the ends of national liberation and social revolution, taking the particular national political conditions and those of the war into account, but the victory of the oppressed country should be favored over that of the imperialist country.

The Communist International itself may actually have gone too far in the direction of defensism, not in the sense of favoring the victory of the oppressed country, which should always be the case, but in the sense of the relationship of communists in the oppressed countries to their state and to other political forces. Its policy of the anti-imperialist united front was ambiguously formulated and its implementation often involved subordinating the communist parties to the bourgeois nationalist movements. The most notorious example being the case of China, where Comintern directives on the Communist Party’s relationship to the Kuomintang had to be explicitly rejected by Mao and his co-thinkers for the Chinese Revolution to triumph.13 This logic has been taken to the extreme in recent years by the Spartacist League, a far-left sect that has devoted space in their paper to putting forward a position of military support for ISIS: “We take a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and forces acting as their proxies, including the Baghdad government and the Shi’ite militias as well as the Kurdish pesh merga forces in Northern Iraq and the Syrian Kurdish nationalists.”14 The cases of China and modern Iraq and Syria show that sometimes in cases of internal disorder or when the forces “resisting the imperialists” are particularly reactionary, whether the Kuomintang or ISIS, the best option for communists and the anti-imperialist struggle is for communists in the oppressed country to wage a military struggle against both the imperialists and the reactionary forces “resisting” them. 

Vietnam

The most successful application of revolutionary defeatist tactics in the US was in the case of the Vietnam war. The best-known images of the anti-war movement in the US are of large public marches and of police repression on college campuses. The truth is that these things were actually pretty ineffective at producing a US defeat and withdrawal. Large demonstrations can do something to turn public opinion against the war and college students were able to take some actions that made a meaningful difference by taking advantage of their positions in a crucial part of the war machine: the university; but these things were not enough to halt the functioning of the most destructive imperialist military in history. We can verify this by comparing the movement against the war in Vietnam with that against the war in Iraq. As with Vietnam, the Iraq war was opposed by millions of demonstrators, including by between 6 and 11 million people on a single day, February 15, 2003, the largest single-day protest in world history; yet the war kept going.15 

What was the difference in Vietnam? The answer lies both in the brilliant military strategy of the Vietnamese liberation movement under the leadership of the Communist Party, and in the practical application of a revolutionary defeatist policy by sections of the US far-left and workers’ movement. This meant disrupting the recruitment of the US armed forces, and especially, organizing opposition within the military itself. This resulted in a situation where “search-and-evade” tactics became the ordinary state of affairs for many units, as common soldiers deliberately avoided combat or simulated the appearance and sounds of combat to deceive their officers, over 600 soldiers carried out “fraggings”, murders or attempted murders of their officers, often with frag grenades, and groups of soldiers occasionally carried out organized mutinies. By June 1971 this state of widespread organized resistance to the war led military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl to write an article titled The Collapse of the Armed Forces, in which he claimed that “The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.”16 This was undeniably a key factor in the breakdown of US warfighting ability in Vietnam and the eventual US withdrawal.

Mutinies and domestic resistance from US troops in Vietnam were key the imperialist defeat

Some insist that the example of war resisters in the US military during the occupation of Vietnam, and by extension, the entire premise of a policy of active revolutionary defeatism, is entirely useless to today’s revolutionary movement because the nature of the US military has been entirely transformed by the transition to an all-volunteer force in the late-70’s and 80’s. What this position misses is the extent to which the claim that the US military is an all-volunteer force is itself an ideological artifice crafted by the US military establishment and the degree to which poverty itself still acts as a draft. The US military does not make public information on the income-levels or class positions of the families from which it recruits, only their geographic distribution. The fact that the localities that enlistees are drawn from are more affluent than average does not rule out that the enlistees themselves may be poor. The higher cost of living in these areas may in fact be an additional stimulus to enlistment, and the fact that military recruiters regularly use material incentives, like the promise of a free education, to prey on working-class kids, is no secret. This means that the class divide in the armed forces has not entirely been eliminated, that officers’ interests still conflict with those of enlistees, and that the possibility of mass war resistance from within the ranks of the armed forces, especially as part of a coordinated working-class struggle against imperialist war, still lies within reach.

Iran and Third-Campism

With the assassination at the beginning of this year of high ranking Iranian general Qassim Soleimani at the hands of the United States, the prospect of war with Iran became a very real possibility. In fact, a section of the US foreign policy establishment has been hellbent on bombing or invading Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that established the current Iranian regime, and the US has imposed harsh sanctions on Iran that themselves amount to a form of warfare. These sanctions have no doubt contributed to the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak in Iran, which has killed 988 and infected over 16,000, roughly 9 in 10 cases in the Middle East.17  Although the immediate worry about an invasion has died down since January, it’s still important for communists to work out what their response to such an invasion would be, because the threat remains on the table. 

The main question is whether a revolutionary defeatist policy in relation to a war with Iran should be pursued or whether a Third-Campist position of “Neither Washington nor Tehran” ought to be put forward. The idea of Third-Campism, in this case, is that the political regimes of the United States and of Iran are both so reactionary that the proletariat has no stake in either side’s victory or defeat in the war and should, therefore, neither support nor actively oppose its prosecution by the imperialists. This approach is flawed. If we were considering a war between two imperialist countries on equal standing, both with reactionary governments, what this leaves out is the benefit that the proletariat in both the belligerent countries could gain by an active pursuit of a revolutionary defeatist policy. Either, it could open up the road to the seizure of power by the proletariat in one or both belligerent countries or it could only serve to train the proletarian movement in each country in the art of carrying out a struggle against “its own” state. 

However, in the case of a US attack on Iran, this “soft Third-Campist” position of dual defeatism, like that implied by the left-communist International Communist Current, when it describes the Middle East after the Soleimani assassination as “dominated by [an] imperialist free for all” would also be wrong because it regards both the United States and Iran as imperialist.18 Such a war would not be reactionary and imperialist on both sides, a reactionary war by the US for the reconquest of one of its semi-colonies. It is no coincidence that the US only became hostile to the Iranian government after the ouster of its puppet the Shah, meaning that the Iranian war effort would contain elements of a progressive national liberation struggle. In the case of a US invasion, the main enemy for Iranians is not at home, their main enemy is imperialism. Communists in Iran are, of course, opposed to the political regime of the Islamic Republic for its brutal suppression of the workers’ movement and its political organizations, its regressive stance on women’s rights, and its treatment of national minorities, but they do not think it fights too vigorously against US imperialism.19 Communists in the United States should take the position: “better the defeat of US troops than their victory”,  and their task would be to carry out an active policy of revolutionary defeatism against an invasion of Iran. The task of communists in Iran would be to fight off the imperialist invaders by any means necessary, including by opposing any effort by the Iranian government to disarm the Iranian proletariat as it prepares itself to resist an invasion.

Third-Worldism

There is another political strand that downplays the importance of active revolutionary defeatist politics in the imperialist countries: Third-Worldism. In this case, it is not the desirability of the proletariat in the imperialist countries carrying out a revolutionary defeatist policy that is questioned, but its political inclination to do so. All this leaves us with is joystick or sideline politics, the cheering on of great revolutionaries and great revolutionary movements, but always happening somewhere else. This makes Third-Worldism a self-fulfilling prophecy, the denial of the ability of the proletariat in the imperialist countries to challenge the imperialist bourgeoisie which exploits both them (usually rationalized by saying that proletarians in the imperialist countries are equally exploiters) and their comrade workers around the world, becomes a reason not to organize to do so. Of course a fraction of the super-profits of imperialism is sometimes distributed to workers in the imperialist countries with the aim of purchasing their loyalty to the bourgeois state. Our point is to build a movement capable of credibly offering something better than that: communism. 

The idea that politics flows directly from the movement of money is an economist error, if it were true, all communist politics would be pointless, because that factor will never be in our favor. Rather, international working-class consciousness will necessarily be a subjective product of common struggle, including the anti-imperialist struggle. It is likely, as Trotsky argues in his History of the Russian Revolution, that for reasons of combined and uneven development, the world revolution will be sparked in the oppressed countries first, but that process will not ultimately be successful if revolution does not come to the imperialist countries as well.20 Most great Third-World revolutionaries have been clear about this, Che certainly was. Indeed, as the late Egyptian communist, Samir Amin wrote in Imperialism and Unequal Development:

“…Third-Worldism is strictly a European phenomenon [we may say a phenomenon of the imperialist countries]. Its proponents seize upon literary expressions, such as ‘the East wind will prevail over the West wind’ or ‘the storm centers,’ to justify the impossibility of struggle for socialism in the West, rather than grasping the fact that the necessary struggle for socialism passes, in the West, also by way of anti-imperialist struggle in Western society itself… But in no case was Third-Worldism  a movement of the Third-World or in the Third-World.”21

Third-Worldism began as an optimistic reaction to successful national liberation struggles in the oppressed countries in the mid-20th century, but to the extent that it exists today, it is simply a symptom of our defeat. Third-Worldism may produce amusing artefacts like That Hate Amerikkka Beat, but it offers nothing to the practical struggle for global proletarian revolution because it refuses to even consider what might need to be done to make revolution in the imperialist countries. None of this is to discount the work of communists in the Third-World, who are doing their part in fighting imperialism and their bourgeoisie. The problem with Third-Worldism is that it’s a poor form of solidarity that looks not to the ways in which one can most practically ensure the final triumph of those one is in solidarity with.

The Upcoming Battle

The goal of communists in the imperialist countries should be to create, to quote once again Che Guevara, “two, three… many Vietnams”22, not in the sense Che used it, focoistic guerilla campaigns, but in the sense of successful applications of the revolutionary defeatist policy of class struggle against imperialist war, which killed the US military’s ability to maintain the occupation of that country. This means, in the case of unprogressive war, strikes in war industries, spreading defeatist propaganda in the armed forces, and organizing common soldiers against their officers and the war effort. We must also fight for a truly democratic-republican military policy in peacetime, rejecting foreign intervention by the United States and fighting for the universal arming and military training of the people and the right to freely organize in militias for the proletariat, as well as freedom of speech and association for the ranks of the present-day armed forces. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”23 and now is a time of relative peace, a time for politics, a time to build up our forces, to train them to become a honed weapon of class struggle, and “not to fritter away this daily increasing shock force in vanguard skirmishes.”24 But a time of war is coming, and we must have those “other means” at our disposal, we must be prepared to crush our enemies and to use the destructive and atrocious wars conjured up by the bourgeoisie as opportunities to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, to make war on the ruling class as a road to the seizure of power by the proletariat and the triumph of communism.

Posted on

Gracchus Babeuf: From Jacobin to Communist

Matthew Strupp looks at the transformation of the French revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf from Feudiste to Jacobin to one of the first Revolutionary Communists.

“The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” -Sylvain Marechal, Manifesto of the Equals, 1796

The specter of the French Revolution, if it ever left us in the first place, has returned in force. The leading publication of the reformist social-democratic Left in the United States is called Jacobin magazine, memes about guillotining billionaires and politicians are all over social media, and the weekly Gilets Jaunes demonstrations in France have produced a great volume of graffiti comparing the Fifth Republic to the Ancien Regime and Emmanuel Macron to Louis XVI.

In all of these cases, the Left has, as is its custom, compared itself to the Jacobins of 1789-94, who espoused radical-liberal republicanism that, even in its most radical codification, the Constitution of Year I (1793), enshrined property rights as “natural and imprescriptible.”1 As communists, we know that private property is the poison pill of liberalism’s radical promise—a guarantee of class society’s continued existence even when democratic concessions in the cordoned off “political sphere” are made to the rabble, be it the sans-culottes or the proletariat. For the purposes of knowing our own history, we should understand that this insight did not originate with Marx and Engels, who of course did much to develop it. Rather, we can trace it to the French Revolution itself in the figure of Gracchus Babeuf, who transcended Jacobinism and came to a conception of communism that greatly influenced Marx and Engels.

The “aristocratic hydra” against the people, with the Guillotine in the background (1789)

The Road to Revolutionary Communism

Prior to the revolution, Francois Noel Babeuf was a feudiste, a legal specialist in feudal rights who essentially advised landowners on how to squeeze their peasants as efficiently as possible. However, rather than allowing his position within the old order to cause him to identify with it, Babeuf came to resent the Ancien Regime’s tangled and parochial legal structure, as well as the nobility who benefited from it. By 1789, when every commune in France was asked to select representatives for the Estates General and submit cahiers de doleances, or lists of complaints, for the body to address, Babeuf personally authored his commune’s proposal for the total abolition of feudalism and the consolidation of a single code of law. Babeuf was supportive of the revolution throughout its course, but was critical of the excesses Robespierre’s terror and the Jacobins’ failure to fully implement the Constitution of Year I, which unlike the Constitution of 1789 and the later Constitution of Year III (1795), would have established a republic with universal adult male suffrage.

Thermidor saw the replacement of the Jacobins, who were at least somewhat beholden to the will of the san-culottes, by the reactionary Thermidorian Convention, which quite openly represented the interests of the class of nouveaux riches that had emerged since the beginning of the revolution and had made their fortunes through speculation on the confiscated estates of royalist emigres. Babeuf reacted to these events by changing the name of his newspaper from Journal de la liberté de la presse to Tribun du Peuple, which reflected the shift in his focus from keeping the Jacobins accountable to the ideals of the revolution to polemic against the Thermidorians.2 At this time Babeuf also adopted for himself the first name Gracchus, after the middle-republican Roman Tribune of the Plebs, Gaius Gracchus. Gaius and his brother Tiberius, who was Tribune a decade earlier, advocated redistributing public lands, illegally cultivated by wealthy patricians in massive latifundia, or plantations, to the propertyless inhabitants of Rome. These were the original proletarii, from the Latin proles or offspring, which was the only thing this stratum was seen as capable of contributing to the Republic. For this, Gaius Gracchus and his brother were both murdered by gangs loyal to the conservative senatorial patricians, a dire omen for Babeuf’s ultimate fate.

Through the Tribun, Babeuf breathed fire at the Thermidorians. After the enactment of the Constitution of Year III, which replaced the single legislative body and universal adult male suffrage of the Constitution of Year I with high property requirements for voting, a lower and upper legislative chamber, an extremely powerful five-man executive Directory, and a requirement that ⅔ of the new representatives be drawn from the existing reactionary Thermidorian Convention, Babeuf wrote in the Tribun: “If you want civil war, you can have it … You’ve cried ‘To arms.’ We’ve said the same to our people.”3 Babeuf was the originator of the demand “Bread and the Constitution of ‘93,” which motivated the ill-organized insurrection of I Prarial. This insurrection was soon crushed, and he was thrown in prison for his role.4

It was in prison that Babeuf developed his communism. He was certainly influenced by utopian writers like Thomas More and Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, but he also incorporated a primitive conception of class struggle absent from these writers. He wrote in a Prospectus for the Tribun, “We too know a little bit about what elements are used to move men. The best lever is their own interest,” and although he didn’t use the familiar Marxian terms, he had seen how the wealth of the now ascendant bourgeoisie had made Thermidor possible and began to theorize about the nascent class of wage-workers being a particularly revolutionary section of the sans-culottes.5 He also wrote in a later letter to one of his comrades an account of the ills of capitalist production that, while obviously less developed than the later work of Marx, displays remarkable sophistication:

Competition, far from aiming at perfection, submerges conscientiously made products under a mass of deceptive goods contrived to dazzle the public, competition which achieves low prices only by obliging the worker to waste his skill in botched work, by starving him, by destroying his moral standards through lack of scruples; competition gives the victory only to whoever has most money; competition, after the struggle, ends up simply with a monopoly in the hands of the winner and the withdrawal of low prices; competition which manufactures any way it likes, at random, and runs the risk of not finding any buyers and destroying a large amount of raw material which could have been used usefully but which will no longer be good for anything.6 

The “Conspiracy” of the Equals

After his release from prison, Babeuf began to speak at meetings of the Union of Friends of the Republic, which, due to its proximity to the Pantheon, was known as the Society of The Pantheon. The Society of the Pantheon was mostly made up of former Jacobins, and Babeuf was able to recruit many to his cause because he and his paper represented nearly the only resistance to the Thermidorian Reaction. However, the Directory soon got wind of the Society’s activities and sent the ambitious young general Bonaparte to suppress it. It was only after the suppression of the Society of the Pantheon that what became known as the Conspiracy of the Equals began to take shape.7

Conservative and revisionist historians, most notably Francois Furet, have seized on the name “conspiracy” to try to draw a direct line of hyper-vanguardist putschism from Babeuf through Blanqui to Lenin. Yet “Conspiracy of the Equals” is not a term that comes from Babeuf himself. Rather, it is derived from the Directory’s prosecution of Babeuf on charges of conspiracy. Babeuf only ever referred to his movement as “the Equals” and the organization that coordinated it as the “Insurrectionary Committee”. It is also simply untrue that Babeuf aimed to carry out a secretive coup. Rather, he was relying on the possibility of a mass insurrection for victory. As the state prosecutor testified at his trial:

Their means were the publication and distribution of anarchistic newspapers, writings and pamphlets … the formation of a multitude of little clubs run by their agents; it was the establishment of organizers and flyposters; it was the corrupting of workshops; it was the infernal art of sowing false rumors and spreading false news, of stirring up the people by blaming the government for all the ills resulting from current circumstances.8

These are not the activities of a group uninterested in mass support! As far as Lenin is concerned, Lars Lih in Lenin Rediscovered has done much to dispel misunderstandings of Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party, misunderstandings which are as common on the Left as anywhere.9 In both Lenin and Babeuf’s cases, to the extent that their organizations operated secretly, they did so out of necessity due to the ever-present threat of state repression.

It was such state repression that defeated the Equals. The movement was betrayed by an infiltrator, Georges Grisel, who had been involved in the leadership of the organization, and who gave the forces of the Directory enough information to find and arrest Babeuf and over 800 of his comrades. As Babeuf sat in a dungeon, several hundred of the Equals attempted one final attempt at insurrection despite the arrest of their movement’s leadership and the destruction of their organization. This insurrection was unsuccessful, and dozens were executed for their role in it after short trials by military commission. Babeuf himself was tried and sentenced to death on 7 Prarial, Year V (1796). After his sentence was given, he and a comrade of his tried to kill themselves in their prison cell with makeshift daggers, but were stopped by a guard. Babeuf was fed to the guillotine the next day, and with his death, so too died the movement against Thermidor.10

Results and Prospects

There are about thirty references to Gracchus Babeuf in the works of Marx and Engels, and although neither of them ever composed a systematic analysis of his thought, Babeuf’s influence on their politics is obvious. In The Holy Family, the beards write:

… the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led beyond the ideas of the entire old world order. The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives Leclerc and Roux, and which finally with Babeuf’s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830.

From a historical materialist point of view, it’s clear that the material conditions in France were not ripe for anything approaching socialism; after all, the proletariat itself barely existed. Engels is correct to insist that it would have been “insane” to “attempt to jump from the Directorate immediately into communism” (although it would also be insane to attempt to jump from the conditions of the present immediately into communism, no matter what the communizers might say).11 The best that could have been hoped for had the Equals taken power in 1796 would have been similar to the best that Lenin hoped for in the event of an isolated Russian Revolution in 1905, a “democratic dictatorship of the (nascent) proletariat and peasantry.”12 This would not have allowed France to “leap over the natural phases of its development” or to “remove them by decree,” but it may have “shorten[ed] and lessen[ed] the birth pangs” of capitalism, as Marx puts it.13

Babeuf’s true contribution was his commitment to revolutionary action at the level of the state to transform society as a whole. Babeuf was considering writing a book titled “Equality” after he was released from prison. Had he done so, he would have been one of several utopian communist writers in the late  eighteenth century.14 Instead, he organized an insurrectionary committee to carry out what Marx called a “political revolution with a social soul,” an attempt to use the political act of revolution and the seizure of state power to extend the radical republican principles that dominated the political sphere at the height of the Jacobin revolution to the social sphere as well.15

Bust of Babeuf made in the USSR, 1934

Our Tasks

We, like Gracchus Babeuf, are living in a Thermidor. His was in the wake of the defeat French Revolution; ours is in the wake of the defeat of the last century’s workers’ movement, exemplified by the isolation, bureaucratic degeneration, and eventual rollback of the Russian Revolution. For this reason, we can still learn from Babeuf’s example. We must overthrow the reactionaries that dominate our politics by means of mass organizing, as Babeuf attempted. We must, more effectively than Babeuf, watch out for the police spies in our midst as we do so. Finally, we must look past liberalism, even at its most radical, and extend its democratic-republican promises to the whole of society, which means abolishing class society. These are the tasks we share with Babeuf, and it is of paramount importance that we learn from the example, and the failures, of past revolutionaries like him as we endeavor to carry them out.