I found your intersting thread, MQG, and the posts you have made around MLM and the history of socialism.
There are several things to say about the "Black Book of Communism" type posts.
The following is posted on the rwor.org website:
"The rulers constantly bombard us with the message that "communism is dead," that it hasn't worked and cannot work, and that revolutions in power lead to tyranny. One aspect of their ideological crusade is to systematically distort the revolutionary experiences of the Soviet Union and China, especially the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And the lies and slanders they put out often have the veneer of factuality.
The RCP has initiated a project to Set the Record Straight . Its aim is to bring out the truth of these revolutions--their great achievements and victories, along with their mistakes and shortcomings--and to bring forward the works and insights of Bob Avakian in summing up these experiences and pointing to lessons for humanity today. The campaign will involve research, writing, debates, and outreach. It will focus on colleges and universities. We invite all who are interested to take part.
The first effort of this project is a sharp Q&A response to the charges and distortions of the bourgeoisie: Everything You've Been Told About Communism Is Wrong: Frequently Asked Questions About Socialism, Communism, and the Cultural Revolution."For obvious reasons there has been a great deal of excitement about this "Set the Record Straight" project. It's first online posting is here:
rwor.org/a/1248/mao_china_setting_record_straight.htm2) Answering, debunking and analyzing the charges of anticommunists is an extremely important project -- a whole ideological counter-offensive that has to be waged (and victoriously!) as part of the preparations for a new wave of proletarian revolutoin.
As part of that, it is extremely important to get our method correct. We have to stand for truth. We have to look at reality fearlessly. And when we answer their lies, we have to separate out several things: what they say that is false, what they say that utilized (and distorts) truth or half-truths, and the conclusions they draw from this.
For example, the essential and very simple thesis of the "Black Book" is to argue (arithmetically) that Communism was a worse horror for peple than Nazism. They rely on the general verdict that Nazism was horrific and oppressive (which it of course was) and the general superficial understanding of Nazism (i.e. often limited to the fact that "Hitler killed six million jews"). Then their method is to attribute a long long list of deaths to "the Communists", add them up, claim that they are in the tens of millions and then (QED by logical proof) "Communism is worse than Nazism."
There are several things wrong with this.
a) First the conclusion is false, and the analysis is based on a false logic. The measure of what is "evil" is not "how many deaths." (For example, who killed more in the civil war, the union or the confederacy? If the union killed more, then is the union "worse than the confederacy"? No.) It separates all these social forces from their real content, what they represent and fight for.
So the international communist movement has been (overall and fundamentally) a movement for liberation, while the Nazis were (overall and fundamentally) a gruesome reactionary and racist movement for tightening oppression. This is a key issue that the BBofC methodology simply sloughs over.
b) Their method of attributing deaths is patently false. Essentially they take every death that happened in revolution and war, and they blame that on "murder" by the leading communists. This is a method used daily in the press where they write "17,000 people have been killed in the so-called peoples war launched by the Maoists of Nepal." And then (if you don't read carefully) you would think "The Maoists killed 17,000 people" -- even though, in fact, the government has been crudely massacring villagers and political opponents.
Similarly the New York Times writes "A million people died under Pol Pot" -- and if you don't read that carefully you would think "Pol Pot killed a million people." In fact most of the people who died "under Pol Pot" died of famine and disease and dislocation caused by the massive U.S. carpet bombing of that impoverished country and people and infrastructure.
It is like taking all the dead of the U.S. civil war, all the people who died of disease (which was much more than those who died of bullets), and in battle, and in dislocation, and in suppression of slave revolts, and in the struggle of Black people to overthrow their owners.... and saying "Between 2 and 3 million people died under Lincoln." Is Lincoln then a "mass murderer who killed 2 or three million people?"
So this whole method is fake and dishonest.
Stalin (who led the collectivization in the USSR) is blamed for the famine caused by reactionaries in the Ukraine (who massively destroyed crops and livestock.)
Mao (who led the massive agrarian reform after liberation, transferring land to hundreds of millions of peasants in histories greatest change of property and ownership) is blamed for every punishment of landlords that took place. And so on.
c) On another side, various forces in history (including communists) were involved in armed conflict.
Lincoln may not have killed two million people, but his armed forces did kill many confederate soldiers (and, on the reactionary side, Lincoln did order the execution of hundreds of Indian rebels in Minnesota in a mass hanging).
Stalin (and his forces) did organize the political arrest and execution of significant numbers of people during the 1930s.
Mao unleashed the agrairian revolution and did not "kill tens of millions of people" -- but it is true that the peasants often settled accounts with rapists, murderers and exploiters among the landlords (and the deaths of these oppressors may have reached the millions during land reform -- in a movement of 500 million peasants)
So we have to separate out truth from falsehood.
And we also have to acknowledge that revolution and socialism have involved real class struggle and war, and this too needs to be summed up.
And we also have to point out that many forces who are "added in" to the communist cause (like Pol Pot) really were not communists in any real sense.
c) and then, on a level that is both deeper and loftier, we have to look at the whole larger socialist project of the last century and think through how its methods worked -- and whether we want to do things the same way.
This is a big part of Bob Avakian's work in recent years -- including his major new work --
Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communismrwor.org/chair_e.htm#democracyspeechI really urge everyone to study this, and grapple with it, and see its approach, method, questions and initial verdicts as an important launching pad for the "ideological counter-offensive" we need to wage. (In other words, this is all anything-but "old news" -- there are many things to excavate, debate, uncover, examine, evaluate.... and many important lessons for our future revolutions.
This "ideological counter-offensive" is not, in short, just "refute the lies of the anticommunists" -- we need to do much more. We need to scientifically and truthfully evaluate the whole experience of socialism, firmly uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat (on a scientific and correct basis), uphold overall the historic experience of our class and its attempt to transition to communism, and then
on that basis learn all we can (in a critical and farsighted way) about how to do better the next time there are successful revolutions and socialist countries. (And we have to think thought what the implications are NOW for our current political preparations.)
