Copyright (c) 1998 by Pathfinder. Reprinted by permission.
June 6, 1998
Dear Comrade,
The request from some comrades in the United Kingdom to reprint The Catastrophe in Indonesia, as well as a similar request from some comrades here in New York, prompted a discussion in the Socialist Workers Party Political Committee on several political questions that we wanted to raise with you.
The pamphlet was published in 1966 by Merit Publishers, Pathfinder's predecessor. Pathfinder subsequently withdrew it from publication because of the political line of Ernest Mandel's article, which reflected his view that Maoism was left centrist in character rather than counterrevolutionary Stalinist. It was a political error for the Militant to have run an excerpt from Mandel's article in the "Book of the Week Column" in its April 6 issue. Mámud [Shirvani]'s comments in the April 20 issue - pointing out that "the article fails to draw the central lesson: the treacherous role of Stalinism in leading the masses to defeat without a battle" - should have been printed as a special feature correcting the error. Instead, it was relegated to the letters column, where readers had no reason to believe it reflected anything more than one person's opinion.
What is in some ways most notable about both the decision of the Militant editor to run the Mandel excerpt and the proposals to reprint the 1966 pamphlet is that comrades did not do the political work beforehand to go back and mine the rich record of the communist movement over many decades - the political continuity of the revolutionary working class, conquered in blood. Few did the hard but rewarding work to find out what our movement had written in the past about the struggles against Dutch imperialism and the revolutionary movement in Indonesia, the counterrevolutionary consequences of the Maoist variety of Stalinism, or even the 1965 massacre itself. This is similar to what we discussed in the international leadership a couple of years ago, when the comrades in the leadership of the SWP and other communist leagues responsible for the reporting teams to France during the wave of workers struggles in late 1995 and early 1996 did not prepare themselves and other comrades by studying the firsthand coverage and analysis of the May-June 1968 upsurge from the Militant and Intercontinental Press collected in the booklet Revolt in France.
This time around, the resources available are, if anything, even more plentiful. World Outlook - the meticulously mimeographed forerunner of Intercontinental Press, edited by Joseph Hansen - ran numerous news accounts and analyses of the 1965-66 events in Indonesia; many were reprinted in the pages of the Militant. In the 1940s and 1950s our magazine, now easily accessible through the New International on CD-ROM, carried numerous informative articles on the struggle for national liberation and socialism in Indonesia in this century, written by revolutionists in that country as well as in the Netherlands, the colonial power. The books, pamphlets, and Education for Socialist bulletins published and distributed by Pathfinder record the lessons of our class from the Chinese revolution and other post-World War II social overturns, the fight for workers and farmers governments, and the counterrevolutionary course of Stalinism from its origins to its accelerated disintegration over the past decade. Not to mention the internal bulletins of our world movement, several of the most pertinent of which I will refer to below.
When the pamphlet The Catastrophe in Indonesia was originally published in 1966, the Fourth International had just been reunified three years earlier. Central to the decade-long split had been the course by those in the current of which Mandel was a leader of adapting to Stalinist and centrist forces, instead of charting a steady communist course to build proletarian parties. Reunification had been achieved on the basis of a converging political response to the Cuban revolution and its communist leadership, as well as to the openings created by the initial, post-1956 manifestations of the disintegration of world Stalinism.
The October 1965 slaughter in Indonesia, in which hundreds of thousands of workers and Communist Party supporters were killed, was the most devastating defeat for the working class since the fascist victory in Germany in 1933. As Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen wrote in his introduction to the 1966 pamphlet, the defeat in Indonesia "had grave repercussions for the colonial revolution, the workers' states and the socialist struggle in general.... The most spectacular immediate result [of the defeat] is to be seen in China. The evidence strongly indicates that it was the precipitating cause for the `Cultural Revolution,' which has so surprised and puzzled the Sinologists."(1)
In 1965-66, the SWP leadership and those who shared our views in the world movement anticipated that lessons drawn from these momentous events in Indonesia and in China itself could alter the thinking on Stalinism of some in the Fourth International majority, just as the defeat in Germany in 1933 had drawn a layer of revolutionary-minded workers and youth in and around the CP to communist conclusions. It was with that goal in mind that we agreed to collaborate in producing a pamphlet that contained the Mandel article, as well as an introduction by Hansen (a Marxist assessment of these events that retains its political value), a statement by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and an account of the disastrous course of the Indonesian CP by a young member of that party who had made his way into exile.
In hindsight, the impact and trajectory we had hoped for at the time did not come about. No qualitatively different articles on Maoism or Indonesia were written by Mandel or others in his current. But politics is not conducted in hindsight, and during the period the pamphlet was produced we were working with comrades around the world with the aim of advancing political clarity and homogeneity as a basis for common action in the class struggle. (For similar reasons, we also collaborated in 1968 to produce a collection of articles, with an introduction by Mandel, entitled Fifty Years of World Revolution: 1917-1967. Although this was made up of longer think pieces - a "colloquium," as George Novack liked to say - the impact of events between 1968 and 1975 did not yield a more communist colloquium, and Merit subsequently withdrew that book from publication.)
The resolutions adopted at the reunification congress in 1963 had seemed to mark a degree of political convergence on the assessment of the Chinese Communist Party, as had the draft of a resolution on the Sino-Soviet conflict that Hansen had participated in preparing for the December 1965 world congress, just a few months after the Indonesian catastrophe. Hansen was in the hospital in Paris and unable to attend the congress, however, and the amendments adopted by the majority reversed its political line. When the SWP leadership learned of these changes following the congress, they wrote a protest to the United Secretariat:
Since receiving the final draft of the resolution on the Sino-Soviet conflict, on February 21 ..., we have held a number of discussions on the problem that was created for us, by the considerable modifications that were introduced into the draft submitted to the congress.
The most significant changes involve the characterization of the Mao leadership. In the draft resolution, the Mao leadership was held to come under the general category of Stalinism although with peculiarities of its own due to the influence of the Chinese revolution. The direction of the changes introduced into the draft resolution was to substitute for this a characterization of the Mao leadership as left centrist.(2)
As it turned out, the lessons of the bloodbath in Indonesia and of the devastating bureaucratic social convulsions during the "Cultural Revolution" in China did not result in a narrowing of political differences in the leadership of the Fourth International. The record of this widening political divergence is fully documented in: Discussion on China (1968-1971), an International Information Bulletin produced by the SWP in the early 1970s; and International Internal Discussion Bulletin no. 13 in 1973, which contains the draft resolution "Two Assessments of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Balance Sheet," submitted to the 1974 world congress by, among others, Joseph Hansen, Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, and Alan Harris.(3)
The debate took form around a resolution on the "Cultural Revolution" drafted by SWP leaders Joseph Hansen and George Novack, initially in consultation with Ernest Mandel, in preparation for the 1969 world congress. Once again, as in 1965, the line of the draft resolution was reversed through a series of amendments, this time submitted by Mandel, Pierre Frank, and Livio Maitan at a meeting of the United Secretariat prior to the congress. To clarify the differences, the SWP leadership prepared the draft resolution and the proposed amendments in dual columns - a painstaking labor that computer technology would make substantially simpler (although perhaps less visually effective) today! The resolution in this dual-column format can be found in both the above-mentioned internal bulletins, which some comrades in the Communist League undoubtedly have and that can be photocopied for comrades who want to read these documents. The collection Discussion on China (1968-1971) also contains Hansen's reports on this aspect of the 1969 world congress to the June 11 and June 18 New York City branch meetings and to the August 29-September 1 SWP convention.(4)
In the very first paragraph of the resolution drafted by Hansen and Novack, the modifier "Stalinized" was deleted from the description of the Chinese Communist Party - and the amendments continued in that political vein throughout. The issues in dispute were summarized as follows at the opening of the balance sheet submitted to the subsequent 1974 world congress:
Those who spoke [in 1969] for the Maitan-Mandel-Frank amendments argued that while the Cultural Revolution had begun as an intrabureaucratic struggle, it had developed into something else. Mao and his followers, they contended, were sensitive to mass pressure for reforms. They said that significant concessions to the masses would be forthcoming as a result of the Cultural Revolution despite the bureaucratic character of the Mao faction. They regarded Maoist foreign policy as eclectic and inconsistent, wavering between opportunism in some countries and objectively anti-imperialist or revolutionary positions in others. The supporters of this resolution rejected the view that Mao would favor rapprochement with American imperialism at the expense of the world revolution.
Those who favored the original resolution also viewed the Cultural Revolution as an intrabureaucratic struggle, but insisted that neither of the contenders would make major concessions to the masses. The supporters of this position held that Mao's policy on the international plane was fundamentally opportunist, aimed at reaching an accommodation with American imperialism and at practicing class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the colonial and semicolonial countries.
Underlying these two opposing views was a disagreement on the character of the Chinese Communist Party. The amendments proposed by Comrades Maitan, Mandel, and Frank showed that they considered it to be "bureaucratic centrist," i.e., that under the pressure of the masses or in resisting imperialism the Maoists could occasionally be expected to take positions close to those of revolutionary Marxism.
The original document analyzed the policies of the Maoists - socialism in one country, the two-stage theory of revolution, zigzags in pursuit of peaceful coexistence, opposition to proletarian democracy - as expressions of the interests of a "crystallized bureaucratic caste" that ought properly to be called Stalinist because of its essential similarity to the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy consolidated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
Most important, as Hansen concluded in his report to the 1969 New York City branch meetings:
[L]ooming behind all of these differences is the question of how to go about building a revolutionary combat party. In the United States, this concerns us a great deal. We see it in relation not only to the Communist party, which is no longer the great problem it once was, but in relation to the ultraleftism of [the Maoist] Progressive Labor [party], of tendencies in the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and other formations, notably the Black Panthers. We have the impression that other sectors of the world Trotskyist movement face comparable problems in their daily work of forging a combat party.
The amendments to the original resolution pointed to actions by the Chinese CP that "objectively favored anti- imperialist struggles in various parts of the world, especially Southeast Asia, the Arab countries and Africa." The balance sheet by Barnes, Hansen, Harris, Waters, et al responded:
This statement did not withstand the test of events. Even at the time it was written, the memory was still fresh of the debacle in Indonesia in 1965 in which as many as several hundred thousand members and supporters of the pro-Maoist Indonesian CP were slaughtered as the price of that party's Peking-approved prostration before the Sukarno regime.
The balance sheet also pointed to the example of the workers and peasants government in Algeria, where "Peking for its own factional reasons was the first government in the world to recognize the reactionary Boumedienne regime after the coup that overthrew Ben Bella in June 1965." Only a few months after this 1973 balance sheet was issued, Peking was also among the first governments in the world to recognize the bloody fascist-like dictatorship in Chile, slamming the door of its embassy in Santiago in the face of refugees from Pinochet's reign of terror.
My aim in this note is not to review all the political questions taken up in these and other publications of our world movement. But these handful of references alone should shed some further light on statements in Mandel's article such as, "The leaders of the PKI [Indonesian CP] did not assimilate these lessons of history" - or a sentence not included in the Militant excerpt: "Underlying this erroneous tactic [of blocking mass actions by workers and peasants "aiming at the conquest of power"] is a false theoretical concept of the conditions for victory in the colonial revolution and of the nature of the state...."
But responsibility for the defeat lay not with bad ideas, but with the self-serving class-collaborationist course of the privileged bureaucratic caste in Peking and its subservient followers in the leadership of the Indonesian Communist Party. Only by clearly understanding the accountability of Stalinism for the 1965 catastrophe in Indonesia can we accurately appreciate the historic significance of the fact - underlined by Mámud in his letter to the Militant -that the Indonesian workers, peasants, and youth who are today beginning to return to political life no longer confront this massive counterrevolutionary obstacle that repeatedly stood in their path to victory throughout much of this century.
As class-struggle developments unfold such as those in Indonesia and the broader "Asian crisis," all of us - individually and collectively - will act with greater political self-confidence and effectiveness if we do the disciplined work to ground what we are doing and what we are saying in the hard-won revolutionary continuity of the working class. In this regard, possibly, communists can be considered deeply conservative - a trait we emulate from Lenin, who never failed to test his political judgments against the class-struggle experience generalized in the works of Marx and Engels for the use of current and future generations of proletarian fighters. There is no better source of this written record of struggle than the books, pamphlets, and periodicals the communist movement is now reaching out to our members and supporters the world over to help us keep in print.
Comradely, Steve Clark
NOTES
1. Hansen's introduction is reprinted in this Education
for Socialists publication.
2. Quoted in "The Anatomy of Stalinism" in The Mao Myth and the Legacy of Stalinism in China, by Tom Kerry (Pathfinder, 1977), p. 157.
3. Reprinted in new booklet (see page 7 ad).
4. The dual-column resolution and reports by Hansen are reprinted in new booklet.
Stalinism And Indonesia
The following letter appeared in the letters column of
the April 20 Militant.
The "Book of the Week" column of the April 6 issue of the Militant printed selections from the article "Lessons of the Defeat in Indonesia" by Ernest Mandel. The article appeared in the 1966 [Merit] pamphlet, The Catastrophe in Indonesia - Three articles on the fatal consequences of Communist Party policy.
The article illustrates the depth of the catastrophic defeat that the working class and peasantry suffered in Indonesia in 1965 at the hands of capitalists, landowners, and their army.
But that article fails to draw the central lesson: the treacherous role of Stalinism in leading the masses to a defeat without a battle. Mandel's article does not mention Stalinism; reading it, one gets the impression that the problem with the Communist Party of Indonesia was that it did not understand certain theoretical questions.
However, other parts of the pamphlet do take up the question of Stalinism. For example, an article written by a young member of the Indonesian Communist party who had succeeded in making his way into exile points out, "During the struggle against the Japanese military occupation [during World War II], the PKI [Partai Kommunis Indonesia ] was instructed or `advised,' under Stalin's guidance, to cooperate with the Dutch imperialist government, to carry out `joint actions' against Japanese imperialism."
Thus they sold out the political independence of the working class and its march toward power to the class collaborationist dictates of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow.
In his introduction to the pamphlet, Joseph Hansen explains the role of Stalinism in the defeat of the workers in Germany in 1920s and '30s and the defeat of the Spanish revolution in the '30s.
Hansen then writes, "In relation to Indonesia, Mao played a role comparable to that of Stalin in the German events. Just as Stalin, out of passing diplomatic needs, blocked the German Communist party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped Hitler and put the German working class in power, so Mao out of similar passing diplomatic needs (an alliance with Sukarno and the Indonesian bourgeoisie) blocked the Indonesian Communist Party from developing a revolutionary policy that could have stopped the reactionary generals and put the Indonesian working class in power."
The role played by Stalinism in the defeat suffered by the toilers in Indonesia is not simply a question of history.
Now that the masses in Indonesia are recovering from the effects of that catastrophic defeat and are beginning to fight back against the capitalist assault on their living conditions, they no longer have to cope with such an ubiquitous counterrevolutionary agency on a world scale that, using the prestige of great Russian and Chinese revolutions, could derail their struggles into reformist paths and to defeat.
In fact, imperialism has been weakened by the collapse of Stalinist apparatuses worldwide.
Mámud Shirvani
New York, New York