Amendments and clarification to the notes on Mao's report

I would like to refine and clarify what I was trying to communicate. The New Left, from what I understood of it, began to focus more on social justice and civil rights, rather than economic issues and class struggle that was more apparent in the left populism from the 1900’s to the early 1950’s. As time has progressed, we have seen many movements such as the LGBTQ+ movement, Black Liberation, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Liberation, etc. become co-opted by the establishment. We’ve seen Lockheed Martin funded pride parades and Lockheed Martin pronoun workshops, the awkward picture the Democrats took for BLM where they were kneeling and draped in Kente cloth, the logo changes every company makes during pride month, a trans senator who is Zionist, Biden’s fake apology for boarding schools, Nike’s N7 campaign, the transition from “Black Power” to “Black Excellence”, the “feminist” girl boss discourse around Kamala and Hillary, Obama’s “inclusive capitalism”, it seems like all of these things came about because the establishment saw the left struggling for these human rights, and this is what those goals have amounted to, and are what the compatible left continues to give primacy towards to this day.

At the same time, we started seeing the U.S. government in the late 80s use these same concepts to justify imperialism through supporting the “Anti-Soviet fighter for peace” Osama bin Laden against a socialist Afghanistan who actually championed women's rights through socialism, only to be overthrown by bin Laden and the mujahideen, who was then overthrown by the U.S., partly because of the guise of interest in the rights for women, who then gave rise to the leadership of the Taliban, of all factions. In the early 80s, Yuri Andropov predicted that the U.S. would use the guise of “human rights” to undermine the USSR. We saw groups calling for “human rights” in Iraq, and people even saying that we shouldn't support Palestine because they are “anti-LGBTQ”. More domestically (meaning within NATO aligned countries), we saw CIA backed entities such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who was later supported by the Ford Foundation, get into leftist spaces, pushing similar ideology. In the more modern age, we saw the US push this soft power through groups like USAID.

I think that it is clear that the hyper-fixation on intersectionality and identity politics doesn’t do much, given how much the establishment likes to co-opt it. The historical record has shown that they’ve gotten us more entrenched in capitalism rather than away from it, so I don’t think it is the struggle to give primacy to. I think that people say that capitalism co-opts everything because everything we’ve fought for in recent years has been on some level compatible with the establishment. I don’t think a continuation of the demands from the earlier traditional left movement are as co-optable. You can’t co-opt the battle of Blair Mountain. you can’t co-opt the Colorado Coalfield War, you can’t co-opt the revolutionary trajectory of a historically defined class that is bound to break its chains.

To provide a metaphor for what I’m trying to say, take CPUSA leadership for example. We saw leaders such as William Z. Foster earlier on, in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s giving primacy to class struggle. We then saw Gus Hall, who was principled, but enabled people like Joe Sims and Sam Webb to lead the party, who have advocated for Democrats and given the entire historical archive of the CPUSA to New York University. No doubt this was taken advantage of by the feds. Gus Hall, although principled, set the stage for these unprincipled, more social democratic figures to reach leadership of the CPUSA, and the decline goes on from there. In what I am trying to illustrate, the New Left, although principled, has at least somewhat set the stage for the left we have today.

The other critique I have of the New Left is that it was primarily led by students or intellectuals. I think that the modern left also reflects this, as I have seen most organizing go on through college campuses, and this is where I saw left wing groups operating more like social clubs than workers organizations. To use another phrase to describe student-led, I could substitute the term “intellectual-led”. Many socialist theorists have written endlessly on intellectuals, but the difference from the populism of the earlier part of the 20th century is clear: the first half of the 20th century was led by working class populism and class struggle, and the movements of the second half were led by intellectuals/students. The earlier historical example of this mistake is the narodniks. They were correct in their content, which was to reach out to the peasantry, but they were incorrect in their form, where they approached peasants with elitist or intellectual language, alienating the peasants.

The reason I mentioned the CIA citing Khrushchev's secret speech is because the beginning of the western de-emphasization of class struggle coincides with Khrushchev's de-emphasization of class struggle in his attempt of de-Stalinization, as illustrated in Keeran and Kenny’s Socialism Betrayed, and also in The End of the Beginning by Carlos Martinez. Keeran and Kenny (and Martinez) note how Khrushchev's leadership was a departure from previous leadership because Khrushchev began focusing on small scale commodity production such as cars, hair dryers, and blenders (due to Soviet citizens capitulating to consumerism influenced by the west), and on wage equality that ended up driving scientists, doctors, engineers, etc. to places like West Germany and the U.S.; where previously, large scale industry and modes of production were developed to advance proletarian consciousness, furthering class struggle. The correlation I’m making here and in general is the departure from the traditional left coinciding with the departure from strategies that are more effective at building scientific and revolutionary socialism in its struggle against capitalism, and arrival at strategies that are less effective. In other words, the traditional left gave primacy to the universal, historical subject (the working class as a collective), and the modern left has given primacy to subjects that aren’t as universal and historical, resulting in less popular, more fragmented movements. As Kwame Ture said in a 1979 speech to students at the University of Georgia, “The white poor must be organized, the white poor must be organized. Conscious college students must begin to do proper political education amongst the white poor; showing them the roots of their exploitation, not talking to them about racism. Talk to them about the roots of their exploitation. Once they see and understand the capitalist system, they will understand racism.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiy_ViFcTNw - Kwame Ture’s speech, the quote begins at 36:35

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/THE%20NEW%20LEFT%20IN%20EUROPE%5B14867560%5D.pdf - CIA document on Khruschev, page 6 of the pdf document, page 3 of the actual report itself