MIM Notes 230                   March 15, 2001

MIM responds to Black Book of Communism editor Mark Kramer

MIM recently launched an agitation campaign to correct the 
historical record on communism. Specifically we will petition 
Harvard University Press to publish an erratum for its book, the 
"Black Book of Communism" that came out in 1999.

On January 21st, MIM sent a letter to the Harvard University Press 
asking for an erratum for the book "Black Book of Communism."(MIM 
Notes 229) On February 22nd, MIM sent a follow-up letter and 
alerted about two dozen news services of our demand for an 
erratum. Four days later, the editor and translator of the "Black 
Book of Communism" admitted some of the errors we pointed out (see 
letter and response printed on this page).

MIM still demands that Harvard University Press (which published 
"The Black Book") print an erratum to the first edition. We are 
also pressing the editor and publisher on several other factual 
errors, including, most relevantly, their belittlement of the 
brutal incarceration craze in the United States.

We seek tenured faculty, student organizations and others to sign 
on to the following statement or to write their own statements:

We the undersigned demand that Harvard University Press correct 
the misplacement of decimal places that occurred in its book "The 
Black Book of Communism" through the publication of an erratum. 
The errors in Harvard University Press's book overstate the 
violence that happened under communism by a factor of 10. Since 
reviews of the book have been in all the major media outlets and 
all over the Internet, it is a pressing matter of the historical 
record to correct these mistakes and ensure a higher level of 
quantitative literacy for the future.

If you would sign on to this statement, contact mim3@mim.org or 
MIM, PO Box 29670, Los Angeles, CA 90029-0670.

From MIM's point of view, this agitation is a win-win campaign for 
us. If the publisher issues the erratum, we will have done our bit 
against the colossal anti-communist propaganda machine of the 
imperialist countries. If the publisher and media do not correct 
or attend to the mistakes, every reader will understand the low 
credibility level of the academic and media establishment when it 
comes to communism. Already it's been four years since 1997 and 
two years since the book came out in English hardcover and none of 
the media or academics saw fit to correct the book for its literal 
errors.

With regard to our own party's understanding of agitation, this is 
agitation because it concerns a current demand to the powers-that-
be, in this case the academic and media powers-that-be; even 
though the subject matter is a history book. We seek to organize 
the masses to attack the reactionaries now regarding actions that 
have gone on since 1999. If we were merely criticizing Harvard 
University Press books and not making a current demand, we would 
be engaged in what we call timeless or theoretical work as 
distinct from agitation. 

Harvard University Press has published countless books against 
communism in China. Never once has it published a Maoist book. 
Hence we have no illusions about the fairness or thoroughness of 
Harvard University Press. Nonetheless, we can make it as difficult 
as possible to issue this sort of propaganda. Our full review of 
the book and why it is wrong is available at 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/commie.html. Readers 
can purchase this the anti-communist propaganda there as well and 
cause a few percent of the profits to go to MIM.

February 26th letter from editor Kramer

Harvard University Press sent me your e-mail correspondence about 
The Black Book of Communism. The points you raise in No. 1 and No. 
2 are certainly correct. My original translation of these passages 
used the European symbol for "per thousand" (as the French edition 
did), but evidently the typesetter wasn't accustomed to the symbol 
and read it as "percent" rather than "per thousand." I should have 
noticed the erroneous switch when I looked over the galley proofs. 
I appreciate your drawing the misprint to our attention. It will 
be fixed in the next printing of the book. 

Best regards,

Mark Kramer
Director, Harvard Project on Cold War Studies
Senior Associate, Davis Center for Russian Studies 
Harvard University

Cambridge, MA 02138

February 27th response by MIM 

Dear Mark Kramer, ed. & Gail Graves, Harvard University Press:

We received Mark Kramer's letter of February 26th agreeing to fix 
the most egregious errors in the "Black Book of Communism" that 
claimed that 15% of the people of China died in a single year in 
the Great Leap and 29% in 1960. (p. 495) Since the note did not 
indicate what would be done before the next printing of the book, 
we would like to inquire if you can publish an erratum before the 
next printing, at least on your web site. 

Expansion of point 2 from original letter 

Our original letter to you is now available permanently at 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/blackb.html . Since 
you have agreed to correct points 1 and 2, we would like to expand 
point 2, which is more of the same thing on page 495: "Under 
normal conditions, mortality in the countryside was between 30 and 
60 percent higher than in the cities. In 1960 it doubled, climbing 
from 14 percent to 29 percent." Again, if it were us, we would 
simply admit the whole chapter is a botch. Readers will have 
difficulty having confidence in any of the percentages reported. 

Continuation on point 4 

As for our original letter, we would still like to press you on 
point 4, the question of imprisonment in the United States and 
China being "more or less identical" (p. 541) since it is one of 
the few situations where you tried to compare socialist countries 
or ex-socialist countries with capitalist countries other than 
where you compare a few years under Nazi Germany with 70 years of 
socialism in larger countries. Again, by your own printing, 0.5% 
of China was in prison, but in 1997 the figure for the United 
States was 0.645% according to the U.S. Government. That's not 
even to ask you to account for China's relatively youthful 
demographics, since at least in the United States, street crime as 
defined by the FBI gets committed disproportionately by the youth. 
The difference between 0.5% and 0.645% is so great that we found 
40 countries listed in UN statistics that have lower imprisonment 
rates than 145 per 100,000. 

We think within your own reasoning you should recognize that you 
made a mistake here, an important one given the subject of the 
book. The difference in incarceration rates makes a difference to 
hundreds of thousands of people each year imprisoned in the United 
States who would not be imprisoned, if only the United States had 
the lower imprisonment rate of other countries. 

However, in addition to your own reasoning, which should suffice, 
there is an emerging consensus even from non-communist sources 
that the United States is in fact the world's leading imprisonment 
leader per capita of the last generation, with the exception being 
a brief state of emergency under Boris Yeltsin. In this regard, we 
are concerned that while attacking us Maoists, Harvard University 
Press prints as fact something which is not fact and can be 
readily gleaned from U.S. government and common Western media 
sources. Atlantic Monthly in December 1998 suggests that the 
United States is holding half a million more prisoners than China 
total--an absolute statistic not even considering China's larger 
population. Hence it seems to us Maoists that this argument should 
have occurred within the non-communist world before it came to us. 

Point 6: Non-violent land reform? 

We have some more inaccuracies in Margolin's chapter to report 
that further lead us to believe that Harvard University Press has 
not taken adequate measures to check the works that it publishes. 
If a writer is to make sweeping generalizations in many areas, as 
the writers of the "Black Book" do, then it seems to us that a 
full-time academic press such as Harvard's should contact experts 
in those areas of generalization. No? 

In terms of sheer enormity, after the Great Leap and incarceration 
rate errors in the "Black Book of Communism" is the error that 
"Other countries in the region--Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea--
where the distribution of land was even more inequitable carried 
out equally radical agrarian reforms in the same period with 
considerably greater success. As far as we know, there was not a 
single death associated with those reforms, and people were 
compensated more or less satisfactorily for their losses."(p. 480) 

While wildly inaccurate in many ways, this statement is also 
either completely misinformed or horribly callous and we will call 
our criticism point 6. The United States had just dropped two 
atomic bombs on Japan and land reform was carried out by U.S. 
armed forces against a class which the U.S. government consciously 
recognized as feudal, militarist and responsible for the attack on 
the United States by Japan. While we support land reform 
enthusiastically, including in Japan, we would never be so callous 
as to say it came at no cost! While every suicide and lost 
porcelain collection ("Black Book of Communism," p. 527) counts 
against Mao and communism according to Margolin, we learn from 
Margolin that capitalist East Asia just so happened to have a 
pacifist land reform after Mao succeeded with his. That's absurd, 
and the failure of land reform in Indonesia, the Philippines, 
India etc. are the proof that what Mao and other East Asian 
communists did was the key to successful land reform. 

What is more, Harvard University Press could have caught this 
error about people "compensated more or less satisfactorily for 
their losses" in Japan's case merely by consulting with other 
government-funded Harvard scholars, such as Dwight Perkins, 
Michael Roemer, Donald R. Snodgrass and their Duke colleague 
Malcolm Gillis. "Land reform in Japan was carried out by U.S. 
Occupation forces. . . Compensation of landlords was provided for 
in legislation, but inflation soon had the effect of sharply 
reducing the real value of the amounts offered. As a result 
Japanese land reform also amounted to confiscation of landlord 
land with little compensation."(1) There are other senior Harvard 
pro- U.S. scholars who said the Japanese land reform was 
"tantamount to expropriation," because of inflation.(2) The fact 
that land reform occurred under bayonet is not a question of 
theory, and again, we cite bourgeois scholars, no communists. From 
the beginning, the U.S. Occupation executed seven leaders of the 
ruling elite, as one might expect in an occupation. To explain 
these events, bourgeois doyen Fairbank, Reischauer and Craig said 
conservative Americans had become radical revolutionaries--at 
least in Japan. 

Likewise, in Korea, President Rhee fired his agricultural minister 
in 1948 for favoring too much land reform, and land reform had to 
come about--and only partially at first--by U.S. military decree 
March 22, 1948 and before 1948 through peasant revolt inspired by 
land reform in the North. During the interim period between World 
War II and the Korean War, the North had land reform by 1946, but 
the South did not. In 1946, the Chicago Sun reported that hundreds 
of thousands or millions of peasants participated in the revolt 
for land reform in the South. Syngman Rhee organized massacres in 
response. Scholar George McCune referred to the repression in one 
locale as "'the Taegu slaugther.'"(3) 

The reactionary fight against land reform in the South even in the 
words of the U.S. General William Dean "'consisted of largely of 
burning the house of anyone the constabulary (army) or police even 
suspected of harbouring or co-operating with guerrillas.'"(4) 
Later during the Korean War, the North continued to attract 
support by its program of land reform. While the communists of the 
North and the guerrillas occupied almost the entire Korean 
peninsula before the United States landed, land reform took hold--
again, in the midst of war--not without "a single death" as 
Margolin says. Summary execution of villagers by reactionaries 
included the "Koch'ang Incident."(5) 

The only factors cutting back violence in land reform in Korea 
were 1) the fact that the 7% of Seoul that left Seoul when the 
communists took over during the Korean War was disproportionately 
upper class and fled to Pusan, the very southern tip of the 
peninsula, so was not around to fight peasant tenants; 2) 
landlords seeing which way the wind had blown thanks to Mao and 
also the communists and peasant rebels in Korea were selling their 
land cheap to peasants or evicting them for not buying. So not 
every expropriation of individual landlords was violent, but the 
context was war and revolution that broke the back of the landlord 
class. 

As for Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek may not have suffered military 
defeat had he taken up land reform before he fled to Taiwan. Once 
there he merely learned his lesson under U.S. pressure, which was 
simply a rational recognition of what Mao had done. Even the World 
Bank has admitted that "Korea and Taiwan (China) began land reform 
under broadly similar circumstances. In both cases, authoritarian 
governments facing a communist threat were dependent on the 
assistance of the United States, whose advisers urged them to 
adopt more egalitarian land holding." (6) Land reform in Taiwan 
was the result of revolutionary violence on the mainland and 
should not be counted separately. In both southern Korea and 
Taiwan, rulers had been associated more with rhetoric for land 
reform than actual implementation before Mao's successes, so for 
Margolin to say that land reform in these places was "equally 
radical" as in Mao's China is already misleading. The assertion 
that these land reforms in Korea, Japan and Taiwan were non-
violent and compensated is simply factually wrong on both counts 
and on a theoretical plane, Mao figures decisively in their 
success, as other U.S. client states without powerful communist 
movements threatening had relatively failed land reform and 
modernization. 

Notes: 

1. Malcolm Gillis, Dwight H. Perkins, Michael Roemer & Donald R. 
Snodgrass, Economics of Development, 3rd ed., (NY: W.W. Norton & 
Company, 1992), pp. 497-98.

2. John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer & Albert M. Craig, East 
Asia: Tradition & Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 
Company, 1978), p. 822.

3. Jon Halliday, "The Political Background" Korea North and South: 
The Deepening Crisis, Gavin McCormack and Mark Selden, eds., (NY: 
Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 49.

4. Ibid., p. 51. 5. Ibid., p. 56. 6. 
http://www.worldbank.org/html/dec/Publications/Briefs/D B21.html 

Sincerely,

mim3@mim.org 

Maoist Internationalist Movement