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ASSOCIATE EDITOR CAMILLE BRYAN WRITES A true revolutionary dedicated to avenging colonial invasions, Chairman Mao would delight in seeing todays uprising in the West: the burning courthouses, destroyed storefronts, street rampages all in demand that the world hear those formerly silenced. In his own country, the Chairman legitimized such use of violence as a fight to create a history separate from that of western capitalism. His doctrine that the masses are the makers of history, that the state must be prioritized over the individual, and that both are born to revolt and overthrow intellectual elitists created Communist revolutions not only throughout China but in Vietnam, Nepal, India, Peru, Italy, and even the United States.

Julia LovellsMaoism(Knopf, 2019) takes you to every corner of the world and every Maoist movement that was inspired by the Cultural Revolution as espoused in that legendary Little Red Book. Her work is not a history of China (no book could fully encompass those 9000 years), nor is it a history of Mao. Rather, it details the journey of the Chairmans vast ideological influence and never ceasing dedication to exporting Communism with as much fervor as Xi Jinpings regime today exports iPhone parts.

Lovell takes you from the birthplace of Mao in southern China to the creation of the PRC (Peoples Republic of China); to the Vietnam War; to Cambodia; through the Cultural Revolution; down to Zimbabwe; over to Peru; then back to Nepal and India, at which point you need a stretch break and a quick turn to page 467 to check her books handy chronology appendix, just to make sure you know exactly where you are, literally, in global history. These revolutions were certainly not dinner parties, to paraphrase Mao. Lovell spares no expense in either lexicon or diction as she goes through communist insurrection after communist insurrection, detailing the expansion of Chinas soft power.

Lovell tells how, through it all, Peking (now re-named Beijing) radio broadcast Maoist thought throughout Africa as Mao tried to out-communist the Soviet Union. His purpose: to show solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle by pushing Chinese comrades into African countries in order to receive the African delegations vote as to whether China or Taiwan would get a seat at the United Nations. Beijing, of course, won. Such an impact on the international balance of power exemplifies the reach of Maoist ideology.

Lovells dense and detailed account (awarded the 2109 Cundill History Prize) shows just how all of this happened. Mao facilitated and empowered full-scale state communist revolts such as the one in Indochina and facilitated the movement of masses into the fields.Whats more, Lovell discusses how political protest in the United States throughout the 60s and 70s was actually based on Maoist thought. The radicalism of the second wave of feminism, the Black Panther movement and the growing power of the LGBT community stem from Maoist concepts such as: consciousness raising, serving the people and cultural revolution. That the Chairman could take his power and domination of Chinese communist thought so far that it seeped into the minds of western, capitalist American youth goes far beyond what we normally conceptualize when we think of Mao.

Herein lies the enormous global influence of Mao, up until the year 2018, when China gained a leader who did away with pesky term limits. Xi Jinping, Lovell argues, is a newer, shinier, quasi-Mao one who thrives off a market economy and special economic zones. Instead of producing millions of Little Red Books, this 21st century Mao produces miles of railroad tracks, oil pipelines and highways to create a modern Silk Road of Chinese influence, via the Belt and Road Initiative.

Lovell is quick to posit a tad of realism into this argument, though, noting that the God-like adulation of Mao is not extended to Xi, despite Xis many political writings attempting to spread his word across the world. This by no means suggests we should pay less heed to the seemingly never-ending rise of China, or to the tightening political control enabled by prevailing tenets of Maoism. Lovell warns, and rightfully so, that the complexities and dichotomies of Maoist thought are here to stay.

Lovells exceptionally ambitious book is a kind of cautionary tale. As we enter a new age of insurrection, the reader might well reflect on the necessity to take care as the masses rise again in revolution under leaders who encourage reactionary violence and ensure that we learn from the vast array of Maos mistakes.

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LOVELL IN 'MAOISM': MAO'S INFLUENCE THEN AND NOW - Asia Media International

Home > 2020 > Dissident movements within the Eastern bloc aspired to genuine socialism |(...)

One of the received ideas that became a truth after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the Soviet blocs populations cursed communism, yet obeyed it slavishly. In fact, many social movements within the Eastern bloc had long aspired to genuine socialism.

by Catherine Samary

In the name of the communist ideal

The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991 is still portrayed as a collection of simplistic clichs (1). British political analyst Timothy Garton Ash says that in 1989 Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution (2), a reverse image of that of the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917. Nothing incarnated this model better than Czechoslovakia and Vclav Havel, the long imprisoned, dissident playwright who became president in 1989. This interpretation gives liberal ideology and its representatives a preponderant weight in the Wests victory at the end of the cold war.

Havel himself didnt believe this. In 1989, he said, Dissidence was not ready... We only had a minimal influence on the events themselves. To designate the decisive factor, he looked a little further east: The Soviet Union could no longer intervene, without opening an international crisis and completely putting an end to the new policy of perestroika [reconstruction] (3).

Some years earlier, Garton Ash had used the neologism refolution (from reform and revolution) (4), to reflect the combined traits of 1989-1991: a challenge to the political and socioeconomic structure of the existing system in a capitalist sense (revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, according to perspectives), but through reforms imposed from above. Charter 77 the intellectual opposition front to which Havel belonged showed remarkable resistance to the normalisation of Czechoslovakia under occupation, but expressed no consensus on socioeconomic issues nor did it have the support of any organised social base.

Mass democratic mobilisations have, in fact, existed at the heart of these regimes: workers riots in June 1953 in Berlin, workers councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 (prolonged by the birth of the Czech workers councils), the revolutionary trade unionism of Solidarno (Solidarity) in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. It is this history that the liberal interpretation of 1989 obliterates or falsifies and tries to appropriate by presenting it as anti-communist. These popular movements fought, not to re-establish capitalism, but on the contrary in the name of socialist ideals.If the end of the single party was popular; the philosopher Slavoj iek recalled that Behind the Wall the peoples did not dream of capitalism (Le Monde, 7 November 2009). Capitalisms triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites grand conversion has been analysed (5), there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations.

Workers councils in Poland and Hungary

We can ask why it is the Polish working class which, out of all the countries in eastern Europe, periodically resumes the class struggle, and why now, Polish journalist and former communist militant Victor Fay suggested in 1980 (6). Each of the great Polish independence struggles was marked by powerful workers mobilisations that, after the second world war, extended into a subtle relationship with the Communist Party of Poland (Polish United Workers Party, POUP), and also with the changing policy of the Kremlin in relation to eastern European communist parties.

The rupture in 1948 between Tito (Josip Broz) of Yugoslavia and Joseph Stalin showed the conflict between aspiration to the sovereignty of a national communism and the hegemonic policy of the Kremlin. It was accompanied by anti-Tito purges in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. After Stalins death, public apologies by his successor Nikita Khrushchev to the Yugoslav communists and the denunciation of Stalins crimes during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 revived the hope that Moscow would respect the egalitarian relationships, national and social, which in theory structured the Soviet universe.Until the 1980s, all the great democratic uprisings sought, explicitly or in practice, to reduce the gap between the reality of bureaucratic oppression and socialist principles. Thus, the emergence of workers councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956 went along with the demand for the Stalinist leaders marginalisation, and was supported by significant sections of each of the parties. Discovering the limits of de-Stalinisation in the USSR, Titos Yugoslavia decided in 1956 to encourage the non-aligned movement, while affirming self-management (in contrast to centralised planning) as the Yugoslav road to socialism.In Poland, Moscow was concerned by the triumphal return of Wadysaw Gomulka to the head of the POUP in October 1956 (from which he had been excluded in 1948), the decollectivisation of land and the favours accorded to the Church. However, Gomulkas profession of communist faith and his promise to respect the Soviet big brother pushed the Kremlin to concentrate rather on bringing Hungary to heel. Though Poland escaped Soviet intervention, its workers councils were contained, even if self-management rights were conceded in the universities: the threat to challenge these later led to the 1968 student explosion.

During the 1960s, workers strikes against planned price increases expressed the strength of an attachment to the egalitarianism and stability of employment that underlay what economist Michael Lebowitz analyses as a kind of (alienated) social contract by which the single party sought to stabilise its reign, in the name of the workers and on their backs. (7). Socialist legality, which made producers the proprietors of the means of production, was expressed recurrently in the emergence of workers councils in workplaces, while the privileges of the communist nomenklatura were simultaneously denounced. The leaders were never perceived as legitimate proprietors. It was the restoration of capitalism after 1989 which would establish their true powers of ownership, that of selling off the factories and introducing the masses to capitalist unemployment.

Social and ownership rights

Meanwhile, the party-state had power to manage enterprises, which it used to stabilise its regime, as an alternative to simple repression. Official trade unionism concentrated its action on the distribution of a social income (non-monetary and associated with employment in the big conglomerates) in the form of access to housing, health services, vacation centres or stores. In the Soviet Unions last decade, more than 60% of workers incomes originated from these collective funds in kind (8). Under this system, all economic choices and mechanisms (including prices) were perceived, correctly, as political. Hence the rapidly subversive dynamic of strikes, which switched almost spontaneously from economic issues, to the demand for social and ownership rights to be recognised as legitimate.

Indeed, in the 1960s, reforms of centralised planning would attempt to reduce waste and improve the quality of goods produced, but without substantially increasing workers rights. It was about introducing autonomy of enterprise management and encouraging directors to compress costs, which threatened the social contract. These attempts were blocked by strikes (in Poland) or would lead, as a consequence of social movements, to an enlargement of the liberties and rights of workers in the enterprises, as in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia, market socialism came to a halt in the early 1970s after an upsurge of strikes and political struggles (Belgrades June 68) against inequality and the red bourgeoisie. The violent repression of the Polish strikes in 1970 led to Gomulkas fall and his replacement by former miner Edward Gierek, president from 1970-80.

In Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania and the German Democratic Republic (RDA), the blocking of market reforms went in the 1970s with an opening to western imports, to respond to consumer demand and improve the efficacy of production through transfers of technology. The hard currency debt crisis which affected all these countries (9) was reflected in Poland by a new attempt at price reform, which led to an escalation of strikes, confrontations and negotiations, laying the bases for workers self-organisation on a nationwide scale in 1980-1981.

During the battle for the legalisation of Solidarno, there was a rise in power inside the independent trade union of a strong self-managed current (10). With more than ten million members, of which two million were Communist Party members, the independent union won the right to legally hold its congress in August 1981. A counter-power and a social project anchored in socialism and the self-managed control of economic choices was being developed (11). What then happened between 1981 and 1989 so that neoliberal shock therapy could be administered without much resistance after the fall of the Wall?

The two Solidarnos

The Polish Marxist intellectual Karol Modzelewski, who was deeply involved in the struggles of Solidarno for which he was an adviser and spokesperson, witnessed to a conception of democracy that, contrary to that of Havel, does not stop at the doors of the workplace. In Nous avons fait galoper lhistoire. Confessions dun cavalier us (12), he concludes, like Havel, that the course taken in 1989 in Poland and in all the countries of Eastern Europe was determined by the situation in the USSR. But for him, this meant that Polish workers no longer weighed on the political dynamic. The cause of this was the introduction of martial law by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981. Modzelewski estimates that 80% of its members then left the union (forced underground), which led to a profound demoralisation and the demobilisation of a whole workers generation.

He distinguishes two Solidarnos. One was the big union, solidaristic and fraternal, the child of socialism, capable of making history gallop. The second emerged transformed by its passage underground: it was no longer a mass workers movement, but a relatively narrow anti-Communist conspiracy. From then on, the return to legality around the Round Table of 1989 (13) produced a clash of values: everything separated the collectivist and solidaristic aspiration of the original workers union and the type of liberty without equality and without fraternity hence precarious advocated by the new Solidarno, acclaimed by the pro-western liberal intelligentsia.For the new and old lites of 1989, the West was like Mecca, says Modzelewski, who perceived at this moment a divorce between intellectuals and workers. Certainly, at the time of the electoral triumph of 1989, nearly everyone felt the taste of victory. But afterwards, they began to lose lose on their wages, lose their work, lose the implantation in the community of the liquidated factories, lose the certainty of tomorrow and lose their social dignity. The self-managed Polish republic inscribed in the programme of Solidarno was in contradiction with capitalist restoration. But would it have resisted a Soviet military intervention?

A review of the Czechoslovak experience of 1968 reveals instead some arguments in favour of an open history. The traditional analysis of the Prague revolt, says Karel Kovanda (14), who was involved in it as a student, opposes the forces of the conservative bureaucracy around the secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Antonn Novotn to those of the liberal reformers incarnated by his successor, Alexander Dubek, all this in a context of restructuring of the planned economy. But this superficial cleavage hides another, at least equally structuring, inside the progressives, according to Kovanda. He distinguishes on the one hand technocrats in the economic area, liberal in politics who demanded very controlled reforms... conducted from above. They were found inside and outside the Czechoslovak Communist Party, as were the members of the second component, what he calls the radical democrats. For the latter, a mass popular participation was an essential condition to undertake a change of system going beyond the cosmetic which raised the question of the mobilisation of the workers.

Socialism with a human face

It was to boost the popularity of the reforms that Dubcek advanced the idea of a socialism with a human face from which the movements from below would emerge immediately. According to Kovanda, the Central Council of Trade Unions (URO), one of the more conservative bodies in the country, received in the first weeks of 1968 around 1,600 resolutions from local sections concerning the question of rights lost by the workers, including in the function of the official union itself. The trade union newspaper Prce launched a crusade demanding more extensive powers for the workers, while, in April 1968, the influential weekly Reportr published a column calling for a self-managed workers movement.

Concrete proposals of statutes were drawn up, in particular in the factories of KD, the biggest industrial complex in Prague, and those of koda, in Plze. In April 1968, the Communist Party central committee had to integrate into its programme the question of workers councils. In a study published that year in the review of the CPs central committee, Nov Mysl (new spirit), focusing on 95 councils, the sociologist Milos Barta stresses the rapidity with which, after the development of the process of democratisation in society, the idea of founding preparatory committees for workers councils took root and spread (15). On the eve of the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovak territory, on 21 August 1968, nearly 350 workers collectivities assumed that a workers council would be at their head as of January 1, 1969.

Before this surge of self-management, the project of a reform under technocratic guidance was vanishing. Positions were taken not between conservatism and reform, but between radical democracy and a return to the bureaucratic grip. The invasion only accelerated this trend. The KD factory hosted, in the district of Vysoany, the clandestine Communist Party congress, which denounced the intervention and elected a new Central Committee, not recognised by Dubcek, himself implicated with other leaders in a spirit of compromise with the Kremlin. In this context, Kovanda stresses, the Prague Spring could only continue through the autumn to the extent that massive popular investment continued, with the transformation of the factories into bastions of economic democracy via the councils as principal priority.

In September 1968, there were 19 councils; from 1 October, 143 others began to function. At the end of October, while the tanks of the Warsaw Pact (16) patrolled the streets, the government, still led by Dubcek, declared, without having been ordered to do so by the Soviets, that it was not appropriate to pursue this experience. This outcome led to a wave of union protests which were taken up by the press. In January 1969 after several months of occupation , the councils represented more than 800,000 persons, a sixth of the labour force (outside of agriculture), Kovanda recalls. Others were still forming in spring 1969. In late June, the existence of 300 councils and 150 preparatory committees was reported, with a prestige associated with the biggest enterprises in the country. A little more than half were CP members.

For a radical democracy

But the crackdown had begun. From January 1969, the praesidium of the party had denounced the worker and student strikes. The student Jan Palach set fire to himself on 16 January. On 17 April, Dubek was removed from his post. During the summer of 1970, the workers councils, initially smothered de facto, were banned. The normalisation was complete.

For Jaroslav abata, a member of the self-management current of the CP, elected to the central committee during the clandestine congress of August 1968, the Czechoslovak communists should be proud of the Vysoany congress, which rejected the invasion of the Warsaw pact; but they should be less proud of having themselves contributed to the dispersal of the sovereign and self-managed radical democracy, which this congress supported. On the other hand, its consolidation would have immensely encouraged all the reformist forces of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR also (17).abata explains that he signed Charter 77 because a radical democracy was needed inside the Communist movement also. However, the social dimension of such a democracy subjecting the economy to collective choices made in a context of egalitarian social relations was far from being consensual inside of Charter 77. And is completely incompatible with the treatment of the workers in the actually existing capitalism and European construction which emerged after 1989.

Catherine SamaryCatherine Samary is an economist and the author of Communism, Democracy & The Commons (co-ed), Merlin Press & Resistance Books, 2019.

Translated by Bernard Gibbons

(1) See Jrme Heurtaux and Cdric Pellen, 1989 lest de lEurope, une mmoire controverse, ditions de lAube, La Tour-dAigues, 2009.(2) Timothy Garton Ash, 1989 changed the world. But where now for Europe?, The Guardian, London, 4 November 2009.(3) Vaclav Havel: Le rgime seffondrait dheure en heure, Le Figaro Magazine, Paris, October 31, 2009.(4) Timothy Garton Ash, We the People: The Revolution of 89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague, Penguin, London, 1993.(5) Georges Mink and Jean-Charles Szurek, La Grande Conversion. Le destin des communistes en Europe de lEst, Seuil, coll Lpreuve des faits, Paris, 1999.(6) See Victor Fay, Unicit du pouvoir politique, pluralit sociale et idologique, Le Monde diplomatique, August 1980.(7) Michael A Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism: The Conductor and the Conducted, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012.(8) David Mandel, Perestroka et classe ouvrire,LHomme et la Socit, no 88-89, Paris, 1988.(9) See Franois Gze, Le poids de la dpendance lgard de lOccident, Le Monde diplomatique, October 1980.(10) See Zbigniew Kowalewski, Rendez-nous nos usines ! Solidarno, le combat pour lautogestion ouvrire, La Brche-PEC, Paris, 1985.(11) Lire Tamara Deutscher, Le pouvoir polonais face lexigence de dmocratisation de la classe ouvrire, Jean-Yves Potel, Un projet politique pour la socit tout entire, and Ignacio Ramonet, La monte dun contre-pouvoir dans la Pologne en crise, Le Monde diplomatique, respectively May 1981, August 1981 and October 1981.(12) Karol Modzelewski, Nous avons fait galoper lhistoire. Confessions dun cavalier us, ditions de la Maison des sciences de lhomme, Paris, 2018.(13) This institution was in the first half of 1989 a place of discussion between members of the government and the dissident movement, including Solidarno.(14) Karel Kovanda, Les conseils ouvriers tchcoslovaques (1968-1969), lencontre, 24 August 2018 (original publication: Telos, no 28, Washington University, summer 1976).(15) Chronologie et analyse de Milos Barta sur le "mouvement autogestionnaire, lencontre, 20 August 2018. See also Jean-Pierre Faye and Vladimir Fiera, La Rvolution des conseils ouvriers, 1968-1969, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1978.(16) A military alliance made up of the countries of eastern Europe and the USSR.(17) Jaroslav abata, Invasion or our own goal, East European Reporter, vol 3, no 3, London, autumn 1988.

(Courtesy: Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2020 The original article was published under the title In The Name of Communist Ideal)

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Dissident movements within the Eastern bloc aspired to genuine socialism | (...) - Mainstream

A Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting in Arkansas, 1937. (Archive Photos / Getty Images)

This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly. W.E.B. Du Bois delivered these lines before a large crowd in Columbia, S.C., in the fall of 1946. The people gathered before him were neither strictly Marxist nor communist; they were mostly members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, which was founded in 1937 to organize young people, workers, and other disaffected groups across the South. But no one in that audience was shocked by what he had to say. For them, like Du Bois, breaking the back of Southern white supremacy required challenging and remaking the larger system of exploitative capitalism that had subjected black and white Southerners to centuries of injustice. With the Congress of Industrial Organizations executing its Operation Dixie to organize industrial workers in the South that year and with African American veterans back from the war embarking on their own militant and heroic struggle for human rights there, Du Boiss insistence that the South had become the center of a new battle for freedom was in no way far from the truth.Ad Policy Books in Review

Part of the reason for this was that the struggle for civil rights and racial equality in the South had long been linked to activity in the economic sphere, where millions of white and black Southerners worked as sharecroppers and factory employees and in various low-wage jobs. During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the region the nations No. 1 economic problem, and there had always been an undercurrent of Southern-based radicalism that sought wide-ranging changenot only civil and political rights but also economic and social ones.

To add to this, beginning in the 1930s, many of the leaders and organizers in the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow were members of the Communist Party or its fellow travelers. From Harlem in New York City to Birmingham, Ala., black and white Communists organized across racial and class lines throughout the Great Depression and World War II to fight fascism abroad and hunger and racism at home. By the time the Southern Negro Youth Congress was organized, many involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement had been active in earlier Communist and Communist-affiliated groups. Others who were radicalized by the trial of the Scottsboro Boys and the Angelo Herndon case were exposed to many radical economic ideas and felt a particular loyalty to the left, having witnessed in both trials the Communist Party backing lawyers to take up the cause of black civil and legal rights in the South.

So when Du Bois spoke before a crowd of young black activists in the mid-1940s, he was preaching to the choir, because an ever-growing number of radical Southerners already agreed with him that the struggle against white supremacy was a struggle against capitalism, too. As Du Bois told them, the first and greatestallies are the white working classes about you, which had also been exploited by wealthy capitalists interested in dividing the Souths working class.

Mary Stantons new book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 19301950, helps recover this history through the story of one of the partys most important sections: District 17, a regional unit of the national party that was headquartered in industrial Birmingham and sought to coordinate efforts to organize white and black Southerners in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. During the Depression, World War II, and the early postwar years, the group was at the forefront of the struggle throughout the Deep South against police brutality, lynchings, and anti-free-speech laws. In terms of the number of members, it often punched above its weight: James S. Allen, a Communist organizer who wrote the memoir Organizing in the Depression South, estimated that in 1931 the party had fewer than 500 members in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. By chronicling the partys successful efforts to establish a foothold in Alabama during the 1930s and 40s, Stanton shows us that Communist organizers adopted a variety of organizing tools and resourcesincluding the International Labor Defense (ILD), the American section of the Cominterns legal armin order to win black Americans their rights and freedom in court. Highlighting how these black and white Communists built a multiracial movement through a series of highly publicized trials, Stanton illuminates how Communists in Alabama and elsewhere in the United States used the law not only to bring international attention to the worst of Jim Crow segregation but also to build solidarity across race and class lines. By doing the hard work of pursuing a legal strategy closely tied to a media strategy of publicizing numerous social injustices, Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Based primarily in Northern cities, the Communist Party started to plan its organizing campaign in the South in the early 1930s, a new view of the South as a key area of activism that Harry Haywood, a prominent black Communist based in Chicago, promulgated in The Communist in his 1933 essay The Struggle for the Leninist Position on the Negro Question in the United States. His 1948 book Negro Liberation insisted, among other things, that American radicals needed to turn their attention to the fight for black political and economic rights in the so-called Black Belt, the fertile land sweeping south from Virginia through the heart of the former Confederacy to Louisiana. There a nation within a nation stood, and Communists, Haywood argued, could join in its struggle for self-determinationand by doing so build a base for revolution.

Haywoods arguments made a profound impression on his fellow Communists, both black and white, in the North. He first came across this idea while living in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and seeing the autonomous republics within the USSR, which provided a model for what he desired for African Americans in the South. The Depression only sharpened this insight. Hoping to expand the partys membership and reach in the rest of the United States, Haywood saw an opportunity to do just that by organizing the South.Current Issue

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However, as the Communist organizers arrived in different Southern cities, they found that they had to make changes on the fly to the idea Haywood promoted. As Stanton tells us, many of the black sharecroppers, miners, and industrial workers they encountered did not want to opt out of the system but rather to opt into it: They wanted to participate in the nations prosperity, to claim constitutional guarantees, and to assume a rightful place in society. This discovery left a profound mark on early Communist organizers and shaped much of the work they did in the South and in the North as well. Instead of focusing on an all-out revolution against Jim Crows entrenched segregation, they sought to help black Americans win their economic, political, and legal rights. Rather than a violent overthrow of the system, they mostly attempted to use various means of protest to win major victories on behalf of social and political reform.

Nationally, the Communists accepted this Popular Front approach, seeking to pursue social justice in all of its manifestations, and the experience of the Alabama Communists played an important role in shaping this evolution in American Communist thinking and in helping the party, as its vanguard, test the applications of this new approach. The Alabama Communist Party, after all, made up a considerable part of District 17. The threats these activists and their allies faced were stark. Even at the height of its popularity during the Great Depression, it was risky being a member of the Communist Party anywhere in the country, and organizing for civil rights and economic reform in Alabama was an even more dangerous prospect. District 17 became ground zero for the new reformism that ran through the party. Communists there could become active in both civil rights and labor organizing; they could reach out to black and white Southerners alike, form trade unions, and provide them with legal defense. As a result, they were a constant target of harassment and beatings, so much so that Stanton compares District17 to a firehousein a perennial state of emergency, running on adrenalin.

Stanton begins Red, Black, White with the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial. In 1931, nine young African American men were accused by two white women of raping them while they rode on a train traveling through Tennessee and Alabama. The NAACP was initially reluctant to take the case, so the ILD rushed to the Scottsboro Boys defense. The case soon rocketed to international prominence, primarily because of the unrelenting efforts of local Communist activists and the ILDs skillful use of publicity. Eventually, the state gave posthumous pardons to several of the young menOzie Powell, Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, Andy Wright.

The achievements of the ILD helped the Communist Party build some support among African Americans across the country, and Stanton traces how Communist organizers in Birmingham and the rest of District 17 used it to fuel activist campaigns throughout the Deep South. Even with the ILDs organizing, however, the Birmingham organizers struggled to craft a party structure that was able to withstand the heat of the anti-communism and anti-black racism that pervaded Alabamas political system in the 1930s and 40s. The party organization that had been developed in the North proved important in supporting the partys efforts in the South. Faced with laws explicitly designed to crack down on radical organizing, the national party sent lawyers to defend the organizers and helped publicize their cases. But District17 often found that it had to innovate its own tactics: investigating the lynchings and other murders of African Americans in the state, organizing local sharecropper unions and a reading group, and enlisting sympathetic local lawyers.Related Article

Stanton also discusses District 17s attempts to investigate police brutality in cities like Memphis in the 1930s. The hostility that the Communist organizers faced was attributable to their radical stance on racial equality as well as to their attempts to organize Southern workers. They were operating in a one-party system that constantly monitored and suppressed all forms of radical organizing, and the ghosts of the past haunted their work. In 1919 in Elaine, Ark., radicals were victims of the Red Summer racial pogrom sparked by attempts to organize black sharecroppers.

The struggles of union workers in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929 and the collapse of the textile workers strike in 1934 likewise showed how hostile Southern authorities were to any labor organizing, and many Communists there were forced to try a variety of tactics untested in the North. Often stretched thin trying to help out wherever they could, they ended up having to live in a state of what Stanton calls mind-numbing fear, but they nonetheless persevered and helped thousands in the American South make their desires for freedom known across the world.

While offering us a close view of local organizing, Stanton never loses sight of the larger story of American communism. She also situates District 17s activism within a larger history of radical activism and protest in the Deep South that helped plant the seeds for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The members of District 17 and the people they served recognized that theirs was but a local phase of a much broader worldwide struggle against not just fascism but all forms of imperialist and racist domination. Du Bois was not alone in making the connections between local struggles against Jim Crow and international struggles against capitalism. Black Southerners defended Ethiopia after it was invaded by Italy in 1935 and journeyed to Spain to fight Francos forces in the Spanish Civil War. They all saw their fight as the same one, against the same enemy, on multiple fronts.

As Stanton shows near the end of the book, the forces of reaction in the South were aware of this larger struggle, too, even as their attempts to crush the Communists and drive back interracial organizing became more successful in the postwar years, when Northerners and Southerners alike targeted labor and socialist organizers across the country, essentially forcing the left underground. The Second Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s dealt some severe blows, but the Communist Party left a legacy of grassroots organizing and agitation that would become part of the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Other books have covered at least a portion of this terrain before. Robin D.G. Kelleys landmark Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression is the best-known work on the partys operations in Alabama in this period. Glenda Gilmores Defying Dixie, John Egertons Speak Now Against the Day, and Patricia Sullivans Days of Hope also note that the fight against Jim Crow did not begin with the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Taken together, these books tell a rich story that is often neglected or minimized in the mainstream narratives of Southern history. By excavating the roots of civil rights activism in the South that reach back to the 1930s, they remind us that the struggle for political and civil rights there was almost always twinned with the struggle for economic and social rights.

The role that Communists played in the civil rights movement of the postwar years is often suppressed or glossed over, if mentioned at all. Red, Black, White prompts us to remember a different Southern past, and Stanton shows us the more practical and down-to-earth nature of Communist organizing in the South as well. The partys activists arrived in the region with an ideological view of class struggle but adapted their tactics and strategy after listening to people on the ground. Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will is the memorable phrase coined by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, but it could just as easily have been uttered by Alabamas Communists, both those from the South and those who traveled there to help organize it. These Communists risked nearly everything, and they did so knowing full well that their ideals might never be realized in their lifetimes. But they nonetheless persisted. Whether trying to save someone from lynching or struggling to organize workers in a Birmingham steel plant, it was, for nearly all of them, a matter of life or death.

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In the run-up to Chinas 13th National Peoples Congress on May 22, the chairman of its Standing Committee, Li Zhanshu, said how important it was that the session was being held in the middle of the global coronavirus pandemic. Li remarked the session was being held at a time when overseas Covid-19 epidemic situations remain grim and complex, while in China major strategic achievements have been made.

Such differentiation between China and the rest of the world is likely to become more prominent in Chinese Communist Party, commonly known as CCP, rhetoric as the nations success is attributed to its socialist political system. The English version of the Peoples Daily commented in its coverage of the National Peoples Congress that foreigners will be looking to Chinas socialist system for enlightenment and guidance as they emerge from the shadow of the pandemic.

The CCP is now proclaiming its success over Covid-19 as a victory for President Xi Jinpings brand of Marxism.

Early in the war against coronavirus, it was predicted that the CCP would be one of the most high-profile casualties. But rumours of the CCPs demise were premature. As China deployed an increasingly vast and sophisticated surveillance system, the pandemic has accelerated the partys authority and control, not caused it to crumble.

While many countries declared war on Covid-19, China stressed it was a Peoples War. Such an analogy recalls the rhetoric of Mao Zedong, who called for a Peoples War to liberate China from the Imperial Japanese in 1938.

By talking about the pandemic in the same language, Xi identified the magnitude of the threat posed by Covid-19. But he also signified that the war would be waged according to the spirit, ideology and beliefs of the CCP and in an effort infused with Chinese socialist characteristics. Victory in this war will be a vindication of Xis Marxist strategy.

As a researcher of the uses of contemporary Marxism in bolstering ideas of citizen obligation and state legitimacy, I am looking at how China channels revolutionary analogies. Seventy years after the founding of the Peoples Republic, Xi has been notable in his efforts to re-establish Marxism at the heart of Chinese politics.

One of the key rationales Xi gives for the strengthening of Marxism is that the ideology can restore Chinas social cohesion. This is required to address the ills of hedonism, extravagance and corruption which have infected China as an inevitable result of opening up to the West.

As China recovers, its success in containing the virus is being put down to the devotion and solidarity of the people. Such claims are not unfounded: a World Health Organization-China joint mission report particularly praised the Chinese peoples solidarity and collective action during the pandemic. Such praise for solidarity will doubtless vindicate Xis efforts in creating a more cohesive and collectively minded populace.

Xi consistently asserts that Chinese leadership is guided by Marxisms scientific truth. An ambiguous term, Xi often explains this approach as one that uses Marxist theory to identify the best way to solve practical challenges. As the CCP deploys a mix of advanced technology and traditional socialist organisational models to tackle Covid-19, this will doubtless exemplify such practical use of Marxism.

Successfully tackling the outbreak is vital for the CCPs domestic legitimacy. Since the early years of the Peoples Republic of China, the promise of eradicating disease and improving the health of all has been at the centre of communist propaganda. Such focus has created an inextricable link between health and Chinese politics. Given this link, the war against Covid-19 was of vital importance for the CCPs legitimacy. Nonetheless, the global nature of the pandemic means that the success China has will also be judged in relation to how other countries, especially Western liberal states, handle the crisis.

Chinese state media claimed Chinas low death rate relative to other hard-hit countries was due to the superiority of socialist Chinas institutional framework. Such assertions have been made in the context of an ideological war with the West, stressing the benefits of Chinese socialism in relation to the weaknesses of Western capitalism.

In the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily, this political message was explicit: Covid-19 should make the people of Hong Kong, who have long been under the influence of Western ideology, recognise the benefits of the alternative socialist system.

In Marxist philosophy, progress comes through conflict. Chinese officials have evoked such belief, quoting Friedrich Engels in particular to claim that Comrade Xis new era will emerge stronger from its struggle with Covid-19. The CCP is already in the process of drafting a book to be published in multiple languages showcasing the key role of the CCP and Chinas socialist system in defeating the virus.

Rather than causing communist China to crumble, the virus will likely serve as a catalyst in Xis bid to present his brand of Marxism as a challenge to the global capitalist system.

Ruairidh Brown, Academic Tutor and Year One Coordinator in International Studies, University of Nottingham.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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The lockdowns and death in China began long before the first case of COVID-19 was ever reported. Though Xinjiang province is nearly 2,000 miles northwest of Wuhan where COVID-19 was first found, its also home to another virus in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom. Officially an atheist country, China technically recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. But while China seemingly promotes freedom of religion, nothing could be further from the truth.

These faiths teachings look very different in China, which routinely takes draconian measures to ensure each faith bows not to their God but to Chinas government officials and their communist ideals. The most prominent example of persecution is in Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic and religious minorities live, including Muslim Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. The CCP began a crackdown on the Uighurs after clashes between the Uighur ethnic minority and Chinese police in Xinjiangs capital Urumqi in 2009. Afterwards, police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting off all cell phone service. The Uighurs plight has only worsened in recent years.

In 2014, President Xi Jinping gave a number of private speeches to CCP officials on the dangers of the Uighurs, calling on the CCP to unleash the tools of dictatorship to eliminate radical Islam in Xinjiang. Xi and the CCP believed the Uighurs and Muslims were extremists who threatened the country, though many reports said CCP police were largely responsible for the clashes in Urumqi.

Xi likened Islamic extremism to a virus-like contagion. Addressing it, Xi said, would require a period of painful, interventionary treatment. Though the Uighurs had lived in this region since ancient times, their presence in China was now considered nothing more than a dangerous disease threatening the CCP and one which needed to be eradicated at all costs. Alarmingly, reports have surfaced of a genocide against the Uighurs. This should have human rights activists and the world very concerned.

Right now, nearly a million Uighurs sit in indoctrination camps, essentially concentration camps designed for brainwashing, forced labor and ridding the Uighurs of their religious differences. These concentration camps have the largest network since the Holocaust. Most days in these camps are spent listening to lectures against the Islamic religion, studying CCP propaganda and singing songs praising President Xi, wishing him a long life. Children are separated from their parents, who are sent to work in factories with no permission to quit unless approved by several government officials.

It doesnt take much for Uighurs to be sent to these camps, either. Reasons for detainment can be faith-based, like reciting Arabic prayers or simply based on physical appearance, like having long beards (a common characteristic for Islamic minorities) or refusing to smoke or drink alcohol. Residents in Xinjiang can see their Uighur neighbors one day, only to have them disappear the next, with no information of their whereabouts. Most are sent to the indoctrination camps or to forced labor factories, where they make materials for well-known companies like Apple and Nike. Other religions in China are also being persecuted by the CCP.

As Christianity grows in China, theyve also become targets. Reports detail crosses being burned in Christian churches, often replaced with the Chinese flag or photos of Xi. Christians are forced to renounce their faith. Churches are required to install facial-recognition cameras. If they refuse, the CCP quickly shuts them down. When bibles were pulled from online bookstores in China, Beijing released new guidelines encouraging churches to localize religion, practice the core values of socialism and actively explore religious thought according to China's national circumstances.

Other religions are also being victimized. In Tibet, over 1.2 million Buddhists have been killed since 1949. Nearly 6,000 monasteries and shrines have been destroyed. The State Department's 2018 report on international religious freedom describes the repression of Buddhists in Tibet as severe, with reports of forced disappearance, prolonged detention without trial and arrests based on individuals faith.

The list of violent persecution seems endless. One thing is clear: In China, differences in thought are not celebrated theyre eliminated -- and religions wanting to exist must celebrate communism at their core. When we discuss repression and authoritarianism in the world, we must look at religious minorities in China. They are victims of the ruthless communist ideology which leaves no room for freedom in any way, shape or form. Chinas government must answer for this systemic oppression and end it immediately.

This is why Congress intends to pass legislation imposing sanctions on any government including Chinas found persecuting Uighurs and other minorities. If we believe we must defend the truly defenseless, we must stand up for the Uighurs and religious minorities in China. They deserve freedom and the world demands it.

Congressman Michael WaltzMichael WaltzThe real virus to the Chinese Communist Party: religious freedom 125 lawmakers urge Trump administration to support National Guard troops amid pandemic Trump campaign launches new fundraising program with House Republicans MORE represents Floridas 6th District in Congress and is a member of the China Task Force.

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