You Don’t Know What You Think You “Know” About... The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future Raymond Lotta Insight Press, Inc. Chicago, IL © 2014 by Raymond Lotta. All rights reserved. Published in 2014 by Insight Press FIRST EDITION An earlier version of this work appeared as a special issue of Revolution newspaper (revcom.us) and is reprinted with permission from RCP Publications. Includes bibliographical references. ePub ISBN 978-0-9832661-3-6 1. Political Science / History & Theory, 2. History / Modern / 20th Century Insight Press, Inc. 4044 N. Lincoln Ave., #264 Chicago, IL 60618 www.insight-press.com No Wonder They Slander Communism Bob Avakian Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA If you step back and think about it, no wonder they slander communism so much. If you presided over a system that has such glaring, howling contradictions and disparities in terms of how people lived, a system which denied a decent life to the majority of humanity, and weighed them down with tremendous oppression and superstition and ignorance, while a relative handful in a few countries lived a life of unbelievable luxury—but, more than just luxury, they continued to accumulate capital while they fought with each other over who would beat out the other through this exploitation and accumulation of capital— if you stood back and looked at that... Imagine if you said to somebody: go to a drawing board and draw up the way you think the world should be. And imagine if somebody went to the drawing board and painted a picture of the way the world is now, and they said: this is the way the world should be. I mean, there would be tremendous howls coming from all quarters of humanity, saying: What the fuck—that’s the way you think the world should be, with these tremendous disparities and people, little children, dying of cholera and malnutrition and other things that could be prevented easily, while a small number battle each other to accumulate more and more wealth from the suffering of this mass of humanity—that’s what you think?! Anybody who would actually draw that up on a board should actually be—and would probably be—rightly accused of criminal insanity. And yet, here’s a class of people, the capitalist-imperialist class, that presides exactly over a world that way, and argues it’s the best of all possible worlds. The only reason that people don’t—masses of people don’t, right at this time—say, “this is criminal insanity” is because they’ve been propagandized and conditioned to believe that, in fact, this is the only possible way, and that the radical alternative to it that does exist, namely communism, has somehow been a horror and a disaster. And it’s not hard to see why the ruling class of capitalist-imperialists would employ a lot of people to propagate that idea everywhere they could. If you presided over such a criminally insane system, you would undoubtedly do the same. From What Humanity Needs: Revolution, and the New Synthesis of Communism, An Interview with Bob Avakian by A. Brooks. Contents Chapter 1: Introduction The Lies of Conventional Wisdom We Need Revolution and a Whole New World Chapter 2: The First Dawn—The Paris Commune Marx Draws the Essential Lesson from the Commune: We Need a New State Power Chapter 3: 1917—The Revolution Breaks Through in Russia Lenin and the Vital Role of Communist Leadership A New Kind of Power Radical Changes: Women Radical Changes: Minority Nationalities The Arts Joseph Stalin Constructing a Socialist Economy Struggle in the Countryside Changing Circumstances and Changing Thinking A Turning Point: The Revolution Is Crushed in Germany and the Nazis Come to Power Mistakes and Reversals A Matter of Orientation Two Different Kinds of Contradictions A Crucial Relationship: Advancing the World Revolution, Defending the Socialist State Chapter 4: China—One Quarter of Humanity Scaling New Heights of Emancipation A Revolution Is Born China on the Eve of Revolution Mobilizing the Masses to Transform All of Society An Unsettled Question: What Direction for Society? The Great Leap Forward A Sane and Rational Path of Development The Truth About the Famine The Cultural Revolution: The Furthest Advance of Human Emancipation Yet The Danger of the Revolution Being Reversed Unleashing the Youth to Initiate the Cultural Revolution The Contradictory Nature of Socialism “It Was a Real Revolution” Mass Debate, Mass Mobilization, Mass Criticism “Socialist New Things” “Human Nature” and Social Change Sending Intellectuals to the Countryside What’s Wrong with “History by Memoir”? Mao’s Last Great Battle Chapter 5: Toward a New Stage of Communist Revolution Bob Avakian Brings Forward a New Synthesis of Communism Learning From, Advancing Beyond the Cultural Revolution The World Needs the New Synthesis of Communist Revolution Notes Appendix: Two Essays Concerning Epistemology “But How Do We Know Who’s Telling the Truth About Communism?” A Reader Responds to “What’s Wrong with ‘History by Memoir’?” Special Feature: Illustrated Timeline—The REAL History of Communist Revolution About the Author Interview with Raymond Lotta Chapter 1: Introduction People need the truth about the communist revolution. The REAL truth. At a time when people are rising up in many places all over the world and seeking out ways forward, THIS alternative is ruled out of order. At a time when even more people are agonizing over and raising big questions about the future, THIS alternative is constantly slandered and maligned and lied about, while those who defend it are given no space to reply. It is urgent that the questions be answered, and the TRUTH be told about the communist revolution—the real way out of the horrors that people endure today, and the even worse ones they face tomorrow. To do this, Revolution newspaper arranged for Raymond Lotta to be interviewed by different groups of people in different parts of the country, and other people sent in questions. What follows is a synthesized, edited version that draws on those interviews and adds new material since the interviews were first conducted. Question: I’ve heard you talk about the “first stage” of communist revolution. What exactly are you referring to? Raymond Lotta: We’re talking about a sea change in human history, the first attempts in modern history to build societies free from exploitation and oppression. Specifically, we’re talking about the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian revolution of 1917–1956, and the Chinese revolution of 1949– 1976. These were titanic risings of the modern-day “slaves” of society against their “masters.” They aimed to bring about a community of humanity, a society based on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” and one where there are no more divisions among people in which some rule over and oppress others, robbing them not only of the means to a decent life but also of knowledge and a means for really understanding, and acting to change, the world. Never have there been such radical and far-reaching transformations in how society is organized, in how economies are run, in culture and education, in how people relate to each other, and in how people think and feel as there were in these revolutions. Against incredible odds and obstacles, and in what amounts to a nanosecond of human history, these revolutions accomplished amazing things —and they changed the course of human history. Never before had the myth of an unchanging human nature—in which people are “naturally” self-seeking, and some people just “naturally” dominate others—been so decisively exploded. For those few decades, a better world seemed on the verge of birth. As it is put in Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, for the first time, the “long night... the thousands of years of darkness for the great majority of humanity”—where society is divided into exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed—this was broken through, and a whole new form of society began to be forged.1 The Lies of Conventional Wisdom Question: But the conventional wisdom is that these revolutions were not liberating, but extremely autocratic, trampling on the rights of people... utopias turned into nightmares. RL: Yes that is the conventional wisdom, and it is built on systematic distortion and misrepresentation... built on wholesale lies as to what these revolutions were about: what they actually set out to do, what they actually accomplished, and what real-world challenges and obstacles they faced. Now people have a certain awareness of how they have been systematically lied to about things like “weapons of mass destruction” that were the pretext for the war in Iraq. And we’re not talking about incidental mis-admissions of fact here... the Iraq war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the dislocation of millions. But all too many people who consider themselves “critical minded” are all too willing to accept the “conventional wisdom” on communism. And let me be clear, the ruling class and intellectual guardians of the status quo have been engaged in a relentless ideological assault against communism... through popular journalism, so-called scholarly studies, memoirs that traffic in the “authenticity of personal experience,” films, and so on. You know, for several years, I have been engaged in a project called “Set the Record Straight,” taking on these distortions and bringing to people the actual truth of these revolutions. For example, back in 2009–2010, I was on a campus speaking tour and one thing we did was to set up tables on campuses with a “pop quiz” on just basic facts about the communist revolutions.2 And the students scored terribly on the quiz.