Particularize Maoism everywhere!

Although the 25 page polemic offered in the previous post has generated a lot of positive feedback in emails and the places where it has been posted, like any work of this type it has also produced the occasional critique and counter-argument––some of which were supportive and others of which were predictably dismissive. Obviously any work that attempts at an ideological struggle between two theoretical terrains will generate this kind of discussion; even had I been longer-winded, refusing to content myself with only summarizing the philosophical situation, and produced an entire book there would still be critiques––perhaps even the same ones! But this indicates that the piece possesses some sort of vitality; it would be worse if it had been met with utter silence.Thus, because I think it is important to participate in the debate one's work produces, I've decided to use this post as an addendum of sorts and clarify areas of my critique of trotskyism by responding to certain key critiques and attempted counter-arguments. In this way I can hopefully illuminate those points of the document that might have been confusing as well as demonstrate that at least some of these attempted counter-arguments were already dealt with, or were besides the point, in the original polemic.I've heard this critique from more than one otherwise sympathetic reader who believed that I should have addressed this supposed fact––that Trotsky and trotskyism was/is a significant "wrecking" force in revolutionary movements––and treated it as a key part of my critique. Well, I did briefly address this claim at the beginning of the polemic in order to indicate that I did not think it was a claim that helped matters and that, rather, it was more of a rhetorical position that produced mud-slinging exchanges instead of engaging in a robust theoretical struggle. Abusive ad hominem arguments do nothing except encourage one's opponents to make similar arguments and this is why so many ortho-trotskyists, who feel the need to prove that they are the true guardians of marxism, are immediately on the defensive and prepared to argue, against the charge of "wrecking", that everyone else is a "Stalinist" who has "betrayed the authentic revolution." Hence, these exchanges lead nowhere and provide those of us who do have critiques of Trotskyism without any useful theoretical material. Rather than fall back into that rhetorical swamp, I wanted to avoid this issue altogether and focus primarily on the theoretical differences which I find more interesting and more significant.Besides, as I also (but briefly) pointed out in the polemic, it's not as if non-Trotskyist groups haven't been guilty of the same "wrecker" behaviour. I gave the example of the RCP-USA's behaviour in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement; the same group is now guilty, according to some, of wreaking havoc on the international communist movement with their Avakianist "New Synthesis". To this we can add the behaviour of a group like the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) [CPC(M-L)] under Hardial Bains that, during the 1960s and 1970s, would actually encourage its cadre to physically assault other communists and anti-capitalists to such a degree that some people accused them of being agents.Even the argument that Trotskyism "wrecked" the international communist movement during its hey-day because it split the working-classes, spread confusion, and possibly played into the hands of the imperialists is no longer an argument that is a live option: it speaks to a period that has already passed and I am more concerned with addressing the current historical conjuncture that needs to move beyond this historical wreckage and focus on the theoretical issues that resonate with the here and now.Although this argument is more rhetorical than substantial, and does not at all respond to any of the theoretical points I made about theorizing class in semi-feudal contexts, it does seem to possess an emotional appeal. Those who make it are clearly convinced that Trotsky's revolutionary leadership of peasants would be rationally connected to a sophisticated understanding of the peasants as a class in Russia even though, logically speaking, the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. Indeed, there were peasant divisions in the White Army led by reactionary commanders (and Trotsky was keen to remind us of this fact in order to demonstrate the peasantry's inability to be a properly revolutionary class despite the fact that there were entire divisions of workers in the White Army and an entire division of workers in the Kronstadt Rebellion that Trotsky was utterly convinced needed to be suppressed) but we would be hard-pressed to argue that these White Army commanders, simply by ordering peasants into battle, understood the Russian peasants as a class.Moreover, the fact remains that Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution itself demonstrates a confusion regarding the peasantry and it was this, rather than biographical details, was what I wanted to interrogate. I think I did an adequate job demonstrating this confusion––how it produced significant contradictions and a failure to explain the necessary phenomena––but if the people making this rhetorical argument are not convinced they are welcome to respond to my arguments rather than rely on emotionally charged anecdotal statements.This critique comes from another sympathetic source but, unless my writing was far less clear that I assumed it was, is generally off-base because I made no such claim. What Iclaim was that presupposing the world was a single mode of production was a foundational theoretical problem with Trotskyism that, since it leads to the confused assumption that only a global revolution can properly be alled "socialist", was worth examining in significant detail. Although I did argue, as people trained in philosophy are wont to argue, that Trotskyism couldbe correct (just as the sasquatch couldexist), I never made this specific argument about the theory of combined and uneven production. This is because the world isa single mode of production and imperialism's existence is contingent, as I implied, on the fact that it is not. Hence, in this context, I would have seen no reason to claim that Trotskyism's theory of revolution would be correct if the presuppositions behind "combined and uneven development" were correct because, obviously, I think that the latter is just patently wrong.Simply making such a rhetorical statement does not make it correct. In fact, it seems rather "sophomoric" to allow such a statement to be your argument against a 25 page polemic that has provided a rather detailed account of the significant differences between Maoism and Trotskyism. It is especially absurd since the second section of the polemic was precisely about negating the charge of "Stalinism" and so, unless you were to do the hard work of demonstrating how I failed to negate the charge, to reiterate the accusation is in bad faith. For I argued that "Stalinism", which is primarily a theory concocted by Trotskyists, is also a marxist dead-end and spent some time trying to argue why this was the case. So was my argument against Stalinism also sophomoric, was I as thoughtless and dismissive as you when I spent pages addressing the very terminology you have employed as an argument against my position? Clearly, no matter how sophisticated a piece of writing is, one always has to deal with uncritical dismissals that, by assuming their ideological line is sophisticated enough to lean on and without having to critically represent, are not interested in thinking through an argument that offends their unquestioned sensibilities.Here is an argument that was made by an ortho-Trotskyist who, apparently caught in the first section of the polemic's examination of "permanent revolution", was angry that I was speaking of the peasantry as a possibly revolutionary class and felt the need to quote a line from the programme of the First International that Marx reiterated inin order to critique, well, the Gotha Programme. This argument is significant not only because it showed no critical intention to my polemic as a whole but because it also proved two of my points: a) Trotsky and Trotskyism, though attempting to escape orthodoxy, still default on a dogmatic understanding of historical materialism; b) Trotsky and Trotskyists really do presume that the entire world is a single mode of production.First of all, the reliance on this statement of Marx's demonstrates a refusal to recognize the particular historical context in which this line (that you will be hard-pressed to find in, the, or anywhere else) is wrenched out of its social-historical framework and presented as a platonically universal axiom. The First International was pre-eminently concerned with building revolutionary parties in Europe and couldwith building revolutionary politics in Europe because its prime ideologues (Marx and Engels) knew very little about the social dynamics of the rest of the world––one only needs to look at Marx's early writings on India to realize how he had (and could not, at that time) little understanding of societies that were the victims of imperialism. Indeed, it is not until Marx completed the first volume ofthat he began to examine (and not necessarily very well, again because of his limitations) world history and attempt to figure out what it would mean to make revolution in places that were the victims of world capitalism but were not capitalist modes of production. (Kevin B. Anderson tries to discuss this in his examination of Marx's unpublished notebooks and recently I participated in a conference where Michael Kraetke, a significant editor of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, discussed Marx's unpublished notebooks on world history.)Thus, only the working-class can emancipate the working-class under capitalism as a mode of production, but how do we make sense of class in the framework of global imperialism where nations can be under capitalist domination, and thus be capitalist social formations, but are not, be capitalist modes of production? Obviously, and this is the second point, the answer is to simply assume, as Trotsky did, that the world is a single mode of production and therefore the working-class that primarily exists in capitalist modes of production (the imperialist centres) will do the emancipating. This position ignores the fact that: i) revolutions generally aren't happening or taking a leading role at the centres of capitalism; ii) the working-class at the centres of capitalism, as properly "working-class" as it might be, is not necessarily at the point of global production, is not necessarily invested in making revolution, and might even be what Lenin called, following Engels, a labour aristocracy. This was the problem I was addressing when I discussed Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution that, on the one hand, wanted to break from marxist orthodoxy by arguing, along with Lenin, that revolution tends to erupt at the global peripheries and we shouldn't wait for "bourgeois revolutions" but that, on the other hand, is sucked back into the same orthodoxy by attempting to side-step the problem and theorizing that there doesn't have to be a bourgeois revolution in these places because they are part of the same mode of production as Europe where the bourgeois revolution already happened––where there resided the proper working-class that could emancipate itself and thus everyone else who was encouraged to wait.Moreover, as I concluded in the section of permanent revolution, the whole Trotskyist complaint about New Democracy and peasantry is actually a red herring when it comes to engaging with Maoism. In the following sections of the polemic I emphasized that properly theorizing the revolutionary role of the peasantry is only important in social contexts where the peasantry are a predominant class and thus Maoism is not concerned with making this its main focus. I even referenced the party programme of the organization I support, the PCR-RCP , as an example of a Maoist theorization of a social context that is a fully developed capitalist mode of production––and this programme indeed holds that, in a capitalist mode of production, the emancipation of the working-class can only be brought about by the working-class itself. The question it asks, though, is just what is the working-class––what is the "hard core of the proletariat"––in this social context: unionized workers, migrant workers, the reserve army of labour, racialized workers, feminized workers? For when we speak of the revolutionary class, those with an advanced consciousness that can be accumulated to form the germ of a vanguard party, we cannot content ourselves simply with platitudes whatever the truth content of these platitudes. It might give us some marxist satisfaction to tell others that only the working-class can emancipate the whole of society, but if we do not attempt to discover the location of the "hard core of the proletariat" and instead simply assume that unionized factory workers who might be more concerned with the benefits accrued from imperialism than class revolution are the revolutionary subject, we are not doing the hard work of revolutionary organizing but instead are substituting social investigation and organizing with clever sounding epithets.The point here is that I don't care about "the Quotable Marx"; I care about how the scientific method we call marxism can be creatively applied for a revolutionary result in a given particular terrain. In the end, I was arguing that the choice between Trotskyism and Maoism came down to a choice between a theory of revolution that, because of what I felt was its purist and non historical materialist view of marxist categories, was unable to produce a revolutionary movement anywhere (Trotskyism), or a theory of revolution that had demonstrated its ability to creatively rearticulate universal concepts in particular contexts and thus produce revolutionary movements––but revolutionary movements that, yes, have often been marked by failure (Maoism). Those who quote Marx out of social and historical context and thus argue for the preservation of a pure marxism––and who believe this preservation is the hallmark of proper communism––will clearly choose the former option and so, rather than waste time trying to counter my polemic by ignoring Marx's method and focusing instead on a theoretical purity that will prove me wrong, you should just accept you've made your choice and that this, due to the unassailable perfection of your quotes, is what counts… Because that, really, is what you're arguing and I've already provided you with that way out of the dilemma.