Discussion with an Indian Maoist on the New Wave Blog

This is part of an ongoing discussion on the New Wave Blog about perpectives on the General Strike of 7 September in India, and by extension on the present state of political struggle in India. A Maoist joined the discussion, and this is a rejoinder I posted to some of his comments.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150261932180007

Sihaya: "If the larger section of the Rev Left in India does not agree with Lenin's program of mass urban insurrection, it does not invalidate Leninism, but simply states that the specif interventions by Lenin were made in Russia in 1917 which is not really comparable with India of 2010. "

Lenin's programme was not "mass urban insurrection" - it was a revolutionary seizure of state power by the masses spearheaded by the working class under the leadership of the Marxist party of the advanced workers, the Bolshevik Party.

The urban insurrections were the final hammer blow that smashed the resurgent rightwing and the pro-bourgeois Mensheviks, and led to the take-over of state power by the working class led by the Bolsheviks. The rural revolutionary mobilization of the small peasants and rural poor prevented the class compromisers from regrouping in the countryside, and saved the new non-capitalist state from the international counter-revolution. The rural masses, that is, gave unconditional and self-sacrificing support to the new workers state during 3 years of wars against imperialist invasions and White Terror civil war.

(During October, by the way, Stalin was holed up in the offices of Pravda, saying nothing - he was against removing the Provisional Government and wanted to work with it. Stalinists and Maoists never ever mention Stalin's ignominious role during October. Instead they demean October into an "insurrection" - which is a cough and a spit from the usual reactionary label of "coup d'état".)

A further minimizing of the Bolshevik Revolution and the line taken by the Bolshevik leadership (Lenin and Trotsky) is Sihaya's statement that "the specif interventions by Lenin were made in Russia in 1917 which is not really comparable with India of 2010. " Now for Sihaya October is "specific interventions"!!! in 1917 Russia. Well, thanks for these lessons of Leninism. 1917 is then and there, we are here and now. Tough titty, Lenin. You'd have been lost in today's India. Or China's 1927 or 1949. Or Yugoslavia's or Vietnam's 1945. Or Cuba's 1959. Or Chile's 1972, or Iran's or Nicaragua's 1979. Since you just intervened then and there, we've got to reinvent a theory of class struggle for here and now. You left us to reinvent the revolutionary wheel! Shame on you...

A new theory for each revolutionary situation. Not new tactics for new circumstances, but a new strategy. Unless of course we take Mao to be our theoretical saviour (eat crow, Vladimir Ilych!) with the theory of Protracted People's War. Vo Nguyen Giap and Che Guevara were better military theorists for revolutionary guerrilla warfare than Mao - they didn't have millions upon millions of peasants and rural poor to throw away, or Mao's elastic ideas of "protracted". If India follows Mao's line in PPW, then Indian peasants and the rural poor will pay dearly for it - and may not even win a non-capitalist state for their sacrifices!! Mao wanted a class-collaborationist government (Four Classes), but couldn't get one, so he nationalized everything - to survive. You can imagine that the Indian bourgeoisie would do anything to suck up to their new masters, anything to keep control of their property and keep capitalism alive for decades. The rural poor and peasantry will have vanquished the class enemy - and got them back the next day (as happened in India in 1947, and in South Africa two decades ago).

Sihaya writes, regarding programme for state power: "it is true that first we have to eradicate fedualism unless you have a magic wand which will enable India to sweep forward into the future - directly." If eradicating feudalism is our great strategic goal, then we're looking at modern India from Cloud-Cuckoo Land! (not even Mao saw the eradication of feudalism as China's great strategic goal.) Sometimes history deals with this kind of elementary class task for us. In this case it was the British who castrated feudalism and shot off its knees. Nehru and the Gandhis have been feudal rulers?! Jesus... Lenin's work on the peasant question in Russia in the late 19th century, before the overthrow of Tsarism, before even the great body blow that brought it to the ground in 1905, regarded feudalism as an irrelevance even in a country as backward and massively rural as Russia. Lenin's programme for the peasantry - Adhiraj can post it - is light years from that of Sihaya's party. Light years ahead, that is. The role of the urban working class is central to Lenin's class-based Marxist historical analysis of conditions in Russia. Lenin's revolutionary understanding was not hermetically separated from his insurrectionary skills. All his work with the revolutionary Marxist left in Russia built up to the seizure of state power in 1917 - with all the consequences this had for the whole Russian people, both urban and rural. And if it could be done then, it can be done now, since we have seen far more revolutionary class mobilizations in empirical terms and international terms than Lenin or Trotsky ever did (Stalin couldn't see such things even in his wildest dreams). And Lenin made perfectly clear in Imperialism that the class enemy of the worldwide working class and rural poor is the bourgeoisie and its system of imperialists capitalism. Perhaps Sihaya thinks that Imperialism only analyses the situation in 1916 in Russia and Germany?? Then and there?? And since then feudalism has come galumphing back to seize power in India? Or in the whole Indian countryside?? There are big landowners, Lords, in the British Tory Party, now in power. So feudalism has reestablished itself in Britain??  We should wait till feudalism has been eradicated before we set ourselves the task of eradicating the big bourgeoisie to set up a Four Class People's Democracy? And only then start thinking about working for a non-capitalist society?

Sihaya writes the following, in the midst of a windy rant: "Do nothing absolutely nothing, run down every one else unless there is a PERFECT condition for a global revolution. Well buster unlike 'perfecitonists' like your troupe of trotskites we unfortunately work within imperfect conditions and continue to learn as we work. we make mistakes we do somethings correct, but praxis is our norm. I am not going to wait for a perfect India before I stand up for the right of Kashmir's to fulfill their democratic aspirations. We stand up for their rights now.

We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

If he thinks that Trotskyists and Trotskyism are sitting on their hands waiting for perfect conditions for a global revolution, he is guilty of grotesquely underestimating his political opponents. But that's his loss, not ours. To defeat opponents you have to know them, and to know them you need to read and study... (ha bloody ha! - read and study Trotsky?? It would melt my mind, says our Maoist :-) 

He also glosses over the deadly persecution of Trotskyists carried out by the Stalinists and Maoists in Russia, China and many other countries. The way they chose to defeat Trotsky's Bolshevik-Leninist ideas was not to use open debate within democratic centralist workers organizations and soviets, but to wipe Trotskyists out physically. Stalin managed to wipe out the whole of the Old Bolshevik cadre that had led the Great October Revolution. And he finally got Trotsky in 1940 - while the Stalinist bureaucracy was in bed with Nazi Germany.

But it's good to know that the Maoists "unfortunately" (one of The Economist's favourite weasel words, by the way) "work within imperfect conditions and continue to learn as we work. we make mistakes we do somethings correct". Well, what a Brave New political World, that hath such people in it! Working. learning, making mistakes sometimes but doing other things correctly! My goodness gracious me! Learning and working, some things right and some things wrong... No one else on the right or the left could ever claim this practical wisdom now, could they?

He continues: "praxis is our norm. I am not going to wait for a perfect India before I stand up for the right of Kashmir's to fulfill their democratic aspirations. We stand up for their rights now.

We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

India will not even be perfect if the Kashmiris fulfil their democratic aspirations. Bourgeois democracy is not what revolutionary Marxists are aiming to set up. Self-determination for Kashmir is part of a wider struggle for national rights within India that will make the participation of all nationalities in a socialist revolution voluntary and strengthen the United Socialist States of South Asia so much the more.

And now we're not just unique in working and making mistakes, but we're unique in standing up for Kashmiri rights now. You'd think that if the Maoists were unique in this they'd not only be leading the Kashmiri struggle but would have taken power years ago...

The reason they haven't done this is partly because they're implicitly lying about their own uniqueness (ignorant dismissal of political opponents) and partly because they have no theoretical tools to help them understand the growing over of a democratic or a nationalist struggle into a socialist one. Instead they laboriously try to heave themselves from one stage of the historical ladder according to Stalin and Mao to the next. First get rid of feudalism and set up bourgeois rule. Then make bourgeois rule democratic. Then (in conditions of perfect bourgeois democracy - oh the ironies that bite Stalinists in the arse! - one perfect historical stage after the next, and no jumping the queue :-D

start working for a socialist society (preferably, as we have seen in Stalinist praxis in advanced bourgeois democratic countries like Britain and France and Sweden, by parliamentary means. Socialist revolution via the ballot box. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky are beaming down from their Historical Heaven - they are savouring the fidelity of latter-day Marxist-Leninists to the word, the spirit and the praxis of their revolutionary work! No more urban insurrections, people! Let's get the vote out!

The final sentence of this extract formulates this treacherous reformism better than we can:

"We accept our accountability to this system we have inherited and we accept our responsibility to it too and at the same time we push to change it."

Sihaya, as revolutionary Marxists we in no way accept any accountability to this system. None. We say NO NO NO. This system is not OUR system but the system of our class enemy. Suck on that. What you are saying is that you accept accountability for the system of the class enemy! What nonsense is this?!

"We have inherited"! The only thing the India masses have "inherited" is a slab of pavement to sleep on. The bourgeoisie has inherited this system and uses it to drain our blood, smash our bodies and fuddle our heads. It uses the system to enrich itself and to keep us in poverty.

And not just "accountability" but "responsibility" too. Are you going to ask the system to give you a vote of confidence for your "accountability" and "responsibility"? Just wondering...

We respect your concrete struggle against exploitation and repression in the countryside, just as we support the struggle of the Taliban against imperialist exploitation and repression in Afghanistan.

What we don't accept is your programme, your theory (such as it is) and your understanding of revolutionary working class history and traditions.

We are "perfectly" ready to work beside you in your struggle as far as our resources permit. We are not, however, going to allow you to force your programme, theory or reformist praxis on us. Stalin entered a United Front with Hitler. NOT a Popular Front subordinating the Soviet Communist Party to the Nazis (although Stalin urged the Chinese Communist Party to merge with and subordinate itself to the Kuomintang, and as Mao urged the Indonesian CP to do with the Indonesian military). The least you can do is follow Stalin's example by forming a United Front with forces you may not fully agree with.  

Cuba - some comments on a blog

Mary Beard has three blog posts on a trip to Cuba. A lot of the comments are the usual right-wing maggot (gusano) venom.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/classics-in-cuba.html

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/from-cuba-with-love.html

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/08/hemingways-retreat-good-books-in-cuba.html

I made the following comments:

First:

Mary's right to get in quick - before the Deluge  [ie to visit Cuba now]. It's not just the retail smear, but the return to Cuba as fun centre of the US. And perhaps we can imagine what the Miami exiles will bring with them in addition to bloodbath revenge. The liberation of Cuba may well be carried out with the same respect for national treasures as the liberation of Iraq.
Pity she didn't visit the other countries of Central America to see what kind of classical tradition they have. 
Oh, I forgot to mention trafficking, drugs and HIV, didn't I? And the dispossession and ejection of most of the people from their homes and jobs. 
Mary! Book a trip for 10 years from now, then we'll get a clear-eyed check on what's going on.

Second:

Paulo writes: "A comment on some of the commentators. You destroy their economy, and permanently threaten invasion with your superior weapons etc. Then you sneer at them for their failures and their poverty."
Not only this - which is spot-on - but according to imperialist ("Western", capitalist, officially sanctioned) economists Cuba should have sunk into the Caribbean about ten seconds after the expropriation of the Batista bourgeoisie. The received wisdom of this crowd is that such economies cannot and will not function or survive. And five decades later Cuba is still afloat. 
Not as the sanction-mongers and sabre-rattlers (and de facto incompetent invaders) would like (ie a hell-hole), but as an attractive (and SAFE) destination for foreign visitors. 
If need was an automatic trigger for revolution the Cuban regime would NOT still be in charge (nor would the US regime in many parts of that country).
In Sao Paulo I stayed for a week with a physiotherapist and her family. She had been to Cuba. She told me that everyone she'd ever touched in Sao Paulo had muscles rigid with stress. But no one in Cuba.

Third:

1) "positive and negative freedom". We won't have to worry about that distinction much longer as our negative freedom shrinks and our positive freedoms get more and more constricting. In fact it's ages since I saw anyone using that notion seriously.
2) for an example of how to analyse and relate to a country as riddled with contradictions as Cuba (and in fact any of those countries that have expropriated capital) I'd recommend Trotsky's 1936 "The Revolution Betrayed". There he takes up the good and the bad, the strong and the weak points of the Soviet Union under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy.
He distinguishes between the non-capitalist (let's call it proto-socialist) mode of production, with astounding advances to show, and the bureaucratic regime which came to power in the mid-20s and had state power firmly in its grip by the early 30s.
He characterizes the Stalinist regime as quasi-fascist and counter-revolutionary. Leaden chains holding down the potential of the new society.
You don't have to be a fellow-traveller to appreciate what's good in places like China or Cuba. Or a rabid reactionary to scourge what's bad about them.
Society is contradictory. Contradictions can't be handled with unilateral either-or ideas. Some dialectical understanding is applied to ancient history and feudalism (and even to some elements of early bourgeois history), but none to our own historical epoch.
The philosophers have stopped interpreting the world - let alone changing it.