Address the individual, but don't forget about the class

Two issues ago we ran a letter from somebody who 
objected to a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois calling whites "the 
most selfish [people] of any on earth." This reader called 
the quote "racist" and suspected that we misquoted Du Bois. 
We showed that the quote is accurate and explained that it 
is not racist, rather it identifies white people of the 
imperialist countries as a social group which benefit from 
and support colonial exploitation and oppression.(1)

A MIM 
Comrade had this to add:

I've been meaning to say about 
this that ran in MN230, it was a very good response for an 
individual and good overall. My gripe is that it does not 
train our class to read for patterns of thought and focuses 
on the individual too much. Perhaps in the future we should 
address the individual but also use the individual as 
training for the rest of us. It should be pointed out that 
this persyn made an accusation [misquoting Du Bois] without 
bothering to do anything and that fact needs to be connected 
to other things. Fear of communism (the typical "bias" 
whines) and accusatory white nation chauvinism lead to lazy 
ignorance and we missed our chance to say so.

MC206 responds: Excellent point. People talk shit all the 
time -- if they gave a damn it would take them 10 mins to 
look it up. Why they don't give a damn and why they won't 
spare 10 minutes says something about their class position. 
On the flip side, people looking to remold themselves into 
proletarian fighters have to learn to give a damn, to 
investigate and not talk shit. That fosters self-reliance, 
but it also is essential to maintaining a proletarian 
perspective and political sanity. Otherwise you're left 
believing whatever it was the last persyn you talked to 
said.

Notes: 1. MIM Notes 230, 15 Mar 2001, 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/mn230/
Letters.txt

Mao not a "modern emperor" -- Peng De-huai purged for a 
reason

Dear MIM,

I am reading Fanshen (about 75% complete) and 
Shenfan (maybe 25-33% complete) by William Hinton and I am 
very impressed by what I have read. I think that, for the 
most part, the CCP was sincere with their democratic 
centralism, but I was really shaken by the chapter in 
Shenfan where Hinton suggests that Mao targeted Peng Duhuai 
(sp?) as a rightist rather than admit to some errors he made 
with the Great Leap Forward.

Mim responds: MIM has its differences with Hinton, who has 
done some great work. This is one. We think Mao was not an 
opportunist and did make sincere self-criticisms for errors 
during the Great Leap.(1) But regardless of Mao's motivation 
for targetting Peng De-huai, Peng was indeed a rightist. 
What do we know about Peng? (a) Peng promoted a 
professional, regularized army on the Soviet model. Under 
his command the army ceased to participate in politics and 
production. Regalia and other rank privileges returned. He 
de-emphasized the militia as well. This all caused the army 
to grow distant from the masses.(1) (b) Peng also promoted 
Soviet revisionist ideas about economic construction. He 
encouraged dependance on Soviet technology, and "top-down" 
development.(1) (c) Peng had close ties to Gao Gang, who 
also favored the Soviet technocratic model and controlled 
80% of the Soviet aid to China. Gao Gang was purged *before* 
the Great Leap amid a movement to replace the "one man" 
style of leadership with collective leadership.(2) (d) Peng 
was removed "because of his opposition to the Great Leap 
Forward."(3) He called it "petty-bourgeois fanaticism." Zhou 
En-lai and others agreed to Peng's purge.(4) The Great Leap, 
whatever its mistakes, correctly revitalized the political 
charater of the army and favored "grassroots" economic 
development with politics in command. So there were clear 
political differences here. On the one hand, Peng's stale, 
"productivity first," pro-technocracy, soft-on-capitalism 
ideas; on the other, politics-in-command, "the masses make 
history," revolutionary Marxism. The only way Peng's 
dismissal can be seen as opportunist is if you cannot 
differentiate between these two poles. If the differences 
are not clear to you, MIM distributes stacks of books 
differentiating between the Soviet revisionists' economic 
ideas and Maoists'. Check out "The Chinese Road to 
Socialism" by Wheelwright and McFarlane ($7) or Mao's 
"Critique of Soviet Economics." Ironically, in his "Turning 
Point in China" Hinton calls Peng a "right-opportunist" and 
correctly criticizes those who saw Peng's dismissal as 
opportunist and capricious on Mao's part.(p. 55) Indeed a 
struggle over whether to rehabilitate Peng is widely 
considered the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. We 
still disagree with the "Turning Point" Hinton -- Peng was a 
revisionist, not a right-opportunist -- but the point that 
this was a principled difference and the not whim of an 
"emperor" contradicts the "Shenfan" Hinton. MIM reviewed 
Shenfan in MIM Notes 31, 7 July 1987.

Notes: 1. See e.g. MIM's March 25 letter to Harvard 
University Press, 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/blackb6.html 1. 
Jean Chesneaux, China: The People's Republic, 1949-1976, New 
York: Pantheon Books, 1979, p. 63. 2. The Political Economy 
of the Counterrevolution in China, MIM Distributors, 1988, 
p. 28. 3. Chesneaux, p. 117. 4. The Political Economy of the 
Counterrevolution in China, p. 30.