How to handle Lin Biaoism today International Minister April 15, 2006 From time to time, MIM receives letters claiming to be from India. Some letters claim to be from the Communist Party of India(M-L) that still upholds Lin Piao (also spelled Lin Biao today). These letters could be anything from British intelligence, to crypto-Trotskyites to people with a strange sense of humor to genuine supporters of Lin Piao who have some difficulty with their web pages. MIM has no way to really check, except by reading the web pages. The web pages do show some India content, but there is also some garbling. In actuality, it's not important, because we can still discuss a political line question of great importance. Even if there are no Lin Biaoists today in India, there definitely were once, and at a time of great armed struggle. Hence, we have good reason to suspect the Indian Lin Biaoists continue to exist somewhere, even if they do not have web pages yet. We told the CPI(ML) that we uphold the 9th Party Congress and two documents from Lin Biao, his report to the 9th Party Congress and "Long Live the Victory of People's War!" CPI(ML) continues to list Lin Biao on the masthead after Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin & Mao. MIM finds that unnecessary and it would be speculative on our part, since we were not there on the inside in struggle with Lin, Zhou Enlai and Mao. Perhaps some Indian comrades were, so we cannot judge them, except to say that on the level of principle they have to allow for parties that formed after them. If the senior Indian comrades know something that Mao did not allow published, then the senior Indian comrades cannot expect us to accept that knowledge easily, because it is clearly under dispute. Here our de facto position is Mao's perspective. Surely by taking neutrality on Lin we are not boosting Zhou Enlai. We have fully admitted that Zhou's protege was Deng. This cannot reflect well on Zhou Enlai. Mao had doubts about both Lin and Zhou. Lin implied that Zhou was too powerful with charge of the government; even though Mao was in-charge and Lin was officially designated Mao's successor. Hence, Lin was either saying he would not be able to manage Mao's juggling act the way Mao did or he was saying Zhou Enlai was no good. This goes back to the issues of 1970 after the 9th Party Congress in China in which Lin Biao gave his report. On the one hand are those who do not believe the story that Lin Biao staged a coup against Mao in 1971. Zhou Enlai's report mentions that Lin was already under observation by August, 1970 anyway for conflicts inside the party. On the other hand, we learn from the 10th Party Congress, that Lin Biao had always pushed a theory of the productive forces line and staged a disastrous coup against Mao with his plane crashing in Mongolia in 1971. So now Indian, and only Indian comrades come forward and say there is something about Maoism we are not getting quite right. We're not getting the history of 1971 right the Lin Biaoists say. Since this all involves highly guarded secrets of the party and its discipline and since MIM did not exist when the key struggles happened, MIM is inclined to raise in principle how it is that we can resolve this sort of conflict, since not everyone can have first-hand or insider information. We must come up with a method to preserve proletarian unity. The first problem for the Lin Biaoist line is that Mao was still alive for the 10th Congress. While claiming that Mao deserves persynal credit for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the Lin Biaoists are nonetheless implying that Mao allowed lies about Lin at the 10th Party Congress. They then blame the "Gang of Four" for not struggling to clear Lin's name. Responding to this, Lin Biaoists could also say Mao was already too old by the 10th Party Congress. Besides, no one can deny that it was Zhou Enlai who made the report to the 10th Party Congress. His influence must have increased with Lin gone. How can we make a decision about these questions in a principled manner? The very question involves comparing the 9th Party Congress of the Communist Party of China with the 10th. The main difference is that Zhou Enlai took the place of Lin Biao by giving the main report. Already the Lin Biaoists can make some hay, because Zhou Enlai's protege ended up being Deng, who restored capitalism. The next main difference in the two party congresses is biographical information concerning Lin-- a question we at MIM say we should hold neutrality on to entertain this debate. We should be neutral because we cannot know and because biography is not really decisive for international unity questions anyway. On theory questions, the main difference is that the 10th Party Congress accuses Lin of having a line not much different than Deng's, with an incorrect understanding of the importance of class struggle. So we are left wondering if Lin and Zhou had little disagreement, just a power struggle over persynal power or did Lin really champion Mao's line better than Zhou did? Another way we could pose this question is how bad was Zhou Enlai compared with Lin Biao? The orthodoxy says that Zhou Enlai was a hero, but that orthodoxy remains to this day in Dengist China, where they have elevated Zhou above Mao. The story goes that Zhou was the practical implementor who everyone loved 100%, whereas Mao was the irascible radical theorist. MIM is not going to buy that favorite tale of the Deng Xiaoping revisionists. MIM is a big fan of Lin Biao's 9th Party Congress report. Among other things, it does not mention any role for oppressor nation so-called workers and it does mention Blacks. The report uses the word "masses," but that can refer to youth, lumpen, migrants and oppressed nationalities. Even better, the 10th Party Congress reconfirmed the 9th Party Congress by saying that even though Lin staged a coup, it was Mao who persynally directed the writing of the reports at the 9th Party Congress. Zhou Enlai continued with that formulation in discussions with the Indian comrades. The 9th Party Congress is still relevant today, because it condemns the "patriarchal party," the type of which Trotsky wanted to keep going with his 4th International and which some still try to set up today. After the disgrace of Lin started, Zhou Enlai took the issue of patriarchal party (with senior "father" parties and junior "son" parties) to the Indian comrades. MIM would speculate that the reason that we have a pro-Lin CPI(ML) party is that in a way, the Indian comrades chose to flatter Mao in writing in a way to lend support to Lin. They wrote an article saying Mao was the leader of the Indian Communist Party(M-L). To this, Zhou Enlai correctly replied with lessons about Wang Ming and Trotskyism. He also pointed out that the formulation would insult the national pride of India. The comments of Kang Sheng to the Indian comrades were in some ways more trustworthy in view of what we know now. Yet he also said the patriarchal party idea was no good in discussions with the Indian comrades. There was one difference though. Zhou Enlai used the phrase "Marxism-Leninism" in discussion with Indian comrade Bose. Kang Sheng used the phrase "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought" in the context of India's revolution. The media at the time also did the same thing in reference to countries other than China. Kang told comrade Bose not to worry that the Chinese comrades were just being too polite: "This is by no means a question of being modest. Chairman Mao has always taught us that on the matter of principle, we should never be too polite." The Chinese were trying to say that there are good reasons Mao does not name himself the leader of a new Comintern, even if India's party wants one. (The Indian comrades also were told that based on discussions with Bose, assassinating police in secret squads was not adequate, as proved when the army or police came en masse and the masses did not rise up to defend themselves. CPI(ML) took this advice as opposing armed struggle.) So it is clear from the 9th Party Congress, 10th Party Congress and discussions with Zhou and Kang, that the idea of an international party or leadership party was out. Finally, after the disgrace of Lin, the Chinese party said that Lin's thesis of surrounding the global cities from the global countryside was "not mature" yet; (although, the official reference for this I do not have.) Actually, this is a very important point. The point of Lin's biography changes made official at the 10th Party Congress may not count in this debate, because he may really have changed enough to have carried out a coup. Also any foreign orientation changes may not count, because for example Nixon changed his tune on China between the 9th Party Congress and 10th. Yet, one thing it would be hard to say changed between the 9th and 10th Party Congress is the existence of oppressed nations dominated by imperialism. So if there were a change in connection to that, then we can see some reason why Lin Biaoists uphold the 9th Party Congress and not the 10th. Here we have to give the Lin Biaoists their credit: once Lin disappeared, the Chinese comrades took back the thesis behind MIM line. The claim was that the Politburo and Central Committee did not review the thesis and also that Lin did not write it! This combination of facts released points the arrow directly at Mao. The 10th Party Congress had already made it known that Mao persynally wrote or directed the 9th Party Congress report. Now it was being released that Lin did not write "Long Live the Victory of People's War." So in order to protect these documents once Lin was disgraced, the party said Mao was in-charge of their coming out. While protecting the documents Lin's name was on, the party also attacked one thesis. Struggle over MIM's thesis was thus at the core of the questions surrounding Lin Biao. The 10th Party Congress also linked the question of the theory of the productive forces as the first item of business. According to Zhou reporting and consistent with the 9th Party Congress but naming Chen Po-ta (Chen Boda) as the behind-the-scenes theorist of revisionism for both Liu and Lin who put forward that the principal contradiction in China "'between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces of society.'" When the Mensheviks including Trotskyists say that the material conditions are not ripe for socialism in the Third World and were not ripe in Russia of 1917, they are saying the same thing as what Mao was referring to with the theory of productive forces. Contrary to this theory of productive forces, Mao put forward that it was not the Western worker leading the way and class struggle was still principal in China. In his polemics with Yugoslavia he also linked this knot of questions to parasitism. Some ex-fans of Hoxha in the united $tates reviewing the Lin Biao situation concluded that the Lin Biao personnel problem was the downfall of the Cultural Revolution. However, these same u.$. people did not accept the parasitism thesis. The Lin Biaoists in India can also say that the fall of Lin was decisive. If slimebags in the party do not recognize what's what they will allow the enemy to hollow out the party. The line stays the same, but real Maoists get disgraced while inferior Maoists or non-Maoists get a larger role. Thus the biographical approach of disgracing individuals can eventually lead to a party's changing color. If for example Chen Boda and Lin Biao were relatively better Maoists and Zhou and Deng worse, then the 10th Party Congress was a bourgeois victory for hollowing out the party. It comes down to the relations among the individuals at that time, especially among Mao, Zhou and Lin. Of course they would have to have the details on how they handle each other, but we outsiders mostly do not, so we say there is an unprincipled character to a struggle over questions that the outside world cannot know. In fact, the unprincipled nature of the struggle is Trotskyist, because the Indian comrades were claiming Mao as the leader of their party at the same time that they were upholding Lin. (We call it "Trotskyist," because Trotsky was the first to believe in a world party with one line as if the conditions were the same everywhere by virtue of the fact that it all hinged on Germany everywhere according to Trotsky.) As Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng correctly warned the comrades, there is only so much one country's party knows about another's. That is why Stalin and Mao dissolved the Comintern once the writings of Marx and Lenin had spread in various languages. There is nothing about Marxism that makes us scientific communists better Liberals than the most modern of Liberals. By this, I mean sarcastically that when it comes to selecting individuals to play larger or smaller roles, as with Lin and Zhou in Mao's day, Marxism does not have a special contribution, because its strengths lie elsewhere. If a modern Liberal superspy enters the party and proceeds to put forward the correct line on the surface while pushing aside more genuine Maoists, Marxism does not suddenly become better or enriched on questions of intra-individual discernment. The struggle over intra-individual choices is not a struggle that advances Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Such struggle is in fact the definition of Liberalism. It is going to Liberalism's home court with Liberalism's paid-off referees and expecting a win. We are in an era when the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is not settled yet, so it would be wrong to keep going to Liberalism's home court by our choice and expect victory. We want to stay off of Liberalism's home field, but the CPI(M-L) in its original political cast asks the international proletariat to get into a Liberal struggle. Mao Zedong was alive when Lin fell into disgrace; yet the Lin Biaoists of India still uphold Mao and credit his persynal role above everything else in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. That is a contradiction. Perhaps the leaders of the Communist Party of India (M-L) had the best ringside seat for the struggle among the Chinese party leaders. What the CPI(M-L) saw, however, cannot be the basis of a universal ideology. The Indian comrades uphold their leaders and their leaders' interpretation of what happened in China, but how can they expect the rest of the world to deny the 10th Party Congress? MIM is the imperialist country incarnation of the 9th Party Congress and Lin's positive contributions or the contributions Mao made through Lin. We uphold the entirety of the original "Long Live the Victory of People's War." We uphold Lin's report to the 9th Congress. There were also smaller but absolutely key articles by Lin explaining that Mao had "elevated Marxism-Leninism to a completely new stage." If MIM did not uphold these treasures of Marxism- Leninism-Maoism, MIM would not have named itself "Maoist." MIM would not have been the first explicitly naming itself Maoist in the world. Where there are official contradictions between the 9th and 10th Congress about things handled while Mao was still alive, we call on the world's fans of Lin Biao not to divide Maoists on Trotskyist bases, on the bases of things that most parties and comrades could not have investigated. If we accept the most pro-Lin conjecture possible, that Zhou Enlai managed to imprison Lin for his own sinister purposes; nonetheless, it happened while Mao was alive. Since Lin died and there are no further documents available from him from reliable sources, we can doubt that Mao made the right choice in that cataclysmic struggle, but we are not going to have a basis for drawing firm conclusions. The revisionists in China have controlled things too long for further and decisive truth to emerge. According to the revisionists the Lin Biaoists and "Gang of Four" did work together anyway. In India, we do not see a basis to divide Lin Biaoists from other Maoists upholding the Cultural Revolution and thrown in the dock together by Deng Xiaoping. Questions such as nationality or religious fundementalism could be principal or even cardinal in India and MIM does not know. We don't see how on an ongoing basis there can be a principled split over questions connected to Lin Biao's biography and the coup reported by the 10th Party Congress. Each party would have to have a way to check on assertions regarding that and it is not possible. Source: "Experiences of Chinese Revolution: Some Unpublished Notes," Produced and Published by Asia News & Information Service Montreal, Canada, November 1980.