[From nobody Wed Sep  6 10:12:37 2017
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Date: Wed, 07 Apr 1999 18:59:13 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox@mail.ilstu.edu>
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To: marxism@lists.panix.com
Subject: The Geneology of Burford's "United Front"
References: <199904032257.RAA05337@ciao.cc.columbia.edu>
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Louis Proyect wrote:

> >It is the logical continuation of the Serbian social fascist views, that
> >unfortunately are copied around the internet uncritically by left liberal
> >anti-imperialists.
> >
> >Chris Burford
>
> There is no such thing as "social fascism". This term, orginating in the
> early years of the Comintern, had disastrous consequences in Germany, where the
> Socialists were dubbed as such by the CP. The term was picked up  by Maoists in
> the 1980s to describe their opponents on the left. Nobody has a clue what Chris
> means by it.

Burford's posts, utterly uninteresting as actual analysis of anything,
do offer a certain interest as a historical curiosity, putting on
display the last few degenerate drops of a perspective that began
so nobly -- gloriously -- in the Chingkang Mountains. Reading the
bits and pieces of Burford's work that you and others have quoted
sent me back to browse through the first hundred pages or so of
Vol. 1 of Mao's Selected Works. Those early works are really magnificent,
and a continuing inspiration even today, IF AND ONLY IF one
recognizes that (as developed) they were specifically designed *not*
to cross international borders, in fact almost from the beginning had
as one of their theoretical poles a distinction between *theory*
and *thought*.  Theory was Marx's and Lenin's analysis of capitalism,
an analysis which was *universal* in the sense of being continuously
relevant to capitalism as a whole, throughout its past, present and future.
*Thought* (inspired and guided by theory) was directly grounded in the
specific conditions of a time and place. (This distinction is implicit even
in these early works, prior to the Long March. It is made explicit later
on.)

Now the beauty of it. The *fact*, the actuality, of a "united front"
*preceded* the formulation of it in principle. There hardly exists
in human history so vividly visible an instance of the fundamental
Marxist insight into the priority of practice to thought. In other
words Mao did *not* start out with some theory of The United
Front, then fish around in the interior of his skull to find the elements
to fit into that theory.

These early works of Mao (through "Be Concerned with the Well-
Being of the Masses..." January, 1934) do not even use the term,
United Front, though they were doggedly concerned with working
out the relationships among the various forces in motion. Nor do they
yet make the self-conscious distinction between thought and theory
mentioned here. But no one reading them with any sense of history
can fail to see that distinction operative in practice -- see Mao's
single-minded focus on the actual conditions confronting Red
Power at that time in that place.

If we are following these events through the lens of Mao's work, there
is now a gap in the record. "Be Concerned..." was a speech by Mao
at the Second National Congress of Workers' and Peasants'
Representatives in Kiangsi in January 1934. Like all the preceding
texts, then, it occurs in the thick of party work, and probably it
is even a bit misleading to label these "works of Mao." And of
course he was not Chairman Mao then. The next text is almost
two years later, December 1935, "On Tactics Against Japanese
Imperialism," at a conference of party activists following the meeting
of the Politburo that month. The Long March was over. Mao was
now Chairman.

This essay or Report to the Party aims at summing up the experience
of the preceding 10 years and analyze the new situation created by
the Japanese threat, and for the first time we find explicit reference
to a "united front," but lower case is still called for here. After listing
the various active political elements in China (including students), he
reaches a provisional conclusion: "The task of the Party is to form a
revolutionary national united front by combining the activities of the
Red Army with all the activities of the workers, the peasants, the
students, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie throughout
the country" (p. 161). No big concept into which reality is somehow
higgledy-piggledy to be more or less rammed (Chris's United Front
Against Fascism, existing only in the great foggy interior of Chris
Thought). And of course Japanese Imperialism was a rather more
impressive threat than the Rump Yugoslavia against which Chris
wishes to unite us all. "[U]nited front" here isn't a concept or a theory
or a controlling principle -- it's a working label for activity and events
already ongoing.

One observation -- it is a strategy which calls for the identification
of one "main enemy," that opposition to a common (and supreme)
enemy being the basis for the unity of the various elements in the
coalition. Secondly, Mao originally characterized it as appropriate
to China only, because only in China was the ruling class itself
split into (potentially) antagonistc sectors. After the Japanese
invasion, the main enemy became Japanese imperialism, and attempts
were continually made to unite with all *patriotic* elements in China
against that external threat. (But the Red Army never gave up its
independence.)

Skipping for now the vast process through which the United Front
(with varying content over time) became a central guiding concept in
the Chinese Revolution, I want to touch on how it came to the
West and, eventually, in utterly trivialized form, to the empty
rhetorical posturings of CB.

The people who were to make up the various "New Communist"
leagues, unions, parties, etc. of the 1970s mostly entered politics
and discovered Marx during the almost hysterical excitement of
the mid-60s -- and the most easily available revolutionary material
was that being thrown out by the excitement of the early stages
of the Cultural Revolution in China. It was easy for us to simply
think of "Chairman Mao" as the current continuator of the communist
tradition to which we were trying to link ourselves -- clumsily, I may
add. And we read Mao as THEORY. (The Chinese themselves were
beginning to by that time -- leading to the absurdities of "Chairman
Mao's Theory of the Three Worlds and the International United
Front Against whatever.")  So there we were -- stuck with what on
its homegrounds was a marvellously flexible and powerful body of
thought, often responding sensitively to changing conditions and
problems of the revolution. But, rudely transplanted and awkwardly
abstracted to "apply" (like a coat of varnish) to the conditions of
an advanced industrial country it became a twisted parody of itself.
The first element of this THEORY now became THE UNITED
FRONT. But United Front of what? Well, there were not really
all that many distinct forces *in movement* in the U.S. So there
began a really undignified rush to invent the elements of such a
United Front in the U.S. The whole concept, as present in
the thought and practice of the Chinese Revolution, is utterly
inseparable from the existence of a large, even predominant,
peasantry. Try and find a peasantry in 1970s United States. At
least two very small organizations (one itself "Maoist") combatted this
metaphysics of a United Front:: Sojourner Truth Organization and
The New Voice. Later on it was fought also by Line of March.

But except for Line of March (and other groups that retained some
respect for the USSR) the other New Communist groups tailed China
into the wilds of "Theory of the Three Worlds," essentially an attempt
to extend to the whole world the strategy that had won the Chinese
Revoution. It was a disaster from the beginning for all concerned. Moreover,
as the metaphysics of it developed, the world situation of the 1970s was
jammed into the pattern established in the 1930s -- this is the source
of CB's bizarre use of "social fascist," for China (and after it the Mao
sects) placed the USSR in the role formerly played by Hitler's Germany,
China in the role of Stalin's Russia, and the "western democracies"
still playing their roles of attempting to turn a fascist power (USSR now)
against the true center of world socialism. Attempting to elaborate this
bizarre schema seems (as evidenced now by the effusions of RIM and
MIM and the RCP) to have turned its adherents into stark raving
lunatics.

This account is extremely sketchy, and doubtless riddled with error
and gaps -- but I think readers will see that it more or less fits Chris's
vast webs. He is a true Maoist to the end -- though what the young
man in the Chingkang mountains would have thought of him I do
not know. One of the Maoist outfits put out an extremely lengthy
pamphlet entitled, *Eventually, Why Not Now*, the subject of which
was the eventual alliance that communists in the west would have to
make with their own ruling classes to build the United Front against,
yes, Social Fascism.

Carrol


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