Russia, as early as 1920, was conspiring against China. Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution ended in 1918, the Communists announced: "We are marching to free ... the people of China." In 1921, a Russian agent was sent to Peking, then to Shanghai, to make plans for the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, which would become the world's largest. They began to infiltrate the government in 1922, and by 1924, the Chinese armed forces were reorganized along the same lines as the Soviet army. Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) was the Commandant, and Chou En-lai was in charge of Political Affairs.
With the use of Soviet troops commanded by Gen. Michael Borodin, Chiang Kai-shek attacked Shanghai, robbing the Rothschild-affiliated Soong Bank. President Coolidge refused to send U.S. troops against the Chinese forces, and T.V. Soong negotiated with Chiang, offering him $3 million, his sister May-ling as a wife (even though Chiang had a wife and family), and the presidency of China for life, if he would change sides. He agreed, and began to rule China as a British ally. In December, 1927, he married the sister of Soong. Seeing the Russians as a threat to his country he had them ejected and had many communist advisors arrested.
Mao Tse-tung [Zedong] fled and hid out in the northern provinces where he began training rebels for a future insurrection.
In 1937, Japan attacked Shanghai, and coupled with the growing Communist insurgency, created a two-front war. China needed help, and sent the following telegram to Roosevelt on December 8, 1941: "To our new common battle, we offer all we are and all we have to stand with you until the Pacific and the world are freed from the curse of brute force and endless perfidy."
China's plea was brushed off and they were the last country to get military aid which came in the form of a $250 million loan in gold [approved by Congress] to stabilize their economy. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the Soviet spy, was in charge of making sure China got the money and over a period of 3 years he only sent them $27 million. In 1945, Congress voted a second loan of $500 million, and White made sure they didn't get any of that which resulted in the collapse of their economy.
After World War II, special envoys Gen. George C. Marshall (Army Chief of Staff and CFR member, who served as Secretary of State 1947-49 and Secretary of Defense 1950-51; who had knowledge of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor, but didn't inform the commanders in the Pacific) and Patrick J. Hurley were sent to China to meet with Chiang Kai-shek. They urged him to give the Communists representation in the Chinese Government and for the Nationalists (Kuomintang) to have a coalition government, since they felt that the Russians weren't influencing the Chinese Communists.
However, Chiang Kai-shek would not accept any kind of Communist influence in his government, so Marshall recommended that all American aid be stopped, and an embargo enforced. There was no fuel for Chinese tanks and planes, or ammunition for weapons. Russia gave the Chinese Communists military supplies they had captured from Japan, and also diverted some of the American Lend-Lease material to them. Soon, Mao Tse-tung began making his final preparations to take over the government.
High level State Department officials, such as Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore who were members of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), besides planning the destruction of the Chinese economy also falsified documents to indicate that the Chinese Communists were actually farmers who were pushing for agricultural reform. Thus, from 1943-49 magazines like the Saturday Evening Post (which ran over 60 articles) and Colliers advocated and promoted the Communist movement. While Mao Tse-tung was made to appear as an "agrarian reformer," Chiang was blasted for being a corrupt dictator. In 1945, Lattimore sent President Truman a memorandum suggesting a coalition government between the Communists and the National Government. John Carter Vincent of the IPR elaborated upon that memo and it became the basis upon which Truman based his China policy which was announced on December 15, 1945.
It was alleged by some researchers that Russia sent China a telegram saying that if they didn't surrender they would be destroyed. They were requested to send ten technicians to see the bomb that would be used and when they went they saw an atomic bomb with the capability of destroying a large city. As the story goes, Chiang sent a telegram to President Truman, asking for help. Truman refused.
In 1948, Congress voted to send China $125 million in military aid, but again the money was held up until Chiang was defeated. In October, 1949, 450 million people were turned over to the Communist movement. Chiang fled to the island of Taiwan [Formosa], 110 miles off the east coast of China where he governed that country under a democracy. [After suppressing the native Formosans. --ed].
Chairman Mao and the World Revolution
Mao Tse-tung, who announced in 1921 that he was a Marxist after reading the Communist Manifesto took over as China's leader, and Peking was established as the new capital. On February 14, 1950 a thirty-year treaty of friendship was signed with Russia.
In March, 1953, Mao proposed to the Soviet Union a plan for world conquest in which every country except the United States would be communist-controlled by 1973. It was called a "Memorandum on a New Program for World Revolution" and was taken to Moscow by the Chinese Foreign Minister, Chou En-lai. The first phase was to be completed by 1960, and called for Korea, Formosa, and Indochina to be under Chinese control.
On July 15, 1971, Chairman Mao appealed to the world to, "unite and defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs."
While campaigning in 1968, Richard Nixon said: "I would not recognize Red China now, and I would not agree to admitting it to the United Nations." In his book Six Crises, he said that
Marxism is a particular political philosophy, economic and sociological worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and a view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The three primary aspects of Marxism are:
1. The dialectical and materialist concept of history — Humankind's history fundamentally is a struggle between social classes. The productive capacity of society is the foundation of society, and as this capacity increases over time the social relations of production, class relations, evolve through this struggle of the classes and pass through definite stages (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism). The legal, political, ideological and other aspects (e.g. art) of society are derived from these production relations as is the consciousness of the individuals of which the society is composed.
2. The critique of capitalism — Marx argues that in capitalist society, an economic minority (the bourgeoisie) dominate and exploit an economic majority (the proletariat). Marx argues that capitalism is exploitative, specifically the way in which unpaid labor (surplus value) is extracted from the working class (the labor theory of value), extending and critiquing the work of earlier political economists on value. Such commodification of human labor according to Marx, creates an arrangement of transitory serfdom. He argued that while the production process is socialized, ownership remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie. This forms the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society. Without the elimination of the fetter of the private ownership of the means of production, human society is unable to achieve further development.
3. Advocacy of proletarian revolution — In order to overcome the fetters of private property the working class must seize political power internationally through a social revolution and expropriate the capitalist classes around the world and place the productive capacities of society into collective ownership. Upon this, material foundation classes would be abolished and the material basis for all forms of inequality between humankind would dissolve.
Contemporarily, Karl Marx’s innovative analytical methods — materialist dialectics, the labour theory of value, et cetera — are applied in archaeology, anthropology, media studies,political science, theater, history, sociological theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology, and philosophy.
Classical Marxism
The term Classical Marxism denotes the theory propounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.[citation needed] As such, Classical Marxism distinguishes between “Marxism” as broadly perceived, and “what Marx believed”; thus, in 1883, Marx wrote to the French labour leader Jules Guesde and to Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son-in-law) — both of whom claimed to represent Marxist principles — accusing them of “revolutionary phrase-mongering” and of denying the value of reformist struggle; from which derives the paraphrase: “If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist”. To wit, the US Marx scholar Hal Draper remarked, “there are few thinkers in modern history whose thought has been so badly misrepresented, by Marxists and anti-Marxists alike”. Marx and Engels
Main articles: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Karl Marx - Founder of Marxism.
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818—14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary, who addressed the matters of alienation and exploitation of the working class, the capitalist mode of production, and historical materialism. He is famous for analysing history in terms of class struggle, summarised in the initial line introducing the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. His ideas were influential in his time, and it was greatly expanded by the successful Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917 in Imperial Russia.
Friedrich Engels, co-founder of Marxism.
Friedrich Engels (28 November 1820–5 August 1895) was a nineteenth century German political philosopher and Karl Marx’s co-developer of communist theory. Marx and Engels met in September 1844; discovering that they shared like views of philosophy and socialism, they collaborated and wrote works such as Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). After the French deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx moved to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than other European countries; later, in January 1846, they returned to Brussels to establish the Communist Correspondence Committee.
In 1847, they began writing The Communist Manifesto (1848), based upon Engels’ The Principles of Communism; six weeks later, they published the 12,000-word pamphlet in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled them, and they moved to Cologne, where they published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a politically radical newspaper. Again, by 1849, they had to leave Cologne for London. The Prussian authorities pressured the British government to expel Marx and Engels, but Prime Minister Lord John Russell refused.
After Karl Marx’s death in 1883, Friedrich Engels became the editor and translator of Marx’s writings. With his Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) — analysing monogamous marriage as guaranteeing male social domination of women, a concept analogous, in communist theory, to the capitalist class’s economic domination of the working class — Engels made intellectually significant contributions to feminist theory and Marxist feminism.
Principal ideas
These are the principal concepts of Marxism:
Exploitation
A person is exploited if he or she performs more labour than necessary to produce the goods that he consumes; likewise, a person is an exploiter if he or she performs less labour than is necessary to produce the goods that he consumes.Exploitation is a matter of surplus labour — the amount of labour one performs beyond what one receives in goods. Exploitation has been a socio-economic feature of every class society, and is one of the principal features distinguishing the social classes. The power of one social class to control the means of production enables its exploitation of the other classes.
In capitalism, the labour theory of value is the operative concern; the value of a commodity equals the total labour time required to produce it. Under that condition, surplus value (the difference between the value produced and the value received by a labourer) is synonymous with the term “surplus labour”; thus, capitalist exploitation is realised as deriving surplus value from the worker.
In pre-capitalist economies, exploitation of the worker was achieved via physical coercion. In the capitalist mode of production, that result is more subtly achieved; because the worker does not own the means of production, he or she must voluntarily enter into an exploitive work relationship with a capitalist in order to earn the necessities of life. The worker's entry into such employment is voluntary in that he or she chooses which capitalist to work for. However, the worker must work or starve. Thus, exploitation is inevitable, and that the "voluntary" nature of a worker participating in a capitalist society is illusory.
Alienation
Alienation denotes the estrangement of people from their humanity (German: Gattungswesen, “species-essence”, “species-being”), which is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others, and so generate alienated labourers.Alienation objectively describes the worker’s situation in capitalism — his or her self-awareness of this condition is unnecessary.
Historical Materialism
"Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 1858
The historical materialist theory of history, also synonymous to “the economic interpretation of history” (a coinage by Eduard Bernstein),looks for the causes of societal development and change in the collective ways humans use to make the means for living. The social features of a society (social classes, political structures, ideologies) derive from economic activity; “base and superstructure” is the metaphoric common term describing this historic condition.
Base and superstructure
The base and superstructure metaphor explains that the totality of social relations regarding “the social production of their existence” i.e. civil society forms a society’s economic base, from which rises a superstructure of political and legal institutions i.e. political society. The base corresponds to the social consciousness (politics, religion, philosophy, etc.), and it conditions the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions, thus, the resultant changes to the economic base will lead to the transformation of the superstructure.This relationship is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure, in the first instance, and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure, whose relationship is dialectical, not literal.[citation needed][clarification needed]
Historical periodisation
Marx considered that these socio-economic conflicts have historically manifested themselves as distinct stages (one transitional) of development in Western Europe.
1. Primitive Communism: as in co-operative tribal societies.
2. Slave Society: a development of tribal progression to city-state; Aristocracy is born.
3. Feudalism: aristocrats are the ruling class; merchants evolve into capitalists.
4. Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the proletariat.
5. Socialism: workers gain class consciousness, and via proletarian revolution depose the capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, replacing it in turn with dictatorship of the proletariat through which the socialization of the means of production can be realized.
6. Communism: a classless and stateless society.
Class
The identity of a social class derives from its relationship to the means of production; Marx describes the social classes in capitalist societies:
* Proletariat: “those individuals who sell their labour power, and who, in the capitalist mode of production, do not own the means of production“.[citation needed] The capitalist mode of production establishes the conditions enabling the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat because the workers’ labour generates a surplus value greater than the workers’ wages.
* Bourgeoisie: those who “own the means of production” and buy labour power from the proletariat, thus exploiting the proletariat; they subdivide as bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie.
o Petit bourgeoisie are those who employ labourers, but who also work, i.e. small business owners, peasant landlords, trade workers et al. Marxism predicts that the continual reinvention of the means of production eventually would destroy the petit bourgeoisie, degrading them from the middle class to the proletariat.
* Lumpenproletariat: criminals, vagabonds, beggars, et al., who have no stake in the economy, and so sell their labour to the highest bidder.
* Landlords: an historically important social class who retain some wealth and power.
* Peasantry and farmers: a disorganised class incapable of effecting socio-economic change, most of whom would enter the proletariat, and some become landlords.
Class consciousness
Class consciousness denotes the awareness — of itself and the social world — that a social class possesses, and its capacity to rationally act in their best interests; hence, class consciousness is required before they can effect a successful revolution.
Ideology
Without defining ideology,Marx used the term to denote the production of images of social reality; according to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.Because the ruling class controls the society’s means of production, the superstructure of society, the ruling social ideas are determined by the best interests of said ruling class. In The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is, at the same time, its ruling intellectual force”.Therefore, the ideology of a society is of most importance, because it confuses the alienated classes and so might create a false consciousness, such as commodity fetishism.[citation needed]
Political economy
The term political economy originally denoted the study of the conditions under which economic production was organised in the capitalist system. In Marxism, political economy studies the means of production, specifically of capital, and how that is manifest as economic activity.
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism (state-run means of production) as an intermediate stage. The idea that a proletarian revolution is needed is a cornerstone of Marxism; Marxists believe that the workers of the world must unite and free themselves from capitalist oppression to create a world run by and for the working class. Thus, in the Marxist view, proletarian revolutions need to happen in countries all over the world; see world revolution.
Leninism argues that a communist revolution must be led by a vanguard of 'professional revolutionaries' - that is, men and women who are fully dedicated to the communist cause and who can then form the nucleus of the revolutionary movement. Some Marxists disagree with the idea of a vanguard as put forth by Lenin, especially left communists but also including some who continue to consider themselves Marxist-Leninists despite such a disagreement. These critics insist that the entire working class - or at least a large part of it - must be deeply involved and equally committed to the socialist or communist cause in order for a proletarian revolution to be successful. To this end, they seek to build massive communist parties with very large memberships.
Communist revolutions throughout history
The following is a list of communist revolutions throughout history. The most significant ones are marked in bold. Among the lesser known revolutions, a number of borderline cases have been included which may or may not have been communist revolutions. The nature of unsuccessful revolutions is particularly contentious since one can only speculate as to the kinds of policies that would have been implemented by the revolutionaries had they achieved victory.
* The creation of the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871, which was crushed within months by the French Army.
* The 1917 communist revolution in Russia, known as the October Revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution. It resulted in the victory of the Bolsheviks and the creation of Soviet Russia, the predecessor of the Soviet Union.
* The German Revolution of 1918-1919, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, which ended in defeat for the communists.
* The creation of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, which was defeated within a month by the German army and Freikorps.
* The Hungarian revolution of 1919, led by Béla Kun, which was also eventually defeated.
* The Outer Mongolian Revolution of 1921 led by the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, which defeated the Republic of China's Mongolian Puppet state and the White Guards under Baron Ungern with the help of the Russian Red Army
* The Chinese Communist Revolution, final stage of the Chinese Civil War (1926–1949), that resulted in the victory of the Communist Party of China on mainland China in 1949.
* 1941-1945 People's Liberation War in Yugoslavia is waged by the Yugoslav Partisans under the command of Josip Broz Tito with Allied support against the invading forces of Nazi Germany and the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustase. The victorious partisans establish the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
* The August Revolution 1945 creating the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
* The Proclamation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948, when the Soviet-backed Workers Party of Korea, led by Kim Il-sung, announced the formation of the state of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
* The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was a communist revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara which overthrew former president Fulgencio Batista and instated a socialist regime in Cuba. Even though Batista had been elected for his first term, he got himself into power for his second term through a coup d'etat.
* Les Trois Glorieuses of 1963 in Congo-Brazzaville, a successful coup d'état led by the Confédération générale aéfienne du travail and the Union de la jeunesse congolaise against Fulbert Youlou established the People's Republic of the Congo.
* The Indonesian revolution and Communist Party of Indonesia support for President Sukarno, which ended when Indonesian General Suharto removed President Sukarno from power and defeated the Communist Party of Indonesia, in 1965-1966.
* The First Indochina War in Vietnam that resulted in the defeat of the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1954, and brought the Communist Party of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh to power in North Vietnam – a victory followed closely by the protracted guerrilla warfare-dominated Vietnam War (1957–1975), which in turn led to the Fall of Saigon and the driving-out of occupying U.S. military forces there, and the unification of North and South Vietnam by communist guerrilla forces into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The conflict drastically changed neighboring Laos and Cambodia.
* The Laotian Civil War resulting in the victory of the communist Pathet Lao/Lao People's Revolutionary Party in Laos by 1975, elinmating a coalition government with anti-communists led to the establishment of the communist-administered Lao People's Democratic Republic.
* The victory of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1975, establishing the Maoist regime known as "Democratic Kampuchea," with Pol Pot as dictator. In 1979 it was overthrown by former allies: communist neighbor Vietnam and another communist party faction, reconstituted as the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party.
* The Malayan Emergency when the Malayan Communist Party and communist guerillas fought against, and were defeated by, British and Malayan forces, 1948-1960.
* Maoist-styled "Protracted People's War" in the Philippines, launched by the New People's Army in 1969 and continuing at present
* The overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia by Mengistu Haile Mariam who then set up one-party Marxist-Leninist rule in Ethiopia by the communist Workers' Party of Ethiopia, 1977–1991, until they were defeated and expelled by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front during a subsequent civil war.
* The 1978 the Saur Revolution that brought the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan to power in Afghanistan. They were overthrown by the mujahedin in 1992.[1]
* The overthrow of Eric Gairy that brought the New Jewel Movement to power in Grenada from 1979 until 1983, when they were deposed by a U.S.-led invasion.
* The 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle and brought the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990.
* Internal Conflict in Peru (1980–present) Comprised two rebellions by two different Marxist organizations. The Communist Party of Peru, also known as the "Shining Path" fought a bloody war beginning in 1980 with successive Peruvian governments both democratic and authoritarian in nature and independent paramilitaries organized by the government known as Ronda Campesina. The Shining Path attempted to enforce a very extreme brand of communism inspired by the beliefs of Mao Zedong the leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949-1976. The Shining Path opposed any form of democracy and committed numerous human rights violations. Another organization, known as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), named after an Incan warrior Tupac Amaru began their own rebellion in 1982. The MRTA did not adhere to Maoism like the Shining Path, claimed to be fighting for democracy, believed in a more mainstream version of communism and modelled their movement on other leftwing guerrilla groups in Latin America. The MRTA and Shining Path quickly became bitter enemies and fought one another as well as the government of Peru. During the war atrocities were committed on all sides, but mostly by the Shining Path and the Peruvian military. Fighting goes on today with a small number of Shining Path cadres, however the movement has mostly been crushed and only operates in a very remote jungle region. Since the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman the organization has lost most of its earlier support. the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement was largely destroyed in 1997 after the Japanese embassy hostage crisis.
* From 1996-2006, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) fought a fairly successful revolutionary war against the autocratic King of Nepal. In 2006 peace was declared, and an agreement was reached that the Maoist would join an interim government.
* In India, various Maoist-oriented factions (generally called Naxalites) have waged armed struggles since the Naxalbari rebellion of 1967. Today, the most prominent Naxalite group is the Communist Party of India (Maoist).