Report on week 5 of Solidarity’s reading group, Problems of Socialist Organization
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
When we first discussed having a class focused on Chinese experiences with socialist organization, some people were uncertain. Isn’t Maoism, some asked, just another form of Stalinism? What do we have to learn from that? Some of this ambivalence comes from Solidarity’s roots in Trotskyism, which pretends to have solved the problems of Stalinism long ago, with Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. And if the questions have been answered, then what’s the point of asking them anew?
There are two problems with this line of thinking. First, it discounts and dismisses the intellectual work and embodied sacrifice of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of peasants, and many thousands of communists against colonialism and capitalism because of the ideology of the group that seized leadership over their revolutionary process. It treats anarchism, which played the most critical role in Chinese revolutionary history up until the 1920s, Trotskyism, and other liberatory socialist currents, as well as feminism, as outside of Chinese communism, rather than constituent of it.
And second, this logic depends on a revisionist history, where Maoism arrived as a homogenous political movement — as though Maoism were never homogenous even internally — rather than developing through a difficult historical struggle, including protracted political and military defeats at the hands of counter revolutionary bourgeois forces. Trotskyist scripts mislead us here. I remember, as a young radical, first learning about communism from a former Trotskyist; I learned that the Soviet Union was a “degenerated” workers state; degenerated because it had been a real workers state (the real workers state), and then was seized by a bureaucracy with its own interests apart from that workers’ power. And China was a “deformed” workers’ state; deformed because it was formed incorrectly from its beginning. This should stand out as a problematic formulation for a Marxist because it implies that there is an ideal form of workers’ state, to which reality must conform. That’s idealism. It’s not what the Soviet Union was in its early years (at least not according to Lenin), and it’s not how history works.
Taking China’s long revolutionary process seriously, we find valuable lessons and legacies for socialism from below, even if the Chinese Communist Party ended up taking and holding power from above. I think two important lessons were about the extensive dangers of revolutionaries taking action without theoretical clarity, and about the centrality of women’s oppression and women’s liberation to both the rise of universalist revolutionary politics and the displacement of that universality into the Party.
Bolshevism before Marxism
The first lesson I want to reflect on is the peril of taking action and building organization without working out clarity of theory and political programme. Rebecca Karl, in her book, China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, says “Marxism developed in China more as a handmaiden to party organizational discipline than as an independent mode of critical socioeconomic analysis.” When we asked about this in our reading group with her, she said something important:
Marxism was not well translated into Chinese, and people were not familiar with the particularities of Marxist analysis. What came before Marxist analysis was the Party.
The consequences of having Bolshevism before Marxism was that you don’t have a very good critique of Bolshevism before its suppositions. So critiques that come from Marxism from outside of that pre-existing party is received as an attack on the party rather than as clarification.
When critiques did come from independent Marxists of the rigidity and mistakes in the party, the party responded strictly. There were then a set of purges and attacks against Marxists in the party. The consequences of these attacks have never been properly rectified.
It’s only in the 1930s Marxism began to be developed in China, and in the Chinese party. It was called Maoism. And trying to force Chinese history into the five stages of official Marxist history (primitive communism, feudalism, slavery, capitalism, socialism), created absurdities.
This comment, which Karl made verbally and on the spot, and which I transcribed to the best of my ability but which might misrepresent some details of her thinking, needs to be qualified slightly by what the Chinese communists would have understood by “Bolshevism” in the mid-1920s. By then, Zinoviev’s “Bolshevist” formula, circumscribed and spread globally through Comintern policy books laid out a doctrinaire form of Bolshevism that emphasized the centralism in democratic centralism, and encoded a rigid dogma that a party, anywhere in the world, must adopt in order to be a member of the Third (Communist) International. This perverted form of Bolshevism was what the Chinese Communist Party adopted before entering into its own struggles with Marxism.
A consequence of the CCP’s adoption of Bolshevism before Marxism was that communist leaders in China developed an organization and strategic action with the Party itself as protagonist force. This Party substituted for the working class –– which had been displaced through severe repression –– as the engine of class struggle.
Chinese Marxism had to theorized in reverse: explaining its practical maneuvers and strategic concessions as innovations. Karl explained, “It wasn’t until he was driven into retreat to his base areas that Mao had some time – not a lot of luxury but some time – to read Marx. It was then that he began to develop what came to be called Maoism. The agrarian revolution was fundamental to Maoism.” A long term effect of this was that the Party itself was affirmed as the engine of socialism, and all other social organizations were subordinated to it.
I think we should understand this as a problem of historical development, not the result of Stalinists pre-ordaining their own control from outside of Chinese history. The Chinese communists were caught in a complex trap: firstly, of underdevelopment, in a society that was great-majority peasant, without the advances of industrialization that even Russian cities had gone through on the eve of October. Second, the triumph of the counter revolution and the liquidation of its urban and working class organizations and movements. And third, the problem of conditional support meted out from their one ally in the Stalinizing Soviet Union. A consequence of the new communist leadership’s will to power, its voluntarist drive, was the creation of new contradictions that set up the party in the way of socialism from below.
Women’s liberation as universal cause
There’s no better example of this subordination of social organizations to the Party than what became of women’s liberation struggles in China. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World, Rebecca Karl makes an important intervention about the origins of Chinese liberation struggles. She argues that after World War One, feminism and women’s liberation become “the key lenses” through which revolutionary demands were “rendered visible and comprehensible.”
It was a historical dynamic that is surprising to some economistic Marxists and traditional historians, who, Karl says, have pushed back against her thesis, but because Chinese society was not totally (or even majority) capitalist, class did not structure production as a whole and was not a universalizing category of oppression. In these conditions, Karl writes, in China’s Revolutions, “the family [was] the basic repressive structure of social authority through which everyday life was lived.” All Han women, peasant, worker, and those from landlord and capitalist families, were subjected to foot binding. All women, though by different degree, had their lives defined by the sexist gender order. In our discussion, Karl explained, “peasant women had less-bound feet because they had to work on their feet, but all classes bound the feet of women.” It was, therefore, under a common flag of women’s oppression that revolutionaries were able to condemn the old world and articulate the designs of a new one.
The liberation movements of the 19-teens and early twenties that coalesced around “the women question” were principally anarchist. Karl said, “Anarcho-feminists made the most searing critique of Chinese society at the time. He-Yin Zhen was part of international anarchist circles. She inaugerated the kinds of critiques that connected the Chinese struggle with global anarchism. And Anarchists were an organized force prior to 1919, but they were purged from the CPC and persecuted throughout the 1920s and afterwards, alongside Trotskyists.” We can see the rise of the new Communist Party as a conservative force for Chinese women, which then subordinated women’s liberation to the priority of the Party’s taking and keeping power.
Karl explained that there was a moment in the 1920s when women’s liberation was understood as part of workers’ liberation, and then “it collapses and women’s liberation is posed against workers and peasant liberation, as though women are not workers and peasants too.” The Party’s initial policy was to mobilize women into factories as wage workers. “But,” Karl said, “there was no attention paid to the problem that the reproduction of the family and the class had to continue, so women still bore the burden of biological and household reproduction.” The centrality of women’s oppression and autonomy of women’s struggles was so badly eroded that by the late 1920s, the Communist Party dissolved its Womens’ Bureau.
In our discussion, Karl explained that Wang Zheng, who’s writings about the Shanghai Women’s Federation we read for this week’s discussion, argues that “the Maoist feminist reliance on the state for women’s liberation is akin to white feminist reliance on the bourgeois state’s guaranteeing of their rights and freedoms.” The fragmentation of the women’s movement in the US today has disarmed women from resisting the misogynistic turn underway in the United States, just as in China, when the Maoist state became the Dengist state, and then the conservative capitalist state it is today, women had no organizational form of resistance to mobilize.
For us, a lesson can be read positively, about the centrality of women’s struggle to all-peoples’ liberation in the 1920s, and also negatively, about the importance of guarding the autonomy of oppressed peoples’ organizations and movements, and not subordinating them to the universal cause of state power.
Conclusion
In her comments concluding our discussion, Rebecca Karl called on us to take China seriously. She said, “Whatever the particularities of Chinese history, China is in the world and of the world, so it is incumbent on us to study and engage with Chinese history.” This is even moreso the case for Marxists and socialists who seek to end capitalism and replace it with modes of production that are in harmony with the ecological life of the planet, and with all the peoples who populate it. The discussion this week about Chinese socialist organization gave us a glimpse of what we today can learn from a century of Chinese revolutions.
I hope you’ll join us for the next class in our series on problems of socialist organization. Our sixth class will be the first one that leaps into something like the present, with a focus on “the revolution that didn’t happen” in the US of the 1960s and ’70s. Dianne Feeley, who wrote an article included in the syllabus about her experiences in the womens’ movement through the Socialist Workers’ Party, will be leading off discussion.
Find those readings and the registration link here: https://solidarity-us.org/socialist_organization_class_2025/
See you there!