When the leaders of Progressive Labor split from the American Communist Party at the beginning of the ’60s, they were considered a Maoist faction. In their early years, however, they placed little public emphasis on their sympathies with Peking. But as the divisions between the Chinese and Soviet bureaucracies deepened, and as the factional struggle inside China increased, PL began to stress its ideological ties with Maoism.
As we pointed out in the first chapter of this history, the most decisive factor in their subsequent evolution was their failure to correctly analyze their own roots and the causes behind the degeneration of the entire international Communist movement after the mid-1920s. Because they never developed an understanding of what Stalinism is, never honestly assessed the roots of “revisionism” in the Soviet Union, they simply switched their allegiance from one current in the Stalinist movement to another.
PL’s various analyses of “revisionism” are quite contradictory. For example, one article (Marxist-Leninist Quarterly, Vol. II, No. 1) states that “revisionism” has been the chronic weakness of the American CP since its inception. In another article dealing with “revisionism” in the Soviet Union, John Ericson indicates that the decisive growth of ”revisionism” probably occurred sometime between the late ’30s and 1950. (A rather large timespan!) Still other analyses, adhering closely to the orthodox Peking line, claim the revisionist degeneration of the Moscow leadership occurred only after the death of Stalin in 1953.
Before going into these various theories in more detail, it is worth dealing with some questions of terminology. In Marxist vocabulary certain words have always had very precise, scientific definitions – like imperialism, fascism, bureaucratism, and revisionism. This is not for pedantic reasons, but to enable people to communicate intelligently with each other.
In both the Moscow and Peking branches of the school of Stalinism, this Marxist practice is disregarded, and words which were previously endowed with exact meaning have been transformed into verbal abstractions capable, as the occasion demands, of being invested with the most diverse meanings.
Revisionism, for example, has historically been associated with the theories of Eduard Bernstein, author of Evolutionary Socialism, who attempted to provide theoretical justification for the adaption to capitalist parliamentarism, especially of the trade union bureaucrats who became a power in the Second International during the prolonged period of imperialist expansion and “prosperity” in the latter part of the 19th century up to the outbreak of World War I.
According to the Maoist dialectic, however, in which everything including theory, divides in two – never three or four, but always exactly in two –the tendencies in the world socialist movement are neatly separated into two compartments: revisionism and Marxism-Leninism. Revisionism is elevated to the status of an abstract term which includes everything the particular speaker or writer does not consider Marxism-Leninism. Reformism, sectarianism, dogmatism, opportunism, ultraleftism, each or all can be included or may be referred to in the general term. Thus, instead of a precise term defining a specific tendency, it has been transformed into an epithet, generally directed against the leaders of the Soviet Union or pro-Moscow CPs, applicable to almost any act or any period of their history, and flexible enough to be applied to almost anyone else as well, if the need arises.
Thus, the previously cited Marxist-Leninist Quarterly article indicates that “revisionism and its political manifestation, class collaboration, has been the chronic weakness” of the American CP since it was founded. Revisionism is used in the abstract sense, and in this instance defined as class collaborationism.
But they are wrong. Internationally, the question of class collaborationism was the dividing line between the newly formed Communist parties in the early 1920s and the reformist socialist parties. In fact, if anything, in the early years of the new Communist International, the main weakness, far from being class-collaborationism, was ultraleftism. It was against this weakness that Lenin wrote his polemic, Ultraleftism, an Infantile Disorder. Class collaboration was indeed one of the major betrayals of the CP in later years, but not at the beginning.
The one period of CP history that PL singles out for real praise as relatively free of “revisionism,” is the early 1930s. “During the 1929-33 years of deepest crisis,” the program of the American CP, “came closer to being a correct Marxist-Leninist program for the U. S. than anything that had been developed during the past 70 years,” states Fred Carlisle in an article on William Z. Foster in the same issue of MLQ mentioned earlier.
This is the period that has gone down in history as the Stalinist “Third Period,” when the Kremlin bureaucracy made a sharp ultraleft turn, liquidated the Kulaks, instituted forced collectivization in the rural Soviet Union, and established the first five-year plan for rapid industrialization. Internationally, the Third Period was marked by the fatal refusal of the CP in Germany to join in united actions with the social democracy to combat fascism. Labeling social democracy the “twin” of fascism, and proclaiming, “After Hitler, our turn,” Third Period Stalinism led the German working class into the jaws of fascism without a struggle.
In the United States, one of the most notable features of Third Period Stalinism was the policy of pulling the Communist Party militants out of the existing trade unions and putting them in “real,” “revolutionary.” “red” trade unions – the Trade Union Unity League. The old AFL union bureaucrats were, of course, delighted to get rid of their main opposition, and the CP militants remained futilely isolated from the bulk of the organized workers in the U.S.
Thus PL holds up for emulation that supposedly “nonrevisionist” period of CP history that led to the greatest defeat ever suffered by the world working class, the rise of German fascism. Little more need be said about the merits of that particular analysis of “revisionism.”
In another article attempting to deal with the roots of “revisionism” in the Communist International (“Origins of Revisionism in the USSR, PL, Oct-Nov. 1966), John Ericson takes up one of the key points – the growth of social privilege and differentiation in Soviet society, particularly for party members. (In this article “revisionism” is defined as “petty bourgeois influence.”)
Ericson points to several phenomena. One was the growth of the number of professionals and technicians in the Soviet party. Another was ending the party practice whereby party members who were professionals had accepted the same wage as blue-collar workers.
But, he says, it is impossible to determine when this “inexplicable” decision was made. “The Chinese seem to think that the change occurred in the 1945-50 period . . . but it may have been adopted earlier, in the late thirties.”
In reality the changes took place long before the late ’30s, and they were far from being inexplicable. Trotsky and the rest of the left opposition began warning against the implementation of incorrect economic policies and the growth of a privileged bureaucratic caste as early as 1923. By the mid-’30s, when Trotsky (by then exiled from the Soviet Union for his revolutionary opposition to Stalin’s policies) wrote The Revolution Betrayed, he was able to describe in some detail the economic privileges enjoyed by the ruling bureaucracy, in terms of not only wages, but also food, housing, clothing, transportation, and virtually every other sphere.
Ericson also notes in passing such other important phenomena as the growth of a privileged officer caste, the use of nationalistic propaganda, etc., in the years prior to World War II. But in the end he fails to analyze why any of these things happened, except to say that they were probably necessary in order to defend the country. Why was it “necessary,” 20 years after a socialist revolution, to appeal to the most reactionary chauvinistic sentiments of the workers to mobilize them to defend their revolution? Why was the old officer corps of the Red Army totally liquidated in the 1930s along with virtually every other living member of the leadership of the original Bolshevik party? Such questions are not even raised, much less answered.
Then, without attempting to draw some of the obvious conclusions from even the facts that are mentioned, Ericson simply says, “In conclusion, since 1955 the petty-bourgeois wing has gained temporary control of the CPSU.”
While the article itself tends to belie the conclusion, the conclusion at least has the virtue of dovetailing with the official Chinese CP position. It lacks precision but it will get by.
Peking’s analysis (“Open Letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU”, On the Question of Stalin, Sept. 13, 1963) makes it clear that “in repeating their violent attacks on Stalin, the leaders of the CPSU aimed at erasing the indelible influence of this great proletarian revolutionary among the people of the Soviet Union and throughout the world, and at paving the way for negating Marxism-Leninism, which Stalin had defended and developed, and for the all-out application of a revisionist line. Their revisionist line began exactly with the 20th Congress and became fully systematized at the 22nd Congress.” (Emphasis added.)
This theory, of course, makes things much easier, eliminating the necessity of examining anything that happened before Stalin’s death – including the policies followed by the Chinese CP under Mao’s and Stalin’s tutelege – and ignoring the fact that the policies implemented by the Khrushchev leadership were fundamentally the same as those followed under Stalin–defense of the interests of the ruling bureaucracy at home and abroad.
The contradictory and confusing nature of these various theories on “revisionism” stems from the fact that the Maoists cannot offer a revolutionary alternative to Soviet policies. because the policies of Peking are themselves based on the interests of a ruling bureaucracy, not the interests of the world revolution.