Never forget class struggle!
The video under discussion, “On the Theory of the Productive Forces,” opens in stirring proclamation of this fundamental principle of Maoism. And our introductory anecdote describes incidents over 30 years ago in which Chinese communists and members of the new communist movement were unfortunately doing just that, forgetting class struggle by denying the parasitic class position of the first world populations.
The MSH document “The sun rises in the East and sets in the West” is correct in still designating as “Maoist” those genuine Chinese Maoists who made this mistake, because global class analysis had not then fully matured to today’s standard. Those of the infant new communist movement can be for the same reason correctly excused for buying into the “Americans are a great people” nonsense. Besides, there being no material basis in the first world for such a movement to arise in the first place, the NCM was fomented solely on the basis of external revolutionary forces: the Black Nation rebellion, the Chinese Revolution and Cultural Revolution, and the Vietnamese heroically sending body bags back to “the states” by the thousands. It’s little wonder that these new communists could bow to the fallacy of the argument from Chinese communist authority, especially when the received argument confirmed their own first world white nationalist education and inclination.
Still, the video is adamant in stating flatly that this was a “serious error.” How serious? Well, the video pretty boldly claims “the cost may well have been socialism in the People’s Republic.” We’ll get back to the TOPF and the restoration of capitalism in China, but that’s just for starters in the seriousness of this error. It’ll turn out, of course, that this error was so serious that the international proletariat demands a whole new stage of Marxism be delineated mainly just to provide a full accounting of this particular error and to make absolutely sure that that it never, ever happens again. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves.
How serious was this error in terms of evaluating comrades of thirty and more years ago? Such evaluation must certainly consider the severity of the consequences of the error, and, as we’ve said, the consequences were plenty severe. But a materialist approach also says look around and see how many contemporaries were doing better on this question. Do that and you won’t find nearly many enough to warrant denying the title of “Maoist” to any of those Chinese who were at the time otherwise genuine Maoists.
That’s not the end of it, though. As a full accounting the international proletariat demands to know if it is actually something more than hopeless idealism to ask why there weren’t at the time more communists worldwide, including more of the Chinese Maoists, who had a correct understanding of the first world as enemy to the world’s oppressed and exploited majority. In fact, the international proletariat is highly suspicious that the salient global material conditions for that correct understanding were present in compelling form throughout the past century. A first world fully consolidated as the first world on the basis of plundering the Third World. A paltry, then vanishing, then nonexistent first world proletariat. First world populations which had hardly so much as blinked while their “own” imperialists hunted down and subjujated the oppressed nations of the Third World one after another after another. In the 1970’s these were not new or recent material conditions, nor were they in the least obscure. The facts of first world parasitism and political reaction were undisguised and in your face global phenomena. Hell, a full seventy years earlier, at the turn of the 20th century, amerikans, the first world population flagship of parasitism, were still living on stolen land and had only recently got done killing each other by the hundreds of thousands just so that the outright enslavement of the oppressed Black Nation could end.
So the international proletariat is highly suspicious that from a purely materialist standpoint there were a host of salient and compelling global material conditions which would otherwise have much earlier given rise to a correct understanding among many communists that the first world is enemy to the world’s truly oppressed and exploited.
The sticking point, the international proletariat suspicions, was ideology. Bourgeois ideology propagated amongst the international proletariat and their leadership which countervailed these long standing material conditions and delayed with deadly effectiveness the development of a correct understanding of the parasite first world. Bourgeois ideology most specifically in the form of the theory of the productive forces, the overwhelming suspicion being that this enemy lie has for many years been much more ubiquitous and entrenched worldwide than previously acknowledged.
The full accounting of past communist errors on this question demanded by the international proletariat requires that Maoists-Third Worldists relentlessly track these suspicions to a satisfactory conclusion. Then and only then do we stand the best chance of smashing the theory of the productive forces and upholding class struggle.
To this point we’ve said little directly about the pernicious lie of the theory of the productive forces itself. That’ll be next.
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