Brandon Lightly on the Mass LIne and New Democracy, Part 2

In part two of our deep dive into China (and part four of our socialist organization series), we break down how Mao attempted to dialectically sublate a national front and a united front. We explore the structural inclusion of the "patriotic national bourgeoisie" into the block of four classes (symbolized by the stars on the Chinese flag) and contrast it with classical Soviet developmental theory and orthodox Marxism.

We also dive into:
- The historical debate between Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Lenin, and Trotsky.
- Why modern "Hoxhaists" and Left Communists consider New Democracy to be revisionist.
- The evolution of class structures under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" doctrine (allowing billionaires into the Party).
- The reality of modern China's development: Is it a transitioning socialist project, or an hyper-competent form of state capitalism and developmental liberalism?

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for Episode 5, where we pivot to National Frontism and National Bolshevism.

Journal Articles

Dirlik, A. (1970). The ideological foundations of the Chinese Revolution. Journal of Contemporary History, 5(3), 39–54.
Dittmer, L. (1977). Line struggle: Notes on its organizational context and theoretical development. Modern China, 3(3), 303–312.
Fogel, J. A. (1980). Ai Siqi, establishment intellectual by Joshua A. Fogel. Modern China, 6(1), 23–47.
Hammond, E. R. (1978). Marxism and the mass line [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Korolev, A. (2017). De-ideologized mass line, regime responsiveness, and state-society relations. China Review, 17(2), 7–36.
Lyman, S. V. (1970). The Chinese Communist Party in the United Front, 1937–1945 [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Mazur, M. G. (1995). The United Front of the 1940s: A social and cultural perspective. Modern China, 21(4), 431–456.
Selden, M. (1971). The Yenan Way in revolutionary China. The China Quarterly, (45), 263–294.
Steiner, H. A. (1951). Current mass line tactics in Communist China. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 277(1), 422–436.
Teiwes, F. C. (1978). The origins of rectification: Inner-party purgation in the 1930s. The China Quarterly, (74), 181–201.
Tokuda, N. (1971). The mass line during the Yenan period. The China Quarterly, (47), 1–18.
Townsend, J. R. (1967). Political participation in Communist China. University of California Press.
Womack, B. (1980). The phase of de-Maoization in China. China Report, 16(1), 7–21.
Womack, B. (1991). Mao Zedong and the sinification of Marxism. The China Quarterly, (126), 1–15.
Young, G. (1980). On New Democracy and the transition to socialism. Modern China, 6(1), 3–22.

Books & Primary Sources

Coble, P. M. (2023). The collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek lost China’s civil war. Cambridge University Press.
Elbaum, M. (2018). Revolution in the air: Sixties radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. Verso Books.
Hirata, K. (2024). Making Mao’s steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the transnational origins of Chinese socialism. Cambridge University Press.
Karl, R. E. (2010). Mao Zedong and China in the twentieth-century world: A concise history. Duke University Press.
Li, H. (2024). Fighting on the cultural front: U.S.-China relations in the Cold War. Columbia University Press.
Lin, C. (2019). Mass line. In C. Sorace, I. Franceschini, & N. Loubere (Eds.), Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political concepts from Mao to Xi (p. 122). ANU Press.
Lovell, J. (2019). Maoism: A global history. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Lowe, D. M. (1966). The function of "China" in Marx, Lenin, and Mao. University of California Press.
Mao, Z. (1940). On New Democracy. Marxists Internet Archive.
Mao, Z. (1977). A critique of Soviet economics. Monthly Review Press.
Moufawad-Paul, J. (2016). Continuity and rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist terrain. Zero Books.
Schram, S. R. (Ed.). (2005). Mao’s road to power: Revolutionary writings 1912–1949: Vol. VII. New Democracy, 1939–1941. M.E. Sharpe.
Zheng, Q. (Ed.). (2020). An ideological history of the Communist Party of China (Vol. 2) (L. Sun & S. Bryant, Trans.). Royal Collins Publishing Group.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Welcome And Series Roadmap

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varmblog. And I'm back with Brandon Lightly, and we're gonna be doing probably this is part two in the series on China, part four in our overall series on socialist organization. And I suspect there'll be one more in China before we even get to the national front because today we are time limited. So we're talking about new democracy today, and I think this is the most controversial part of Maoism, but I'm also gonna say I think it is Mao's attempt to dialectically sublate a national front and a united front, as well as deal with the two different theories in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, of which he was not a key member, between Chin Ju Xu and what's his face? And the reason why I bring it up because it does feel like to me, maybe controversially, that uh yeah, excuse me, Lee Das Howe, who's always the one I forget because he dies so early. But Lee Das Howe is where we get the idea of proletarian national identity, which has the unfortunate thing of being developed exactly concurrently to Mussolini doing the same thing in fascism. So by the time you get to 1940, Mao can't do that, but Mao also has to make the distinction between himself and uh Chindushu because Chindushu has a been been forced to take the fall for the KMT, b, by this time he's been deemed a Trotskyist, which he kind of wasn't, and three by this time as well, he has become a classical, almost second international Marxist, believing that they the Chinese revolution has gotten into a problem by prematurely having a revolution. He almost sounds like Kotsky, but prematurely having a revolution and not developing its its capitalist forces first, thus getting go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

It reminds me of I think was it Plakanov who was like, We aren't ready for this, and then Lenin essentially having to be like, Yeah, but it's happening. I feel like that was very it's very similar to that debate that was happening.

C. Derick Varn 3:41

Plakanov and Lenin

Why New Democracy Sparks Fights

C. Derick Varn 3:42

had a similar debate, and then although Plakanov really wasn't alive to finish the debate, and then Kotsky and Trotsky, that's not confusing at all, as proxies basically for Plakanov and Lenin, uh, have the debate again in a text that eventually gets called on terrorism, which is very confusing, or on terror, excuse me, not terrorism. The argument was that having to do state capitalism, which by the way, Lenin did endorse as a periodization, would would be so brutal that it would lead to all kinds of backlashes. And Trotsky took the opposite side of that. Um I actually find new democracy interesting because A, it comes out before the PRC is really established, so it's it's long doctrine, even though some Maoists do reject it, it's actually kind of hard to argue about how they reject it. And two, it's it feels like it really does feel like the compromise position between the Chinjusu position and and the Li Do Zhao position. I don't know how to say that name exactly. I'm bad at opinion.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Uh go ahead. Yeah, I feel like the uh for me at least, working through New Democracy, it was fascinating. Specifically, it's at least I was finding connection points to the Boxer Rebellion, and then like I I mean the the the questionable thing, the controversial aspect of new democracy is the inclusion of the national bourgeoisie or the patriotic bourgeoisie. And like that that like lends itself to a question: is this like a thing? Is this a phenomenon that actually exists? And I feel like you can actually point to a couple different examples uh that go the other way. Uh, you can point to Italy, you can point to Germany after Versailles and everything, and this this denigration, this collapse of a national bourgeoisie, and this like national resentment that grows. You can also see it in Spain, uh in like the Catalonia

The Patriotic Bourgeoisie Question

SPEAKER_00 6:04

regions, as Britain is expanding out its textile trade and just destroying in Spain before the Second Republic. Like a lot of people don't realize this. This is like a little bit of a side tangent, but a lot of the revolutionary sentiment in Catalonia that a lot of anarchists will point to during the Spanish Civil War, that is birthed out of a bourgeois aversion to British imperialism that was happening in Spain at the time because it was like the textile industry was centered around Barcelona and Cat Barcelona and Catalonia, and the textile industry was being destroyed there. And the decolonization movement. So, like these text the Spanish Empire had this whole thing, they were selling essentially to their colonies in order to like like keep profits somewhat up, but this was all being destroyed by like British imperial, British neocolonialism. And so, like, there's this weird tension that I feel like that existed all across Europe, uh, especially in these like semi-periphery states, like states that were essentially beaten at by some point by France or by Britain, by what became the capitalist empires of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. And China experienced that in a way after the Boxer Rebellion because they had to pay, they had to remunerate all of like all eight countries, I think they declared war on. And so I all of this to say is that this idea of like a national patriotic bourgeoisie isn't as far-fetched as like I think a lot of people might realize, even if I think it's still questionable to include them as a revolutionary class.

C. Derick Varn 7:32

Well, I mean, to me, they're a revolutionary class when you have a national liberation revolution and you establish a bourgeois state, which Chen Du Shu would have said. The problem that that I have is this takes the the linen idea of state capitalism as a as a necessary means to develop a capitalist revolution didn't happen in and an imperialized nation, or are in a butcher also itself an empire. That's another thing about China that complicates this. National liberation in China was not just national liberation of the Han, and so you have this re you have this tension going all the way back to Sun Yat-sen's like soft socialism and the and the and the left side of the of the Guamindong, the KMT, because you had two variant kinds of nationalism in the KMT. You have Han nationalism, you have Sun Yat-sen's nationalism of five nations, which is basically a plural nationalism. I find it very funny that Americans have such a hard time with discussing plural nationalism since we are a plural national country. Like just like we're already that, you idiots. And the five categories get expanded, but like the the Uyghurs are explicitly mentioned, as are the Tibetans, as are I forget all the groups, like the Toys and E's, etc. etc. etc. So Chindushu is basically parroting traditional Marxism. Lenin is saying, like, oh no, we have to have this anti-imperial stuff, but Lenin never, ever argued that you should put the national bourgeoisie into anything. In fact, yeah, his argument was that the state should step in, you know, in a way that make Plakonov roll in his grave, but the state should step in and do that development instead of the bourgeoisie, and that's not what happened in China, and this is a difference between the USSR and China. But let's I do think we have to talk about traditional you know, Marxist conceptions because there's when we talk about the block of war classes, there's some interesting weird stuff in the block of war classes. Traditional Marxist theory implies pretty strict historical stages, rentier society or aka feudalism, at least in Europe, if we can put a fork in that because Marx does seem to imply that if it happens in Europe, other places like Russia can skip it. But even there, people will sometimes read that as like, Whoa, he's saying that you didn't have to go to capitalism. No, he's saying that like the peasant communes could be a basis for workers' communes it because they can join up with the benefits of Western capitalism later. That's that's the Varis Asulik letters implication in the various drafts, of which it go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

Oh, a lot of people misconstrue that to be like we can just skip this stuff, or this can this is actually the vanguard. And I don't think that's at all what Marx is saying.

C. Derick Varn 10:57

No, I mean, well, it's just like how Maoice will say sometimes Maoist believes the lumpen should be the vanguard, and I'm like, they're not even in the black of four classes, yeah. They're actually a third thing called the non-hostile class group. The idea of brainwashing, which is a misconstrued idea, actually comes from the re-education of the lump in to proletarianize them.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

From what I understand, I feel like it's the I do feel like it was the Black Panther Party that really, or no, it might have actually been Peru, but sexual Marxist that actually like leaned in on the lumpin.

C. Derick Varn 11:34

Yeah, well, the the only theoretical writings I can think that started doing it early, and by early, I still mean you're looking at the 60s, yeah, yeah, is Eldritch Cleaver because it wasn't even the majority position in the Panthers, the majority position in the Panthers was that you could work with the lumpens, you could work with street gangs. I think it's the young kings that are the but that led to some problems later on, which are not were never directly tied to the Panthers, but their origins are actually in a group that was inspired by this Panther lumpin' idea. The other thing is like you have all this incorporation lumping in this thing's like the Fark in Colombia, and we know exactly how that it went the exact same way. Yeah, they basically just become narco gangs.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 12:21

And I know I I'm gonna get heat in the comments, but but I'm not saying everyone involved became that, but that is primarily what they ended up being.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Yeah, that is the trajectory of the movement itself.

C. Derick Varn 12:35

So let's get into this. So traditional Marxism, particularly of the second international variety, though, which didn't even acknowledge a Cesulik letter, so we can bracket that out. Says feudalism must be and early modern imperialism must be overthrown by a rising capitalist class and a bourgeois democratic revolution that also is usually a national liberation revolution or a national consolidation revolution, depending on where you're at and what relationship you have to empire, which builds up the industrial productive forces enough to the working class can grow strong enough to overthrow the capitalist in a socialist revolution. There is a distinct problem that that, like, that's actually some not happen anywhere. Mao sat down and decided that they needed this needed to be revised, which is why I love the fact that we call the stuff about Stalin the anti-revisionist debate. Because I'm like, no, they were explicitly revising Marxism, like not even not it wasn't even hidden. It's weird now that people will try to claim this is like straight up classical orthodox Marxism, but like the Maoists did not initially think so. So like they knew what they were doing. So they they you know, Mao and the Pull-Up Bewer changed the sequence into late developing capitalism, colonialized cap excuse me, late developing nation states, colonialized nation states, and semi-colonialized nations. Eventually, this is going to be the basis for the misunderstanding that leads to three world theory.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 14:20

Although when I tell people that when I remind people what the three worlds were, they're often like, what? And I'm like, Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't map on to this actually.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

And to be clear, three worlds is different than third worldism, of which there are two different types of third worldism, at least two different types of third worldism.

C. Derick Varn 14:35

Yes, one I am sympathetic to, one I think is objectively insane. So like so, like, okay, so I am willing to give Mao the benefit of the doubt. I'm also willing to say that this is where there are certain problems that piss Maoist off today. When someone like Black Redguard says, Hey, we're the mark, we're the anarchists of Marxism. Because I'm like, Well, they are though, and people are like, Oh no, they're we're not anarchists. I'm like, I'll get to it because it shows up in a block of four classes. It's not about the state, it's not that is not the issue where they rhyme with with the anarchist.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Um I'm excited for this.

C. Derick Varn 15:20

Yeah, so so the domestic national bourgeoisie, according to Mao, and the colonial and semi-colonial countries are too weak, fragmented, and dependent on foreign imperial powers to rage a successful independent democratic revolution against feudalism, which I find interesting because I'm like, but they're not even fighting feudalism, they're fighting imperialism, and Mao thus flips the order of operations. All Marxists, except for the right wing of the second international. So after the second international, all Marxists basically believed that imperialism is bad. That that comes with Lenin. It's also the majority position in the second international until World War I. But there were pro-imperial socialists in the second international.

Nationalism In China Isn’t One Thing

C. Derick Varn 16:07

I want to be very clear on that. Yeah, that was not Kotsky or Bernstein, it was people to the right of them.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

It's go ahead, it's fascinating to me that like that this is like framed as a like anti-feudal method that does, in fact, then incorporate landlords, not into like leadership positions, but like landlords are just explicitly a part of some of the areas that are like run by the party, at least during the Japanese invasion, to the point that there were landlords who would move from the KMT areas because they didn't like the KMT areas a lot, into some of the communist run areas.

C. Derick Varn 16:43

So, yeah, so that whole thing about Mao killing landlords, they did do that. Yeah, that was the only class they were really brutal with, but they also worked with them depending on the time period that we're talking about. Okay, so the solution is the working class and the peasantry or organized through the vanguard communist party would step in and lead the bourgeois democratic revolution themselves, but with the bourgeois as part of the coalition, that is the difference between new democracy and classical Soviet developmental theory, and I do think it needs to be pointed out that that is a difference, like because while Lenin thought that they had to do the capitalist development, and you that there's a big debate, you know, in the 1930s about whether or not they achieved that. The end of the NEP is partially based off that. It can't be said to be completely true. Another thing I'm gonna actually talk about is when we talk about like China now, this block of four classes no longer just includes the the patriotic bourgeoisie, it includes all bourgeoisies.

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Yeah, I there are like this.

C. Derick Varn 17:56

Is how you can have billionaires who are a part of the party, which is they're not a major part of the party, but they're a part of the party. Also, it's how you have you can justify a country that is communist that has more billionaires than the United States does.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Yes, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 18:12

We don't have they don't have as many of the super duper rich as the United States does, but yeah, and they can definitely discipline them better, to be clear.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Yeah, but we used to do that too. Exactly. This is a bit of a side tangent. This is actually one of my one of my actual like fears about China as it exists right now, is that like its hyper progress, the increase of its living standards, the reintroduction of certain reforms that she's been doing, especially in the rural countryside, is not necessarily a part of a like socialist project, but is just China really just embracing the 20th century developmental liberalism that the United States in the general West has completely abandoned at this point. And so it's like, oh, we're looking at what this is China's Fordism. And so will there be a thing that comes after China's Fordism?

C. Derick Varn 18:59

Yeah, I've actually said that. I'm like, it's not, I'm like, it's basically the development, it's not even European social democracy, it's basically a step above Fordism. Um, and the other difference is they don't want to generate domestic demand, and we can talk about like that's a different problem, but it actually is a problem. It's one of the the the the pro-China MMTers are always baffled by this.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

So that was a side tangent, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 19:28

Yeah, to the state with new democracy a bit. The resulting state would not be a capitalist democracy, which Mao, of course, termed old democracy, nor would it be a Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat or a dictatorship of the proletariat and peasant, depending on which type period we're talking about, it would be a joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes as an acting step towards socialism, basically achieving a a uh a united front, but as a joint dictatorship, which I think to use a term from William Bullman, who was not a communist at all, but pours acid on the classical definition of communism because I'm like, not only is that class collaborationist, that's not a dictatorship of the proletariat, that's a national dictatorship. Um, let's talk about who's in the the black afford classes because it's also, and this is where I talk about the anarchist stuff, gonna get really interesting. So visually uh immortalized by the four small stars on the flag. That's why there's four stars.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yep, the big one is the party, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 20:46

The big one is the party, and then the four stars are the the the various classes. By the way, there

The Block Of Four Classes

C. Derick Varn 20:52

is weird symbolism to all these AS countries, and like the two that get defended a lot, Juice and uh and the PRC, and I have a lot of good things to say about the PRC. I'm a defensiveist against it against liberals for the most part, but like I'm always like, there's always classes on these signs that tell you that they've accepted classes that were not part of the Marxist thing, and I find it interesting that this is like not dealt with. I mean, this is where Dominico Lacerdo and all that stuff comes in, but I just actually think that ends up being more than a little bit problematic. So Mal argued that because for foreign imperialism and rule and rural backwardsness, I'm not gonna say feudalism because it's not really what we're dealing with, actually. Yeah, oppressed a broad swath of society, a united front can be formed amongst the key progressive groups, and they would jointly serve in the dictatorship. So there's the proletariat, which is the industrial working class, which is the ideological and leading force, there's the peasantry, which are the rural agricultural population, and that was the main base of the of the of the CPC, which was acting as a primary physical engine of the revolution through agrarian land reform and through you know being most of the people who actually fought. Uh, I will remind people, however, that Mal thought that the peasantry was the most revolutionary force, even though they weren't supposed to be in charge of things of communism. There are the urban petit bourgeois, not the rural petite bourgeois, small business owners, artisans, intellectuals. They include students in this, which I am always like I don't know how that works.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Like, okay, this actually answers a question that I've had about like being called petite bourgeois before. Like when I was in college. I was like, oh, okay, this actually makes sense now. All right. This is where this is the ideological tradition you're pulling from.

C. Derick Varn 22:56

Right. Well, it's the everyone I don't like is petite bourgeois. Artisans and small business owners are petit bourgeois. Yes. Intellectuals are more difficult depending on the structure of your society.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

So, like the individual I was about to say, like in China, like the intellectual, like that is a class. Like the intellectual. Except maybe like priests, but I don't that it's not even true today. It was like at one point, I guess you could point at the church as maybe a semi-intellectual class, but even then they were more reaction, like it's more of a reactionary element than at least it's I'm not sure the intellectuals weren't reactionary because this is one of the problems that come up in the Cultural Revolution. That's that's a good way.

C. Derick Varn 23:41

Like that's a specific subset of the urban petite bourgeoisie that Mao feels like they have to deal with. Whereas the national bourgeoisie were generally middle market domestic capitalists who were pissed off at foreign monopolies and bureaucratic capitalism, which were elites tied to either the Chin dynasty or to foreign powers. Because I'm not one of those people who thinks we can limit Marxism to what was said by Marx, but it is not part of orthodox Marxism. It gets added later because of specific conditions in Asia. But I get real fun, I get laugh like hell when people start talking about applying that category to the United States. I'm like, they're all comfort door. Yeah. I will say that when you also remember that Mao thought this only made sense in colonized and semi-colonized nations, not even late developing ones. This is slightly more defensible.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Yeah, this is the thing you always have to give Mao is that like at no point was Mao like this is the worldwide tradition that we need to embrace, especially the United States needs to embrace this framework, is never a thing that was uttered by Mao.

C. Derick Varn 25:35

But I actually do think that that the popular front, and then in the 60s, Americans trying to approximate the block of four classes in the developed world is where the ability of left populism and Marxism to merge emerges from.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

That's a good point.

C. Derick Varn 25:57

This was something that I almost put in my book with Daniel Putin and decided that like it would it would be longer to prove this than the you know 80 to 90 page book that we wrote. So I was like, okay, well, I'll come back to this later. It is like a footnote. So let's talk about this political and economic features in practice, and this is where things get a little even more weird. But the the idea, the reason why I say that like Maoism has a an almost anarchistic core is perdon, the mutualists, the magonists don't do this, but the the sapadas and and the sapista of the zapatistas original edition, although actually the modern edition also does this, actually, sees the peasantry as the most revolutionary part of society of society. Communizers will often talk about that. The problem that you have though is in Europe the peasantry was reactionary as fuck. And like you make who who's the war in the Von Day and the French Revolution fought against, it's not aristocrats, left. Yeah, and this was something that Bukhar and even defended. Like you would talk about like the reason why the peasants were reactionary is because they were rightly mad at the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie was lead was leading the liberal revolution, so they'd identify the king as a counterforce to that. And I'm like, well, historically, though, that's what peasants' revolts have always done is rebote against local lords and local governmental authorities by appealing to the king, and they normally get fucked.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

That's literally what the German like Engels wrote about it, but like, and I don't think Engels was 100% right. I think he glorified it a little bit, but like the German peasants' revolt was this as well. It was literally the exact same thing, and people will point to it as a potentially revolutionary action, but then you actually look at the things that were written, and it's like hyper patriarchal. It was like we need to establish a new king. Like a lot of them were like, we just need to like appeal to the king. A lot of other ones were like, we just need to get a new king. A lot of other ones were just like it's there's not there's not that's not the case that they were hyper revolutionary.

C. Derick Varn 28:14

They are pushing for different conditions, they're not pushing for a fundamental change in society, yeah. And we're not saying that that you know they shouldn't push for different conditions. I mean, my god, those conditions sucked, but like nonetheless. So the other thing Mao does is you start getting some of the first writings on culture outside of the USSR here are you know, so you had the pro-cult debates and the debates

New Democracy Meets Modern China

C. Derick Varn 28:42

about communist aesthetics and then the social realism debate. But this is actually kind of very different because Mal talks talking about the need for national scientific and mass cultures, and those are not the same thing for him. It's a whole section of that essay, but that one needed to purge foreign imperial influence and old feudal superstitions altogether, which is part of why the irony about post-Zi Min love of Confucianism and the claim that a 2,000 years of Confucianism was necessary to make China the most substitute for communism are essentially Chinese rightist claims, and Westerners don't understand the context and thus like will sometimes parrot them uh without realism was oh no, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Go ahead. I'm saying like Confucianism was so unpopular that even before like the communists came around, there were a lot of like intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie and members of the proletariat who are like, we need to we need to fucking do something about this. I mean even before uh the warlord period, I think. Was it before the warlord period?

C. Derick Varn 29:52

Confucianism Confucianism was so was so maligned in Korea, which is obvious uh which in some ways is more Confucian than China, even though Confucianism is a Chinese religio-philosophical ideology. But Korean neo-Confucianism is even stricter than any form of Chinese Confucianism, and but it was so unpopular that like that's why there is mass defections in the north to Christianity before there are mass defections in communism.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

But anyway, so that claim is funny to me, and it's coming back, it's coming back.

C. Derick Varn 30:28

I don't I don't know what social media algorithm you're on, but I've seen a lot like in the last like two weeks, even I've just seen like a mass of just thinking about this dipshit American communists not even realizing that they're picking sides with Han nationalists against the fucking G government because they don't understand what they're reading, even though it's being said in English, because they're just that they're like they don't get the the argument really. And I'm like, yeah, god, this is what happens when you're politicized by fucking memes, instead of either learning our material conditions, although arguably material conditions are why the means are popular, but anyway. Um democracy was supposed to be a temporary conditional phase by 1956. The CPC determined that the immediate goals of consolidation, basic land redistribution, and economic stabilization have been met. The state transition to socialist transformation, which was supposedly finished in 1982, although you still hear it brought up today. I say supposedly finished because it's in the China, the Chinese Constitution, which I do think people should read. But then I read Pulit Bureau statements by everybody but Dung after that, and they're all claiming we're still going through socialist transformation and building the necessary preconditions for full socialism. So, yeah, the other thing that you see with with with the Soviets were often likely to change definitions so they could declare that they reach stuff faster. The the Chinese tend to like, oh, it's protracted people's war. We can fight this for a hundred years, and you know, it might be a millennium before we achieve full communism or whatever. Like, this is this is Chinese tactic, which I've always been a little bit you know, for all the good stuff we said about Mao last time, this is where you're gonna hear me go, like, mmm. I am for a strategy of patience, but that patience should not be millennial.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Yeah. Anyway, so I do wonder how much because three worlds theory was also like explicitly developed around the same time that like new democracy was supposed to have been like we did it, we did, we've achieved it. And the Sino-Soviet split is like actively, depending on where you like put the like last the final like like pin in the coffin. I feel like a Sino-Soviet split is actively like happening at this point, and I'm genuinely curious how much of like this new democracy framework is almost a shoring up, it's like a shoring up of resources, becoming a little bit more like socialism in one country-esque, even though, or new democracy in one country. I I don't know because China was never correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think China was ever as big about exporting the revolution as even the Soviet Union was during its revision period.

C. Derick Varn 33:31

They have never been big on exporting the revolution. Part of that I think has to do with Campuchia or Cambodia. Oh, because that's one of the few times they tried to export it. But the other the other thing is like basically after the common turns disbanded, and also because the Chinese are rightfully bitter that the KMT were chosen to represent the Chinese nation in the Comintern and not the actual Communist Party, yeah. Which that doesn't remain true forever, but it's in the beginning. Uh, there's a strong bitterness towards that, and I think you see this today, and like the Chinese belief that national determination trumps basically the expanding the revolution, which I've always said that you know, they might have argued that like Stalin might have argued for socialism in one country off of Bukharin, but I don't actually think that he really believed that it was possible forever, given that he did try to expand communism. Yeah, the Chinese might actually, because their their foreign policy in the 70s, in particular, the end of the collective period and the cultural revolution and all that is almost impossible to explain if you think you need an international to make this viable. Totally. But anyway, so let's talk about this. So the so we mentioned the four classes, the peasantry is the most revolutionary, the proletariats are who can actually run communism. The peasantry is basically encouraged to slowly self-abolish, which to be fair, they mostly have done, not entirely, and the Chinese peasantry is still pretty large and still pretty poor. But Xi's like popularity in China was that's like I've told people is sincere. It's because unlike even Hu Jintao, who said they were going to finally bring some social democratic reforms into China, Xi at least did it for the peasantry reversing Sung of Dung's liberalization, and that doesn't get talked a lot about, but that's part of reasons why like I've had people who hate Dung, like Dong Ping Han, you know, come on and play Zhi, is because the the reversal of the extent of liberalization in the countryside. But I like you often sometimes think that's just establishing like early United States levels of maybe more than that, but like like it's still crazy, for example, how privatized the Chinese healthcare system is. Yeah, you know, they find until like 2021 it was as privatized as the United States. Now it's slightly better if you're really poor. But yeah. So where does this show up? Well, the United Fronts never formally abandoned, and believe it or not, this four block of four classes is manifested in things like the eight democratic parties that are approved to have lower coalitionary roles in the government. They can't run a government, but they can have some form of coalition. There's also something that I think would make Mao really deeply angry, which is or definitely Marx Marx would be furious about this. The CPPCC in English, uh, I don't know what the hell it'll be in Chinese, which is Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference,

The United Front After Victory

C. Derick Varn 37:09

which is basically the business federations. Yes, China has business federations and civic groups, the equivalent to NGOs in our society, all get together and they have a consultative conference to work with the party so that the party maintains a balance with non-communist technocrats and private sector leaders to keep them on board.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

I think there's a lot of people, even like liberal political scientists included, who try to like make like a hard separation between like the Mao period and then Dung and then Xi. And the problem with this is that like what you're describing right here is kind of what was set up in Shanghai when the communists first came in, just because they didn't have the resources to fully manage these like large businesses. And so what they did is they set like they literally set up like a proto-version of these councils of these business interests, worker interests, like they had worker interests involved as well, but it was essentially these like this consultative council that would then like work with the party to make sure taxes were being paid, that like people weren't being like hired under the table and stuff like that. But it was it was a it was like two independent groups as like a collaborative relationship almost. Yeah, and that was going back to Mao, so it's hard to like it's hard to make these like distinctive lines in a lot of that a lot of at least American people American like academics try to make.

C. Derick Varn 38:39

But I will say it makes sense why my hojaists consider Maoist revisionist when you think about yes, yes, like 100%. For those of you who don't know, hojaists are the super Stalinists, like they considered they considered uh you know, it's the Albanians, they considered the the USSR to be revisionists after Khrushchev and the secret siege, but they also considered Mao to be revisionist because they're like, What's all this other crap you're incorporating? It has nothing to do with with anything even Stalin said, What's up with you? And so if you ever wonder why Hojus get all mad at Maoist, this is why. Even though they both hated Trotskyist and the Soviet Union. I I get the feeling that weirdly everybody hated the Soviet Union after 1952, which it which makes the current Lacerdo Rock Hill thing where they're trying to like they're trying to focus on like you know the CAA messing with Western academics, like so interesting. I bring this up a lot, but it really does interest me because it feels like we are trying to make the Sino-Soviet split go away. I talked about this in Carlos Garitas Garrito's book back when before Minbuster Mars was part of the HTP and you know a lot of Marxist Linus took them seriously. And I was like, he's like saying we should support the USSR and Vietnam and Cambodia. You can't.

SPEAKER_00 40:05

Yeah, you can't do that. That's not how that, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 40:07

I mean, you can now because none of because half those things don't still exist, but like but like at the time there was no way to do that. And if you want to talk about like where what brought what broke up intellectuals in the fights in the new left, like and and Europe and the United States, it wasn't over the fucking Frankfurt school, it was over the Sino-Soviet split, and we know the CAA utilized that because the COINTELPRO documents from the CPUSA and the RCP and the SDS have been released. You can read books on them. I've even read some of them directly. It they they went in and played up the Sino-Soviet split knowing that it was a legitimate port division. So it's anyway.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

So we I'll even say I feel like that I feel like if we're getting to the point of like the academics are split on this. Like, I don't think you had a Marxist movement at that point. If like that's the thing that you think destroyed the movement.

C. Derick Varn 41:13

Yeah, I said that too. If if the academics can destroy all of communism, you have at a time when only 20% of the population went to college, you have a much larger problem than you're admitting.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Yeah, you're actually admitting to like a huge, like a huge issue that like we're just not addressing, I guess. Right.

C. Derick Varn 41:36

But anyway, so the the you would think then was the incorporation of the national bourgeoisie over after the end of the formal new democracy period, which was formally ended in 1953. And the answer to that is no the fuck it wasn't so one the the Chinese bourgeoisie, the national bourgeoisie gets resurrected as a primary concern under Dung. Once the Gang of Four lose, it it's pretty much you pretty much see this thought come back in. And then when you have the three represents period under Zhang Zi Min, which is in 2001, the party codified the inclusion not just the CPPCC, uh, that's fun to say, but also into the party itself. So private entrepreneurs could now join the communist party. The three represents doctrine stated that the party must represent the development trends of China's advanced productive forces, even within the party itself. So even though it is true, like I don't believe that the PMC are a class, so you could argue that these are mostly workers, but I would it is actually true that like the the PRC is mostly engineers and lawyers, meaning that and and lawyers in the in the Chinese context are not petit bourgeois in the way that rich lawyers are in America. So my my friend who does believe in PMC theory will be like the funny thing about China is it's an actually existing PMC government.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

Um I will say PMC feels like a feels like an attempt for Marxists or leftists, because they're both they both subscribe to it, certain types, incorporates some kind of like intellectual inelectia, like intellectual class as like a thing when it doesn't exist. I'm not a proponent of PMC. I sometimes call it a professional managerial strata, but like if it's not a class in the way that like the intellectual class was a thing in China.

C. Derick Varn 43:52

It comes up. Nicholas Polancis pulls this stuff because Polancis is actually echoing the Maoist without realizing

Mass Line Culture And State Violence

C. Derick Varn 43:57

it being Ostosyrian and Ostosyrians are all crypto maoists, or not so crypto maoists. Depending on who you're talking about. I actually do think there is a rational core in the United States of thinking about professionals as the as a PMC being proletarianized formation, and that today we can talk about the professional managerial strata because there's a strata that is labor aristocratic in the working class, a word that no one likes, but it's accurate. And then there's a strata that is petite bourgeois still. That petite bourgeois strata is smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Those are people who can actually like own their own practices, that's just less and less of that. And after AI, I don't think it's gonna exist, I think it's gonna be gone.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

So the strata can essentially be defined as as a as people who are like hyper proletarianizing like hyperproletarianizing and whose children will probably be like making less than they are. Right. Like that that's the way that I understand the strata to exist.

C. Derick Varn 45:00

Yeah, I mean I I I think I think it is similar to the urban petit bourgeois shop owners who have mostly been you know busted up outside of certain areas. That does not mean there still aren't plenty of uh petit bourgeois in fact one of the interesting side effects of neoliberalism was expansion of the petit bourgeois but and with the decadence of neoliberalism the reactionary I mean the petit bourgeois is always reactionary but the hard reactionary turn of a lot of the petit bourgeois yeah I mean we'll talk about the problems with this but I did one of the reasons why I I I um Daniel and I went back and forth about whether the PMC are a class and I think he he will sometimes use the word class I will never use it for the PMC because I cannot and I don't just mean it from the standpoint of productive forces although I definitely mean it there I also mean when I use liberal notions of class it doesn't make sense either because there's no income variance or singular habitas that defines it. And when people talk about it particularly the conference of the world comrade Lou is a is is acquaintance of mine and not an enemy but like you're talking about like mostly about the culture of academia which everyone goes through but you ignore that like fire is all tied into that that's you know real estate engineering you ignore that all large corporations including industrial ones have managers often who are not at all concerned about the cultural concerns of the humanities department of California university and so you realize that that the people are yelling about the PMC are just mad at themselves because they're also all from that strata. Yeah and I'm like this is this is this is self-violence and self-erasure like there's there's this class of of which I mean I remember listening to Amber Frost say she was not PMC and me go you weren't the fucking NYU and you are literally not even all that petite bourgeois you are a bourgeois rentier off of your participation in Chopo Trap House one of the most lucrative podcasts that has ever existed yeah PMC are you on PMC is all of all of the pe all of my peers who I work with but not me. Right because of half of my family of birth but anyway yes so new democracy permitted cap private capital to develop the nation's infrastructure with state oversight and partial state control you will see defense of this I'm doing a whole behind the Patreon thing about Chinese state ownership because people got mad at me when I said that like the NEP was radically different than the current situation because I'm like China only owns 20% or so of IPO trading directly and in the NEP under Bukharin 70% of the entire economy was owned by the government like including all commanding heights and the method of expropriation was also different and like in a lot of cases with the especially the patriotic bourgeoisie that they wanted to incorporate into the like the new democracy it wasn't just expropriated it was they though they were still partial owners of a lot of these large companies and they were bought out by the party which is just a different that's just a different way of expropriating not adding any judgment either way but that is that is different. Yeah yeah and and to be fair I mean the Chinese did not have a Kulag rebellion and have to go and kill you know two percent of the population or whatever I do feel like I have to keep coming back to this because like I'm pretty critical of new democracy I'm pretty critical of like how how this formed up and the class collaboration of it all.

SPEAKER_00 49:18

And then I also have to sit back and I'm I'm also a China defensist when it comes to liberals because I have to sit back and be like well China exists and a lot of the other projects that I'm referring to no longer exist. So there has to be some kind of reckoning with that to a certain point.

C. Derick Varn 49:33

This is the other Lacerno move to his love of Hegel's philosophy of writing saying that Marx was wrong about that. Um I I love that and this is gonna piss a lot of people off who I don't think people in the show much I was going to say it outright. Dominico Lacerdo is their worldist in in small capacity because the dung is so worldist and his argument that that communists should just give up the idea of getting rid of markets oh yeah the government I mean the state excuse me not any form of government even Marx and things that classes he he does actually say that we're not you know we should give up on the abolition of classes and I'm like you're not a communist you're a fucking liberal despite all your anti-liberal posturings you actually fundamentally believe that what communism is to do is just liberal development to bring the real promise of of early liberalism out except for the developing world yeah and people like oh it's communism for the for the for the you know for the developing world and these are the same people who tell me that somehow the fucking most productive society on the planet is still in the developing world that society still claims it's in the developing world too yeah uh that's that's real funny no that's a fair point though I think those are the two things that I'm constantly balancing when it comes to China is like ah but they exist but also do they exist? It's a constant back and forth of like is this actually a project that we should be much from I am very torn on China because on one hand I don't want 12 hour workdays six days a week on the other hand they did they did capitalist developmentalism better than anybody else including the Imperial core they do seem to care about their population in ways that we don't uh but again to me I'm like but that's just like competent nationalism which we're just not like exactly our nationalism's all fake like so like what I what people are like what do you mean I'm like nobody who's actually leading the nationalist charge in America gives a shit about the components of the American nation yeah like that's why they're always propping up fucking I mean like I was telling some of this the other day I was like I'm not a jingoist but have you ever looked at how many of these tech oligarchs that these that MAGA pops up aren't even Americans they're not even naturalized Americans like but anyway that's a that's a rant so this does tie to the United Front because the United Front does call for a union of uh with the with with bourgeois parties but but refusing to let them control the government which you could argue that the CCPPC is an example of the problem that you have though is in United Front logic historically that only applies before the revolution yeah or are in defense of national liberation it's not supposed to apply 30 40 years after the nation has it has received so like again I can kind of in a very rough way given the conditions that China existed in and Mao not wanting they already lost enough people to famine yeah Mao not wanting to like lead a civil war basically again also there were like three within like a 40 year period that were the three largest civil wars in world history right before the communist revolution so like I can understand yeah I mean you know that's also like when I was like even during the worst part of the Great Leap Forward life expectancy was still better than it was during the three Civil War periods prior so like yeah maybe there's a reason so I'm not saying that it also led to some weird resentment because of like the caste system that develops in China in the 50s is tied to the huko because your class origin starts being really important and maintains with you throughout your life which became part of the re one of the big backlashes against Mao in the Thousand Flowers period that the anti-riots campaigns really aim to stamp out was complaints about that. But a lot of people like that's not Marxism like you're not supposed to like once you have liquidated that class which you chose not to do but their children aren't really part of it why are you maintaining it like this yeah and you know it is an interesting problem. So the block of four classes and the mass line were the two big parts of early Maoist political strategy tied into national revolution you can also see this with the with what they call the inversion of the primary contradiction and the reason why that's important for Maoist and the reason why this is important today and it's I'm not gonna get into this debate we might this might be another series because I unf I unfortunately do take the I take a modified version of the classical Marxist position that while imperialism does precede does exist before capitalism it is not the primary contradiction of which capitalism is subsidiary the existence of capitalism changes the meaning of imperialism its function and its operations just like it changed the meaning of rents their function and operations so the argument about whether or not imperialism only happens before capitalism or after capitalism is irrelevant to me it's different depending on where you're at and what it's doing. Otherwise none of we wouldn't need the theories of imperialism to explain anything and we could just talk about like colonialism and be done with it. So I guess people have said that sounds like a compromise between the classical and the malice position. Oh really because I do admit that like imperialism predates capitalism that's but but it's not the malice position. It's actually it to be quite frank it is closer to both the Stalin and Trotskyist position and I know people aren't gonna like that I said that they have the same side on this but they do and one of the funny things about that is as a as Rob Ashlar said on Twitter once the thing about the Soviet Union is unlike China it was actually existing third worldism because they were using national liberation as their primary means of expansion and China wasn't and so like which is pretty fucking funny. That's wild so that I mean that's a that's the kind of thing that you would expect from Ashlar because it's gonna piss everybody off but I do think it's interesting one thing you could say about the particularly when combined with the collectivization period the block of four classes mixed with the with with the mass line did mean that you had more national cohesion in China than you did elsewhere. It's something that Michael Sandel actually the the Americ the the American communitarian philosopher worries about because he's worried that once uh the the leadership from the collective period dies and that's like after G because she was involved in the collective period yeah that the class collaboration that you see in China is going to go away because it is it is mainly maintained by memory of people who are now very old.

SPEAKER_00 57:37

Yeah um the actual I feel like the actual reality in China right now and correct me if I'm wrong is a lot more stratified than one would imagine.

C. Derick Varn 57:45

Oh yeah it's very stratified they're happier with their with their nation than we are but like it's very stressful yeah I mean they have they have a bunch of billionaires which I mean uh you know like that that that means there must be like a lot of poverty right all right so the mass line is really important for the functioning of the of new democracy and for the Black of four classes and for the three represent and and and we've talked about the definition of the mass line but part of the reason why it's important here is that the party was supposed to basically build a national culture that could combine the interest and vocabularies and slogans of all kinds of different people something that I could say that the Soviets and God forbid western communists are incredibly shitty at even though despite everyone complaining that it's liberal now because they don't know shit we invented code switching no no I mean we didn't invent it but we codified it as a concept that's Stuart Hall that's Marxist um and the malice did too because the malice actually spent a long time trying to come up with a way to get the proletarian vision distributed to everybody of different economic interests vocabularies and worldviews and while I'm not nearly as collaboration in fact if you tell me we should incorporate the national bourgeoisie in the United States I'm basically like I kick you out of the train the tent is not that big.

SPEAKER_00 59:34

Yeah yeah although I mean I guess it is that big because uh if you look at what most people actually want who call themselves socialist it's basically not even this yeah um that's I feel like I had that I had a long conversation about that last year I was having a conversation I was like if you picked up a your average socialist in the United States and dropped them into Switzerland they would be completely placated.

C. Derick Varn 59:59

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:00

Switzerland notoriously the most expensive country in Europe right and hyper isolationist and right wing you know I I I just find it very they'd also probably be okay in Singapore.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:13

Yeah yeah totally so Singapore the Switzerland of of Asia yeah by the way new democracy was something that a lot of new democracy and vanguard partyism was and five year plans were something that a lot of the the right of Asia actually adopted for national unification oh wow like explicitly like the the national front in Singapore the the second dictatorship in Korea they they all used it I mean that's similar to how like the Birch Society picked up vanguardism. Right I mean but they they they used they did not use western developmental patterns they used Soviet developmental patterns which I also think you see even in right wing governments in the developing world today but so the mass line gives you a way to to part of the function the mass line that makes the merger thesis a little bit more viable you and I are gonna write an article about this actually yeah is that it really did try to code switch from people in these different classes but also in different sectors of these classes so like they knew the like industrial workers and like shopkeepers and like farm like agrarian laborer who were not tenant farmers but actually paid that they had massively different educational attainment levels massively different socialization and they also this is one of the things that we talked about last time on cultural stuff mao was pretty progressive particularly on gender actually compared to traditional Chinese society i mean he did some things that that make some feminists uncomfortable including killing a bunch of female communists during the 40s but in general he was not a Mao was not particularly big on killing other communists despite the way he's portrayed in western media that's just not true he critiqued mal he critiqued Stalin for it excuse me and two and also importantly you can see some of this is almost a reaction to not having the bloodshed of the 30s in China after you know three civil wars Mao thought that the mass line would be a way to sublate the contradictions among the people which means that this block of four classes that makes new democracy possible is only possible through the mass line and while I'm pretty open to trying to win over parts of the petite bourgeoisie I think a lot of it is proletarianized anyway. One of the things I tell people is I don't want to remove the PMS I want to sub I want to subordinate that strata I want its skills to be spread out and particularly now that it's being assaulted by technology too through you know the possibility of AI although it's still not really effective at doing it but nonetheless it still costs a lot of jobs the reason why this was really important is they really mal really seemed and I know this this sounds crazy to a lot of Westerners who've been propagandized but mal seemed to really want to avoid having to explicitly kill a whole bunch of Chinese or communist yeah when people go talk about Mao's death count it's like attributing famines to him that is not to say that the the the CPC never killed anyone oh hell yeah they did it's wartime and they did even after it is not to say that even during the great proletarian cultural revolution that people weren't executed by the state but by and large you will find that the actual executed by the state numbers are much smaller than you think.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09

Yeah the death go ahead oh I think China's a perfect example of the uh industrializing a country kills a lot of people and that's that's what you can learn is like you see the same like you see actually higher per capita death rates as like Brit as the UK isn't or not the UK I think it was Britain at that point or the English British Empire.

C. Derick Varn 1:04:29

The British Empire is industrializing you see like higher per capita death rates it's just industrialization kills people as a thing that we know that happens and it's hard to ascribe that to a communist I mean I always thought the US of China comes from three things one there was the the the purging of most of the upper party membership that consolidate power that was real sorry people yeah that was two that unleash social forces that no one can control so people and Stalin Stalin was obsessed with actually bourgeois legal norms like all this stuff had to happen legally unlike the Nazis actually it is something interesting about Stalin he did not only in like the forest massacres and the stuff in Poland did stuff really get like a like outside of formal legal apparatuses but because you had quotas which is something that should always scope when people start putting quotas on crimes you're like ah that's gonna be a problem yeah but because they had quotas and because there was so much national trauma not just from the revolution but just in general yeah uh a lot of in a lot of interpersonal score settling was done and I find it weird that like Paul Cock shot and a bunch of other people will use this to defend Stalin and there's some truth in it but I'm all because I'm also of the like let's quit pretending that Stalin was the big bad that ruined everything because the problems are larger than that. But once you unleash social forces where people can get revenge they do.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:03

And so I mean this is the res this is the terrors there was there were terrors after the civil like we've I think we talked about this last time is like there's after a revolutionary period when these social forces are unleashed there's a terror and a lot of work and I think we see the documents today and I'm not trying to be like a full apologist for anything but we do see that we've seen the documents today that like a lot of even work in the Cultural Revolution was actually a work to like tamp down on the terrors that were happening.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:31

Right because they were they were they were civil terrors would that means it's the settling of civil and social scores that could be put in class times but like in China a lot of them were ethnic even like with these sub nationalities killing each other.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

There was a ton of built-up resentment for like the Manchu and Right.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:52

And by the way, we had that too. We had our own terrorism in America. We don't talk that much about it. That's why a lot of people went to Canada. Yeah. Um, I'm not saying, like, I'm not. This is the other thing. You and I actually will just say like national consolidation is a lot more violent than you guys want to admit. And it's a lot more ugly than you guys want to admit. And there's like there might be ways around it, but I'll be damned if I exactly know how, if you're gonna enter the world of nations.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:21

Um this is partially why a lot of Marxists just kind of like don't want to deal with the national question, I think.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:28

Yeah, or they just want to be like, it's good, except like when you do bad stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:32

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:33

Um, and I'm like, but you have to do bad stuff, like there's no way not to do bad stuff. Like, I can't think of a national consolidation project that didn't fuck around with nomadic and pastoral peoples, aka the indigenous. Yeah, I literally can't think of any. Like sometimes that's undone later, like in you know, Bolivia. Yeah, um, but I can't think of where it didn't happen at all. But anyway, and this is not me justifying it, this is me being a descriptive realist.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:11

Like, yeah, yeah, again, like I don't think either of us are being apologists for any, I think we're just trying to like describe a thing that happened and why it happened compared to this person is an evil person.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:23

Well, yeah, one of the things that makes people mad about me is I've I've been one, I've turned lumpinization into a verb because I think it's incoherent as even a social category, it definitely fucking isn't a class. But because I see lumping characteristics in all classes now that isn't separate enough to be called like its own cohesive parasitic class. The other thing I will say is like my answer for the lump in is not, you know, if you're gonna consider them a coherent class group, which again I don't, and I'm hearing crazy stuff now, like see Malice in America talking about how the disabled who have jobs are somehow lumping, and I'm like, lumping doesn't mean it's a it's a j basically in in in German, it just means crashy, it does, but it doesn't mean even for Marxist examples and bitch about just anyone who has been marginalized, it means people who because of the decomposition of their class position are now having to use either the state or our violence, usually from people who are from the same class strata that they used to be from to survive. And like, you know, who do the you know, like the the Casic conservative thing is who do the gangs terrorize if not white people, which is actually pretty true, you know. So the the the malice answer to that before the Panthers was like, we're not gonna kill these people, which Lyndon joked about, but I didn't actually do most of the time. We're you know, we're not gonna kill these people, we're going to try to proletarianize them, and that's you know, and so you have the schools for the non-hostiles. That's where it comes from. And they were basically the parts of what you might call the the highly lumpanized de-class A people, of which Mal was himself part of. He wasn't lumpin', but he was de-class A. He was the educated son of a mid-sized farm-owning peasant. And literally, I do find this funny, literally, some of the distinctions between mid-sized, which is okay, and large, which is not okay, holding peasant and landlord was based off of Mal's own family. Um, like but anyway, so I guess today what you see is this focus on whole process people's democracy is itself a legacy of new democracy. Uh the difference is, and this is this is where the great debates over whether Chinese China is socialist or not, which is something where I take the very unsatisfying position, is I think a lot of China really is trying to transition to socialism still, but in no world could you call it socialist in the sense that it's actually abolishing classes or even owns the the commanding heights of production as a state. They just don't. They might have a lot of leverage that no one in the West has, even in the social democratic sector, but like at best, you could argue somehow they're still in some kind of like new democratic they're in like a holding territory, I think. Yeah, national dictatorship, holding territory, and even that. I mean, like the national dictatorship is wrong because in some ways China is very democratic, in some ways it's not, which is like true for every fucking democra democracy that exists.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:13

This is my rant on democracy. If we start it now, I won't stop talking for 40 minutes.

C. Derick Varn 1:12:19

No, we you and I have to talk about like I become more pro-democracy, but like everyone gets mad at me because I'm like, one of the things about being pro-democracy is pointing out that like almost everything everybody calls democracy wouldn't meet any classical definition of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:33

Yeah, that's true.

C. Derick Varn 1:12:35

And that's even including the fact the classical definition was still very tiny, and like only like five percent of any state was even part of it, even when it was direct. So, like, anyway, so you have can, I mean, one of the things that you have with China today is you have bureaucratic feedback loops, local partitioning systems. Uh highly for such a centralized state, for democra for a democratically centralized state, they actually have a very highly provincial system. Like, there's massively different, there's massive difference between the different provinces and like the way they implement policies. But like you have algorithmic monitoring of public sentiment on social media, you have consumer satisfaction tracking, like it's not just for control, it's also so that they can like try to figure out how to serve the people, which is not we do all that shit, and it's just for control. So, I'm like, I am sort of like I want people to be clear as much as we've been critical of China today, and there's parts of it I don't I would not necessarily want, but like if given a choice today to be born in the United States or I don't know, Guangzhou, I'd probably choose Guangzhou. Yeah, so you know, just keep it up. So I want to talk about the critiques real fast, other than ours. Um, and then we can and I'm let you talk about it. So there's the Trotskyist critique, which is permanent revolution, which everybody calls is premature, although it comes from it. Does actually come from Marx.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:09

It's the problem with a lot of Trotsky critiques, it's they are there. You can find them, you can trace the logic.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:16

Yeah, I mean, they I mean, like the the thing is about Trotskyists is they're like dogmatic ultra-Marxists in some ways, but also not because eventually Trotskyism splinters in its various rigid ways into replicating the entire spectrum that exists in every other communist group. Maoism does that too, so you know, don't get don't get all pissed

Trotskyist And Orthodox Marxist Critiques

C. Derick Varn 1:14:38

out.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:38

Yeah, the joke the joke is that there are nine Trotskyist groups with eight Trotskists.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:42

Right. So the the classical line, which is also called the Mensh, which was something that both the Mensheviks and the Marxist-Leninists actually maintained after Stalin came to power, is the country must go through a democratic revolution and a capitalist age of setup's economy. Now, what made what made the socialism in one country different is the idea that you could do that with communist leadership without a bourgeoisie, but you still need to go through that development. Um, the Menshevik line is like that needs to be democratic and capitalist, the Bolshevik line is that it can be managed by the party, and and the party should be democratic internally. Ish. But nonetheless. Uh and I say ish because there's a lot of changes to rules after the civil war that get implemented by everybody that don't work for anything but terror sales. Um which is, you know, this is something that like Donald Parkinson of Cosmonaut and I agree on because we're always like, yeah, the post the post Soviet, I mean the post-civil war Soviet, like and like the Bolsheviks' internal constitution, not the constitution of ru of the USSR, but like only really works in a situation where you're under siege, and yeah, they were always under siege uh externally, but like it it actually hurt certain other doctrines over time, and it does not export, yeah. Like, because it's it's a way like if you think about it in a non-wartime footing, it's a way to establish like a clique that just runs everything into the ground really quickly, which you see both and Trotsky. I mean, Maoists are actually the most flexible in getting rid of it, ironically. But anyway, so just because it's always funny that people think that Trotskyists were would somehow argue that imperialism is good because of the social democratic disciples of Max Shachman going that direction in the 60s.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:53

I feel like consistently, I don't know why this is like the I don't know why this is the lane that I took, but I feel like I've taken every a lot of people will like take the information that they had and then work back from there so they work through those debates. I'm just now coming into like the Shachman debates, and I'm just like, this is not the Trotskyism that I knew what was and uh like it's reframing a lot of conversations I've had with Trotskyists, but it's just interesting to me that I'm like I guess I went like the long way around where I was here, I was ingesting weird post-Occupy stuff, and then like went to Radic's and then came from there. Like went back to Marx, went through the second international, went through instead of the other way.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:34

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Where I sort of did both simultaneously, I worked forward and backwards.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:41

How dialectic of you.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:42

Yeah, well, dialectic sort of like when I met Maoist and when I was in college, I thought they were weird, and when I met Trotskyist, I thought they were annoying. And when I met Anarchist, which was a predominant formation when I was although now that I I'm hesitant to call them anarchists because they don't actually have that much link to the classical anarchist tradition at all. I thought they were I thought they were super annoying. Um which is a bad, it's a that's a bad reason to make tendency decisions, but honestly, it's how most people make them, and if they admit it to themselves, there's like, oh, you know, either that or like oh, there's all these not obnoxious white people or whatever. Yeah. Um so he argued that in the imperialist era, national bourgeoisie and undevelopment country countries were structurally and incapable of carrying out a democratic revolution, too, because they would always be tied to foreign capital. And I wonder if dungism kind of proves some of this's point.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:47

It's kind of a good point, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:50

And that local therefore the working class must take power immediately and push the bourgeois revolution straight through into a socialist one without stopping. That's what permanent revolution meant. So instead of instead of like, you know, it wasn't revolution forever, although that's part of it, but it was the idea that like we're not gonna have stages, we're just we're gonna take charge and we're just gonna do the bourgeois development ourselves, which is kind of actually what Doug is ends up doing. But the the the issue is like there still needs to be an admission that that there's no such thing as a national bourgeoisie that stays just national, there's no way for you to do that. And I actually, in looking at the Bakaran versus Luxembourg versus to some degree, versus, although Lenin was really siding with Bakarin in a lot of ways, but he took some things out. But like Bakarin's focus on national cartels and the belief that like capitalism could be solvent in one country theoretically, even though he says that they're not actually, does actually make more sense about how he arrived at socialism in one country because he kind of thought national capitalism was possible and Luxembourg didn't. My issue with Luxembourg is that I don't think how she solves the problem makes any sense, including how she defines what is outside of capitalism because it just seems to be like random shit. Yeah, but nonetheless, you have it, you also have the Luxembourgist idea that, like, as soon as you finish capitalizing the world, it will collapse because there's no place for it to grow. And when I don't think that's true, I think there's the the counter tendencies arguments actually pretty good, yeah. I thought I think you're right about that. So, anyway, so Trotsky has argued that a political alliance with the national bourgeoisie would subject would subordinate the the independent class interests of the proletariat, and also the national bourgeoisie would not stay national. And I do kind of think there's some truth to that. That's why, like, just to point out, for all we've been talking about oligarchs and shit, when Trump visited G this a couple weeks ago, and this was recorded in May of 2026, so this probably come out probably two months later, but nonetheless, that they were they they actually were meaner to Trump than they were to the tech oligarchs, yeah. They kind of wind and dine Musk and Co. who are objectively reactionary forces. Uh, and I I do think that does kind of put a pin on where they are. The other things is like I like they'll help Iran, but they won't risk war over it. Um they'll help Cuba, kinda, with some shipments of oil, but they won't risk war over it. And there's also a limit to how much oil they are willing to or can because of Iran ship. And they don't get along. I mean, like they the Chinese interest in with North Korea is actually interesting because one thing that we can kind of look at is Kim Jong-un has done Honaker-esque that's DDR, Democratic Dutch, Deutsche Republic are so the East German style liberalism, late East German-style liberalizations, as much as it can because the sanctions are so heavy.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:36

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:37

But that is why there is development under Kim Jong-un as opposed to Kim Jong-il. But yeah, Trotsky is contended that holding back workers to placate patriotic capitalists delay a socialist transition, disarm workers' independent power, like the Soviets, and so delusions that capitalists could be patriotic allies, period.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:03

I I think that's the question that you were mentioning, like when the last of the like the collaboration like uh generation dies out. Like, that's the question that we're kind of gonna be waiting to see. Is that like, does this devolve? Like, is the Stratskyist like critique correct? Right. Was the revolution delayed? Was it will it be will the revolution be betrayed? But yeah, I think that uh I think that critique holds some water.

C. Derick Varn 1:23:31

So uh the left communist and what we might call ultra-orthodox Marxists. Um those aren't quite the same thing, but you guys can critique new democracy from the standpoint of basic definitions of socialism. They say it preserves a commodity form, wage labor in the market. That's what Lacerdo is arguing against. Marx would say probably some of those things have to be. I think Marx would say probably some of those things, although I'm not sure it's the market, actually have to be preserved in a transition, uh, but it is a transition. And you know, my thing about Lacerdo is like he seems to think that we should just accept that as communism.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:13

I'll I'll say I feel like I might not have my dates right about this, but I'm thinking about like the new democracy like setup, and I'm thinking about the cultural revolution, and there was like there were real attempts to abolish like currency and the commodity form during that. Yeah, they were. Yeah, so I think I know I know they didn't work, but it doesn't seem like new democracy in and of itself prevented that from happening. Or maybe it did.

C. Derick Varn 1:24:38

But they weren't real the thing is they weren't that's the time where they were the least new democratic, and that's that's fair. They really were trying to get rid of the bourgeoisie without killing them. So the I I think the traditional Marxists have kind of a point if you say that the goal needs to be something beyond state capitalism, which I think you is correct, but it's how immediate do you think that needs to be? Particularly in these places that did not have bourgeois national revolutions or weren't weird settler imperial outgrowths of bourgeois national revolutions. So I think we're gonna stop here. We're gonna come back to this, and I think our next episode, which we'll try to record relatively soon, we'll be finishing off talking about new democracy and then use it as a transition to build to our sixth episode. No, fifth, no, that no, at that point it'll be sixth. Our sixth episode on national frontism, communist, and not. Um mostly not, actually, historically, but and I think we can then start parsing some weirder things like national Bolshevism, which has never really had a revolution, but is a tendency that I don't love and whatnot. There, I'm

Where We Go Next

C. Derick Varn 1:26:10

going to talk about some other critiques next time of this, and then we can use it to pivot over to discussions about China in general and then national fronts.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:23

Sounds great.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:24

All right, take care.