Adventurism in the German Left

In my last entry, I criticized the stubbornly persistent petty-bourgeois mindset of First World communists. Today I turn to a special, (relatively) fast-growing movement in the imperialist heartland, the so-called "Principally Maoism", mainly represented by the Norwegian "Tjen Folket" and its German and Canadian offshoots. Now, when they say "Principally Maoism", they are really only saying that they want to emphasize Maoism as the third stage of development of Marxism. They call their actual "Maoism" "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought" or "Maoism Principally Gonzalo-Thought" respectively, although there is still a big argument about this point (yes, very proletarian to argue about naming, surely the Bolsheviks also spent an eternity on this; for the sake of simpleness I will just refer to them as M-GT which is the abbreviation for "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought). In "Maoism Gonzalo-Thought there are two main aspects, broadly speaking, the "Jefatura" ("Great Leadership") and the "Guiding Thought".

Jefatura

We believe that the revolution, the Party, our class, generate leaders, a group of leaders. It has been like this in every revolution. If we think, for instance, about the October Revolution, we have Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov and a few others, a small group. Similarly, in the Chinese revolution there’s also a small group of leaders: Chairman Mao Tsetung, and his comrades Kang Sheng, Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, among others. All revolutions are that way, including our own…it is necessity that generates leaders, and a top leader, but just who that is is determined by chance, by a set of specific conditions that come together at a particular place and time. In this way, in our case too, a Great Leadership [Jefatura] has been generated. This was first acknowledged in the Party at the Expanded National Conference of 1979. But this question involves another basic question that can’t be overlooked and needs to be emphasized: there is no Great Leadership [Jefatura] that does not base itself on a body of thought, no matter what its level of development may be.  

-Gonzalo, Interview with Chairman Gonzalo

Now that is an interesting statement, instead of criticizing the cult of personality or devotion to a particular leader, etc., it is embraced? A cult of personality is metaphysics. Luckily many M-GTs agree that "no true Maoist would support building up a cult of personality, yet I will go through the point for clarification.

The notion that the masses need a "Great Leader" or guiding hand is so nonsensical. There must be the right relationship between the masses and the vanguard; I also touched on this problem in the last entry: In the communist party mainly people from the intelligentsia or from the petty bourgeoisie occupy the upper party ranks. Only they usually have the knowledge, the literary-academic skills, the money and the access to literature and the necessary means to define and lead a party theoretically and structurally. Only a few workers find their way into the vanguard from the beginning. But this is very problematic, there is a contradiction here: the party is communist, it works in the class interest of the proletariat, but the leadership is in the hands of petty bourgeois and labor aristocrats and they certainly do not have a class base that generates proletarian interest. They do not embody the "oppressed people" they merely defend them because it is in their subjective interest.

A "Great Leader" is therefore not a necessity generated by the revolution or any unnamed "specific conditions" but the conditions of our society and the material bases of people, namely classes. The leadership is not generated by the revolution or the "masses" they usually come from petite-bourgeois circumstances and it is certainly not coincidence who leads the party.

Maoism solves this problem, with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in which the masses are to be educated, to a level where they can keep up with the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, take the party leadership into their hands, revisionists must be corrected, criticized and in the worst case liquidated to preserve the proletarian character of the vanguard, these points are not really brought up here, instead the need for a "Great Leader" is discussed, why? Here the petty-bourgeois mindset of the First World Maoists comes to light, theory is read and quotations are being copied for the sake of quotations or theory, authorities are accepted without any criticism, although Marxism is a "critique of everything that exists".

Guiding Thought

Revolutions give rise to a thought that guides them, which is the result of the application of the universal truth of the ideology of the international proletariat to the concrete conditions of each revolution; a guiding thought indispensable to reach victory and to conquer political power and, moreover, to continue the revolution and to maintain the course always towards the only, great goal: Communism.

- PCP, On Gonzalo Thought

This point is not so problematic, in fact it is relatively correct. Here, however, the following problem stands out: If each country has different material conditions, why don't the self-proclaimed Maoists pay attention to the bourgeoisification of First World workers? Many modern M-GT organizations oppose Third-Worldism with all their might, declaring it "revisionism", "defeatism" and the like. But it is a fact that in the First World a bourgeoisification of the working class through value transfer and Unequal Exchange is occurring, and on a large scale. A good example is the Tjen Folket article on Third Worldism, which we will come to in more detail later. Many M-GTs can't keep their own principles, on paper they seem very reasonable and correct, but lack in practical implementation, thus reflecting the typical petite-bourgeois behavior of "much talking but little thinking". The petty bourgeois goes out on a limb, due to his relatively secure status in the First World he can afford to acquire any theory and the like, but it is difficult for him to think materialistically and to learn how to analyze objective reality, because it contradicts his subjective interest -mostly searching for adventures, such as that of a sudden revolution, a mass uprising, guerrilla warfare, etc.- and hence he declares this "deception of the theory he read and learned (or rather "that he worships and hails") impossible.

Massive Militarization of the Movement

M-GT groups are usually very violent or "militarized" (as far as the laws of the respective country allow). Well it is difficult to build a mass movement in an environment where people hardly have the addressed class position, i.e. the interest in abolishing the system of exploitation in this case. The labor aristocrat of the First World prefers to live his life, in which he lives relatively to very well, and does not care so much about resistance, war and struggle against the government, because he profits from it, through the exploitation of the periphery.

On the other hand we do have people who are extremely violent and they are violent for a reason, as the blog of "the Late Fifi Nono" points out in his article about the American Maoists:

One might accuse the Maoists of loving violence. This would be inaccurate. To me, love implies a far more complex and mature relationship. The Maoists are simply infatuated with violence. They’re receiving their first sloppy handjob from violence, and political violence at that. They don’t, and can’t, know where it leads, how awkward or embarrassing it looks, they don’t care about context or consequences — all they know and care about is how good it feels.

It's very interesting to see how my criticism on the Western (remember: -petite-bourgeois-) left applies well here again, it's the search for adventure, the desire for short-term satisfaction that brings one to engaging in violence and the good feeling from it. For the M-GTs every action is correct, as long as they have agreed on it together (oh, I forgot that the material reality is interested in our opinion, my bad), of course it is absolute nonsense to attract the "masses" with any unnecessary acts of violence and provocations, one attracts at most the attention of the state and is then quickly outlawed, like the Youth Resistance in Germany, which was banned last year, by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Of course, now someone could criticize that my tone and criticism leaves only defeatism and does not allow any praxis in the First World.... What? What kind of statement is that? By all means there is still praxis to be done here, on a legal level you can get involved in Trade Unions for example, you can educate people and get them to look at objective reality, you can exploit the contradiction between labor aristocracy, petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie to get the petty bourgeois layers on your side - ultimately, amassing intellectuals and people with financial capacity is incredibly useful, especially to prepare the groundwork of later revolutions. In his works on adventurism, especially among the Narodniks (Russian petty-bourgeois social revolutionaries), Lenin stresses that the terrorism and aimless acts of violence of the Narodniks alienate the masses from the movement and do not bring them close to the movement, especially other petty-bourgeois are scared off, as long as they are not suffering from any miseries that leads them to taking immediate actions. Lenin further criticizes that the Narodniks are subjective idealists, they hold the theory that the whole world history is made by individuals and events arise through struggles between individuals.

Here my criticism also closes up again, the M-GTs themselves hold on to a still too individualistic doctrines with the "Guiding Thought" and "Great Leadership", which from the point of view of materialism make no sense or are fallacious. So, in conclusion, I can state that the M-GT is another movement of the frustrated petty bourgeois of the First World. Drawn by adventurism, their own (bourgeois) class interest and lack of knowledge of theory, but also of the lack of practical experience, they usually lack even the simplest of all experiences, that of being exploited, precisely because they are not exploited as labor aristocrats or petty bourgeois and thus have no real understanding of it. "Social existence determines social consciousness", who is not exploited cannot have the consciousness of an exploited worker, to pretend to be exploited leads to a circle at the end, where one arrives at all the above mentioned, adventurism, idealism and lack of theory. Maybe engaging with genuine criticism and theory that one may not like at the first glance (which is mostly Third Worldism for these kinds of "Maoists") could help, although for many M-GTs even this seems hopeless.