This is a collection of articles defending Maoism with special reference to China. Maoist View of Beijing Massacre, July 3-4, 1989 This article addresses the broad historical amnesia being promoted by the press concerning Tiananmen and Maoism. For its part, MIM has denounced Deng from the beginning of MIM's existence in 1983. While Deng was popular in both phony communist and Western capitalist circles, MIM saw him for what he was--a bourgeois dictator. Yet, some people fooled by the bourgeois media think Deng is a Maoist or that we Maoists are responsible for the Beijing massacre. They taunt us with the Beijing massacre or tell us to move to China or other state-capitalist societies. Actually it is the critics of Maoism responsible for the massacre in Beijing. No truly Maoist people's army would have massacred its people. This article is to clear up the record.--July 27, 1992 >From MIM Notes 38, 1989 by mc5 On the weekend of June 3rd-4th, the Beijing regime shot down hundreds of student-led demonstrators opposed to government corruption and dubbed as pro-democracy by the Western press. The figures for the death tolls are estimates. According to USA Today, the figure was at least 500 deaths. (USA Today, 6/5/89, 1) In the following days there were crackdowns in other cities as well. Estimates of people killed in the whole crackdown in China ranged into the thousands. (New York Times, 10/19/89, 5) In the ensuing struggle the students retaliated with violence. AP published the photo of a military vehicle driver killed by students after he rammed into them with his vehicle. (USA Today, 6/5/89, 6a) Apparently, the urban areas largely supported the students while the countryside was silent. "In Beijing a poll indicated that 93.3 percent of the residents believed that the student demonstrators' goals were reasonable, compared with 1.5 percent who thought they were unreasonable. The rest had no opinion." (NYT, 8/5/89, 2) The massacre has reportedly created a small, perhaps permanent armed resistance. Two or three times a week, soldiers in Beijing are attacked by snipers according to diplomats. The so-called guerrillas may be relatives of those massacred. (NYT, 8/2/89, 7) Citizens seized 1,000 guns from soldiers during the Tiananmen uprising that have not been turned in. (Ibid.) Demonstrations of thousands occurred across the world in protest of the massacre. The largest demonstrations were in Hong Kong. Under pressure the U.S. government supposedly halted in $685 million in arms shipments. It did not cut off diplomatic ties or impose economic sanctions. (The Plain Dealer, 6/6/89, 1) It did cut high-level non-diplomatic exchanges and got the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to postpone loans to China. (New York Times, 9/30/89, 5) The reason that the U.S. government did not do more is that the U.S. imperialists obtain electronic intelligence information from China in the kind of alliance against the Soviet bloc that the U.S. seeks to preserve at any cost. Background to massacre Students started their demonstrations this year in Beijing with a commemoration of former party leader Hu Yaobang, who died. Hu had lost his job for being soft on the student movement in the past. Toward the end of April, the CCP ordered the students to stop their disturbances in the streets, but hundreds of thousands ignored the CCP and continued their demonstrations. They maintained an occupation of Tiananmen Square for weeks and started a hunger strike which garnered widespread sympathy. By May 20th, one million people helped occupy the square. The government had reason to fear the movementUs attacks on government corruption. The children of government leaders in particular were seen becoming wealthy and travelling abroad because of their special privileges. Out of 28 people with wealth exceeding 10 million Chinese dollars, 26 were found to be children of top officials in one investigation. One scholar found that a majority of those participants in the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1976) were ready for another campaign against government corruption. (Forward Motion, September 1989, 33) One common poster in the demonstrations said that "Mao's son died in Korea." This referred to the fact that Mao gave his son no particular privilege. He died fighting for the communists in North Korea when China aided Korea in fighting the Western imperialist invasion. Something of a Mao revival occurred with demonstrators carrying posters of Mao, especially outside Beijing. This is not to say that all the demonstrators sang the communist song "Internationale," which some did. There was also an important section of the movement dedicated to copying the West as the mock Statue of Liberty brought to Tiananmen proved. CCP power struggle Deng Xiaoping is the most powerful leader in China. Deng, Yang Shangkun and Li Peng appear to be mainly responsible for the massacre. The wake of the Tiananmen massacre left an apparent power struggle in the Chinese Communist Party heirarchy. Jiang Zemin, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo --the highest committee in the Communist Party --who is little known to Western China-watchers emerged as the new Communist Party leader called General Secretary to replace Zhao Ziyang, who received blame as a "splittest" in the party who broke party discipline and bore responsibility for China's economic problems. Like Hu before him, Zhao appeared soft on the student demonstrators and met with students in the square when his purge was already imminent. After taking over ZhaoUs job, Jiang issued the formal opinion of the CCP that the Tiananmen rebellion was a " counterrevolutionary rebellion aimed at negating the leadership of the Communist Party of China and overthrowing the socialist system." (AP in Ann Arbor News, 9/26/89, 1) Scaring Westerners even more, Jiang said China was having "a serious class struggle." (New York Times, 9/30/89, 5) He said the rebellions "aimed at overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party's leadership and subverting the socialist system, at (sic.) turning China into a bourgeois republic and reducing it once again to a dependency of the Western capitalist powers." (Ibid.) This is the most radical rhetoric out of the CCP in over ten years. It does not mean much in terms of the economy though; it's just a new type of justification for repression. Jiang also admitted some problems have become worse in recent years including "abuse of power for personal gains, corruption and degeneration, which result in alienation from the masses of people." (Ibid.) Despite the tough talk, Jiang is one of the parents of children studying in the United States. 70,000 have taken the privilege and failed to return to China. (Ibid.) For being replaced by Jiang, Zhao receives a higher salary and better treatment than Jiang Zemin. (Ibid., 7) Such is admittedly crude evidence, but it supports the theory that Jiang, Zhao, Li and Deng are all part of the same state capitalist class. They don't imprison or kill each other for their disagreements, just students. Imperialist media tarnish Mao The New York Times started its editorial on the Tiananmen massacre with the following: "Mao Zedong taught Chinese Communists that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Deng Xiaoping believes it." (New York Times, 6/5/89, 16) No where in the editorial does the New York Times explain that Deng Xiaoping came under attack by Mao for his repression of students and that in fact Mao purged Deng just before his death in 1976. When Deng did things the capitalist media liked, it proclaimed him a hero. When the same man massacred the students, they blamed Mao. ItUs no-lose politics for the capitalists. Even the slogan "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is taken out of context. It omits that Mao had to liberate China from imperialists who oppressed China with guns. It omits that the United States sent millions in military aid to Mao's opponents. If Mao thought that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, so did Roosevelt and Truman. So did the New York Times when it supported that military aid. Mao certainly instructed that the army should not attack its own people. "In recent weeks of the standoff between China's army and democracy-seeking students, soldiers had told the crowds, 'We will never kill Chinese,' just as spiritual leader Mao Tse-tung commanded." (USA Today, 6/5/89, 2a) Media confuse issue Perhaps the most important story of summer 1989 was the massacre of student demonstrators in Beijing, China. As a story it is most instructive in how the U.S. media consistently misleads public opinion. The same corporate press that effusively praised Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatism in moving China into capitalist-style economic organization turned right around and started denouncing "hard-liners" and "conservatives," who only weeks before were described as "reformers" and Rpragmatists.S It is the nature of the corporate media that its use of blitz style publicity, photos and headlines and repeated cliches makes it easy to have historical amnesia. Time magazine had named Deng Xiaoping Man of the Year twice in congratulatory tones. Blatant capitalist propaganda sang the praises of Deng Xiaoping. Named "Success Story of the Year for 1985" by Success magazine editor- in-chief Scott DeGarmo, Deng Xiaoping was said to make "a Horatio Alger hero look like a piker." __________________________________________ _________________________ Why does Time magazine contradict itself on Deng Xiaoping? a. It doesn't know what it is talking about. b. It has no consistent theory, only the consistent task of glorifying capitalism. c. It has a total of two people in China covering the whole country. d. All of the above. __________________________________________ __________________________ Whenever there were problems in China, the media could refer to "conservative" bureaucrats who opposed Deng XiaopingUs program of decollectivizing agriculture and running industry on a profit/loss basis. It were as if China were only poor because it was stuck on socialism and did not adopt Western business practices. Then, Deng Xiaoping orders the crackdown on students and suddenly he becomes described as a "hard-liner" himself. No one ever suggested that the very people who advocated free markets, unemployment and private or quasi-private property in agriculture were also the same people in favor of repression of political movements in China. The hidden ideological agenda in virtually all media coverage --and there are only a handful of Western reporters generating all coverage of China, a maximum of two per agency like the Associated Press, United Press International and the New York Times-- is that the good guys are the ones advocating capitalism. The theory goes that if China gets capitalism, democracy and freedom from repression will surely follow. It's a tired refrain that South Africa should have disproved long ago. Black South Africans can attest to the fact that free markets and capitalism do not bring about political freedom, never mind an escape from the pervasive political violence, starvation and disease afflicted on the majority of the worldUs population exploited by the capitalist system. ________________________________________________________________ "To protect or to suppress the broad masses of the people --that is the fundamental distinction between the Communist Party and the Guomindang, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." Mao Zedong, June 1968 ______________________________________________________________ Endless space in the papers is spent hand- wringing over whether Deng Xiaoping and other aging Communist Party leaders will see the light and install Western-style democracy or at least another so-called thaw. A little history on Deng Xiaoping and the other leaders of the government would have gone a long way to answer the question. In 1966 China had a student movement. It too focussed on corruption of bureaucrats and used posters freely to criticize authorities. The ideological slant of the student movement of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) was different than the one today, but the response of Deng Xiaoping was the same: repress it. It was the action of Deng Xiaoping and his cohort of Communist Party leaders that led Mao Zedong in 1966 (now described by the media universally as hard-liner of hard-liners, fanatic of fanatics etc.) to declare that "it is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student movement. . . . The Central Committee of the Youth League should stand on the side of the student movement. But instead it stands on the side of suppression of the student movement." (2) ______________________________________________________________ "It is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student movement." Mao Zedong commenting on Deng Xiaoping's efforts to repress the students in the 1960s. ______________________________________________________________ By this Mao referred to the efforts of party leaders who personally went to campuses and ordered student activists locked up in cafeterias and cut off from the outside world for putting up posters critical of certain party leaders. Indeed, the suppression of the student movement by a faction of party leaders, the second in rank being Deng Xiaoping, became one of the central issues in the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand was Mao and his followers who said it was impossible to have socialism without the mobilization of the people in both economic and political affairs. On the other hand were people like Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, who declared that "cadres decide everything." (3) In their self-criticisms in 1966 Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi admitted that their anti-corruption and anti-student campaigns repressed the masses of people and oppposed Mao. (4) For these and other non-Marxist practices Liu Shaoqi lost his power as second to Mao in China and Deng Xiaoping lost his party and government posts. The current number two de facto power in China behind Deng Xiaoping is Yang Shangkun. He and his relatives in the military were the ones ordering the troops to massacre the demonstrators. He was also one of the targets of the Cultural Revolution attacked by the Maoists. It is therefore grossly ignorant of history to associate Yang with Mao. The Western media and governments always opposed the Cultural Revolution, the student movement that started it and the purge of Liu and Deng during the Cultural Revolution. That movement was too radical for the West, so it supported its repression by Deng and Liu. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao and his much villified followers the Gang of Four succeeded and ousted Deng Xiaoping from his top government posts only to return him to his posts after an attempted military coup and oust him again just before Mao's death. After the death of Mao in 1976, however, leaders more to the liking of the Western media came to power --including Deng Xiaoping again. One of the first actions taken by the new leader Hua Guofeng was to change the constitution of China to take out the right to strike and to put up political posters. People who put up posters received prison sentences. Then across the board, various groups in society were told to stop making political demands in the name of advancing ChinaUs modernization. Propaganda came out saying that the most admirable quality of the working class was its discipline in following orders. For women, the most cherished role became that of raising children for the "socialist motherland." The new regime indirectly supported the fascist slogan of keeping "the trains on time." In this new authoritarian atmosphere, it also opposed the old slogan that dockworkers "should not be slaves to cargo tonnage." In other words, the dockworkers should get to work and show results in the number of tons of cargo they put out and shouldn't organize production by any other criteria. The West is concerned about its ideas about democracy, but it did not care that Deng implemented anti-democracy in the workplace and womenUs roles. Maoists on the other hand support democracy for the working classes-- the proletariat and peasantry in both politics and economic matters. It is especially hypocritical to associate Mao with Deng when Mao purged Deng and the West supported Deng all along until the massacre. (1) E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of the Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 235-6. (2) Stuart Schram ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 253. (3) This slogan repeated by Chen in Beijing Review, no. 13, 1984, p. 16. (4) Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Stud yBerkeley:University of California Press, 1978), pp. 36-41. Subject: definition time Defining Maoism: by the Maoist Internationalist Movement mimnotes@um.cc.umich.edu > To the Maoists: before you continue the Maoist marathon >and cause more confusion on the net, I invite you to clarify the >very definition of Maoism. It seems to me that you have failed so >far to do this first thing and you would rally more support if >you differentiate your belief from what Mao did in practice. >After all, how much does Maoism differ from the current ideology >of CCP? Did Mao follow or even mean what he preached? Was Mao a >Maoist? OK. Maoism is a kind of communism,an ideology and theory that supports a movement for the abolition of classes, patriarchy and national conflict--the power of people over people. We also say it's an end to oppression. It's true there isn't much to talk about if people don't like Maoism from its very definition, because they don't like communism. According to Mao himself, he had two main accomplishments, things we believe made him stand out in the communist movement. One was his development of People's War against numerically and technically superior landlord-comprador regimes. This contribution had world-wide impact after 1949 in decolonization and liberation struggles around the world. The second point, which is even more distinctive, is that Mao believed there was a new bourgeoisie created under socialism. This is what sets Maoism apart from the Deng Xiaoping regime today. In fact, Mao named the leaders of today's regime the capitalist-roaders in the CCP, so Maoism is definitely different from what we see today, which is just an elaborate cover for bourgeois rule and its comprador corruption. > You wanted to vindicate Mao from the responsibility for >the historical errors of the CCP government since 1949. There >are two ways to accomplish this: to alter the interpretation of >these errors: what happened during the Cultural Revolution (CR) >or the Great Leap-Forward (GLF) were not really bad >but good things, and, if they were bad, to change the party >responsible for the errors: it was Deng and Liu who were the bad >guys, Mao was innocent, or even better: a victim of the >capitalist roader. Mao admitted that the Great Leap tragedy was 30% political mistake and 70% natural disaster and Soviet withdrawl from the industrial economy. We shall have to argue about that further later. As for the Cultural Revolution, you are right, we believe that it was Deng and Liu and later ultraleftists who made the Cultural Revolution an opportunity to commit crimes against the people. (We will post more on that later. Already we posted that excerpt from the Milton book.) The Right attacked the masses the way the bourgeoisie does and the ultraleft attacked the masses for not being politically correct enough. Both the Right (Liu and Deng) and the ultraleft (like 516 Red Guard factions) attacked the masses in the name of Mao, but neither was Maoist. The Right stirred up attacks on the masses to divert attention from Liu-Deng-Peng Zhen etc. The ultraleft was probably just foolish, and often well-intentioned. The ultraleft was manipulated by the Right so well that the GPCR was discredited and Deng Xiaoping came back to power. >These two single events alone far exceeds the combined casualties >of the whole world during the two world wars. To me, defending >CR or GLF is worse than defending the atrophies of the two world >wars. This would be an important point if it were true, but you provide no references unlike our posts. I will challenge you further: actually the leading cause of violence in the world is not war. It's starvation. That's why we work so hard to post numbers on life expectancy, infant mortality etc. >It is now not only a tautology to denounce the wrongdoings of >CCP; it is an offense to Chinese to defend these >disasters. This is a demagogue's tactic. We've already said that the GLF and GPCR had their tragedies. But it is one thing to say the GLF was a tragedy and another thing to conclude that Maoism in particular caused that tragedy. One does not follow from the other. In actuality, we believe YOU are defending those disasters. Why? Because the GLF was starvation. Yet, Maoism has the best record in the world of stopping starvation in a short period of time. When you attack Maoism, you attack the best chance that Third World peoples have to escape the 14 million child deaths each year from starvation. You are defending the fact that India suffers a Great Leap tragedy every six years in NORMAL times, not to mention bad weather conditions. It's like this: you have a choice between two hospitals: Hospital A takes in 1000 patients and 100 end up dead in a month. Hospital B takes in 1000 similar patients and 50 end up dead in a month. The 50 dead is still a tragedy, but it does not follow Hospital Bism is an ideology "offensive" and "defending" tragedy. We've already demonstrated that in previous posts by using the only method possible to prove our point--comparison. When you continue with demagogic arguments, you let the CAUSES of tragedy slip away. And every time you say that Chinese history is just full of bleakness, you allow those tragedies to continue. You must distinguish between Hospital A and Hospital B. > Mao created and saved CCP and CCP created Chairman Mao. CCP >promulgated Maoism and made Mao its spiritual and political god; >the next thing >it found was to be destroyed by its own god, who discovered that >the machine he had built was no longer of utility, but an >impediment, to his personal power. This is typical anti-communism. The reason is that it is easier to see someone who has state power than someone who has market power. Here all what you say boils down to saying someone has state power. So what? In capitalism, someone has market power. Then look what you do. You say Mao is a god; yet, he lost his power and needed the GPCR. Well, make up your mind. Did Mao have absolute power or not? If he had absolute power, why did he need the GPCR? Did he cause the GPCR with his absolute power or did he need it because he had no power? Overall there is a lot to unite with in this post from zhang@chemistry.ucsc.edu. It's a very good analysis. Here we will bring up remaining disagreements. > Mao didn't care a dime about either democracy or >intellectuals; he was simply too busy with his dealing with his >rivals. If by this you mean you want to abolish the power of people over people and so you are a communist, good. If by this you mean that it's possible to have power of people over people and not have power struggles, then that's bad. In fact, it would probably be a lie from someone so analytical as you. We never claimed that Mao was God. Power struggles go on as long as there is power. Only the communists are even trying to change that. More figures from the Maoists on the Real Violence Before we go further, we would like to refute the claim that the Third World would be worse off if it had more Maoist revolutions. While Third World countries often endure tragic conditions of famine or medical neglect, Maoism has proved to be a superior solution in a less-than-perfect world. In previous posts we explained why it is not fair to compare Mao's China with the United States, which was richer than China before Mao ever took power. Maoists only had state power for 27 years in a country that had been very poor relative to the West for hundreds of years. (The fact that it was the richest civilization 800 years ago is hardly relevant here.) To judge Maoism, we suggest making real world comparisons. Then we will find that Maoism made up for a lot of poverty. Countries starting in a similar position as China's did not do as well as China after 27 years of Maoism, because Maoism was indeed superior. In this post we will make use of facts from a bourgeois, anti- Mao book by Martin Whyte and William Parish. The facts generally collected by the World Bank show that Maoism's accomplishments were so great that China's masses had better social services than countries several times richer on a per capita income basis. In 1979, China's infant mortality was 49 per 1,000 live births, compared with 48 for countries averaged in the "middle income" category. It also compared with 134 for India in the "low income" category that China was in. (Urban Life in Contemporary China, p. 63) The bourgeois scholars found that free market societies with China's level of income were vastly inferior in this regard and China came out on top. The life expectancy story was the same. It was 68 in China, 60 in the "middle income" countries and 50 in the "low income" (Talk about violence--50 is 73.5% of 68. If a poor country does not have Maoist revolution, you can count a quarter of its population dead.) capitalist countries averaged together. In earlier posts we showed readers that China started behind India in income and life expectancy and surged ahead under Mao, which is not to say that China ever left the "low income" category in Mao's mere 27 years of rule. When it comes to population per Western doctor, population per secondary doctor (like barefoot doctors) and population per hospital bed, China outdid the average of both the "middle income" capitalist countries and "low income" capitalist countries. Only the most advanced free-market, capitalist countries did better than China on average when it came to health care issues. These are exceptions in the world, not the majority of capitalist countries or countries with more free market than China. (Ibid.) Only by making the unfair comparison of China with very rich countries, countries that were much richer than China even before Maoism took power, only then could you make the distorted conclusion that Maoism was not a good strategy for health care in the Third World. The same is true when it comes to education. China surpassed the averages of "middle income" countries in the world only because it had the Maoist strategy. Adult literacy was 70% in China, 71% in "middle income countries" and 38% in the average of "low income countries." China surpassed both the middle and low income country averages in primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment and pupil-teacher ratios. (Urban Life in Contemporary China, p. 60) (It had lower pupil-teacher ratios.) Even in Maoist China's weakest area--housing--China surpassed the average of the developing countries in rooms per house, smallest number of people per room, electricity and piped water available. (Ibid., p. 78) We realize that all these gains, especially in health care and enrollments, started to erode under Hua Guofeng/Deng Xiaoping capitalist-restoration. We don't support what happened after the arrest of the Gang of Four. In conclusion, capitalism is an international sweepstakes. A handful of countries that have been exploiting other countries for a long time are rich and getting richer. The vast majority of countries like China in 1949 are poor. If you live in a Third World country, you should definitely support Maoism, because Maoism brings better health care, education and housing in a very short period of time. We won't claim it brings industrialization in a mere 27 years, but no system does, especially in a world where the imperialists take the precious surplus and resources from the poor countries. *** Subject: Long live Maoism! To: csf@postgres.berkeley.edu OK, you guys/gals have had a free ride criticizing Maoism for a long time. Now you have some real Maoists to argue with and vent your spleen against! We are internationalists who happen to live within U.S. borders. Many times we have seen criticism of Western Maoists, because Western Maoists don't live in China, and therefore supposedly don't know anything about China. But if that is the case, then Chinese people don't know anything about the real history of the United States. Actually, we don't think that is true either. However, to really argue for or against Maoism, we think oppressed people and their allies amongst the intellectuals must address conditions within both China and the United States. As our first contribution to the U.S.-China dialogue about Maoism, we would like to discuss the Rodney King verdict. Many people speak of the United States as a "free" country, but the fact is that Black people in the USA have always lived under slavery or quasi-fascism. In fact, as Maoists who believe in anti-imperialist struggle, we see Black, indigenous and Latino nations occupied by the white nation called the United States. The occupation of the Black nation is apparent in regular police harassment, beatings and shootings. The Rodney King incident is not at all uncommon; although people living in American suburbia like Simi Valley never know it except as cops and biased jurors. Hence our first plea to Chinese students is not to allow U.S. imperialism the dignity of being called a "free" country. It is still a dictatorship of the white nation over its oppressed peoples. At this point, if there is any disagreement, we would like to hear it. We know that most Chinese students are in fact internationalists at heart and we doubt that they will overlook the facts once they are aware of them. The next point we would like to make is that the situation of Black people and other oppressed nationalities within the United States raises the obvious question very important to Chinese students: "how did the United States become so wealthy and 'free'?" As you can see, the answer to the first question is that white nation people are "free" only at the expense of Third World peoples--2 million killed in Vietnam, tens of millions of indigenous peoples killed in settlement of this country and recently several thousand Panamanians killed in the invasion of Panama to remove Gen. Noriega, the man the U.S. imperialists set up in the first place when they wanted a stooge in power there. So we would like to say to those who think Maoism is a "failure" and the U.S. system is a "success": your country would be such a success too if you cleared the land of millions of its original inhabitants, employed millions of slaves and decimated a continent (Africa) of its population, installed dictators all over the globe to ensure cheap resources and labor supplies and killed and repressed smaller nations within U.S. borders. Sincerely, The Maoist Internationalist Movement P.S. No we do not support the revisionist Deng Xiaoping regime. We do support Mao and the Gang of Four, so please feel free to hold us accountable for that but not the 6/4/ massacre. We have called the Deng Xiaoping regime fascist and social-imperialist since our foundation in 1983, and we are only following Mao's theories in so doing. ==================================================================== ==================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 01:13:24 EDT From: mail Subject: Long Live Maoism II! To: csf@postgres.berkeley.edu Thank you to everyone who is so courteous and thoughtful. NEED FOR COMPARATIVE APPROACH One great thing about having many people from different countries on one conference is that it facilitates a comparative approach. Actually, when students from the PRC condemn Maoism, they do so with an implicit yardstick, unless of course they are committing what we call idealist/ religious errors. By this we mean, there is no society in the world that is perfect yet. We communists believe that a world without violent conflict, classes, national conflict or patriarchy is the ideal. That is our goal, but that says nothing about what is the best system, movement or model in the world today. Many Chinese students have told us about the pain and confusion from the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. And to some extent we would not deny that the masses make great sacrifices during revolutionary experiments. More importantly however, is how does that violence and pain compare with that in other countries? Many people believe 20 million starved to death during the Great Leap, which may be true. (I would just point out that the figures are actually for the aftermath of the Great Leap, '60-2, not the Leap itself. Furthermore, the figures are based on population estimates not actual countings of dead people. I would suggest that if you lived in a tumultuous period like the Great Leap, you would not be arranging to have babies. You would conserve your strength, but that does not mean there was mass starvation, only 15 million fewer babies than usual.) In any case, suppose the 20 million starvation figure propagated widely by the CIA and its hacks in academia is true. THE REAL QUESTION IS "HOW DOES THAT COMPARE WITH OTHER IMPERFECT SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD?" Is it fair to compare Mao's China with countries that had been industrializing republics since the 1800s--USA, France, Germany and even Japan? Obviously not. The fair comparison is with countries that started in a similar position as China's in 1949. Let us note that before 1949, China also endured a starvation of 22 million during World War II thanks to KMT. That is proportionately greater than 20 million in 1960-1. The real comparison is with India. India was ahead of China in 1949. It achieved its independence in 1947. It had a higher life expectancy and per capita income than China did. Yet it was also 75% peasant like China. Yet, give Mao's system one generation and China goes ahead of India in life expectancy; even though, India is a parliamentary democracy with much more capitalism than China. THANKS TO MAOIST REVOLUTION, India suffers 3 million deaths a year, mostly from starvation, because it does not do as well as China. Indeed, every year 14 MILLION CHILDREN DIE FROM STARVATION IN THE CAPITALIST ASIAN COUNTRIES.(Source: Ruth Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1987/8.) What those children need is more Maoism not less Maoism. LANDLORD oppression is still very real for the world's majority of people. And some of you are pointing out the exceptions in the international sweepstakes known as the capitalist system--Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. One of the most disconcerting things is to hear well-educated scientists and mathematicians speak of such exceptions without counting the failures for every success under the world capitalist system. Taking a statistical average, China will always come out near the top in crucial life expectancy figures. But let's count those exceptions. Where are they? Two cities and two countries. Well the two countries succeeded again BECAUSE of Maoism and class struggle. If Maoism had not swept the Mainland of entrenched landlord class interests allied with U.S. imperialism, the PRC would look a lot more like India or the Philippines. Southern Korea also had its landlord class's influence greatly reduced thanks to the revolution that swept the peninsula before U.S. intervention. Wherever such landed interests are still dominant, it does not matter whether there is democracy, pseudo-democracy or military regime, the economy stagnates and the peasant masses starve at high rates. That means places like El Salvador, Philippines, India, Bangladesh etc. (This is getting long, so send us a couple bucks for more references and articles: MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140) FREE SPEECH The United States wised up and did not reinstall landed interests in Taiwan and southern Korea after class struggle knocked the landlords down a few pegs. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world it backed every petty dictator already in power--whether that dictator represented landlord interests or not. Chinese students know who we are talking about because they are great internationalists compared with most Amerikkkans. We are talking about the Shah of Iran, Somoza, Marcos, the Salvadoran death squads and the corrupt Vietnamese regime. It remains true today that the largest obstacle to free speech in the world is the U.S. government, not so much for what it does domesticaly but because of all the Chiang Kai-sheks it still supports globally. "Free speech" is allowed to the bought-off working class of the white nation at the expense of "free speech" in the Third World. The U.S. imperialists give its own working class a break in exchange for peace at home and for support of its foreign and military policies. Domestically, it is true that I can print this message, but even white nation revolutionaries get arrested for distributing revolutionary papers. They also get framed up for various "crimes" or put away as "mentally ill." Our imprisonment rates and mental illness rates are higher than even Deng Xiaoping fascism's imprisonment and mental illness rates. Also domestically, the government does not like to be caught often repressing free speech. But cops do routinely kill people on the streets for how they look. The way to go here is to repress people by charging them with phony crimes. (Again a lot more to say, but we'll stop.) Someone mentioned Kent State--a massacre in which no state troops or cops were attacked. Yet very few people know of another massacre that same year. Ten days after Kent State police opened fire with a machine gun on a dorm at a Black college. They killed two people! Most people haven't even heard of this because it did not affect middle-class white people. There were 53 demonstrations at mostly Black colleges, but they didn't get media attention. I would also mention the Black Panther Party which had over 20 people murdered by police, including one in his sleep as is documented in the movie the "Death of Fred Hampton." Most of the time, white middle-class Amerika has "free speech" and doesn't use it, so it doesn't know about all the frame-ups, harassment and killings that people who do use their "free speech" face. It's only when you challenge the system that suddenly you face violence. MIM is for the ability of the masses of the world's people to have political discussion and debate. We can't talk about such "free speech" when the United States is willing to kill 2 million or more people to stop communism in Vietnam or slaughter 3,000 people just to remove Noriega in Panama. What happened to their free speech? And the free speech of people oppressed by U.S. backed apartheid? Death squad El Salvador? ETc. etc. The world is full of Chiang Kai-sheks ready to cut a deal with the U.S. imperialists to stay in power. To get to a society of real free speech we need to get rid of the incentive people have to kill each other for land or money or resources. Communism is still the only logical goal for those who want real free speech. Now we must compare what movements have been most successful in making real-world steps toward those goals. The answer is Maoism. Maoism did not make China perfect over night but it brought faster progress than any other movement, ideology or system. That's what counts, how it compares with other REAL-WORLD EXISTING SYSTEMS. That method of comparing realities is what we Marxists call materialism. ============================================================================== ========================================================== "Consistent use of statistics" Date: Tue, 19 May 92 15:15:09 EDT In the United States we collect what are known as "excess death" figures. If you take a Black person and a white person and one dies because of a difference in medical treatment, we call that an excess death. The death rate for Blacks in 1986 was such that they suffered 75,980 excess deaths from their oppression in the United States. There were 29.223 million Blacks in 1986. (See Statistical Abstract of the United States 1989, p. 74 for mortality figures.) If Black people numbered 1 billion, then the excess death figure would be 2.6 million deaths EVERY YEAR. So we are glad people use statistics in talking about the Great Leap, so that people can get an overall sense of comparative violence going on. Now let me ask you a moral question. It doesn't matter to dead people how they die, whether it be McDonalds serial murder or 6/4/89 massacre. They are victims and every person's life is as good as every other's. But which system do you expect more of, the country with the richest economy in the world or the system that is still 70% peasant? Yet, in Shanghai under the Gang of Four, according to a Western doctor who went there, the infant mortality rate was lower than it was for Blacks or whites in New York City. The deaths per 1,000 infants by age 1 was 12.6 in Shanghai (1972), 18.1 for whites in NYC (1971) and 27.1 for "non-whites" in NYC (1971). Victor Sidel, M.D. and Ruth Sidel, M.S.W. Serve the People: Observations on Medicine in the People's Republic of China (NY: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1973, p. 257) That speaks volumes about the superiority of socialism, even when one country starts much poorer than another. Dead people have no free speech and Maoism is still the best plan for the reduction of violence internationally, despite whatever flaws China may have had. MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140 Subject: Long Live Maoism V! To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU Sender: csf-adm@postgres.Berkeley.EDU To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU The reality of imperialist exploitation: no democracy for the exploited Banks in the Western monopoly capitalist countries pulled in $325 billion more than they loaned out to the Third World in the 1980s. In 1988 alone, the figure was $50 billion. (New York Times, 9/18/89) $50 billion is a hefty sum, even by Amerikan economic standards. It would be over $3000 a year for every starving child in the world. Food policy analysts have already shown that the world already produces the food to feed everyone. The reason it doesn't is the distribution system. The starving people have neither the food nor the means of producing food. It's just a power problem. The world's Chiang Kai-sheks conduct a "free trade" in human lives. They are all too willing to help with the exploitation of Third World people in exchange for U.S. military backing and a share of imperialist lifestyle. Merely living in the United States and China is not enough to say which economic system works for the world's majority of people. You have to look at how the U.S. wealth was created. You have to look behind the luxuries and comfort. When you do you will see a history of genocide, slavery and imperialist superexploitation. That is not to say the U.S. economic system does not "work" for the imperialists, the bought-off Western working classes and the middle classes. It does work for those upper classes. But those of us who support "democracy," should see through U.S.-style democracy and support a vote for the Third World's people, the world's vast majority. We at the Maoist Internationalist Movement know these people have already spoken against world war, starvation and genocide. They don't support the Chiang Kai-sheks, Marcoses, Noriegas, Christianis etc. The Third World masses just never get a vote on U.S. imperialism. The only people who get a vote are the imperialists, bought-off working classes of the First World and the middle classes. They support Reagan/ Bush etc. They support the invasion of Panama and the killing of millions in Vietnam. And we are not surprised at MIM, because they get the benefit of that $325 billion from one avenue of exploitation alone every ten years. For those interested in more facts and calculations proving that the U.S. economic system does not generate the wealth enjoyed here, send $3 cash (check to "ABS") to MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140. We are quite sure that the well-educated scientists on this network can understand the statistics and calculations necessary to understand who is really making the United States rich. Post replies to us personally because we are having technical problems. Subject: Long Live Maoism VI! To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU Sender: csf-adm@postgres.Berkeley.EDU To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU USA IS NUMBER ONE! In the last post, we explained why we disagree with Fang Lizhi and others who simply say "China is behind the United States; the United States is expanding its lead; therefore, the U.S. system is better." The U.S. "lead" is only at the expense of the world's majority of people. Some people think we just whitewash anything that happened in Mao's China. That is not true. We said in our first post that no system is perfect yet until we reach the utopia of communism. The people dead from starvation and other catastrophes cannot be brought back, but we can look around and determine what is best to do to protect the "human-rights" of all peoples to live without violence--be it military or economic violence which results in death. If you compare things, you will find that despite its wealth, the U.S. system cannot solve some basic problems. So here is a list of things that the United States is number one in in the world. 1. Number one in mass murders (known as serial killings) e.g. the infamous McDonald's killing. 2. Number one in teenage suicide (and please not to tell me that young people kill themselves for any reason other than an imperfect system). 3. Number one in rape rates (recorded and available statistics). 4. Number one in pornography consumption. 5. Number one in processed cocaine consumption. 6. Number one in imprisonment of Black people per 1000 (even surpassing South Africa in this). 7. Number one in ordinary murder (in rates per 1000 people compared with all societies for which such figures are collected including Europe, China, Soviet Union and Japan) 8. Number one in arms exports. All Right USA all the way!!!!!!! Woop it up! VOA will never tell you this, but we Amerikans have a hard time understanding Chinese ideas about violence, so I make self-criticism in advance for this national characteristic of ours. Many, many Chinese have told us that the Cultural Revolution was bad because some people commited suicide. Now of course the VOA propagandists agree with this, because VOA loves to criticize other cultures and political systems. (By the way, we know that most Chinese students do not put much stock in VOA if they listened to the propaganda at all. We just use VOA as an example of what Americans think stereotypically.) But from the MIM perspective, suicide happens in a lot of societies for a lot of different historical reasons. Suicide is of course bad, but the existence of suicide does not prove the Cultural Revolution is bad. Speaking as a society, Amerika should say to China: "pardon our insensitivity, but you complain about the Cultural Revolution because you had it so good before the Cultural Revolution. We as Amerikans have much higher rates of violence including suicide." No matter how poignant the suicide story it can say nothing about which system is better unless there is a comparison made. Here once again, the U.S. system just falls on its face. We think Mao Zedong was very correct to guard vigilantly against becoming a U.S. type system during the Cultural Revolution. According to Deng Xiaoping, the archenemy of the Gang of Four, the Gang of Four executed 34,000 people in the Cultural Revolution, their supposed crime. Yet, we have over 20,000 ordinary murders here every year. That would be 80,000 every year if we had a billion people. Over ten years that would be 800,000. Why is it that people like Fang Lizhi blame Mao for the suicides, 34,000 and other deaths, but they don't blame Bush for the 800,000 would-be murders over ten years? Sure the historical context is a little different, but it makes not the slightest difference to the dead people. A fair comparison between the U.S. system and the system in China under Mao would blame Mao for the Cultural Revolution violence but also credit him for violence avoided relative to the United States. Either do that or don't blame any violence on the political system, which is the custom here. (When someone commits suicide here, it is not thought of as an indictment of an entire age/policy or system. That's another reason we are Number One, number one in psychiatric care. We think everything is an individual problem here so we have psychiatrists and social workers working on individuals, always without result.) MIM does not support individuals who killed each other in the Cultural Revlution or violence against intellectuals without state power. WE do not think of the Cultural Revolution as the sum total of such experiences so traumatic to Chinese individuals, because we think of the Cultural Revolution in comparative light. We understand the CR theory put forth that the bourgeoisie does exist right inside the party--hence today's Deng-Li- Yang clique and capitalism in the Soviet bloc. It's the top power-holders in the party who can become corrupt and really mess a country up once it is on the socialist road. We do not support any aspect of the GPCR that did not show the differences between the Maoists and the Liu Shaoqi/Lin Biao/ Deng Xiaopingists. If someone beats his wife during the Democratic Party presidential nomination convention here, we do not blame that on the Democratic Party convention. That is just something wrong with society as a whole that needs straightening out. >From MIM's perspective, most criticisms of the Cultural Revolution involve standards that would never be applied to the United States. Hence we can understand that people suffered in the Cultural Revolution, but we do not agree with the imputed causes of that suffering. In a democratic centralist system, it is easy to make political assessments of responsibility. Hence Chinese blame Mao and the Gang of Four for much violence in the CR. In the U.S. "invisible hand" system, power hides behind "free markets," where no one is accountable except to shareholders seeking a profit. Ironically, especially concerning the fight for democracy, it is easier to monitor Mao's CP, than it is to monitor what goes on in U.S. corporate boardrooms. The violence caused by decisions in corporate boardrooms almost never gets blamed on the people who made those decisions. MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140 Subject: The right to talk about China To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU Sender: csf-adm@postgres.Berkeley.EDU To: csf@postgres.Berkeley.EDU Occasionally people tell us that we have no right to talk about China, because we don't live there. (Many incorrectly assume that we never did.) It is indeed a big task just to understand one's own country when you live in a place like the United States or China--really big places. So we can sympathize with the sentiment and we certainly agree that the oppressed people within a nation must liberate themselves and come up with their own leadership and theories for doing so. When it comes to reality though, many Chinese intellectuals are telling us that America is so great. Hence we cannot always refuse to talk about China. If both sides shut up, we'd shut up. But in fact, we have to contend with Fang Lizhi printed in English by huge publishing houses like Alfred Knopf telling us how great the American system is. These books and newspaper articles go out in the millions within the United States and they make our job harder to fight for the liberation of the oppressed within the United States. So if Fang Lizhis are going to say how great the U.S. system is in books and articles mostly for U.S. audiences, then we are going to do the same for a few hundred or thousand Chinese intellectuals on this network. Still because Fang has the backing of many Western capitalists he will tell the oppressed in America much more about America than we will ever tell Chinese about China. So we think people who complain about our contributions on the net, but don't complain about Chinese comments on America in American media are hypocrites. Chinese intellectuals need to realize that they do have power even in this country. They do affect the struggles of the oppressed here whenever they talk about the U.S. system. We do sympathize with people who say both sides should shut up, but that just isn't going to happen. It's a dream. In the end, MIM actually agrees a little with Fang Lizhi too. He is right to try to learn things from other countries. And he knows that it is impossible to do that without making comparisons and talking about both countries. We don't think Fang Lizhi has done a very thorough job of really looking at the causes of violence, but we agree with his project and general line of inquiry. So again, people who disagree with us: what are the CAUSES of violence that happened under Mao and how do they compare with CAUSES of violence in the United States? MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140 ======================================================================== 92 Date: Sun, 14 Jun 92 02:13:18 EDT From: Maoist Internationalist Movement Subject: Long Live Maoism IX! To: Maoist Internationalist Movement Some Chinese students have raised with us the tragedy of the Great Leap under Mao, which estimates say saw the death of 20 million Chinese from starvation. In previous posts, we already explained China's history of starvation and some problems with the approach used in condemning Maoism based on the Great Leap. Perhaps in future posts, we will deal with the causes of starvation during the Great Leap. Before we go further, we would like to refute the claim that the Third World would be worse off if it had more Maoist revolutions. While Third World countries often endure tragic conditions of famine or medical neglect, Maoism has proved to be a superior solution in a less-than-perfect world. In previous posts we explained why it is not fair to compare Mao's China with the United States, which was richer than China before Mao ever took power. Maoists only had state power for 27 years in a country that had been very poor for hundreds of years. To judge Maoism, we suggest making real world comparisons. Then we will find that Maoism made up for a lot of poverty. Countries starting in a similar position as China's did not do as well as China after 27 years of Maoism, because Maoism was indeed superior. In this post we will make use of facts from a bourgeois, anti- Mao book by Martin Whyte and William Parish. The facts generally collected by the World Bank show that Maoism's accomplishments were so great that China's masses had better social services than countries several times richer on a per capita income basis. In 1979, China's infant mortality was 49 per 1,000 live births, compared with 48 for countries averaged in the "middle income" category. It also compared with 134 for India in the "low income" category that China was in. (Urban Life in Contemporary China, p. 63) The bourgeois scholars found that free market societies with China's level of income were vastly inferior in this regard and China came out on top. The life expectancy story was the same. It was 68 in China, 60 in the "middle income" countries and 50 in the "low income" capitalist countries averaged together. In earlier posts we showed readers that China started behind India in income and life expectancy and surged ahead under Mao, which is not to say that China ever left the "low income" category in Mao's mere 27 years of rule. When it comes to population per Western doctor, population per secondary doctor (like barefoot doctors) and population per hospital bed, China outdid the average of both the "middle income" capitalist countries and "low income" capitalist countries. Only the most advanced free-market, capitalist countries did better than China on average when it came to health care issues. These are exceptions in the world, not the majority of capitalist countries or countries with more free market than China. (Ibid.) Only by making the unfair comparison of China with very rich countries, countries that were much richer than China even before Maoism took power, only then could you make the distorted conclusion that Maoism was not a good strategy for health care in the Third World. The same is true when it comes to education. China surpassed the averages of "middle income" countries in the world only because it had the Maoist strategy. Adult literacy was 70% in China, 71% in "middle income countries" and 38% in the average of "low income countries." China surpassed both the middle and low income country averages in primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment and pupil-teacher ratios. (Urban Life in Contemporary China, p. 60) (It had lower pupil-teacher ratios.) Even in Maoist China's weakest area--housing--China surpassed the average of the developing countries in rooms per house, smallest number of people per room, electricity and piped water available. (Ibid., p. 78) We realize that all these gains, especially in health care and enrollments, started to erode under Hua Guofeng/Deng Xiaoping capitalist-restoration. We don't support what happened after the arrest of the Gang of Four. In conclusion, capitalism is an international sweepstakes. A handful of countries that have been exploiting other countries for a long time are rich and getting richer. The vast majority of countries like China in 1949 are poor. If you live in a Third World country, you should definitely support Maoism, because Maoism brings better health care, education and housing in a very short period of time. We won't claim it brings industrialization in a mere 27 years, but no system does, especially in a world where the imperialists take the precious surplus and resources from the poor countries. Doing the right thing in the Cultural Revolution (Send replies to mimnotes@um.cc.umich.edu or mimnotes@UMICHUM. Let us know if we can publish your replies.) As we said in our second refutation of Joseph Wang for the CSF, (ask us for a copy), we believe that people who say all was evil during the Cultural Revolution make a dangerous historical mistake. If you do not understand the causes of good and evil, you cannot find the cures for evil. In the West, the press likes to speak of the Cultural Revolution as all bad often because the same publishers and editors believe that all Chinese are basically crazy--something that comes out in repeated Time magazine cover stories featuring mobs of Chinese in the last 30 years or more. The same is true of Western anti-communists who want a simplistic moralizing answer to the Cultural Revolution without having to undertake the work of studying China and its Cultural Revolution. Here we would like to review some books by first-hand observers of the Cultural Revolution that show that not all Chinese went out during the Cultural Revolution and killed their neighbors, tortured their peers or beat-up intellectuals with no state power. Most of the popular stories of resistance to wrongs during the Cultural Revolution emphasize simple non-participation--hiding away to do mathematics problems or logic puzzles. We at MIM think that traditional Confucian intellectuals removed from politics are a part of China's problems. The real resistance to wrongs during the Cultural Revolution was by some Red Guards faithful to Maoism. These Red Guards opposed the theory that one inherits a correct line by coming from the right class background. They also opposed attacking masses or intellectuals with no state power, even if their ideas seemed bourgeois. The Miltons report their participation in the Cultural Revolution in this passage excerpted below: "We were invited one day to a 'struggle meeting' organized by the Cultural Revolutionary Committee against three of our former colleagues labeled as 'bourgeois academic authorities.' The meeting was led by young teachers and older students whom we recognized as stalwarts of the school Party bureaucracy . . . [One of the three bourgeois academic authorities] "was an active and apparently dedicated Communist Party member, but the question raised against him was whether a man with such an upper-class background should have been admitted to the Party in the first place. . . "Unfortunately, although the majority of students and teachers did not really believe that this man was an enemy, an active minority continued to consider him one for the duration of the Cultural Revolution. . . "The other academic 'enemy' . . . no longer in a position of power and possessing little authority, if he were, in fact, taking the capitalist road, he might find it a little difficult to march down all by himself. "Surely these men were not the main targets of a movement designed to remove those in the Party in power taking the capitalist road. The meeting left a bad taste in our mouths. Within a few months, it would be clear that it had indeed been a diversion to protect the status quo at the Institute." David Milton and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside (NY: Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 163-165. The Miltons and others active in Red Guard organizations in the First Foreign Languages Institute in Peking consistently struggled against Red Guards loyal to powerful capitalist-roaders and criticized the dupes of the ultraleft both of which focussed the attack away from the top party officials on the capitalist-road. The Miltons recognized when defenders of top Party officials sent their children and supporters to be Red Guards diverting attention from the real issues at hand. The Miltons also recognized the ultraleft error of attacking 90 or 95% of the masses or party members, because neither the masses nor general party members were powerful enough to be capitalists. We at the Maoist Internationalist Movement believe there were many Red Guards who did not commit crimes against the people, and in fact kept the focus on the capitalist-roaders like Deng Xiaoping. Unfortunately, Liu Shaoqi supporters and ultraleftists amongst the Red Guards who felt Mao and the Gang of Four were not going far enough let Deng Xiaoping off the hook and hence he came back to power shortly after the Cultural Revolution, only to commit more crimes against the people. In our next post we will deal with the issue of ultraleftism during the Cultural Revolution. To obtain a copy of The Wind Will Not Subside by the Miltons, send us a message. MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140. ======================================================================== 173 Date: Sat, 27 Jun 92 16:01:24 EDT From: MIM Subject: Mao: The Real Fighter for Democracy To: csf@bigbro.wustl.edu The Cultural Revolution and Mao: The Real Fighter for Democracy Many Chinese students have asked us how we assess Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution. They cite widespread crimes against the people and ask if those aren't Mao's fault since he initiated the Cultural Revolution. So far in our posts, we have argued that one person or even a Gang of Five could not have committed millions of crimes against the people. You must look at the broad social causes of such crimes. Here we would like to point out the positive aspects of the Cultural Revolution and assess Mao's responsibility. From the perspective of communists, the Cultural Revolution was the first movement of the masses in a socialist country against a bourgeoisie right inside the Communist Party--people like Deng Xiaoping. >From the point of view of Chinese history, the Cultural Revolution was also very important. In particular, it was a blow to Confucianism and emperor-worship. The people saying Mao was a bad emperor who brought calamity to the Chinese people are still stuck in emperor-worship. These critics who blame Mao for a supposed 20 million violent deaths during the Cultural Revolution are saying that an emperor can cause disaster. Logically, the same people who think one emperor can do so much bad are the same people who are going to think that one emperor can do so much good, perhaps even by being just a neutral emperor. We at MIM do not buy into any emperor logic and from our reading of Mao we know that Mao hated emperor logic. We also know from reading Red Guards opposed to Mao that Mao actually helped them to think without emperors. Ultraleftist Red Guard Wu Man had this to say about Mao and the Cultural Revolution: "We must not be biased by the anti-communist propaganda that the people are all ignorant and the Mainland is a hell. In fact before the Cultural Revolution, China had published a number of works by Western writers. . . "The Cultural Revolution is also an important reason why we could read so many books. This might seem unbelievable. The one thing the general public abroad could not forgive China was that the authorities encouraged Red Guards to 'destroy the four ancients' thereby destroying Chinese culture. "The fervour with which the Red Guards devoured books had to be seen to be believed." (Kan San, China: The Revolution Is Dead-- Long Live the Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977), p. 211. Wu Man indicates that after seizing the "four olds," at least his Red Guard group (a faction which we Maoists oppose) did not trash the "four olds," but attempted to understand the "four olds." In fact, they tried to understand both what the Central Committee and the Red Guards were trying to say. We at MIM say, what's wrong with that? Wu Man and other ultraleft Red Guards blame Mao for shutting down the Cultural Revolution in 1969 by sending in the PLA. Wu Man had faith in the Chinese people to this extent. Most commentators today take the Rightist view that such a period should never have occurred, that the Cultural Revolution should have been shut down right away. In their minds, it is the emperor's fault that widespread masses-on-masses violence took place during the Cultural Revolution. But what did Mao really say about violence during the Cultural Revolution? 1. "It is normal for the masses to hold different views. Contention between different views is unavoidable, necessary and beneficial. In the course of normal and full debate, the masses will affirm what is right, correct what is rong and gradually reach unanimity. "The method to be used in debates is to present the facts, reason things out, and persuade through reasoning. Any method of forcing a minority holding different views to submit is impermissible. The minority should be protected, because sometimes the truth is with the minority. . . . "When there is a debate, it should be conducted by reasoning, not by force." The above is from the "Sixteen Points" that guided the Cultural Revolution. We at MIM ask all those who supposedly uphold "human-rights" what was wrong with that? The real Maoists were the ones defending this principle of interaction amongst the masses. 2. "Let the Masses Educate Themselves in the Movement" was one of the Sixteen Points. This point answers why Mao did not send in the PLA sooner to halt the Cultural Revolution. It was not correct to look to the emperor to figure everything out and make everything right. Only when clear majorities of workers and students' parents wanted the Cultural Revolution to end did Mao move in with the PLA. At this time, Mao gathered Red Guard leaders and expressed his disappointment with them for using violence without getting the masses on their side. The masses rightly wanted the fighting with guns, spears and knives etc. to end. It was just masses-on- masses violence and the Red Guard factions on campus showed no sign of getting beyond it. The Ultraleft was unhappy, but it had blown its chance to really mobilize the massses for change and oust Deng Xiaoping types for good. (We have books on this subject such as William Hinton's One Hundred Day War.) 3. While Mao obviously launched the struggle against Liu Shaoqi/ Deng Xiaoping etc. he also criticized the Ultraleft in July, 1967. "Personally, I think we can see the first signs at present of giving up the struggle against the enemy, the struggle against the biggest power holders in the Party who are taking the capitalist line.. . . At present this contradiction is not concentrated; it is widely dissipated." (Mao Zedong Analyzes the Cultural Revolution, Jean Daubier, A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, p. 310) Mao added that revolutionary cadres must be righteously defended against indiscriminate attack. Mao criticized such indiscriminate attacks in the Shanghai People's Commune of 1967, taking a stand against what the masses had done and were being led to do by ultraleftists. When these ultraleftists raised the unrealistic slogan of "no chiefs," Mao said, "this is extreme anarchism; it is most reactionary." (David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside (NY: Pantheon Books, 1976) , p. 197. 4. Mao took a clear line against violence amongst the masses, even when that violence did not cause any lasting damages! In the winter of 1966 he sent Zhou Enlai a letter that was published. "Recently, many revolutionary teachers and students and revolutionary masses have written to me asking whether it is considered struggle by force [wu-tou] to make those in authority taking the capitalist road and freaks and monsters wear dunce caps, to paint their faces, and to parade them in the street. I think it is a form of struggle by force [wu-tou]. These goals cannot achieve our goal of educating the people. I want to stress here that, when engaging in struggle, we definitely must hold to struggle by reason [wen-tou], bring out the facts, emphasize rationality, and use persuasion before we can reach our standard of struggle and before we can achieve our goal of educating people." (David Milton and Nancy Dall Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside (NY: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 185.) We at MIM don't know how much clearer Mao could have been about violence amongst the masses. He opposed it. To the extent that it happened, it was perpetrated by non-Maoists masquerading as Maoists. So some people then ask, why didn't Mao end the Cultural Revolution sooner then? But that is just asking the emperor to take care of everything. Mao stressed that the "masses must liberate themselves." That's why he did not move in the PLA until the masses very broadly became disgusted with the shallow politics of the Ultraleft and their manipulators on the Right. It is a tragedy that Red Guard ultra- leftists killed unarmed workers and soldiers rather than end their "hot war." They only brought violence on themselves and let Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun and other top capitalist-roaders off the hook. These Rightists pushed the ultraleftists into violence to discredit the Cultural Revolution. Those confused by the violence blamed the emperor and all the Red Guards and hence the Right had an easy time coming into power with Deng Xiaoping after Mao died. Often times we hear that everything about the Cultural Revolution was bad. The Western media simplifies the whole issue by talking about it as if everyone went out and killed or tortured their neighbors, co-workers or intellectuals without state power. MIM has talked to some Red Guards and read about Red Guard organizations, and we have learned that some people struggled to do the right thing during the Cultural Revolution. We think it is important to know that lest simpleton anti-Chinese or anti-communist ideas gain currency. Our question to former Red Guards is this: 1. Did you or other Red Guards you know struggle to stop violence of people against people? Which Red Guard organizations did not kill anyone? 2. Did you or other Red Guards or Red Guard organizations struggle to keep the "fire" focussed on Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping etc.? In other words were there any Red Guard groups that opposed the physical torture of people who did not hold high-ranks in the governmment? We are restricting our questions to physical violence, especially any that caused permanent damage. We don't think yelling, writing posters, taking over buildings, harsh rhetoric etc. constitute good reasons to condemn the Cultural Revolution or particular Red Guards. Please send a copy of your response to mimnotes@um.cc.umich.edu (mimnotes@UMICHUM) or MIM, PO Box 559, Cambridge, MA 02140. Please tell us if we have the right to publish your article or brief statement of fact. Also, we would like to take this time to invite people to submit articles for an upcoming theoretical journal. We print all articles that respond to articles we have written, no matter how critical they may be of us Maoists, as long as they respond to something they read from us. Upcoming issues will treat the issue of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Cultural Revolution and why it is that some countries develop or don't develop--the Four Dragons issue. We hope to dedicate dozens of pages to the letters from the Chinese students here. We apologize for not keeping up with this conference, so please send responses to us personally. Thank you. ======================================================================== 99 Date: Thu, 25 Jun 92 17:22:01 EDT From: MIM Subject: The Ultraleft in the Cultural Revolution To: csf@bigbro.wustl.edu by Maoist Internationalist Movement Recently, someone on CSF asked us if we thought Maoism was practiced during the Cultural Revolution, and if so by whom? We at MIM based our opinion on close readings of participants in the Cultural Revolution. We found that the people committing crimes against the people came from either the Right--Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping etc.-- or by the ultraleft. In a previous post we gave an example of Maoist resistance to the ultraleft and Right during the Cultural Revolution. This is something you cannot generally ask Western scholars about, never mind journalists who never studied the Cultural Revolution. As far as Westerners are concerned, it is impossible to sort out Chinese shouting "Long Live Chairman Mao!" All they know is that what the participants in the Cultural Revolution were saying doesn't sound like what we have in Amerika. The press lumps everyone including Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng, the Gang of Four and everyone else not advocating U.S. neo-colonialism openly enough--as "hardline." We at MIM find this ignorance to be dangerous. There are important lessons to learn from the Cultural Revolution, but we can't learn the lesson just by saying "China Went Mad" like Time Magazine did in 1987. When we raise the issue of the ultraleft, some people say that it didn't exist. Luckily, some leaders who even called themselves "ultraleft" did go to Hong Kong and wrote their views about being "ultraleft" Red Guards. Without these documents, we would not know from Western journalism that some Red Guards really opposed what Mao was advocating. Wu Man was one such Red Guard, who escaped to Hong Kong in 1973. The date is very important to note, because it is proof that people opposed Mao very early on in the Cultural Revolution. Wu Man criticized Mao with the aid of other Red Guards and Western anarchists and Trotskyists in 1974. I know a lot of people on this net will say, "great, they opposed Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution!" However, these "ultra- leftists" were the ones who believed Mao did not go far enough. "We could not accept this 'transitional period' as excuse, for if we accepted it, many problems would disappear. We deliberated on this point and felt that 'can't be helped' was only an excuse. . . . You may ask what are the solutions to this problem. Many feel it is difficult to answer." (Wu Man interviewed in Kan San, intro. China: The Revolution is Dead--Long Live the Revolution, (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977), pp. 208-9. Wu Man was similar to many Krondstadt rebels in the Soviet Union in 1921 who wanted utopia instantly. Such utopia-seekers are always quick to use violence on anyone for the slightest imperfection. And despite this impatience for "excuses," the ultraleftists, as in Krondstadt finally admit that they don't have solutions themselves, just criticisms. Wu Man went on to advocate "neo idealistic heroism." (p. 208) Unlike Mao who studied reality and upheld dialectical materialism, Wu Man compared all reality to the ideal of communism. If the reality did not match utopia, then violent opposition was justified. Another ultraleftist, Yu Shuet, opposed Mao's use of the military to end the Cultural Revolution. (p. 187) Yu called Mao the "chief representative of the ruling class." This kind of thinking was very influential amongst millions of Red Guards and even some Western Marxists. In the United States, Maoist forces split at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1969. The previously official Maoist party in the United States denounced Mao as a state-capitalist and split the entire revolutionary movement in the United States. The name of the party was Progressive Labor Party, which teamed up with the ultraleftists, anarchists and Trotskyists in the book cited here. It was these overread poets who felt that 90% of the party was bad and that that 90% deserved the violence against it of the Cultural Revolution. Quote: "The January Storm told people that China would go toward a society which had no bureaucrats, and that 90 percent of the senior cadres had already formed a privileged class. The fact that 90 per cent of the senior cadres had to stand aside in the storm of the January Revolution was certainly not an error by the 'masses.'" (p. 156) This document even referred to itself as the "ultraleft," partly to distinguish itself from the Gang of Four that it saw as to its Right. (p. 157) Chinese students will recall that Mao maintained that the vast majority of the party was "good" or "comparatively good." Mao and the Gang never referred to the whole party as a privileged class. The ultraleft targetted a whole strata of people as enemy that deserved violence against it. This tended to fall on lower-ranking party members and intellectuals. _____________________________________________________________ If you had been reading MIM Notes, the newspaper of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, you would know all this already. Subscriptions: Send US$12 for 12 issues of MIM Notes sent via US Mail. MIM Distributors PO Box 3576 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576 USA Make checks out to "ABS" or send cash.