Yes, in the Russian and Chinese revolutions, there was death and destruction--and excesses, even grievous ones, occurred. But all this was in the context of the oppressed and exploited fighting to get free and creating the world's first socialist societies... while facing internal and external threat, and having very little experience to learn from.
But we are not in the same place. With the new communism developed by Bob Avakian, there is the scientific framework to understand the great achievements and the mistakes of these revolutions... and the scientific framework to go further and do better in a new stage of even more emancipatory communist revolution.
Point 3: "History by Body Count" Is UnscientificSuppose you were told that 650,000 people died during the American Civil War of 1861-65 (equal to 7.5 million deaths in today's U.S. population). Incredibly high, and true. But then you are told: Abraham Lincoln was a "mass murderer," having stubbornly presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. That is not a scientific statement. The body count doesn't tell you what the causes and clashing objectives of the Civil War were--what it was fought over--that slavery was the central question.
So, too, with the Russian and Chinese revolutions. You can't start with "body counts." And you can't start "in the middle of the movie"--like the battles of the American Civil War. What were the socio-economic and political situations of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the threats and real imperialist invasions, the counter-revolutions and civil wars, epic natural disasters, and the oppressive and exploitative societies that gave rise to these revolutions and the millions who literally cried out for emancipation? And how did the revolutionary leadership respond to challenges and obstacles, and what mistakes were made in dealing with these challenges?
To get to what's objectively true requires historical and all-sided analysis, including of the forces in collision.
Point 4: The Imperialists Are World-Class Liars. They Systematically Lie About Particular Episodes in the History of CommunismWhen the U.S. massively escalated the war in Vietnam in 1964, it manufactured a lie about an attack on a U.S. warship. That lie was repeated by the media to justify a war that ultimately killed three million Vietnamese. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it manufactured a lie, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify the war--and hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced.
In terms of communism, the bourgeois method is to twist and distort particular events and movements in the history of communism--especially those that involved great turmoil and great upheaval, and great struggle and transformation. Like the collectivization of agriculture in Russia in the late 1920s, or the Cultural Revolution in China of 1966-76. The actual aims of these movements are distorted, and then the "death toll" machine goes to work--inflating body counts to serve an official story line of communism's supposed "indifference to human life."One example of this is the Great Leap Forward that took place in socialist China in 1958-1960. We will say more in upcoming "Refutations" about the tremendously liberating character of this movement and struggle to establish food security, to revolutionize economic and social life in China's countryside, and to overcome inequalities, including longstanding patriarchal barriers facing women.
This gets ignored, and what gets pumped out by mainstream media and by ideologues of the capitalist system is that during the Great Leap Forward, 65 million people starved to death because the revolutionary leader Mao Zedong was so hell-bent on keeping to his radical economic and social policies. The story continues, that this led to a famine--and since Mao didn't care about human life, tens of millions died. This is a complete and scandalous lie.
What is the truth? In 1959-1960, there were food shortages and deaths from famine. But this was mainly caused by unprecedented weather conditions--terrible drought and flooding, natural disasters that were common in China's history. In response, famine relief measures were taken, and resources mobilized, by the socialist government to deal with the disaster and meet the needs of the people. The charge that 65 million died is based on unreliable data and statistical manipulation to attack socialism in China from 1949-1976. You can find out more about this and other ways that "death tolls" are inflated at the Set the Record website. But just because something is widely repeated and popularly believed does not make it true.
Point 5: How Dare the Capitalists Point Their Blood-Dripping FingersAgain: the historical reality is that no system has been as barbaric as capitalism--not only in numbers of needless and continuous deaths and human suffering, but in the crushing of the human spirit. Capitalism rules by an inherent and fundamental logic of ruthless competition and profit-driven expansion. Capitalism is based on a handful privately appropriating that which is produced through the interconnected efforts of hundreds of millions worldwide in socialized production. It operates on the basis of exploitation and the most vicious oppression.
Capitalism worldwide brought exterminations and enslavement of indigenous/aboriginal populations. What of the colonial expansion and colonial wars such as Belgium's conquest of the Congo that slashed the population by 10 million, or the four million and more killed in the recent civil wars in Congo fueled by imperial grab for resources?
The "triumph" and maintenance of Western imperialist control in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America have "required" military conquest, invasions, coups, death squads, and drone wars. It has "required" the killing of three million during the Korean War... chemical and biological weapons in Vietnam... the slaughter of 500,000 to a million communists and sympathizers in Indonesia in 1965.
Then there are the countless "routine" deaths caused by this system: women dying because of lack of access to safe abortion; the 16,000 children, mainly in the poor countries of the Third World, who die each and every day from preventable disease and malnutrition. And we now face, under Trump, the real and growing danger of nuclear war against North Korea that could spiral into global devastation.
But we are fed the lie that this is the best and only of all possible worlds.
Raymond Lotta is an advocate for Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism. He is a political economist and author of America in Decline and You Don't Know What You Think You "Know" About... The Communist Revolution and the Real Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future. He writes for Revolution/revcom.us and is a spokesperson for The Bob Avakian Institute. He has written extensively on China during and after the Cultural Revolution and has, through the "Set the Record Straight Project," which he leads, fought to spread the truth--and refute the lies--about the experience of the communist revolution in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1956 and China between 1949 and 1976.
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