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How the Mensheviks Take Revisionism As the Key Link

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How the Mensheviks Take Revisionism As the Key Link How the Mensheviks Take Revisionism as the Key Link RCP Reply to Mensheviks on China, Adopted By the 2nd Congress of the RCP, 1978 A Method to the Madness The Menshevik opposition has produced a document which pur• ports to answer the CC report on China. The ramblings and whin- ings of the authors are palmed off as new and persuasive evidence of the incorrect line of our Party. The only problem is that most of their arguments of substance—if one can be so generous—have already been answered; in fact, the bulk of what they raise was rebuffed and repudiated at the CC meeting and the substance of it was refuted in the CC Report. But maybe—just maybe, they hope—by repeating the same arguments, like a sorcerer repeating an incantation, they can per• form magic and convince someone that there's an ounce of Marx• ism in their argument. Maybe their confused and uncertain followers, worried by the prospect of joining up with the CP(ML) and a little sickened by the thought of embracing Teng Hsiao-ping will be temporarily distracted by these pages of muck. Maybe they can make the question seem so confusing that they can force these people to conclude that you have to be a genius to understand it. Answering their preposterous claims puts the Party in a curious position: what's called for is almost a Red Papers with the CC Report, their attempted response, and the CC Report again, since nothing much new has been said by them. But there is development—more accurately, degeneration—as well as repeti• tion here. Freed from the constraints of the Party's line, our Men• sheviks have beat a hasty retreat from Marxism and the basic revolutionary positions of our Party. 265 1 266 Key Link Key Link 267 In many ways their paper is similar to the BWC's first response nored, the line of the three weeds and the line of the Four in oppos• to National Bulletin 13. On the one hand, it's very flabby. Their ing them is put to no analysis. case against the Four is very weak and their arguments not at all The point of all this is not to say that facts speak for compelling, especially if one adopts even a critical attitude toward themselves, because they don't. Truth and facts are not the same what's appearing now in the Peking Review rather than swallow• thing. Facts represent perceptual knowledge. Truth is higher than ing it wholesale without questioning as our Mensheviks do. Fur• facts—it involves rationally grasping the interrelations between ther, it's not clear what their evaluation of Teng is and it's even facts, this is what it means to seek truth from facts. It is possible less clear who the revisionists in China are, etc. On the other hand, to agree on certain facts and reach quite different conclusions. Cer• the paper is definitely transitional and it's only a matter of time tainly there were disruptions and difficulties in the Chinese before they adopt even more outrageous positions as they free economy over the past three years—these facts are undeniable, but themselves totally of any influence of the Party and plunge fully is this to be blamed on revisionists and a revisionist line or the gen• into the embrace of revisionism here and in China. uine revolutionaries? Does the fact that socialist new things are Let's look more closely at their method. To begin with, the struggling to survive indicate that they are basically flawed or Mensheviks have never ceased yammering about facts, facts, that they are coming under attack? facts. "Empty speculation," "opinions," "we want hard and fast In other words truth has a class character and there are certain facts," they chirp. One would have expected a richly detailed and universal truths of Marxism-Leninism. There is no condition, time, lavishly documented case from them, but one searches in vain for or place that justifies replacing dialectics with eclectics as our such analysis. What we get instead is the pablum and distortions Mensheviks and their revisionist mentors in China do. There is no of the current rulers. For instance, the Four are said to have been condition, time or place that makes pragmatism ("black cat, white unconcerned about production and opposed to modernization. The cat") somehow acceptable to Marxist-Leninists. And there is no proof? Peking Review articles that say so. Never mind the fact condition, time, or place that warrants replacing the theory of con• that in literally thousands of pages, experience and struggle tinuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat with around these questions were summed up in the Peking Review and the "theory of the productive forces" and the dying out of class elsewhere under the Four's leadership or that the Shanghai text• struggle. book deals systematically and fully with basic problems of The method of the CC Report is not to start from a conglomera• socialist construction. No attempt is made to analyze the line of tion of scattered facts, but to compare and contrast the different the Four, but only to regurgitate horror stories from the Peking lines that have been contending in China over the past period and Review. on that basis to examine and evaluate facts. The Chinese do not, The Mensheviks have extreme difficulty dealing with certain for example, publish data on absolute output in the economy for obvious facts. Where articles in the Peking Review have put for• every sector. Does this mean that it is not possible to understand ward the view of experts and professionals in command, and done questions involving the direction of the economy? No, not at all, this consistently over the past year, the Mensheviks can only because very clear and definite lines on the development of the reserve comment and promise us future discussion on these economy and the relationship of that to other questions emerged developments. Is it or is it not a fact that the three poisonous at the very start of the Cultural Revolution and have been fought weeds are being upheld in the Peking Review? What do the Men• out ever since. sheviks have to say about them? Very little, except for some token The method of the Mensheviks is not to proceed from the high criticism to cover up their support for the content of the three plane of two-line struggle. The method to their madness is to start weeds. What do the Mensheviks have to say about the fact that with the assumption that the Four were rotten, self-seeking Hua was, at the very least, associated with the "Outline Report on disrupters, to provide for proof of this the absurd slanders and lies Science and Technology," something that the Peking Review has of the Peking Review and other material put out by the current pointed out on numerous occasions? The pro-Hua book The Case of rulers, and then to reach the surprising conclusion that the Four the Gang of Four links Hua with Teng and Li Hsien-nien in the for• were rotten, self-seeking disrupters. Their method is the real mulation of the three weeds. Again, the significance of this is ig- apriorist one and not because they, too, had an opinion on the 268 Key Link Key Link 269 events in China shortly after the Four were arrested. Hua, accord• rebellion, had subsided and new tasks and opportunities presented ing to their view, represents the truth. This becomes the principle themselves—notably the development of the economy. The "Gang with which they examine and evaluate the situation in China. Why of Four" got stuck in an earlier period, that of the Cultural Revolu• does he represent the truth? Here their pragmatism shines bril• tion, and that was their doom. Their stubbornness and self- liantly. Hua is in office; he won, therefore whatever he says must righteousness, their wanting to wage the class struggle from the be true. The Four lost and therefore whatever they said must be mountaintops, strengthened the right, hastened their fall, and false. But how else is a Marxist to judge the "facts" that appear in necessitated new alliances between the genuine revolutionaries, as the Peking Review except by analyzing what line they are in the represented by Hua, and the right (who the right is at this point re• service of and what line is being attacked with these "facts"? mains unclear). (See pp. 201-214.) In a sense our "fact"-obsessed authors hang themselves. They What about the actual situation? Mao seems to have maintain• nonchalantly inform us that the Propaganda Ministry is controlled ed his lucidity during this period so one would expect a fairly credi• by the right. (By the way, with this we do agree—the Propaganda ble analysis from him. In 1969, following years of tumultuous Ministry is indeed controlled by the right, and this is true regard• struggle in factories, universities and major convulsions in the less of which specific faction in the current regime has control—it's Party, in this same period that the Russians are attacking on the still the right.) This would cast doubt, it would appear, on the facts northern borders and the U.S. is heavily engaged, still, in Vietnam, they glean from the Peking Review and other current Chinese Lin Piao comes forward and says enough is enough, it's time to set• sources to back up their case. But our authors, we're sure, would tle down and push the economy forward.
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