I have no love for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Long before the rise of Maoism, Trotskyists understood that the CCP had lost its links to the working class and that it treated its peasant base as slave labourers. Adopting a Stalinized, 'socialism from above' model, it conquered the Chinese state on the basis of military power, not revolutionary democratic socialism.

Think how much easier this'd be if I had a bureaucrat to watch me!

In this light, its future crimes - the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward, the insanity of the Cultural Revolution - make perfect sense. 'Building existing socialism' became the crimes that the ruling bureaucratic class perpetrated to maintain its power. (For a good overview, check out Phil Hearse's review of Mao In Power.)

The workers' and students' uprising of Tiananmen Square was an inspiration to socialists the world over - not because Chinese demonstrators wanted 'freedom', but because it showed how revolutionary traditions of direct democracy, including mass demonstrations and the general strike, were still alive in China today.

So I'm always excited when I read about mass upheaval in China. The issue's being raised by Falun Dafa, the quasi-religious movement based in China. Tortured, exiled and killed by the Chinese state for years, Falun Dafa has quietly built a huge base among diasporic Chinese communities and, apparently, within China itself. I defend them against the violent repression they face from the Chinese state. No matter how wonky I may find their spiritual practices, they have a right to practice them in peace.

Marching students in Tiananmen Square, 1989. Contrary to Western media reports, the Chinese state only cracked down when Beijing workers started a general strike in sympathy, and sections of the army began to refuse orders.

Communism and its discontents

This actually puts me at odds with Falun Dafa itself, because they are fundamentally anti-communist. In the latest Epoch Times, the front newspaper the group publishes, they advertise the publication of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party. Purported to be a stinging critique of the CCP, they're actually anti-communist propaganda that completely confuses Stalinism with Marxism. Here's some examples:

From On What The Communist Party Is:

Violence is the one and main means by which the Communist Party gained power. This character trait has been passed on to all subsequent forms of the Party that have arisen since its birth....

This is absolutely false. Communist Parties progress through agitation, organizing among workers and oppressed people, elections, and armed struggle. Armed struggle is a last resort; obviously, because the capitalist state will crush incipient rebellions.

Argh! I kill you! Argh!

Marx & Engels never advocated violence as a principle; however, they saw workers' self-defence as a legitimate response to the daily brutalizations imposed by capitalism. The 'Black Book of Communism' is vastly outweighed by the 'Dripping Red With Workers' Blood Encyclopedia of Capitalism'. I don't support the crimes of Stalinism, and there's a rich historical tradition that explores why Stalinism was an abomination of Marxism; check out Hal Draper's The Two Souls of Socialism for an introduction.

Falun Dafa's 'History' Lesson

the world’s first Communist Party was established many years after Karl Marx’s death. The next year after the October Revolution in 1917, the “All Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)” (later to be known as the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union”) was born. This party grew out of the use of violence against “class enemies” and was maintained through violence against party members and ordinary citizens. During Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union slaughtered over 20 million so-called spies and traitors, and those thought to have different opinions....

The first Communist Party was the party Marx himself helped to start, The International Working Men's Association. That 'violent' organization supported the workers of Paris resisting the Prussian invasion of 1871, and the North in the American Civil War.

The Bolsheviks were formed in 1902, after a split with the larger, reformist contingent, the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks remained relatively small until 1917, when the Russian workers and peasants began to form Soviets, or workers' councils, alternative forms of direct democracy. The Bolsheviks grew by agitating in the factories, in the trenches, in the fields, until they had a majority in the Soviets.

A Bolshevik regiment demanding 'All Power to the Soviets', 1917
Stalin's rise was accomplished over the dead bodies of 100s of thousands of Bolsheviks who opposed his agenda of dictatorship and forced collectivization. You cannot understand Soviet history without understanding the massive class conflicts that led to Stalin. Draw a 'red line' from Marx to Stalin comes from some of the worst of cold war propaganda - and the Soviet regimes themselves, naturally. Both are untrue. Yet Falun Dafa relies precisely on this false logic to condemn any action associated with Communism.

Their argument about the Khmer Rouge is typical: claiming that Pol Pot's murderous regime was Communist, they forget that he arose only because the U.S. had run saturation bombing campaigns against Cambodia, massacring 500,000 and destroying the country's infrastructure, and then supported Pol Pot against China itself. Khmer Stalinism, like all Communisms, can only be understood in the context of global political and economic forces i.e. imperialism. If Falun Dafa had even a passing acquaintance with the Communist Manifesto, they'd realize the society Marx and millions of others fought and died for looked nothing like the barbarities of the Khmer Rouge. Or, indeed, the Chinese regime.

Holiday In Cambodia, where you'll do what Marx tells you to!

Marxism and Really Bad Philosophy

Falun Dafa completely misunderstands materialism and Marx's conception of human nature, claiming Marx believed humans "are nothing inherent and inborn but products of the environment." Yet alienation, a separation from our natural abilities, runs through all of Marx's works, from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital.

They repeat the old lie that "Lenin believed that Marxism cannot be generated naturally among the proletariat, but must be infused from outside." Lenin thought this for 3 years (comrades correct me on this if I've got my dates wrong), from 1902-05, until the Petrograd 1905 Revolution showed him - and Trotsky, significantly - that workers could create their own forms of political organization. Even Trotsky doesn't escape the sloppy paint job; apparently he, like Lenin, was a follower of Pavlov's 'conditioned reflex':

Trotsky [7] even vainly hoped that conditioned reflex would not only psychologically change a person, but also physically change the person. In the same way that a dog drools once it hears the lunch bell ringing, soldiers would be expected to rush ahead bravely upon hearing gunshots, thus devoting their lives to the Communist Party.

Woof! I'm a Bolshevik! - Pavlov & his dog

One wonders why Trotsky spent time agitating among soldiers, eliminating class divisions within the Red Army, writing detailed works on dialectics, and even bitterly critiquing the Chinese Communist Party itself, in its disastrous campaigns of 1925-27. Apparently consciousness, working class organization, ideology - all the complexities of Marxist analysis which build a rich, 150 year old philosophical & political tradition, can be reduced to ringing a little bell.

I could go on, but there's too much bad history & philosophy for one blog entry. The Falun Dafa are oppressed, but that doesn't make them an organization worth supporting. Defending, yes. But their hysterical anti-Marxism cuts themselves off, not only from international solidarity but from progressives within China itself. It makes me wonder who's funding them. They publish a free newspaper in 20 countries, with teams of journalists updating their website daily. That doesn't come from free donations. The rhetoric is so classically cold-war that I wonder if the CIA is involved. It wouldn't be the first time; the CIA have been linked to the recent 'orange revolutions' in the Ukraine and Serbia, among others.

Scenes from the class struggle in Huankantou - Chinese villagers trash a police car

What makes this tragic, rather than just ridiculous, is that there's plenty of class struggle going on in China right now. Without an understanding of class power, it's impossible to understand how entire towns can revolt against poverty and environmental disasters. More than 3 million Chinese protested illegally in 2003. This has everything to do with Marxism: how capitalism develops the means of production at the expense of workers' lives. In their anti-Marxism, Falun Dafa are rejecting a key tool for both understanding China, and making links with the real social movements that exist.

The future Chinese revolt won't be led by a right-wing religious sect, however oppressed it is. It's being led by Chinese workers and peasants rebelling against the class rule of the CCP. That's the anti-Communism I support: an anti-Communism squarely within the living, historical movement of Marxism.