As we all know, the internet has virtues and vices. One of its virtues is that it allows ideas and information to be exchanged among people, often in different parts of the world, with an ease that would have been impossible in pre-internet days. So we, in the Socialist Party, can more readily than ever find out about other individuals or organisations who have come to similar conclusions to ours and share, or are close to sharing, our views on the system we live in and the need to replace it with a different kind of system. We are talking here about a society of free and equal access to all goods and services with no buying and selling or wages and salaries and with the technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy needs and not for profit-making ends. An example of such like-mindedness is to be found on the Facebook site called ‘A Group Where We Are All Active Against Capitalism’. It carries its own self-description:
’This group exists to support the abolition of the power of capital through the transformation of the means of production from private to social ownership. This will only be achieved by the working class emancipating ourselves world wide.The revolutionary reconstitution will also involve the ending of wage labour and all elements of capitalism as the global proletariat (the working class within capitalism) lays the basis for a sustainable future for humanity.That transition to a socialist/Communist/cooperative world will eliminate all the horrors associated with the Imperialist period including military conflicts and ecological destruction.The replacement for such barbarism will be a stateless, classless, moneyless society based on free association and production and distribution according to need.We are open to all individuals and organisations who are in broad agreement with that position. We actively seek to host contributions that are in accord with that position from any source.For the avoidance of doubt we will not carry posts that support any existing or proposed nation state.Neither will we carry posts supporting the historic or continuing theory and practice of state capitalist entities such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or similar regimes.Forward to an end to capitalism!’
It would be hard to find a closer likeness to our own position and aspirations. And this being the case, one might expect the posts on the site to be largely supportive of its objectives or at least asking honest questions of those. Yet this is by no means always what one finds. Rarely, in fact, do those posts contain clear mention of aspirations like the end of wage labour and ‘stateless, classless and moneyless’ social arrangements.
What is to be found on the whole are the kind of reformist calls for various improvements to what already exists that regularly come from those on the left who (mistakenly in our view) call themselves socialists or communists. So there are plenty of references to, for example, state ownership of industry, more ‘rights’ for workers, laws to favour trade unions, better health care, higher taxes for the rich, etc., etc. Calls, in other words, for more crumbs from the table, for a more benign form of capitalism. And mixed in with them we also often find support for, or defence of, states or regimes within capitalism that are somehow deemed to be ‘progressive’ (eg, Cuba, China, Vietnam). Any posts that challenge this tend to elicit the response that yes, in reality and ideally we want the same thing as you, but that’s likely to be a long way off and we need to improve things as much as possible ‘in the meantime’. So they are deaf to the obvious reality that if you put off the demand for socialism, you continue to put off socialism itself.
Maoist mythology
A prime example was to be found on that site in a recent post entitled ‘Is Maoism Marxist?’ and providing a link to an article written by Steve Leigh from a website called ‘A Marxist View of Current Events’. Leigh, who describes himself as ‘a member of Seattle Revolutionary Socialists and Firebrand, national organization of Marxists, 50 year socialist organizer’, begins by asking ‘What is our relationship to Maoism?’ and ‘What Maoist ideas, if any, have merit?’. He goes on to outline the history of Mao Zedong’s gradual rise to political prominence in China from the late 1920s onwards leading to his eventual takeover in the late 1940s and then authoritarian rule of the country till his death in 1976. Much of what the writer has to say actually makes good sense – for example that Maoism was a form of Stalinism which, via its economic policies, caused ‘widespread famines’ (the ‘Great Leap Forward’) and, in its oppression of those who were not held to be in conformity with Maoist doctrine, practised mass persecution and killings of its supposed enemies (the ‘Cultural Revolution’).
The writer also criticises Mao and Maoism for putting forward the idea that ‘socialism’ can be developed and achieved in a single country and has to be imposed on workers by a revolutionary leadership rather than workers establishing it democratically themselves. But he then goes hopelessly awry in declaring that ‘the Chinese revolution had many positive aspects to it’ (tell that to its millions of victims) and that ‘all of these things are towering historical accomplishments’. Clearly some of the mythology of China under Mao being in some sense positive and having something to do with socialism has stuck with Steve Leigh, as it has with many others on the Left.
The reality is that, rhetoric apart, China under Mao and subsequent regimes have been anti-socialist dictatorships bearing no relation whatever to the society of voluntary cooperation, democratic organisation and economic equality via free access to all goods and services which the Socialist Party stands for and consistently advocates and that the website which gives access to this article declares that it too endorses. So why, one might ask, does such a website, which says it will not carry ‘posts supporting the historic or continuing theory and practice of state capitalist entities such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China or similar regimes’ give a platform to articles like this. Of course, a free exchange of ideas from all sides is entirely desirable, but why carry without any attempt at response ideas or material that do nothing to promote – and indeed even contradict – the aspirations it claims to stand for?
Howard Moss
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