¶Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book
Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence
of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of
the grotesque Stalinist-Maoist-Third World Marxist
and
Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New
Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the best and the
brightest
coming out of the American 1960’s.
¶Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a
certain level, Elbaum’s book (describing a mental universe that in many
respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to
jettison 99% of what Third World Marxism
stood for in its 1970’s
heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled progressive
politics
for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and
the unions are concerned, preparing progressive
forces to paint a
new face on the capitalist system after the neo-liberal phase has shot
its bolt.
¶I lived through the 1960’s too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in
an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called
Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970’s had spawned eight
different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with
Eurocentric
Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from
the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by
way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by
working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third
World national liberation movements
and states resulting from
them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies
(Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum’s
Third World Marxists
, who cheerleaded for most or all of them,
were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We
based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist
for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian
Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left
Opposition) (in Elbaum’s milieu the choice was between 1953 (death of
Stalin) and 1956 (Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress)).
Eurocentrics
that we were, we took note of Stalin’s treacherous
and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao tse-tung at the time had
criticized from the right); of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Third
Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also
throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 Communes
in Vietnam
and China). We critiqued Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Popular
Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the
reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to
the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the
Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to
the abandonment of anti-colonial agitation by the Vietnamese and
Algerian Communist Parties in the name of anti-fascism
). We were
disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin’s
1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact,
through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of
the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union. We
read about Elbaum’s one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the
massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they
advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the
return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho
received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein
Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had
done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered
while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French
and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their
respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers’ uprising in East
Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest)
of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish
Workers’ Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened
by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970,
which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the
Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts
against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too Eurocentric
for
him–they did after all take place in Europe–assuming he heard about
them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described
them as revolts against revisionism.
¶From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse
anti-Stalinist milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge’s
Memoirs, and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; we
discovered Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and the
Situationists; we saw Chile’s 1970-1973 Popular Front once again crushed
by the same collaborationist policies which Elbaum’s Stalinist lineage
had first perfected in France and Spain in 1936, and unlike Elbaum and
his friends, we were hardly startled when the Chinese Communist Party
embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our Eurocentric
attention
that China itself had pushed the Indonesian Communist Party to adopt the
same Popular Front strategy in 1965, leading to the massacre of hundreds
of thousands (a success for US imperialism that more than offset the
later defeat in Indochina), or that it had applauded when the Ceylonese
regime (today Sri Lanka) bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student
movement in 1971. We were similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his
friends, when China went on to support the South African intervention
against the MPLA in Angola, or call for the strengthening of NATO
against Soviet social imperialism
, or support the right-wing
regroupment against the Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in
Portugal in 1974-1975. We Eurocentrists
snapped up the writings
of Simon Leys, the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the
Shanghai proletariat by the People’s Liberation Army in the course of
the Cultural Revolution
, the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976.
Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle
between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times,
as a brilliant success in putting politics in command
against the
capitalist restorationists, technocrats and intellectuals, and burning
Beethoven for good measure. All of these writhings of Chinese Stalinism
struck us more as the second-time farce to the first time tragedy of the
world-wide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920’s onward. Elbaum
and his friends cheered on Pol Pot’s rustification campaign in Cambodia,
in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the
post-1976 developments in China after Mao’s death (the arrest and
vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S.
in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied
Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the
Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to
be a Third World Marxist
!
¶We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in
motion by the serious diffusion of the early Marx
and the growing
awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the late Marx
in the
Grundrisse, Capital and Theories of Surplus
Value. We leapt upon the Unpublished Sixth Chapter
of vol. I
of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the
early
and late
Marx (though we did not yet know Marx’s
writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew
an even sharper line between a truly late Marx
and all the
bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th
Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to
the diamat
world view and texts which were the standard fare of
Elbaum’s world. It was of course Eurocentric
to rethink Marx and
official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, not
Eurocentric
to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria,
and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and
China from the 1840’s onward may have been Eurocentric
but the
brain-dead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the three
goods
and the four bads
were, for these people, decidedly
not.
¶Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable
writings–no doubt Eurocentric–in primitive accumulation in the colonial
world and her rich material on pre-capitalist societies everywhere in
Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) meant nothing to these
people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian
Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national
self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not
interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the
latter’s lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully
unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques
of Korsch and Lukacs similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard
of the 1940’s and 1950’s CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max
Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul
Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or
Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China’s
four revolutionary operas
and songs such as The Mountain
Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers
while the
serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the
latter’s limitations) and Guy Debord.
¶Then there was the influence of Monthly Review magazine and
publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to
various Third World anti-imperialists
to China; they were infused
with the Bandung
climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the
Soviet-Chinese-neutralist anti-imperialist
bloc. Names such as
Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mind-set, as did the later
Tri-Continental
(Latin America-Africa-Asia) consciousness
promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy,
Monopoly Capital (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton
Woods system, did not even mention credit), became a major theoretical
reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names
such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arrighi Immanuel, and the South
American dependency school
(Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the
lynchpin was Lenin’s theory of imperialism, with its idea of
imperialist super-profits
making possible the support of a
labor aristocracy
and thereby the reformism of the Western
working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed.
Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy’s economics,
Elbaum still uses monopoly capital
as one of his many unexamined
concepts.
¶Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of
Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in
reality, in most cases, the study of vol. I, which is tantamount to
reading Hegel’s Phenomenology only on the initial phase of
sense certainty
of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far
more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of
Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite
was Beria’s On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the
Transcaucusus
, reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct
Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: the
publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost
nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and
scholars.
He might have added that it wasn’t worth reading at the
time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas
for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of
soviets and workers’ councils for direct democratic worker control of
the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far
more interesting ones), by Elbaum’s own account the vision of the
socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed
beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly
discredited, or the invocation of the socialism in one rural
commune
of William Hinton’s Fanshen, or the writings on
Viet Cong democracy
by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who
had also written lyrically about Stalin’s Russia 30 years earlier). The
real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value (i.e. the
regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of
reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960’s, not for
Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital
world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization
process but as a quasi-Dühringian system ultimately of power and
domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view
of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing
Keynesianism pervaded this part of the left, relegating the law of value
to the capitalism of Marx’s time and (following Lenin) seeing everything
since the 1890’s as power-political monopoly capital.
This
anti-imperialism
was and is in reality an ideology of Third World
elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class,
like all the progressive
regimes they have ever established. It
did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World
in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the
1960’s, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places
between the three major capitalist centers of the U.S., Europe and East
Asia (so much for Lenin’s theory of imperialism); the illusory
prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of
the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being
looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to
implicate the white
(e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West
in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory
bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This
working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from
1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the U.S.
and Britain, May 1968 in France and the creeping May
of 1969-1977
in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum’s Third World
Marxists
that they were bought off by imperialism.
¶A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum’s book from
beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism,
Marxism-Leninism, ultra-leftism. Elbaum never explains that
revisionism
meant to this milieu above all the ideological
demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called
themselves antirevisionists
were identifying, implicitly or
explicitly (and usually explicitly) Stalin’s Russia with some betrayed
Marxist orthodoxy.
In his counterposition of
revisionism/antirevisionism
Elbaum does not devote one line to
the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of socialism in
one country
, a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his
other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin’s Testament
called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, another fact
that counted for nothing in the mental universe of Third World
Marxism.
) For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum
has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu
I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of
Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or
entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and
affirmed it. As for Marxism-Leninism
, Elbaum does admit that it
was a concoction of Stalin. In its subsequent career
Marxism-Leninism
could mean anything to anyone, anything of
course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every
failed proletarian revolution of the 20th century (Russia 1905 and
1917-21, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-67, Hungary 1956, France 1968)
had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small
totalitarians in Elbaum’s Third World Marxist
pantheon put
together.
¶Ultra-leftism
for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards
running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum
seems quite unaware of the true historic ultra-left. One can agree or
disagree with Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin’s
State and Revolution), Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the
Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed
onto western Europe) or Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of
the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale. But such
people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland and Italy)
that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be
confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct)
League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true
contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic
dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of
the proletariat
as the commodity form of human labor power). As
indicated above, figures such as Korsch, Mattick, Castoriadis, and the
early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered
part of an ultra-left, and unlike the productions of Elbaum’s milieu,
their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist
organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically
bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea
Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002.
¶Internationalism
for Elbaum means mainly cheerleading for the
latest Third World Marxist
movement or regime, but in reality his
vision of the world is laughably America-centered. He refers on occasion
(as a source of inspiration for his milieu) to the French mass strike of
1968, which swept aside all self-appointed vanguards,
Marxist-Leninists
first of all. This is lost on Elbaum. By the
early 1970’s, Trotskyist groups had clearly out-organized the
Marxist-Leninists, and for what it’s worth, today the two largest
Trotskyist groups, Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste, together account
for 10% of the vote in French elections and are now larger than the
Communist Party, without a Marxist-Leninist in sight. In Britain,
similarly, Trotskyist groups out-organized the Marxist-Leninists hands
down, played an important role in the 1972 strike wave (never mentioned
by Elbaum) and today the British Socialist Workers’ Party (not to be
confused with the American rump of the same name) is the largest group
to the left of the Labour Party. Elbaum refers in passing to the
Japanese far left of the 60’s as an influence on some
Japanese-Americans, but he seems blissfully unaware that the Zengakuren
was overwhelmingly anti-Stalinist and mainly viewed Russia and China as
state-capitalist. The most creative and internationally influential
currents of the Italian 1970’s, the so-called operaisti or workerists,
were breaking with Leninism from the early 1970’s at the latest. (To be
fair, in Italy and in Germany large Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups
did exist, and the Trotskyists were basically marginal).
¶On the subject of Trotsky: I am not a Trotskyist, and have basically
(as previously indicated) since my callow youth viewed all so-called
socialist societies as class societies, and not (as Trotskyists do) as
workers’ states.
But I have more respect for Trotsky (who should
be distinguished from the Trotskyists) than I ever had or will have for
Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim il-Sung, Castro, Guevara, or Cabral.
¶Wearing the blinders of his milieu, Elbaum shows real ignorance of
Trotskyism. (Third World Marxism’s
philistine hatred for Trotsky,
while generally not stooping to 1930’s Trotsky the agent of the
Mikado
-type slanders, was exceeded only by such ignorance.) Blinded
by his milieu’s acceptance of complete and positive continuity between
Lenin and Stalin, the world events of the early 1920’s, which decisively
shaped both Trotskyism and the above-mentioned ultra-left (and the last
80 years of human history) have no importance for him. Hence (as
indicated earlier), the triumph of socialism in one country
after
1924 and the total subordination of all Communist Parties to Soviet
foreign policy are totally unproblematic for these people, as were all
the debacles of the Comintern mentioned earlier. Similarly, the question
of the relationship of the Bolshevik party and Soviet state to the
soviets and workers’ councils, i.e. the question of the actual
working-class management of society, which was settled (in the negative)
by 1921, is of no consequence either. It’s Eurocentric to be concerned
about Soviet history before the rise of Stalin, not Eurocentric to
admire Stalin’s Russia with its 10 million peasants killed in the 1930’s
collectivizations, its massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the Moscow
Trials, its factories operating with killing speed-up under direct GPU
control or its 20 million people in slave labor camps at the time of
Stalin’s death. For such a view, revisionism
must therefore be
Khrushchev’s (equally top-down) attempt to decompress (a bit) this
nightmare. The memory of Stalinist Russia still weighs on the
consciousness of masses of people around the world as the seemingly
inevitable outcome of trying to do away with capitalism, and reinforces
the still potent neo-liberal mantra there is no alternative
, but
why the people Elbaum describes as the most dynamic
part of the
American left in the 1970’s were so taken with the Stalinist legacy
never seems to strike him as a major problem to be addressed.
¶Elbaum might also inform himself about Trotsky’s (and Marx’s) theory
of permanent revolution, which was the centerpiece of the Bolshevik
internationalist strategy in 1917, and its repudiation by Stalin the key
to all the post-1924 politics swallowed whole forty-five years later by
Elbaum’s Third World Marxists.
Permanent revolution–rightly or
wrongly–meant the possibility that a revolution in a backward country
like Russia could link up with (or even inspire; cf. Marx’s preface to
the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto) revolution in the
developed European heartland, and in that way be spared the bloody
primitive accumulation process which every capitalist country from
Britain to Russia to contemporary China has necessarily undergone. It is
this theory, and not some Eurocentrism
, that made (the small
minority of) honest Trotskyists keep their distances from regimes using
Third World Marxism
as a figleaf for capitalist primitive
accumulation. Most Trotskyists were howling with the wolves that
Vietnam Will Win!
Well, we have seen what Vietnam (and even more
Cambodia) won.
¶This is hardly the place to describe the devolution of Trotskyism
since Trotsky, but honesty and courage of convictions were not the
strong suit of the Mandels and Barneses and Pablos who shaped it after
1940. Elbaum sees the American SWP as the main face of Trotskyism for
1960’s and 1970’s leftists in the U.S. (and he’s right about that), and
claims that Trotskyism’s involvement with old 1930’s issues
and
European questions
was the main hindrance to a larger impact of
Trotskyism when the Third World, from China to Vietnam to Cuba was
supposedly sizzling with revolution and the building of socialism.
¶In point of fact, watching the SWP (like their French counterparts
Ligue Communiste) in the 1960’s and 1970’s, I could only laugh up my
sleeve watching the way they buried their critique of Stalinism (as in
the case of the Vietnamese NLF) in the fine print of their theoretical
journals while rushing after popularity, waving NLF flags, in exactly
the milieu influenced by Elbaum’s Third World Marxism.
To take
only one anecdotal example: In a 1969 debate in Berkeley between the ISC
and the SWP, we put SWP spokesperson Pete Camejo up against the wall
about the 1945 massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in front of a
large New Left audience, and Camejo conceded that, yes, Ho Chi Minh’s
Viet Minh had, in fact, well, oppressed the Vietnamese comrades of the
Fourth International. I’m sure most of the New Leftist cheerleaders
present considered our point to be ancient history
–24 years
earlier!–; today, as they watch Vietnam rush into market
socialism
with investment capital from Toyota and Mitsubishi, I’m
sure they don’t think about it at all. I remember Camejo’s brother Tony
telling a similar audience that we couldn’t be too critical of black and
Latino nationalism in the U.S. because blacks and Latinos had not yet
passed through their bourgeois revolution
, as if American blacks
and Latinos did not also live in the most advanced capitalist society in
the world. But he had put his finger on a certain reality, since many of
the black and Latino nationalists of the 1960’s and 1970’s were in fact
on their way to middle-class careers, once the shouting died down, as
uninterested in genuine proletarian revolution (and the true 20th
century examples of it) today as they were then. (They were and are in
this way no different from the great majority of the white New Left.)
Elbaum approvingly quotes Tariq Ali attacking those who (such as myself
and the ISC to which I belonged) saw no difference between Mao
tse-tung and Chiang kai-shek, or Castro and Batista
, whereas all of
world history since Ali uttered that remark has demonstrated nothing
except that the main difference made between old-style U.S.-backed
dictators and Third World Marxist
dictators with state power is
that the latter better prepare their countries for full-blown
capitalism, with Mao’s China exhibit A for the prosecution, and Vietnam
following close behind.
¶Further, Elbaum, never seems to notice that many of the 20th century Marxists still worth reading today (and he apparently has not read them), such as the early Shachtman, James, Draper, and Castoriadis, made their most important contributions in a break to the left of Trotskyism. In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.
¶Finally, while Elbaum rightly says that the turn ca. 1969 of
thousands of New Leftists to the American working class was largely
fruitless, he does neglect one important counter-example, namely the
success of the International Socialists (the renamed ISC after 1970) in
building the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and through it being
the sparkplugs for the election of Ron Carey as President of the
Teamsters in 1991. There is no question that this development, however
much it turned into a fiasco, was the most important left-wing
intervention in the American labor movement since the 1940’s. I no more
wish to go off on a long tangent about that terribly-botched episode
than I wish to expound on the history of Trotskyism; I left the IS
milieu in 1969. It is rather, again, to show Elbaum’s blind spot to the
real flaws of his own tradition. The IS’s success with TDU came at the
price of burying (at least for the purposes of Teamster politics) the
fact that they were socialists, not merely honest trade-unionists (it
turned out that Carey wasn’t even that). Anyone educated in a Trotskyist
group (and the IS, despite its rejection of the socialist character of
the so-called workers’ states
was Trotskyist on every other
question), in contrast to most Stalinist and Maoist groups, develops a
healthy aversion to the trade-union bureaucracy and to the Democratic
Party. Elbaum provides a long history of how Maoism evolved out of the
wreckage of the old CPUSA after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Some of
these groups looked back to the CP under Browder; others preferred
William Z. Foster. But almost all of them saw something positive in the
CP’s role during the Roosevelt era, both in the Democratic Party and in
the CIO. The problem of those working off of Trotskyism was, on the
contrary, the bureaucracy
that developed in exactly the era of CP
influence; the problem of those working off of Marxism-Leninism was
revisionism
(Stalinists and Maoists for some reason don’t have
too much to say about bureaucracy, except as in the Cultural
Revolution
, when they are supporting one bureaucratic faction
against another). And the concept of revisionism
rarely
inoculated these people against seeking influence in high places, either
with Democratic politicians or with trade-union bureaucrats, as the CP
had done so successfully in its heyday. It is certainly true that many
of Elbaum’s Marxist-Leninists did neither. But he seems to ignore the
fact that the ability of a group like the IS to intersect the Teamster
rank-and-file rebellion of the 1970’s and thereafter had something to do
with the fact that they, in contrast to every Marxist-Leninist around,
were not approaching the American working class with tall tales about
socialism in Cuba or Albania or Cambodia or North Korea. The
oh-so-radical defenders of Beijing’s line, whether for or against the
Gang of Four
, turned out to be defending a considerable part of
the global status quo.
¶Finally, if Elbaum would lift his head from the rubble of Third
World Marxism
, he might notice that, in Britain and France,
Trotskyist groups have a solid mass base (whatever one thinks of the
politics involved), whereas Marxist-Leninists are almost nowhere to be
seen; and even in the politically-backward U.S., groups such as the
ineffable ISO, not to mention the youthful anarchist scene, are
attracting more young people interested in revolution than any
Marxist-Leninists. Being for the overthrow of every government in the
world lets you see and do things that the baggage of Pol Pot or Shining
Path or Kim Jong-il conceals.
¶It is now time to turn to the merits of Elbaum’s book, which,
contrary to what the reader may conclude from the above, it indeed has.
First–and with this I have no quarrel–Elbaum attacks the good
sixties/bad sixties
vision of figures such as Todd Gitlin, for whom
the late-sixties turn to revolution was the bad sixties
, compared
to the early sixties Port Huron vision of participatory democracy.
Revolution was necessary then, and is necessary today, whatever the
current ideological climate might favor. Elbaum is also right in
critiquing Gitlin’s (and many others) almost exclusive focus on the
white New Left, seeing the movement essentially collapse with SDS in
1969-70, and not recognizing its extension, particularly among blacks
and Latinos (not to mention the thousands of white New Leftists who went
into the factories, and the wildcat strike wave which lasted until
1973).
¶But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World
Marxist-Stalinist-Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more
successful, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, in attracting and influencing
militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the
Trotskyist currents, not to mention the post-Trotskyists
to whom
I was closest, were partially blind to America’s blind spot
, the
centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was
in it in Berkeley in the late 1960’s, was all for black power, and (like
many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had
virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have
some, as did all the others. But there is no question that Elbaum’s
milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was
the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this
difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out,
many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960’s
and 1970’s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of
their families to attend college, and were=-whether they knew it or
not–on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising,
when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes
and movements of progressive
middle-class elites in the Third
World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient
militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the
professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring
one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that
the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from
working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their
families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such
people in the prairie radicalism
(i.e. populism) of the Midwest,
in contrast to the more European
left of the two coasts, one
important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are
important social-historical-cultural insights, which could be developed
much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby
was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively
identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around
Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it;
the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly
critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly
anti-nationalist itself.
¶It is undeniable that the 1960’s movements of peoples of color in the
U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the de-colonization of
most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the
de-centering
of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world
history, following the 1914-1945 de-centering
of Europe in the
new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by-and
themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of
white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and
moralistic to explain their attraction to Third World Marxism
,
Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that they
had the wrong ideas.
One important part of the answer is definitely
the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups,
who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes.
But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao’s
little red book or chanting We want a pork chop/Off the pig
was
not signing on for Stalin’s gulag, or the millions who died in Mao’s
great leap forward
in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia,
or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in
Sekou Toure’s Guinea (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael
spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more
than the working-class militant in the CPUSA in 1935 was signing on for
the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and
Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or
falsified by Third World Marxism
was available and known in the
1960’s and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely
one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear
certain truths. What Elbaum can’t face is that the entirety of Third
World Marxism
was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in
1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case
of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the Cultural
Revolution
in 1966-69. Workers, white and non-white, in the American
sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum’s minions, blinded by
ideology. As Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, speaking of
the English Revolution of the 1640’s:
¶…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.
¶When the upwardly mobile middle class elements of the 1960’s and 1970’s New Left and Third World Marxism, both white but also important numbers of blacks and Latinos, had established themselves in their professional and civil service jobs and academic tenure, suburban life and VCRs drove out Ho, Che, and Mao. Things went quite differently, above all for blacks without a ticket to the middle class, as one can see in the difference between the ultimate fates of even the Weather Underground after years on the run, and black political prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt.
¶But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the
wars of sects and ideologies that no one–himself included–misses, it is
not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one
of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: Finally, we have one book
that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960’s
and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century.
The
giveaway is Elbaum’s treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential
campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as
momentous as the 1960’s, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist
groups (Marxist-Leninists for Mondale
as someone once called
them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to
the 1960’s, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact
except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New
Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and
butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CPUSA’s strategy within
the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy
of the CP’s role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930’s is
Elbaum’s legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true
origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us
nothing about the CPUSA coming off its 1930’s heroic
phase,
herding the American working class off to World War II through the
enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of U.S.
imperialism’s moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and
applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it
is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a
contribution to some new progressive coalition
wedding the
American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an
all-out drive to Beat Bush
around a Dean campaign (or something
like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist
forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George
Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz and Paul Krugman as the
still-dominant neo-liberal paradigm of the past 25 years begins to
seriously fray. While Elbaum’s book makes occasional passing reference
to economic hard times times the 1970’s, he doesn’t see the extent to
which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of
reform
, which can only be some kind of Tax The Rich
,
share-the-declining-wealth kind of left populism, with suitably
diverse
forces that will probably be the final fruit of the
progressive
middle classes, white and people of color, that
evolved out of Elbaum’s Third World Marxism.
¶Despite what Elbaum thinks and what he and his milieu thought 30
years ago, the fate of the world is in the hands of the world working
class. In contrast to 30 years ago, however, this working class is no
longer limited to North America, Europe and Japan, but is now spread
through many parts of the anti-imperialist
Third World, led by
China. The East will be red again, not as the bureaucratic-peasant
hallucination of the Third World Marxists
of the 1960’s and
1970’s, but as a genuine working-class revolt against precisely the
forces that used Third World Marxism
, in the Third World as in
the U.S. and Europe, to muddle every social question and advance their
social stratum. The remnants of these forces are positioned today in and
around the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy, as well as
in the anti-globalization movement, readying themselves to again revamp
the capitalist system with torrents of progressive
rhetoric, as
they did in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
¶The only thing that is progressive
in today’s world is
working-class revolution.