Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:48:42 +0000
Subject: M-G: Godena stalinist apologist


> Date:          Fri, 7 Mar 1997 08:40:30 -0500 (EST)
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
> Subject:       M-I: "Dr" Bedggood,  Cracker-jack historian
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

> 
> Now,  I honestly don't know how Dave Bedggood manages to eke out his living,
> but if someone is paying him to teach history or even read it,  they should
> insist on some remedial courses for the good doctor.
> 
> He disapprovingly quotes EH Carr declaration that Trotsky only discovered
> his opposition to the KMT after the April 1927 disaster,  and goes on to
> "prove" his (Bedggood's) point by prolific quotes from Leon Trotsky -- ALL
> written AFTER April 1927!!  

Why don't you read my reply instead of skipping the bits that you 
dont agree with.

Point one:
 I proved my point against you that Trotsky did not 
vote to make Chiang Kai-shek an `honorary member of the comintern'. 
One down.

Point two:
Trotsky's calls to get the CCP out of the KMT began in print in April
1926, one month after the first Chiang `coup' not as Carr claims 
about the same time as the second Chiang `coup' April 1927. 
Two down.
 
Point Three:  
The Trotsky archive editors are the ones who document Trotsky's 
positions and timing on China. I explained that the reference in the 
1926 article that "approves" of a CCP-KMT ENTRY  not ALLIANCE is 
specific to the CP before 1925 while in a propaganda stage. For 
Trotskyists entrism is something very different from stalinist 
liquidation, which is what the Comintern `"Bloc-inside" amounted to.
Three down.

Point Four:
I would not take van de Ven (*From Friend to Comrade*, seriously 
given the near unaniity of Trotskyist and non-trotskyist historians 
who show that it was not the immaturity of the CCP as such but the 
active collaborationist bloc with the KMT which destroyed the 
revolution.  Van de Ven is a latter day menshevik whose method and 
arguments a circular and flawed. Here is a key example of his 
circular sociological reasoning. Referring to the cause of the defeat 
of the CCP by the KMT:
"The essential assumption of Brandt and Meisner, as well as those 
made by PRC historians, is that the CCP could have succeeded in 
defeating Chiang Kai-shek. A crucial element of the case is that 
Stalin prevented the CCP from building  an independent military 
force. ONE PROBLEM WITH THIS ARGUMENT IS THAT THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS 
DID NOT RAISE THE IDEA OF SETTING UP AN ARMY UNTIL 1927, WHEN IT WAS 
MUCH TOO LATE.  IT WAS NOT THAT THE CCP MEMBERS OPPOSED THE USE OF 
FORCE; MANY SERVED IN THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AS SOLDIERS OR 
POLITICAL COMMISSARS, AND THEY ORGANISED ARMED PICKETS AND PEASANT 
SELF-DEFENCE CORPS.  HOWEVER, ITS MEMBERS DID NOT CONCEIVE OF THE CCP 
AS AN ORGANISATION THAT SHOULD HAVE ITS OWN MILITARY APPARATUS."
(182)

I wonder why. It does not accur to the author or his brief, Godena, 
to ask why when the CCP was quite capable of engaging in organised 
military activity, they had not separate army.  The reason, is 
simple. It was a condition of the cominterns agreement of the CCP 
"bloc-inside" the KMT that is HAVE NO SEPARATE ARMY. That in fact its 
members serve in a common army.  This was precisely the whole point 
of the popular front,  to disarm the CCP and prevent it building its own 
indepenent revolutionary army which would have not 
only defended Shanghai from the thugs in Chaing's pay, but carried 
the revolution to the rest of China.  If you read the numerous other 
sources, including Chang Kuo-tao's Autobiography, you will find that, 
right from 1922, significant elements of the CCP resisted the 
Comintern liquidationist bloc.  At the time of the second Coup there 
was evidence of KMT troops sympathetic to the CCP.  KMT troops came 
over the the CCP after April 1927 during Stalin's ultra-left turn. So 
had the menshevik line of subordinating the proletariat and the poor 
peasantry to the reactionary bourgsoisie beeen overturned in the 
Cominitern by the Left opposition the revolution would have 
stood a fighting  chance. As it was the heroic CCP cadres had one 
hand tied behind their backs by the Comintern.

To conclude this point it is completely clear that  van de Ven's 
apologetic sociology is a revision of the revolutionary history of 
China masquerading as `new' empirical evidence of the weakness of the 
Chinese CCP.  This is the old familiar menshevik line, when a 
revolutionary fails because of a popular front betrayal,  blame the workers.  
At the time the Comintern blamed some of the CCP leaders for their own crime. 
Today,  Godena's  sophistication demands a bit of anthropology, a sprinkle of 
sociology, and a whole heap of  bourgeois formal logic, and comes up 
with guess what - blame the immaturity of the workers!
Four down!

Godena makes this point against himself:

> The catastrophe of April 1927 resulted from the Chinese Party's feeble
> organization and lack of a secure social foundation,  made worse by a lack
> of military back-up.   This is equally true of the Nanchang and Autumn
> Harvest uprisings later that year.   Anti-Marxists like Bedggood are always
> looking for "evil people" betraying, *ad finitum*,  heroic larger-than-life
> revolutionaries imbued with the Grand Truth of Revolution,  rather than
> looking the dynamics of the societies in which these "betrayals" occur.   It
> is a child-like view,  less becoming in squat,  aging "revolutionaries" like
> our good doctor but still enormously attractive to those still obsessed by
> the bogey of Josef Stalin.
> 
Well  I am now an aging, squat,  but child-like anti-marxist because I explain 
history in terms of "evil people".  You might have noticed that the 
dynamics which I point to in the Chinese revolution are class forces, 
not individuals. Class forces which underpinned the cominterns 
menshevik politics, and class forces that were reflected in 
differences in the CCP over the liquidationist policy.  On the 
contrary I have never claimed Stalin to be an `evil person'.  For Trotsky 
and Trotskyists stalinism is a class phenomenon, not a personality 
defect, though we can make allowances in Godena's case. . The only reference 
to Trotsky as an individual in my last post, is his single opposing vote 
to the admission of Chiang Kai-shek to the Comintern. The tables are 
turned, it was Stalin who personified politics.
Five  down!

Dave.



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