The lack of controversy is fitting
> because there wasn't much soul-searching at the time. In 1945, 85% of
> Americans approved of a step deemed necessary to end the war and head
> off a costly invasion of Japan.
Loren Goldner>...applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/goldner.html
>...Didn't See The Same Movie
"The sleep of dialectical reason will engender monsters".
Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist- Maoist- 'Third World Marxist" and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the "best and the brightest" coming out of the American 1960's.
Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum's book ( describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what "Third World Marxism"stood for in its 1970's heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled "progressive politics" for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing "progressive" forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neo-liberal phase has shot its bolt.
I lived through the 1960's too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970's had spawned eight different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with "Eurocentric"Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third World "national liberation movements" and states resulting from them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum's "Third World Marxists", who cheerleaded for most or all of them, were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left Opposition) (in Elbaum's milieu the choice was between 1953 (death of Stalin) and 1956 (Khruschev's speech to the 20th Party Congress). "Eurocentrics"that we were, we took note of Stalin's treacherous and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao tse-tung at the time had criticized from the right); of Stalin's treacherous and disastrous Third Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 "Communes" in Vietnam and China). We critiqued Stalin's treacherous and disastrous Popular Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to the abandonment of anti-colonial agitation by the Vietnamese and Algerian Communist Parties in the name of "anti-fascism"). We were disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin's 1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact, through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, We read about Elbaum's one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers' uprising in East Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest) of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish Workers' Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970, which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too "Eurocentric" for him,--they did after all take place in Europe-- assuming he heard about them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described them as revolts against "revisionism".
>From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse anti-Stalinist
milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge's Memoirs, and Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia; we discovered Lukacs' History and Class
Consciousness, and the Situationists; we saw Chile's 1970-1973 Popular
Front once again crushed by the same collaborationist policies which
Elbaum's Stalinist lineage had first perfected in France and Spain in
1936, and unlike Elbaum and his friends, we were hardly startled when
the Chinese Communist Party embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our
'Eurocentric" attention that China itself had pushed the Indonesian
Communist Party to adopt the same Popular Front strategy in 1965,
leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands (a success for US
imperialism that more than offset the later defeat in Indochina), or
that it had applauded when the Ceylonese regime (today Sri Lanka)
bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student movement in 1971. We were
similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his friends, when China went on
to support the South African intervention against the MPLA in Angola,
or call for the strengthening of NATO against Soviet "social
imperialism", or support the right-wing regroupment against the
Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974-1975.
We "Eurocentrists" snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, the French
Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by
the People's Liberation Army in the course of the 'Cultural
Revolution", the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his
friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings
of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant
success in "putting politics in command" against the capitalist
restorationists, technocrats and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven
for good measure. All of these writhings of Chinese Stalinism struck
us more as the second-time farce to the first time tragedy of the
world-wide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920's onward. Elbaum
and his friends cheered on Pol Pot's rustification campaign in
Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they
digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao's death (the
arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the
turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after
Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked
Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult,
in those days, to be a "Third World Marxist"!
We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the "early Marx" and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the "late Marx" in the Grundrisse, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the "Unpublished Sixth Chapter" of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the "early" and "late" Marx (though we did not yet know Marx's writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly "late Marx" and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the 'diamat" world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum's world. It was of course "Eurocentric" to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, "not Eurocentric" to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840's onward may have been "Eurocentric" but the brain-dead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the "three goods" and the "four bads" were, for these people, decidedly not.
Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings-no doubt Eurocentric-- on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on pre-capitalist societies everywhere in Einfuehrung in die Nationaloekonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter's lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukacs similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940's and 1950's CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China's four "revolutionary operas" and songs such as "The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers" while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter's limitations) and Guy Debord.
Then there was the influence of "Monthly Review" magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World "anti-imperialists" to China; they were infused with the "Bandung" climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist "anti-imperialist" bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mind-set, as did the later "Tri-Continental" (Latin America- Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arrighi Immanuel, and the South American "dependency school" (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin's theory of imperialism, with its idea of "imperialist super-profits" making possible the support of a "labor aristocracy" and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy's economics, Elbaum still uses "monopoly capital" as one of his many unexamined concepts.
Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of vol. I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel's Phenomenology only on the initial phase of "sense certainty" of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria's "On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucusus", reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: "the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars". He might have added that it wasn't worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers' councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum's own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the "socialism in one rural commune" of William Hinton's Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong "democracy" by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin's Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960's, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Duehringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx's time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890's as power-political "monopoly capital". This "anti-imperialism" was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the "progressive" regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960's, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the U.S., Europe and East Asia (so much for Lenin's theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). <SNIP>