Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: > Foreign influences are not necesserily detrimental to self-determination and > national progress. There is enough evidence (cf. Gerschenkron's work on > relative backwardness) that the Soviet (and by implication) Chinese model of > industrialization was heavily influences by "capitalits" (esp. German) model of > industrialization. So how come that those early imperialists imports were > good, but later were not. The early imperialists imports were not better. The difference was they arrived in the service of socialism. The later imperialist import came to replace socialism. It is a difference of control. > > > I happened to live in Shanghai, China duiring the Cultural Revolution and I can > assure that the sight of public humiliation of scores of people for "going the > imperialist way" was not very liberating - even if the accusations were true, > there is such a thing as ordinary human error, and public humiliation is not > the way of winning converts for the revolution. > I do not mean to blame anyone, all I am saying i sthat I saw plenty of abuse > which, even if they were no match with the US funded death squads, were still > reprehensible. Should not we judge those who claim buildingsocialism by higher > standards than bourgeois flacks? > As Napoleon observed: "There is a general rule that there can be no revolution without terror." As sad a commentary as that fatalistic observation is on the nature of human affairs, its validity would be repeatedly borne out by history. Every revolution is by its nature a revolt which success and the passage of time legitimize, but in which terror is one of its inevitable phases. A revolution is like a volcanic eruption. It can neither be started prematurely nor stopped before it has run its full course. Like a volcano, when it erupts, its burning lava runs in all directions, destroying indiscriminately the decayed as well as the healthy. Mao Zedong insightfully pointed out that a revolution is not a dinner party. It is not a parlor game of the liberal rich. A revolution is a momentous event of gigantic dimensions. Millions of people die for it and generations are affected by it. Its occurrence is caused by irresistible social forces against unyielding established resistance. It creates general disruption and massive destruction. Its molten lava, however, produces rich minerals for future generations when it finally cools. There is a fundamental difference between revolutionary violence and regressive reactionary massacre. In the name of saving the revolution, a reign of terror will strike at both the radical left and the reactionary right in order to hold the center against counterrevolutionary slippage. Paradoxically, while a reign of terror is the ultimate weapon against the counterrevolution, popular reaction against terror inevitably heralds the ultimate triumph of the counterrevolution. For terror, like all emotions of intensity, cannot be maintained permanently. It is the most agonizing affliction of the metabolism of revolutions. All political systems dislike dissidents. The degree to which a government tolerates dissidents is a function of its perceived security. A revolutionary government, insecure by nature, generally takes no political prisoners. Political terror is generally staged by the secret police which, like roaches, normally infesting only the subterraneous world, would flourish into an open epidemic, fed by the apprehension of a court haunted by the mentality of a garrison state. At first, the victims of political terror are bona fide seditious reactionaries and other deserving criminals whose downfall delights the public, particularly the representatives of the emerging social forces. Later, the complexity of revolutionary politics gives rise to ideological polemics and esoteric sophistry that can be twisted at will to implicate anyone not popular with the secret police. Innocent men are then persecuted at the mirth of their political enemies and the frightened acquiescence of their friends. Finally, indiscriminate arrests becomes commonplace. As has been wisely said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for enough good men to keep silent. Typically, a reign of terror begins as a temporary political necessity. In time it inevitably degenerates into a dark age of arbitrary mass arrests amid an atmosphere of witch-hunt. As the social destructiveness of the terror intensifies, the political purpose of the terror would become diffused and unfocused, while unbridled personal ambition and runaway greed of the secret policemen become its main driving forces. The reign of terror in all countries follows the same predictable pattern. China came close to this point during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Yet the ideological target of the CR, namely capitalistic revisionism, had not been a mere fantasy, as events of the past two decades has shown. Still, China and the Chinese political system survived the excesses of the CR and learned lessons from it. The US went through several reigns of terror in its history, the last one being the McCarthy era, and the latest one is about to begin via an anti-Chinese hysteria. China today, is far from perfect, but it is progressing along the right path, more than the neo-liberals seem to be willing to give it credit for. > > A larger point is that Marx can hardly be interpreted as an enemy of > capitalism. In fact, he saw many benfits being brought about by capitalist > development - yes, liberation from feudal oppression and freedom including - > his main criticism was, at least as i understant it, that those benefits were > limited to bourgeoisie but denied to workers. Marxist revolution is not about > destroying capitalism, but about making its benefits available to the working > class. > This must be viewed on two separate levels. One is distributional. It is then a matter of equity. The use of capitalistic production to support a socialistic distribution regime. The effect is the welfare state - a dead end that will destroy both capitalism and socialism. The other is the level of structure; there the capitalistic system itself is recognized as inherently exploitative rather than cooperative. The solution to this structural defect of capitalism cannot come through just making everyone a capitalist. That is the American strategy, and we see the results very clearly - the need to search for new victims of oppression. I am afraid the aim of Marxist revolution is the destruction of capitalism. Any compromise on this point is revisionism - the focus of struggle in the Cultural Revolution. Alas, revisionism won (temporarily, I hope) in China. But the revolution is continuing on a very complex and protracted path. We have not reached the end game. Marx's contribution is his understanding of dialectic materialism, the replacement of an obsolete social system with a new healthy one, advancing human civilization in the process. Henry C.K. Liu >
