Rawthentic
3rd February 2009, 18:15
Wheres the Proletariat in Maos Long March or Nepals Revolution? (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/wheres-the-proletariat-in-maos-long-march-or-nepals-revolution/)
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on February 3, 2009
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/young-worker-in-kathmandu.jpg?w=300&h=199 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/young-worker-in-kathmandu.jpg)Young worker in Kathmandu, Nepal
By Mike Ely
TNL posted the important question: what is proletarian about communism? What is the connection between the working class and communist movement (other than vestigial markers of terminology, tradition and pretense)?
And, obviously, we know what this means (at the extreme) because we have all encountered movements that appointed themselves vanguard of the proletariat often without connection, leadership, representation or even a real sense of that proletariat. We have seen circular, self-aggrandising apriori assertions.
For a year I have been thinking about a remark TNL made:
when we debate the dictatorship of the proletariat, the real controversy is not over the word dictatorship, but over the phrase of the proletariat.
That is what we are engaging here. the controversy over the phrase of the proletariat. It is a discussion of how class is mediated through politics and ideas.
TNL now writes (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/prachanda-nepalese-people-will-seize-power/#comment-11159):
I know Im a little late to this thread, but i have a question for Jose (and I presume others) which is: in what real sense can you say that the proletariat led the Chinese Revolution? This seems to me a bit of doctrinaire nonsense. Certainly the CCP built up a proletarian base before the smashing of the Shanghai Uprising in 1927 and some of that base fled to the countryside to join the work amongst the peasantry. I also know that special efforts wer made to recruit rural proletarians. But nobody really disputes the fundamentally peasant composition of the organized forces that made the revolution. So is the claim here that the leadership of the CCP was significantly of proletarian origin or just that it represented the proletariat by virtue of its ideology? If its the latter, to say its metaphysical would be kind. What this stance has always signalled to me, and this was always part of my reluctance to call myself a Maoist, was a dishonest capitulation to the reigning orthodoxy of the Stalin-era Comintern in the face of obviously contradictiry facts, namely the actual class composition of the leadership and the base of both the CCP and PLA.
Id like to take a stab at this.
Not a Matter of Sociology or Demographics
First, I want to dig into what it does not mean: It does not mean that a sociological class of Chinese workers literally and directly led the Chinese peasants in revolution. There were of course actual workers involved in the revolution at each point. The early CCP built itself among workers (and among supporters of the then-revolutionary KMT from other class). They had a base among railroad workers and in Shanghai. Mao himself went among the coal miners of Anyuan. And there were considerable numbers of miners in the Autumn harvest uprising that was defeated among the forces Mao then led up into the Chingkang mountain region to create his first political base area.
But, again, to be clear: it is not the existence of people of working class origin at key posts or in key numbers within the party, the army or the leadership that is the basis for saying that there is proletarian leadership.
The basis for saying there is proletarian leadership lies somewhere else. Let me zoom out (instead of zooming in).
Something Radically New That We Associate with The Proletariat
Starting with the Paris Commune something new is stirring in the world there is an increasing organized, increasingly self-conscious and increasingly international attempt to carry though a revolutionary movement against class society itself. With the Russian revolution, it bursts on the world stage in an unprecedented way, and the theory leading the Russian revolution bursts into the sight of oppressed and revolutionary people all over the world. Mao writes that the cannons of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism.
This view of proletarian revolution starts by seeing all of the communist revolutions as a world process. And after the 1917 revolution something new happens, the proletarian revolutionary movement of Europe connects with the anti-colonial movements of Asia and the outlook (and the organized forces) emerging from the most radical socialist/communist circles in Europe starts to profoundly influence and shape those anti-colonial movements. And (at the same time, as they take root) those anti-colonial movements start to reshape and influence the ideas and organizational forms that fell into their hands.
It is often hard to look back in history and actually see the shocking nature of things that radical and new. But this was something shockingly new.
Previously the resistance to colonialism had taken the form of a defense of traditional society. (See the so-called Sepoy Mutiny of India, or the Native American resistance to European advances in the Americas.) And the problem with those strategies of resistance was that the European advances came with steel and gunpowder and offering commodities that no one on earth could resist. cheap needles, cheap cloth, cheap knives, steel pots, opium, whisky and much more.
So suddenly you had a radical new form of militant resistance to colonial domination that had appropriated for itself a vision of modern development it intended to learn, adopt and recreate the advances of the colonial countries (industry, modern armies, scientific farming, communications, world trade), but on a basis that was both profoundly indigenous and naitonally independent, and on a bases that promised egalitarianism (in the place of the abject degradation and poverty of the colonial relations).
As Mao bluntly put it (in a thesis that would be a battleground over the following decades): Only socialism can save China.
This break this opening for a new kind of resistance in the colonial world, the ideology and politics that led that break is what proletarian leadership means. It represents that arrival and maturation of something radically new in the power struggles of the world the connection of the peoples struggles with communism (as goal and outlook).
In the early politics of this transition, the term proletarian leadership meant both a communist line leading the national democratic struggle, and also a strategic assumption that urban workers were (demographically) the strategic base of revolution, and that working class soviets were the discovered universal political form for socialist transition.
The first part of this was, in fact, crucial. The second part of this proved, in fact, to be doctrinaire and disconnected with the realities of most colonial countries. (Attempts at urban uprisings in China, reproduced the isolation of the Paris commune i.e. they could not stand as small radical islands surrounded by an unaroused countryside. Or they reproduced the rash failures of the German uprisings of 1923, they were called into being by a leadership in Moscow that underestimated the importance of particularity.)
So a second startling break happened: Mao developed a strategic approach that actually flowed from the conditions of China where the great revolutionary potential of the peasantry was married to the great revolutionary potential of anti-colonial resistance. It was done through the means of a specific concept of united front one that united all who could be united against the real enemy. It was done under a specific concept of who the real enemy was using a theory of stages that identified key contradictions and their development over time.
This second startling break required a serious rupture with orthodoxy among the communists. The communist international sent a series of plenipotentiaries and annointed a series of Chinese leaders to impose their strategic assumptions (li-li san, wang ming, Bo Gu etc.) And Maos approach in strategy and his break in the realm of ideology was carried out through a series of sharp struggles with the comintern. (Mao was knocked down repeatedly, and had to fight for his line to victories first at the Tsunyi conference in 1935, and then in the Rectification movement in isolated Yenan, and then again in a series of struggle with Soviet-alligned elements over the 1950s.)
Maos break the development of a communist revolutionary conception for a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country required a break with what the very term proletarian leadership meant.
And it turned out to have a great deal of general importance because of how things turned out over the last century.
One of the ironies of the last century of history is that revolutionary successes have mainly come in the most backward of countries. Instead of breaking out in the most developed countries, it often broke out at the margins.
In Russia you had the heavy weight of Tsarist autocracy in sharp contrast with the very largest and most modern factories the most hateful backwardness confronting a footloose working class concentrated raw and restless in new urban areas. But by the time you get to the Chinese revolution, we are speaking of a country with only a very small working class (2% by some calculations), and a vast impoverished countryside representing the great defining bulk of the country and its people. And still today, communist revolution has taken root in Peru (in the 1980s), in some Indias most backward and tribal areas, in Nepal, in places in eastern Turkey, and so on again at the margins of the world market, not at its heart. And in areas of intense peasant distress and national oppression, not in the heartlands of working class concentrations and exploitation.
On one hand, as Ive been pointing out, Maos application of proletarian leadership meant a distancing from a naive sociological meaning (i.e. proletarian leadership means workers lead the movement at the grass roots and in the organization at every level). This is not about the proletariat as a class in itself it is about the historic and international impact of the class for itself (the impact of its self-consciousness concentrated in communist organization, politics and theory).
It privileges the idea that ideas have a class character, and that proletarian leadership also means the leadership of a particular ideology and set of goals that are said to be characteristic of the proletariat (as a class for itself). And it has a conception of the communist movement (internationally) and the communist party in each country as a representative (not of the workers in that country) but of the proletariat as an international class, as a carrier of the most advanced philosophy, strategic thinking and organizational principles of the proletariat as an international class at that stage of the world revolutions development.
The Contradiction That Raises the Question
Now to put it sharply:
If you zoom in from outer space, and look at Maos rag tag army on the long march an army of bone-weary peasant soldiers and a few intellectual, traveling through some the most remote and impoverished areas of Asia moving from the mountain fastness in southern China to the even more remote loess regions on the fringes of the Mongolian steppes in Yenan It is easy to ask (as TNL does) what is proletarian about any of this? How can one look at that force, and that project and say it is proletarian led?
TNL makes a second point:
To my mind this sort of invocation of the proletariat did damage to the neccesary theorization of the historical fact of a peasant revolution under the leadership of the intelligentsia in which the actual proletariat was (as might be expected in a country like China where it was puny and politically weak) relatively marginal. This bowing to the supposedly unique revolutionary character of the proletariat leaves the theory and practice of new Democracy more open to these obviously quite shallow criticisms. It also leads to real muddle about what precisely it means to speak of the proletariat, something that always seemed much more a moral category than a political-economic one in how it was used by the RCP.
I agree that (in the hands of some!) this invocation of the proletariat has done damage to the understanding of what was actually going on. In part because it was often invoked and never broken down (the way i am trying to do here). And in part because in the hands of some it is rather simply an article of faith and circular logic. (we communists represent the proletariat, so where we are the proletariat is leading.) But we cant criticize a theory merely because it has been abused, and because that abuse did damage.
And I would say there is sufficient truth to that invocation (correctly understood) that we should clarify what we mean, not simply discard it.
But I think one needs to tease out (of that same picture) what is distinctive about this Long March, and this Red Army, and its Maoist leadership in order to identify the things that Maoists call its proletarian leadership.
First, this army is distinctive from any previous peasant army in the world by a number of very startling and new breaks.
One example: Edgar Snow reports that peasant delegations would travel large distances to find this half-starved Red Army and beg them to pass through out county come kill and disposses our oppressors. And they would often come with prepared please for Mr. Sow-ei-ei. The word had spread through Chinas peasants that something new had arisen, this Sow-ei-ei (this Soviet form of government in the ChingKang base area) and they wanted to be in touch with it. They often thought it was the name of a man, but in fact it was something else, it was a lingistic marker for the proletarian leadership, and the distinctive nature of THIS peasant army.
This (sociologically) peasant army had different goals than any previous peasant army it was shown by the red stars on their hats (which symbolized the final goal classless society and communism). It was shown by the connection of THIS peasant army with the worlds only socialist government and society (they were traveling to Yenan for two reasons: a) to be close to the Soviet border region for supply and communication, and b) to be closer to the Japanese occupation zones to be able to take an independent frontrank place in that war of resistance.) And ideologically, this army trained its soldiers in ideas that have never (ever) emerged from peasant armies (or from centuries of indigenous anti-colonial resistance). They were concentrated in the basic rules of the army (the Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Rules of Attention) which were the most radical imaginable rupture with the conduct of all the other fragmented armies then crisscrossing warlord-infested China. And they were elaborated in all the other materials that the increasingly literate solders (and captured KMT soldiers) were taught in the political education classes that soon became famous.
So in those ways, this clearly peasant army was proletarian led. It is an understanding that requires a sense of the proletariat as an international class, as a historic class, as a class that has (through levels of mediation) given rise to the most extreme revolutionary movement (communism) and when that communist movement (at its best, not its worst) has a profound impact on the struggles of a country, this can be said to be the impact (and even the leadership) of the proletariat (at that level of historic abstraction and mediation) in ways relatively autonomous from the immediate involvement and consciousness of the workers in that country.
I dont mean literally autonomous, but only relatively autonomous, as will will explore for a bit. There has to be some mediated connection between the proletariat as a historic class and the working class of any particular time and place (as a class in itself). And it is not simply a connection of section slice (I.e. you slice through the proletariat-as-a-historic-class and you get the working class of this moment). Because we are also talking about matters of interest in a historical materialist sense, (not just real historical continuity of sociological class forms and experiences).
The Role of Workers in the Communist Revolution
And in the Maoist experience of China, the proletariat was not just an ideological marker. There was always a concerted effort for this revolution did seek (whenever possible) to sink roots among the workers, and bring them to the fore as a class-in-itself becoming a class-for-itself.
One early example of this was when the Maoist armies started taking cities there were quickly line struggles over who to rely on in the cities: Some wanted to rely on the exisitng administration(i.e. take over the state as it existed, but run it with new methods), some wanted to apply the methods from the countryside (i.e. find the most radicalized poor peasants living on the fringes of urban life), and Mao argued (strongly) that the revolution finally had a chance to connect with, mobilize and relying the masses of working people in these urban areas (and that this focus had an important strategic component). So while I am arguing that the notion of proletarian leadership does not rest on the presence and initiative of people (literally) of working class origin Mao and the other Maoists were quite conscious of wanting to make and strengthen that link, in order the strengthen the social basis for proletarian ideas within a movement (and within a country) of overwhelmingly non-proletarian classes. This same approach came forward in the GPCR, where the revolution was first triggered in schools among the youth (red guards) and among the soldiers (the publication of the Red Book), but where mao struggled to bring the actual workers into the conflict (not just as fresh footsoldiers in a key social sphere, but as a potentially transformative force.)
So to be clear: while proletarian leadership in the Maoist context mainly refers to strategic, ideological and organizational approaches characteristic of the proletariat as a historic class there is an element where it also refers to the need to bring workers-as-workers to the fore (as possible) to play a special and transformative role (strengthening the basis for upholding and developing the line that represents proletarian leadership.)
Final: There is a degree of abstraction to this Maoist concept of proletarian leadership that seems (to TNL) as a bit of doctrinaire nonsense. (Perhaps similar to the way, the idea of uniting with the national bourgeoisie in order to advance to communism seems like Alice in Wonderland nonsense to Chuck).
There is an outlook that says proletarian leadership either means that actual workers are actually leading the movement or else we have crossed over to double talk and bullshit.
At the heart of this is the question of whether classes (and specifically the working class) have (a) historic interests characteristic of the proletariat as a class, (b) whether there are ideas (philosophies, strategies, verdicts) that are characteristic of the proletariat as a class. And whether those things can be said whether or not the actual workers in a specific country have embraced them (yet) or not. Marxism (and certainly Maoism) says that socialism and communism are world historic goals entwined with the world historic interests of the workers as a class.
In recent struggles with the RCP we have collided with a particularly
fictious, self-serving and circular version of this: i.e. we are the vanguard of the proletariat, what we say represent the way to communism, therefore we are the representatives of the proletariat, and any attempt to measure that in the real world violates point number on, i.e. we are the vanguard of the proletariat. In other words, in some self-created bubbles, the notion of proletarian leadership has been drained of all connection with reality and real people, and has simply become a marker for an ideology (i.e. some localized version of MLM or trotskyism or whatever.) I am convinced we have to break with that idealist view, and not tolerate, and certainly not reproduce it.
But on the other hand, I am arguing that there are ways in which the
communist movement, rising up for revolution, even at the head of non-workingclass millions, does represent (in a way that is real, in a sweeping sense) proletarian leadership.
I think we can talk of working class and proletariat in both senses, and have to make clear in our discussions which sense we are using. There is a real existing working class (at every moment, in every country), and there is also the presence and linkages that represent the work, goals and historic interests of the working class as a historic class.
And looking at the Chinese revolution, and the huge transformative impact of proletarian ideas on that anti-feudal, anti-colonial struggle can help us understand the degree to which this second sense of proletarian leadership as material existence.
Posted by Mike E (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1129785784) on February 3, 2009
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/young-worker-in-kathmandu.jpg?w=300&h=199 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/young-worker-in-kathmandu.jpg)Young worker in Kathmandu, Nepal
By Mike Ely
TNL posted the important question: what is proletarian about communism? What is the connection between the working class and communist movement (other than vestigial markers of terminology, tradition and pretense)?
And, obviously, we know what this means (at the extreme) because we have all encountered movements that appointed themselves vanguard of the proletariat often without connection, leadership, representation or even a real sense of that proletariat. We have seen circular, self-aggrandising apriori assertions.
For a year I have been thinking about a remark TNL made:
when we debate the dictatorship of the proletariat, the real controversy is not over the word dictatorship, but over the phrase of the proletariat.
That is what we are engaging here. the controversy over the phrase of the proletariat. It is a discussion of how class is mediated through politics and ideas.
TNL now writes (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/prachanda-nepalese-people-will-seize-power/#comment-11159):
I know Im a little late to this thread, but i have a question for Jose (and I presume others) which is: in what real sense can you say that the proletariat led the Chinese Revolution? This seems to me a bit of doctrinaire nonsense. Certainly the CCP built up a proletarian base before the smashing of the Shanghai Uprising in 1927 and some of that base fled to the countryside to join the work amongst the peasantry. I also know that special efforts wer made to recruit rural proletarians. But nobody really disputes the fundamentally peasant composition of the organized forces that made the revolution. So is the claim here that the leadership of the CCP was significantly of proletarian origin or just that it represented the proletariat by virtue of its ideology? If its the latter, to say its metaphysical would be kind. What this stance has always signalled to me, and this was always part of my reluctance to call myself a Maoist, was a dishonest capitulation to the reigning orthodoxy of the Stalin-era Comintern in the face of obviously contradictiry facts, namely the actual class composition of the leadership and the base of both the CCP and PLA.
Id like to take a stab at this.
Not a Matter of Sociology or Demographics
First, I want to dig into what it does not mean: It does not mean that a sociological class of Chinese workers literally and directly led the Chinese peasants in revolution. There were of course actual workers involved in the revolution at each point. The early CCP built itself among workers (and among supporters of the then-revolutionary KMT from other class). They had a base among railroad workers and in Shanghai. Mao himself went among the coal miners of Anyuan. And there were considerable numbers of miners in the Autumn harvest uprising that was defeated among the forces Mao then led up into the Chingkang mountain region to create his first political base area.
But, again, to be clear: it is not the existence of people of working class origin at key posts or in key numbers within the party, the army or the leadership that is the basis for saying that there is proletarian leadership.
The basis for saying there is proletarian leadership lies somewhere else. Let me zoom out (instead of zooming in).
Something Radically New That We Associate with The Proletariat
Starting with the Paris Commune something new is stirring in the world there is an increasing organized, increasingly self-conscious and increasingly international attempt to carry though a revolutionary movement against class society itself. With the Russian revolution, it bursts on the world stage in an unprecedented way, and the theory leading the Russian revolution bursts into the sight of oppressed and revolutionary people all over the world. Mao writes that the cannons of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism.
This view of proletarian revolution starts by seeing all of the communist revolutions as a world process. And after the 1917 revolution something new happens, the proletarian revolutionary movement of Europe connects with the anti-colonial movements of Asia and the outlook (and the organized forces) emerging from the most radical socialist/communist circles in Europe starts to profoundly influence and shape those anti-colonial movements. And (at the same time, as they take root) those anti-colonial movements start to reshape and influence the ideas and organizational forms that fell into their hands.
It is often hard to look back in history and actually see the shocking nature of things that radical and new. But this was something shockingly new.
Previously the resistance to colonialism had taken the form of a defense of traditional society. (See the so-called Sepoy Mutiny of India, or the Native American resistance to European advances in the Americas.) And the problem with those strategies of resistance was that the European advances came with steel and gunpowder and offering commodities that no one on earth could resist. cheap needles, cheap cloth, cheap knives, steel pots, opium, whisky and much more.
So suddenly you had a radical new form of militant resistance to colonial domination that had appropriated for itself a vision of modern development it intended to learn, adopt and recreate the advances of the colonial countries (industry, modern armies, scientific farming, communications, world trade), but on a basis that was both profoundly indigenous and naitonally independent, and on a bases that promised egalitarianism (in the place of the abject degradation and poverty of the colonial relations).
As Mao bluntly put it (in a thesis that would be a battleground over the following decades): Only socialism can save China.
This break this opening for a new kind of resistance in the colonial world, the ideology and politics that led that break is what proletarian leadership means. It represents that arrival and maturation of something radically new in the power struggles of the world the connection of the peoples struggles with communism (as goal and outlook).
In the early politics of this transition, the term proletarian leadership meant both a communist line leading the national democratic struggle, and also a strategic assumption that urban workers were (demographically) the strategic base of revolution, and that working class soviets were the discovered universal political form for socialist transition.
The first part of this was, in fact, crucial. The second part of this proved, in fact, to be doctrinaire and disconnected with the realities of most colonial countries. (Attempts at urban uprisings in China, reproduced the isolation of the Paris commune i.e. they could not stand as small radical islands surrounded by an unaroused countryside. Or they reproduced the rash failures of the German uprisings of 1923, they were called into being by a leadership in Moscow that underestimated the importance of particularity.)
So a second startling break happened: Mao developed a strategic approach that actually flowed from the conditions of China where the great revolutionary potential of the peasantry was married to the great revolutionary potential of anti-colonial resistance. It was done through the means of a specific concept of united front one that united all who could be united against the real enemy. It was done under a specific concept of who the real enemy was using a theory of stages that identified key contradictions and their development over time.
This second startling break required a serious rupture with orthodoxy among the communists. The communist international sent a series of plenipotentiaries and annointed a series of Chinese leaders to impose their strategic assumptions (li-li san, wang ming, Bo Gu etc.) And Maos approach in strategy and his break in the realm of ideology was carried out through a series of sharp struggles with the comintern. (Mao was knocked down repeatedly, and had to fight for his line to victories first at the Tsunyi conference in 1935, and then in the Rectification movement in isolated Yenan, and then again in a series of struggle with Soviet-alligned elements over the 1950s.)
Maos break the development of a communist revolutionary conception for a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country required a break with what the very term proletarian leadership meant.
And it turned out to have a great deal of general importance because of how things turned out over the last century.
One of the ironies of the last century of history is that revolutionary successes have mainly come in the most backward of countries. Instead of breaking out in the most developed countries, it often broke out at the margins.
In Russia you had the heavy weight of Tsarist autocracy in sharp contrast with the very largest and most modern factories the most hateful backwardness confronting a footloose working class concentrated raw and restless in new urban areas. But by the time you get to the Chinese revolution, we are speaking of a country with only a very small working class (2% by some calculations), and a vast impoverished countryside representing the great defining bulk of the country and its people. And still today, communist revolution has taken root in Peru (in the 1980s), in some Indias most backward and tribal areas, in Nepal, in places in eastern Turkey, and so on again at the margins of the world market, not at its heart. And in areas of intense peasant distress and national oppression, not in the heartlands of working class concentrations and exploitation.
On one hand, as Ive been pointing out, Maos application of proletarian leadership meant a distancing from a naive sociological meaning (i.e. proletarian leadership means workers lead the movement at the grass roots and in the organization at every level). This is not about the proletariat as a class in itself it is about the historic and international impact of the class for itself (the impact of its self-consciousness concentrated in communist organization, politics and theory).
It privileges the idea that ideas have a class character, and that proletarian leadership also means the leadership of a particular ideology and set of goals that are said to be characteristic of the proletariat (as a class for itself). And it has a conception of the communist movement (internationally) and the communist party in each country as a representative (not of the workers in that country) but of the proletariat as an international class, as a carrier of the most advanced philosophy, strategic thinking and organizational principles of the proletariat as an international class at that stage of the world revolutions development.
The Contradiction That Raises the Question
Now to put it sharply:
If you zoom in from outer space, and look at Maos rag tag army on the long march an army of bone-weary peasant soldiers and a few intellectual, traveling through some the most remote and impoverished areas of Asia moving from the mountain fastness in southern China to the even more remote loess regions on the fringes of the Mongolian steppes in Yenan It is easy to ask (as TNL does) what is proletarian about any of this? How can one look at that force, and that project and say it is proletarian led?
TNL makes a second point:
To my mind this sort of invocation of the proletariat did damage to the neccesary theorization of the historical fact of a peasant revolution under the leadership of the intelligentsia in which the actual proletariat was (as might be expected in a country like China where it was puny and politically weak) relatively marginal. This bowing to the supposedly unique revolutionary character of the proletariat leaves the theory and practice of new Democracy more open to these obviously quite shallow criticisms. It also leads to real muddle about what precisely it means to speak of the proletariat, something that always seemed much more a moral category than a political-economic one in how it was used by the RCP.
I agree that (in the hands of some!) this invocation of the proletariat has done damage to the understanding of what was actually going on. In part because it was often invoked and never broken down (the way i am trying to do here). And in part because in the hands of some it is rather simply an article of faith and circular logic. (we communists represent the proletariat, so where we are the proletariat is leading.) But we cant criticize a theory merely because it has been abused, and because that abuse did damage.
And I would say there is sufficient truth to that invocation (correctly understood) that we should clarify what we mean, not simply discard it.
But I think one needs to tease out (of that same picture) what is distinctive about this Long March, and this Red Army, and its Maoist leadership in order to identify the things that Maoists call its proletarian leadership.
First, this army is distinctive from any previous peasant army in the world by a number of very startling and new breaks.
One example: Edgar Snow reports that peasant delegations would travel large distances to find this half-starved Red Army and beg them to pass through out county come kill and disposses our oppressors. And they would often come with prepared please for Mr. Sow-ei-ei. The word had spread through Chinas peasants that something new had arisen, this Sow-ei-ei (this Soviet form of government in the ChingKang base area) and they wanted to be in touch with it. They often thought it was the name of a man, but in fact it was something else, it was a lingistic marker for the proletarian leadership, and the distinctive nature of THIS peasant army.
This (sociologically) peasant army had different goals than any previous peasant army it was shown by the red stars on their hats (which symbolized the final goal classless society and communism). It was shown by the connection of THIS peasant army with the worlds only socialist government and society (they were traveling to Yenan for two reasons: a) to be close to the Soviet border region for supply and communication, and b) to be closer to the Japanese occupation zones to be able to take an independent frontrank place in that war of resistance.) And ideologically, this army trained its soldiers in ideas that have never (ever) emerged from peasant armies (or from centuries of indigenous anti-colonial resistance). They were concentrated in the basic rules of the army (the Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Rules of Attention) which were the most radical imaginable rupture with the conduct of all the other fragmented armies then crisscrossing warlord-infested China. And they were elaborated in all the other materials that the increasingly literate solders (and captured KMT soldiers) were taught in the political education classes that soon became famous.
So in those ways, this clearly peasant army was proletarian led. It is an understanding that requires a sense of the proletariat as an international class, as a historic class, as a class that has (through levels of mediation) given rise to the most extreme revolutionary movement (communism) and when that communist movement (at its best, not its worst) has a profound impact on the struggles of a country, this can be said to be the impact (and even the leadership) of the proletariat (at that level of historic abstraction and mediation) in ways relatively autonomous from the immediate involvement and consciousness of the workers in that country.
I dont mean literally autonomous, but only relatively autonomous, as will will explore for a bit. There has to be some mediated connection between the proletariat as a historic class and the working class of any particular time and place (as a class in itself). And it is not simply a connection of section slice (I.e. you slice through the proletariat-as-a-historic-class and you get the working class of this moment). Because we are also talking about matters of interest in a historical materialist sense, (not just real historical continuity of sociological class forms and experiences).
The Role of Workers in the Communist Revolution
And in the Maoist experience of China, the proletariat was not just an ideological marker. There was always a concerted effort for this revolution did seek (whenever possible) to sink roots among the workers, and bring them to the fore as a class-in-itself becoming a class-for-itself.
One early example of this was when the Maoist armies started taking cities there were quickly line struggles over who to rely on in the cities: Some wanted to rely on the exisitng administration(i.e. take over the state as it existed, but run it with new methods), some wanted to apply the methods from the countryside (i.e. find the most radicalized poor peasants living on the fringes of urban life), and Mao argued (strongly) that the revolution finally had a chance to connect with, mobilize and relying the masses of working people in these urban areas (and that this focus had an important strategic component). So while I am arguing that the notion of proletarian leadership does not rest on the presence and initiative of people (literally) of working class origin Mao and the other Maoists were quite conscious of wanting to make and strengthen that link, in order the strengthen the social basis for proletarian ideas within a movement (and within a country) of overwhelmingly non-proletarian classes. This same approach came forward in the GPCR, where the revolution was first triggered in schools among the youth (red guards) and among the soldiers (the publication of the Red Book), but where mao struggled to bring the actual workers into the conflict (not just as fresh footsoldiers in a key social sphere, but as a potentially transformative force.)
So to be clear: while proletarian leadership in the Maoist context mainly refers to strategic, ideological and organizational approaches characteristic of the proletariat as a historic class there is an element where it also refers to the need to bring workers-as-workers to the fore (as possible) to play a special and transformative role (strengthening the basis for upholding and developing the line that represents proletarian leadership.)
Final: There is a degree of abstraction to this Maoist concept of proletarian leadership that seems (to TNL) as a bit of doctrinaire nonsense. (Perhaps similar to the way, the idea of uniting with the national bourgeoisie in order to advance to communism seems like Alice in Wonderland nonsense to Chuck).
There is an outlook that says proletarian leadership either means that actual workers are actually leading the movement or else we have crossed over to double talk and bullshit.
At the heart of this is the question of whether classes (and specifically the working class) have (a) historic interests characteristic of the proletariat as a class, (b) whether there are ideas (philosophies, strategies, verdicts) that are characteristic of the proletariat as a class. And whether those things can be said whether or not the actual workers in a specific country have embraced them (yet) or not. Marxism (and certainly Maoism) says that socialism and communism are world historic goals entwined with the world historic interests of the workers as a class.
In recent struggles with the RCP we have collided with a particularly
fictious, self-serving and circular version of this: i.e. we are the vanguard of the proletariat, what we say represent the way to communism, therefore we are the representatives of the proletariat, and any attempt to measure that in the real world violates point number on, i.e. we are the vanguard of the proletariat. In other words, in some self-created bubbles, the notion of proletarian leadership has been drained of all connection with reality and real people, and has simply become a marker for an ideology (i.e. some localized version of MLM or trotskyism or whatever.) I am convinced we have to break with that idealist view, and not tolerate, and certainly not reproduce it.
But on the other hand, I am arguing that there are ways in which the
communist movement, rising up for revolution, even at the head of non-workingclass millions, does represent (in a way that is real, in a sweeping sense) proletarian leadership.
I think we can talk of working class and proletariat in both senses, and have to make clear in our discussions which sense we are using. There is a real existing working class (at every moment, in every country), and there is also the presence and linkages that represent the work, goals and historic interests of the working class as a historic class.
And looking at the Chinese revolution, and the huge transformative impact of proletarian ideas on that anti-feudal, anti-colonial struggle can help us understand the degree to which this second sense of proletarian leadership as material existence.