[Marxism] Mao Tse-TungMickey Mousesong(was: somethingor other about porn)

[S. Artesian]

I really don't think it's armchair theorizing, second guessing, etc. to 
analyze what took place, why it took place, what it did accomplish, and what 
has led to the reversal of the impulse of the revolution.

The beginning of the bottom line is that you characterize China, pre-1949, 
as feudal, autocratic, when it was neither and you reproduce that lack of 
knowledge of China's actual historical development into a "theory" of 
"practice" and "revolution."

I think it's a bit deeper than "were mistakes made, and lessons learned"--  
mistakes are always made, lessons are always learned and not learned, but we 
need to come to grips with several critical factors:

1. the defeat and destruction of the workers movement-- its sacrifice to the 
stabilization of capitalism by the very same  "strategy" of peoples' or 
popular front that is credited with achieving victory in China .   I don't 
think that strategy is the source of the victory.  I think the power of the 
Russian Revolution, as deformed/distorted as it was/became was still more 
powerful than the bourgeoisie, imperial/local, in China and deserves the 
credit.

2. despite that victory, the "historical tasks" of the bourgeois democratic 
national whatever revolution were in fact never fulfilled, and this has 
determined the turn toward capitalism.

3.  It is not ultra-left, adventurist posturing to point out that the 
success of the CCP in taking power has not been identical with the advance 
of proletarian revolution.  The bourgeoisie, who were not dominant in China 
in either domestic or imperial forms, were expropriated; the decentralized 
warlordism was crushed and those things were and are worth defending against 
the designs of the bourgeoisie.  But there is little if anything that 
amounts to the remnants of a proletarian revolution in China, because there 
was little if anything of a proletarian revoluton, other than a disembodied 
property form, at the moment the revolution took power.

4. Trotskyists in China, and Indo-China, were not exactly on the sidelines, 
outsiders looking in. Just as they were not outsiders looking in in the 
USSR, Germany, France, Spain.  They were insiders, hunted down and 
exterminated by our benevolent uncles in the various Communist Parties, and 
quite clearly the advances achieved by the CCP, as those achieved in the 
USSR involved the bloody sacrifice of the working class and the working 
class's revolution, achieving the stabilizing and reconstruction of 
capitalism as a whole.  That too is part of the great achievement of the 
peoples front.


5. The comparison isn't with Lincoln and the US Civil War, and those 
socialists who might have taken exception-- the comparison is with the post 
Civil War-- with the struggle over Reconstruction.  The struggle is with 
capitulating to the post-war needs of capital, the requirements of the 
ruling class to maintain the subjugation of labor, the sanctity of property. 
Clearly, in your version of the peoples' front, you and your 
real-politickers would line up with capitulationists in the Republican Party 
who understood the importance of not being "sectarian," and the relative 
unimportance of maintaining the exclusion of the slaveholders from the rule 
of private property, no matter what it cost the former slaves.   I'm happy 
to say I'm with the sectarians, isolationists, recalcitrants who stood for 
the most radical components of radical Reconstruction.

6. For all your ersatz, hard-nosed, brawny, bare-knuckled proclamations, you 
are really the one proclaiming revolutionary slogans into an echo chamber 
where the sound of your own voice convinces you someone must be listening. 
You are the one who has to believe every collapse, defeat, is either the 
result of someone betraying the true Orthodoxy of Mao or Stalin or Ho [i.e 
your comments about the Stalin-Hitler pact or China-Sri Lanka] or whomever; 
either that,  or "it's all good," and there is a secret strategy hidden 
inside the Forbidden City, or perhaps the Citadel at Hue, for flipping the 
script, and seizing all those capitalist assets, selling the T-bonds, and 
replacing the dollar with yuan.  We've heard it all before, seen it all 
before, the act is old, and the play always ends the same way-- not that 
way.


7. The guys handing out the religious tracts?-- that's YOU-- only it's not 
religious tracts-- it's Kool-Aid your handing it out in little cups marked 
"made in the people's republic of Jonestown."


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Cod" <tcod at hotmail.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 9:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Mao Tse-TungMickey Mousesong(was: somethingor other 
about porn)