Does imperialism still need to be fought? A reply to Mike Ely

By Greg Butterfield

Despite our profound differences on many issues, I’ve always respected Mike Ely and his efforts to grapple seriously with the problems facing communists in our time. So it was with some disappointment that I read his piece “Perp Walking into the Future: Problems of Tankie Fantasy” on the Kasama Project website. Ely’s article comes off as a nasty piss-take on BJ Murphy’s “From China to Libya: A Critique of Kasama’s ‘Remembering the Rebels of Tiananmen,’” an article that makes important points and actually attempts to document them.

 

Ely tries to psychologically analyze “tankies” – that is, those who support the right of workers’ states and bourgeois-nationalist states to defend themselves against counter-revolution and imperialist subversion – accusing them of opposing the agency of the masses in favor of a “gray police state.” Much of it comes off sounding like a personal attack on Murphy, but throwing this blanket over many other genuine leftist fighters.

 

As offensive as it is, let’s focus instead on the political assertions underlying Ely’s article.

 

Ely’s version of “mass line” – that any rebellion is inherently good, and any existing workers’ state or bourgeois nationalist regime is inherently bad – is essentially an anarchist position, and leads into the same “above class” morass of supporting rebellion against any state, regardless of its class character and objective position in the global struggle of the workers and oppressed against imperialism.

 

Ely’s argument fetishizing any and all “popular uprisings” is an idealist one divorced from fact. In this it is similar to the received wisdom he expounds that a rightward political shift and/or pro-capitalist economic measures equals capitalist restoration (in China and the USSR), and that any government allied with these states is ipso facto not revolutionary.

 

This is simply inadequate for communists in the age of imperialist war and revolution.

 

Does imperialism still need to be fought?

 

Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and the national question was made to educate communists on the complexities of the struggle in the age of imperialist war and revolution. Ely’s position, in contrast, has no nuance: All existing states are capitalist and all capitalist states are equally bad.

 

Even if your position is that there are no “real” workers’ states today, this view is problematic. Is it really right for communists to support uprisings fueled (overtly or covertly) by imperialism against the governments of bourgeois-nationalist states?

 

If only the struggle were so simple! Someone rebels, you support them. No analysis is needed; no need to confront imperialism and its war machine in a serious way; no need to challenge the preconceived notions of students and intellectuals or the media disinformation aimed at working-class people.

 

But no. This path leads to would-be revolutionaries cheering on counter-revolutionary events.

 

BJ Murphy was absolutely correct to draw a parallel between support for the counter-revolutionary student movement in China and support for the counter-revolutionary “rebels” in Libya. The same ideological confusion leads to supporting both.

 

Imperialism may be a paper tiger in the long march of history. But it is not powerless. It has, in fact, been on the offensive for more than three decades. It has agency. It has loyalists of many stripes and the profits of stolen labor to fuel them. 

 

It takes courage to stand up and support oppressed nations and workers’ states when they are under attack – when everyone from FOX News to the White House to social-democratic “radicals” are cheering on the other side as “revolutionary,” “democratic,” “liberators.” (It might be pertinent to point out that they use this same language when U.S. troops march in and occupy a country.)

 

Tiananmen Square and the Cultural Revolution

 

Ely upholds China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as the model communists should strive for. I agree; the Cultural Revolution was the highest advance toward socialism that has yet been made. However, the GPCR was not some idealized phenomenon that can be replicated merely with the “correct” line. It took place in the context of a global revolutionary upsurge against imperialism, from Cuba to Vietnam to Paris to Oakland. It took place in a world that had a powerful bulwark against imperialism in the existence of the USSR (despite its revisionist leadership).

 

As we all know, history isn’t a constant upsurge; it’s a dialectical process. What is a workers’ state to do in a period of setbacks and imperialist offensive? Should it give up? Should the workers and oppressed willingly surrender hard-fought advances to their enemies and wait for some perfect revolutionary movement?

When Ely denigrates the Chinese workers’ state and its defeat of the counter-revolutionary rebellion of 1989, he’s actually running down one of the major lasting achievement of the Cultural Revolution – the strengthening and politicization of the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese society as a whole – which allowed China to weather the reactionary tide that swept away the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, despite the deeply damaging inroads of capitalism under Deng.

‘Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones.’

I find the above quote from Leon Trotsky’s collection “In Defense of Marxism” an excellent rule of thumb. Trotsky was polemicizing with those who wanted to abandon defense of the Soviet Union during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact before World War II.

(The irony of quoting Trotsky in defense of regimes frequently associated with Stalin, against someone who to one degree or another upholds Stalin, is not lost on me. But of course there are many revolutionaries who uphold Stalin and do not share Ely’s view.)

 

It is quite a distortion of the views of me and my comrades in Workers World Party to say that we try to sell “gray police states” as an ideal form of socialism. I believe it’s a distortion of others’ views as well, not to mention a slander of the societies that revolutionary masses have fought and sacrificed to build and defend. It is, essentially, the crude anti-communist language of the ruling class.

 

For our part, WWP has always tried to present a balanced view of the accomplishments, problems and setbacks of workers’ states striving to build socialism and of bourgeois-nationalist regimes striving to be independent of imperialist domination. For this nuanced approach based in objective facts, we have been criticized from both sides: either we are apologists for evil dictatorial regimes, or we are too critical of genuine communist governments.

 

I don’t know of any serious communist who glorifies the need of a workers’ state or bourgeois-nationalist government to put down counter-revolutionary revolts and subversion. But it is the duty of communists to know which side of the class barricades to stand on, and to explain the situation forthrightly to workers and all of the people.