The Anti-Imperialism of Fools: How Rooting for China is Voting for Democrats on A Global Scale
Class struggle, the struggle for production and scientific experiment are the three great revolutionary movements for building a mighty socialist country. These movements are a sure guarantee that communists will be free from bureaucracy and immune against revisionism and dogmatism, and will forever remain invincible. They are a reliable guarantee that the proletariat will be able to unite with the broad working masses and realize a democratic dictatorship. If in the absence of these movements, the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and monsters of all kinds were allowed to crawl out, while our cadres were to shut their eyes to all this and in many cases fail even to differentiate between the enemy and ourselves but were to collaborate with the enemy and were corrupted, divided and demoralized by him, if our cadres were thus pulled out or the enemy were able to sneak in, and if many of our workers, peasants and intellectuals were left defenseless against both the soft and the hard tactics of the enemy, then it would not take long, perhaps only several years or a decade, or several decades at most, before a counter-revolutionary restoration on a national scale inevitably occurred, the Marxist-Leninist party would undoubtedly become a revisionist party or fascist party, and the whole of China would change its colour. — Mao Zedong
It is heartening to see that the overwhelming majority of the American Left (by left I’m referring to the revolutionary Communist movement) has the simple common sense to realize that voting for and working for the neoliberal wing of the bourgeois apparatus (the Democratic Party) is treason to the cause that we work for. Yes, we have a common cause, despite sectarian hairsplitting — those who are Communists in the United States all struggle for the ending of exploitation, the defeat of Yankee imperialism. We realize that this will not come about at the ballot box, but through armed force and armed force only. Good. Now, of course, we also should realize that there are those who traffick in Communist rhetoric and play havoc with the words of our predecessors to justify their right opportunism. This piece will deal with the right opportunists — those who resurrect the already defeated trends from our history to justify their own cynicism, lack of belief in the masses, and the fact that all who are exploited desire revolution. The right opportunists, despite their constant cries of “anti-China chauvinism”, “sinophobia”, and meaningless lip service to the contributions of Mao Zedong to our revolutionary treasury, are the real chauvinists, glossing over the universal contributions of the socialist period in the PRC and turning Mao into a zombie much like their counterparts in the modern day Chinese “Communist Party”.
Revisionism and right opportunism are bourgeois ideology in the Communist movement. Both Lenin and Mao led sharp struggles against the revisionists in their respective parties. One of Mao’s errors was not struggling against the centrism of Zhou Enlai and thus allowing him to bring the “number 2 capitalist roader”, Deng Xiaoping, back to power. Deng, the man who Mao criticized as not knowing the difference between imperialism and Marxism-Leninism, was brought back to power during an ebb in the Cultural Revolution, when the USSR was declared to be “enemy number one” and the rapprochement with the US (again, brokered by centrists and rightists) led to immense betrayals of the revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America, the withdrawal of support from the reconstituted Communist Party of the Philippines, the disheartening images of Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing shaking hands with the Marcoses and Nixons of the world, and confusion in the ranks of revolutionaries in the First World who saw China as a guide. This shows the need for revolutionary parties to develop their own analysis and not look for great patrons across the world — hard geopolitics and rightists’ realpolitik do not take into consideration the lines of small groups in the West.
It is a revisionist individual and a revisionist Party that would claim that China is a progressive force in the world today. Maoists are used to revisionists and rightists crowing about Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist backslide “lifting millions out of poverty”, which is a testament to their own economism. They, like their twins, bourgeois analysts who also praise the “Chinese miracle”, are obsessed with numbers, figures, and material goods. Look! This Chinese factory distributed cars to all the workers for National Day! It’s no surprise that these charlatans are also usually the same who admin groups such as “fully automated luxury communism” — the welfare of the workers of the world and, more importantly, their control of the State and the Party and the struggle for the socialist road never cross their mind. Their support for the Third World and its revolutions is abstract. They’ll share pictures of armed Filipino, Indian and Turkish Maoists, and rip words from Fred Hampton’s dearly departed mouth, but in true charlatan fashion, ignore their analysis of revisionism when it’s inconvenient or contradictory to the ideas they’ve conjured up in their heads. They do not understand dialectical materialism despite them using the term as a sort of magic spell to ward off “ultras”, anarchists, and others that pop their little bubble. For the revisionists, these social democrats that think the hammer and sickle looks nice, there is an unbroken line of continuity between socialist China and today’s China of the forced abduction of true Maoists, the looting and debt slavery of Africa, the continued attempts to take Filipinos’ land, and the myriad of outright imperialist shit that is going down. To them, it is impossible for a good thing to transform into a bad thing. They mock the social democrats, but are blissfully unaware of the fact that their “lifting people out of poverty” nonsense is the exact same shit on the international arena.
The revisionists are also toothless, and self-important. China can defend itself, it is a nuclear power, with the largest army on Earth. The US is a wet paper tiger, and even bourgeois analysts predict that this will be the Chinese century. China does not need the Western revisionists to defend it, or to enable its looting of the world. Its army and corporations do that well enough. I doubt that they are convinced that their silliness is a defense, rather, they seek to feel important and support something. It’s geopolitical cheerleading, nothing more. The revisionists who cape for China are the same that call revolutionaries at home “ultras” and in many cases function as peace police. Why? Because they’re afraid of revolution. Revisionism is bourgeois ideology, and bourgeois ideology doesn’t make allowances for revolution. Revolution is for ultras only, the revisionists choose to “settle” for China just like the social democrats “settle” for Biden. Two sides of the same piss-stained coin. The social-democrats see the rioters in the streets as “ultras” and turn them over to the police, the revisionists see Maoists, anarchists and others who reject their nonsensical defense of capitalism as “ultras” and seek to throw the highest stage humanity has ever reached, the Cultural Revolution, into the garbage can of history as being made by “foolish ultras”. Let’s see who history will absolve.
