Historical Developments of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-(38): 15th September, 2013 Some ‘Left’ Ideological Currents in this Period: In the period after the attack on Stalin by Khruschev at the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 there was some confusion in various communist parties of the West which gave rise to new theories trying to reinterprete Marxism. Groups by the name of New Left arose first in France in the late fifties and later in Britain and other countries. In Britain their literature mainly appeared in the New Review and the University and Left Review, which later merged into the New Left Review. Lacking a clear and common orientation, the common characteristic of this New Left trend was a criticism of Stalin without clearly identifying with either the Soviet or Chinese positions in the Great Debate. This broad categorisation of views however gained in popularity after the growth in Latin American movements attempting to follow the model of the Cuban Revolution and further in the wake of the world-wide upsurge of student movements in the late 60s. The peculiarities of the Cuban Revolution gave rise to theories upholding it as the example suited to Latin American conditions. An attempt was made on the basis of the Cuban experience to even revise some basic Marxist-Leninist formulations. This was done by the Revolution’s leaders - Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but also quite considerably by Regis Debray, a Frenchman who tried to formulate a theory of revolution for Latin America. One of the central points of Marxism rejected by these formulations was the need for a proletarian vanguard party to successfully complete the revolution. As mentioned earlier the leaders of the Cuban Revolution were not members of the Cuban Communist Party; and it was only two and a half years after seizure of power that Castro formed the Partido de la Revolucion Socialista (PRS) which included the old Communist Party. Thus, according to Debray, Castro held the view that "there is no revolution without a vanguard; that this vanguard is not necessarily the Marxist-Leninist party; and that those who want to make the revolution have the right and duty to constitute themselves a vanguard, independently of these parties." This conception was further theorised by Debray to the sphere of the relation of the people’s army and the party. He felt that the subordination of the military to the political was inappropriate for Latin America where the Communist Parties had not been able to take root and develop in the same way as in Russia and China. He theorised that the ‘staggering novelty’ of the Cuban Revolution was that it introduced the guerrilla force as the party in embryo. He believed the people’s army to be the nucleus of the party and not vice versa. The guerrilla force was to be the political vanguard’s initial form and from its development a real party could rise. Central to this process was the concept of the guerrilla ‘foco’ (focus) where the guerrilla squad was the central focus of all forms of organisation and elevated above all else. Debray contrasted with the Vietnamese experience says that unlike there where the military pyramid of the liberation forces was built from the base up, in Latin America it would be built from the apex down. Many of the concepts propagated by Guevara and theorised by Debray ran counter to the basic Marxist understanding of revolution. They were based on an understanding that dedicated, well organised and militarised heroes can make history and belittled the role of the masses in the revolution. In contrast to Mao’s principle that the guerrillas relation with the masses is like fish with water, Debray formulated three golden rules ‘constant vigilance, constant mistrust, constant mobility.’ Further the analysis concentrated only on the military aspect without attempting to understand the political context of the class forces at the time of the Cuban Revolution or later in Latin America. It thus could not arrive at the correct conclusions regarding the central issue of the friends and enemies of the revolution, the question of the united front and the leadership of the revolution. In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution many guerrilla struggles along Guevarist lines were attempted in other Latin American countries but most met with failure. Guevara himself died while fighting in one such guerrilla war in Bolivia. One of the most prominent of these movements which continues to this day is the armed struggle led by the Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution (FARC). The theories of Guevara and Debray which neglected the leading role of the working class, also gained prominence during the upsurge of students’ movements in the late sixties as they seemed to prove the importance of non-class categories and the revolutionary potential of the students and youth as compared to the working class and the peasantry. Another group of theorists who in this period gained some prominence while attempting to revise basic Marxist theory were the ‘dependency’ theorists in the field of political economy. Prominent among them were André Gunder Frank, Emmanuel Aligerhi and Samir Amin. They saw the source of exploitation not in production but in distribution and in what they defined as ‘unequal exchange’; they abandoned the categories of imperialism and colonies and semi-colonies and instead talked of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ of world capitalism; they did not accept that imperialism tended to preserve pre-capitalist relations in the colonial countries but instead analysed that capitalist relations had developed in the ‘dependent’ capitalisms of the periphery. Deng Revisionism and the Loss of All Socialist Bases After the death of Mao in1976, the capitalist roaders who had remained in the party staged a coup under the leadership of the arch revisionist Deng Tsiao-ping and took over the control of the party under the nominal leadership of Hua Kuo-feng, a so-called centrist. As Mao had often taught, with political control going over to the hands of the revisionists the socialist base had gone out of the hands of the proletariat. At the same time the leadership of the Albanian Party of Labour switched over to an opportunist line attacking Maoism and projecting Mao as a petty bourgeois revolutionary. Though the Khmer Rouge continued to hold power in Kampuchea they were waging a constant struggle against the internal and external enemies of the Revolution and were yet to emerge from the economic ravages of war and consolidate their rule when they were defeated by the Soviet backed Vietnamese Army. Thus there was no country anywhere in the world where the proletariat had consolidated its hold on state power and could play the role of a socialist base for the international proletariat. In China, though the Cultural Revolution had gained great victories, there had yet been much more to be done. In fact the revisionist victory was in a way a confirmation of the words of Mao in August 1967, "The present Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is only the first ; there will inevitably be many more in the future. The issue of who will win in the revolution can only be settled over a long historical period. If things are not properly handled, it is possible for a capitalist restoration to take place at any time in the future." Thus this fifth period (1949-76) was a period when the subjective forces of World Socialist Revolution faced unprecedented losses. The international proletariat which had established a mighty socialist camp at the start of this period, had to face the loss of its last socialist base – China – by the end of this period. Though the imperialist system from 1974 was again in the throes of a new and extremely deep economic crisis, the subjective forces of the international proletariat had been substantially weakened and were therefore unable to take sufficient advantage of the imperialist crisis. However this period had produced a major ideological victory. In the face of the most dangerous attack in its history – the attack of the forces of modern revisionism and capitalist restoration – Marxism had proved its dynamism by further developing itself in the course of this struggle. Thus though there had been loss of socialist bases, ideologically Marxism had managed to effectively counter the attempts to destroy it. Even in a seemingly hopeless situation it had proved that it had the capability to provide the ideological answers. While providing these answers in the Great Debate and the GPCR Marxism had advanced to a new stage-Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. It was as MLM that it was to continue to be the guiding science and ideology of the international proletariat.
Posted on: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 18:41:22 +0000