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Zig Zag Magazine Volume 2 Issue 1
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ZIG-ZAG 2.1 April 29,
1994
TRACKING THE MARXIST DIALECTICAL STRATEGY OF ADVANCE-RETREAT-ADVANCE OR
UNITY-SPLIT-UNITY IN INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTION
DEDICATED TO DEAF-MUTES AND USEFUL IDIOTS
STEPHEN GROSSMAN <SGROSSMAN@UMASSD.EDU> OCCASIONAL INTERNET
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ZIG-ZAG
Stephen Grossman
(c) May 5, 1994 (1991), Fairhaven, MA,
The Soviet retreat from eastern Europe and empire and its split into
Russia and the other provinces resulted in aid, increased trade, and
welcomes for their representatives. Communism has ended. Gorbachev buried
the Cold War and Yeltsin struggles for democratic capitalism. Does this
popular view have intellectual respectability? Understanding is not the result
of arbitrary political experiments on arbitrary jumbles of concrete facts for
testing arbitrary hypotheses derived from the arbitrary desire to end
conflict. Foreign policy is not crisis-management.
After all, as Walter Duranty, the Pragmatist who helped Stalin
hide his Ukraine famine, told _New York Times_ readers on April 13,1921,
"Lenin has thrown communism overboard. His signature appears in the official
press of Moscow...abandoning State ownership....The new economic policy...was
adopted...by the Council of Commissars of the People..." Well, now, if
communism ended in 1921, according to one of the world's most respected
newspapers, how was it possible that, as the _New York Times_ assured its ever
faithful readers on May 7, 1992, that "Gorbechev Buries the Cold War?" If
communism died seven decades ago, just exactly what was lowered into the
ground two years ago?! Shall we take alarm from Lenin's advice to Checherin, his
commissar of foreign affairs, "Tell them what they want to hear?" Do we,
perhaps, hearing about the end of conflict with our enemies, believe, like the
White Queen, six amazing things before breakfast? And is our foreign
non-policy,including the non-discussion of continued nuclear war preparations
in...well, Russia, a Pragmatic test of our touching faith in sentiment and
compromise? Will this work to give us peace in our time? How much time do we
have? Does Pragmatism work? Is Pragmatism realistic? Why does Gorbachev discuss
"contradictions" and "this stage in history" after declaring the end of
communism? Curiouser and curiouser!
This conundrum cannot be solved by diplomacy, espionage, spy
satellites, intelligence analysis or by the mainstream of contemporary
political science and history. It requires a well-stocked library and the
recognition of the role of philosophy in human life. Since 1848, Marxists have
been telling anyone who cared to read that history "progresses" by temporary,
developing contradictions to communism. This is the infamous dialectic, not
merely a false metaphysics, but the practical revolutionary strategy of
advance-retreat-advance or unity-split-unity.
Lenin called them zig-zags, Stalin studied flows and ebbs, and Mao
discussed developing contradictions. But whatever the name, the concretes of
Soviet and, wider, Marxist policy, require more than range-of-the-moment
Pragmatist crisis-management for understanding and counterattack. "Without
revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement," observed Lenin.
With more intellectual ability than most academic scholars, Stalin recognized
that, "Dialectics is the soul of Marxism" and lamented "that disease of narrow
empiricism and unprincipled practicalism [Pragmatism] which has not
infrequently caused certain 'Bolsheviks' to degenerate and to abandon the
cause of the revolution." Mao said, "Vulgar 'practical men' respect experience
but despise theory, and therefore cannot have a comprehensive view of an
entire objective process, lack clear direction and long-range perspective, and
are complacent over occasional successes....Only [theory] can guide action....
Our comrades with practical experience will be able to organize their
experience into principles and avoid repeating empiricist errors." The Marxist
victory in Vietnam was caused by Marx's theory, in his _Communist Manifesto_,
that, "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the
movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of
the movement."
In radical contrast, Americian foreign policy, as an application of
its philosophy, is guided by Pragmatism. Consider John Dewey's bizarre claim
that, "Conscious life is a continual beginning afresh." In a war between
short-range Pragmatism and long-range Marxism, Marxism must win-in the long
run. For Pragmatists, compromise is the essence, standard, and purpose of
politics. Marxism is also Pragmatism. As Marx said, "The point is not to
understand reality but to change it." Marxism, unlike American Pragmatism, is
Pragmatic idealism, the ideal being world communism, and Marxists are
Pragmatic in pursuit of that ideal. American Pragmatists regard compromise as
absolute but Marxists view it as relative. Short-range American Pragmatists
regard Marxist Pragmatists as essentially like them, political whores who
intend to compromise their values, who are pleased to negotiate any value.
Pragmatists regard politics as random, acausal, discontinuous events (that
was then, this is now), but Marxist politics is a causally systematic process
necessarily leading to world communism regardless of the compromises needed to
get there. "The revolutionary will accept a reform in order to use it...for
the overthrow of the bourgeosie," warned Stalin.
For Marxists, politics _is_ class warfare. Thus diplomacy and even the
very existence of nations, including the Soviet Union, _is_ war. Marxists regard
the Soviet Union, not as a conventional nation, but as a temporary, evolving
stage in the revolutionary process of history. Its class enemies should
diplomatically recognize, not the Soviet Union, but the internationalists who
regard it as a revolutiony base. Soviet totalitarianism and Russian democracy
are merely temporary, developing stages of revolutionary progress.
One can study the concretes of Soviet foreign policy, subversion,
guerilla wars, military doctrine and power, the KGB, and the coordinating
International Dept., yet remain as confused as American foreign policy
"experts" have been for decades. Even the prophet Winston Churchill thought
them "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Influential political
"scientists" study Russian nationalism or the social psychology and
institutions of totalitarianism. Mao, however, understood that,"Communists the
world over are wiser than the bourgeoisie [because] they understand dialectics
and can see farther." _International Affairs_ (Moscow), the _theoretical_
foreign policy journal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in noting
Sovietologist Richard Pipes' denial of a Marxist theory of foreign policy,
declared, "Lenin worked out the theoretical foreign policy principles of the
Socialist state and formulated its key principles and aims on the basis of...
Marx and Engels." Clausewitz recognized that war has a political purpose.
Building on that, Marxists recognize that politics has an intellectual purpose.
Thus war, including revolution, is _essentially_ a conflict of ideas, not
military combat! War is human action, not brute response.
Marxists have developed an aggressive, sophisticated, and dangerously
systematic theory of conflict. Rejecting the metaphysics of identity (a thing
is what it is) for dialectical contradictions or "unity in difference,"
Marxists claim political events _are_ developing contradictions. Political
oppositions flow from prior political oppositions into later political
oppositions. Pre-glasnost communism had problems which contradicted communism
"at that stage in history," developing into the _dialectical_ end of communism.
The Soviet retreat from communism is a _dialectical_ contradiction of its
economic problems. The present movement toward democratic capitalism contains
a _dialectical_ contradiction, the increased prosperity flowing into continued
Soviet nuclear war preparations, the decrease in Western defenses, and the
increased openness of Western polities to subversion. Dialectical history is a
false theory and my plausable description of current Soviet politics may not
be exactly the thinking of the leaders of world communism. This is irrelevant!
This is the pattern of their thinking as they build on the past to "construct
socialism" in the future.
Rejecting the Pragmatist claim that political events are isolated
parts of an unknowable chaos, Marxists regard them as temporary parts of an
orderly and systematically knowable historical process which ends in communism.
An acorn is a developing oak tree and an oak tree is a developing acorn. "War
and peace...transform themselves into each other," said Mao. This is not the
chaotic change of Pragmatism but a secularized Augustinianism leading to, not
God, but social harmony. The (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) dialectic is history
moving from capitalism through socialism to communism. Socialism, which
dialectically includes capitalism, explains Soviet history, including Lenin
and Stalin's New Economic Policy, Gorbachev's glasnost, and Yeltsin's
temporary democratic capitalism. There are also minor contradictions within
major contradictions, making Marxist strategists very busy people indeed.
Again, while dialectics is false about reality as a whole, it's true about
conflict. In fact, dialectical strategy is a systemizing of the traditional,
well-accepted, strategic retreat in military affairs.
Others, such as Sun-Tzu, the Greco-Roman historian/strategists,
and Machiavelli, understood a divide-and-conquer strategy. Marxists, using
systematic philosophy, have added a diabolical twist of "We divide and conquer"
or "United we fall, divided we stand!" The revolutionary process _requires_
splits, not merely among class enemies, but among Marxists! _Hong-ki_, the
_theoretical_ foreign policy journal of the Communist Party of China, wrote
that "unity, struggle, or even splits, and a new unity on a new basis"
described the history of international communism. The revolutionary process
requires a struggle of opposites rather than harmony for progress. The
Sino-Soviet "split" is a dialectically necessary and temporary "moment" in the
revolutionary process, a result of the Law of Uneven Development caused by
different concrete conditions in each nation. The Soviets needed "peaceful
coexistence" with their nuclear enemy while China could more easily subvert
anti-colonialism. At other times, Soviet calls for peace and Chinese
militarism are dialectically correct. The "unity-in-difference" in this
Sino-Soviet split is the revolutionary process and goal. Pragmatists report
the concrete differences between the Soviets and China but, opposing theory,
evade the unity-split-bigger unity process which requires conflict.
Pragmatists, ignoring the temporary nature of each "moment" in the
revolutionary process, then claim that the end of monolithic communism enables
us to safely lower our defenses. They also ignore Soviet and Chinese
statements about their common goal and Chinese acceptance(!) of the more
experienced and powerful Soviets as leaders of the revolution.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution was not anarchy but a theoretically
controlled process of splitting revisionists (evading theory) and dogmatists
(evading experience) from the Party. "Without contradictions....the party's
life would come to an end," said Mao, showing the absurdity of the
academically influential, Pragmatist claim that contradictions mean the end of
communism. Lenin wrote of the need to regularly purge the party, a strategy
which partly caused the dialectical retreat from eastern Europe (a _smaller_
dialectical retreat than Lenin's Brest-Litovsk Treaty) and the dialectical
capitalism in the dialectically split Soviet Union. Stalin, the former
seminary student always seeking systematic guidance, was a dialectical mass
murderer, not the lunatic of the revisionists.
Pragmatists, recognizing only differences, cannot agree with Chinese
Marxist theorist/military commander/political leader Lin Piao that, "The
Chinese Revolution is a continuation of the great October Revolution. They
cannot accept the Soviet "coup" as a moment in the revolutionary process. "I
sent the President an analysis of Soviet policy [which]...._began_ [not with
Marxism as systematically understood, but] by rejecting the proposition that
Soviet policy necessarily follows a master plan, wrote Henry Kissinger, who
rejects ideological war for a Pragmatist balance of power. Anti-communist
Pragmatists, like Brezinski, Kirkpatrick, and Kissinger, may be suspicious of
the Soviets but refuse to consider Marxist theory as cause. Even those who
know that "coup" leader Gennadi Yanayev, as former(?) Secretary of the
International Policy Commission, was (is[?]) probably the chief planner and
coordinator of Soviet and Marxist political influence operations ("active
measures"), do not connect this to revolutionary theory and practice. Even
Sovietologist Adam Ulam, advisor to the previously excellent _Political Wafare_
and author of the accurately entitled, _Soviet Foreign Policy-Expansion and
Coexistence_, does not recognize dialectics and accepts the alleged end of
Marxist revolution.
As Stalin's active measures researcher in KGB archives(!), Anatoliy
Golitsyn said, "In the preface to his book, [also accurately entitled], _The
Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, 'I am also
grateful to several officials of various communist states, for their
willingness to discuss matters they should not have discussed with me.' No
explanation is offered in the book of the reasons why communist officials
should have been willing to speak frankly to a prominent anticommunist scholar
and citizen of the leading 'imperialist' power,' nor is any reference made in
the book to the possibilities of disinformation." Brzezinski rejects
systematic foreign policy for bribery, evading millenia of ideologists willing
to kill and die for absolutes. It is grimly ironic that America, founded on the
Enlightenment respect for ideas, should guide its foreign policy by something
approaching economic determinism, while its Marxist enemies, accepting
economic determinism in principle, should wage revolution basically with
ideas. Golitsyn and Jan Sejna, another Soviet-bloc Intelligence defector with
access to the "long-range bloc policy," were debriefed by the CIA on Soviet
tactics but their knowledge of strategy was unwelcome! Nixon, whose Pragmatism
is the source of his renaissance and who accurately recognized that detente,
the compromise between his Pragmatist anti-communism and Brezhnev's Marxism,
was threatened, gave the orders.
The 1991 Soviet "coup" is less a deception than a moment in the
dialectical process. A 30-year military build-up bankrupted the Soviet economy
and encouraged suspicion. A split between "conservatives" and "liberals,"
including a photo-op "coup," encouraged compromise-seeking Pragmatists among
class enemies to aid Soviet "liberals" before "conservatives" returned the
Cold War. One leading "liberal," Alexander Yakovlev, was director of the
International Affairs Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU. As head
of international political influence operations, he coordinated the public
image of the dialectical splits among retreating Marxists. "Brezhnev
[advised] us to pretend in our talks with Americans that we ourselves did not
take some Marxist dogmas seriously," revealed Arkady Shevchenko, defected
Soviet UN Ambassador. "The fable of hawks and doves contesting in the Kremlin
has been encouraged for Western consumption by Soviet propaganda and
disinformation outlets." The resulting aid, trade, lowered military budgets
among "imperialists," and increased openness to subversion is enabling the
Soviet and other Marxist revolutionaries to unify in a larger, more dangerous,
way. Pragmatists will, once again, evade the past and future; and the
theory-driven dialectical strategy of unity-split-unity or
advance-retreat-advance will continue until world communism destroys Western
civilization. Various systematic and dialectical descriptions of Soviet
history have been made and will be discussed, along with active measures,
agents-of-influence, military strategy, disinformation, Gramsci's theory of
cultural hegemony, and other exciting topics, at a later time.
Although Soviet Marxists continue nuclear war preparations, with new
missiles, submarines and shelters, even SDI is useless unless a rational,
systematic, and absolutist capitalist political philosophy is recognized as
the most important weapon in our national defense. Ideology cannot be defeated
by Pragmatism but only by another ideology. As rock chanteuse Marianne
Faithfull so tartly sang, "We've been trying to get high without having to pay."
_______________________________________________________________________________
SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY (in order of importance)
"For the New Intellectual"-Ayn Rand, in her _For the New Intellectual_,
Signet, NYC, 1963 (1961).
"The Difficult, Devious, and Dangerous Dialectic"-Fred Schwarz, in
his _You Can Trust the Communists..._, Prentice-Hall, NYC, 1960.
_New Lies For Old_-Anatoliy Golitsyn, Dodd, NYC, 1984.
_Communist Manifesto_-Karl Marx, 1848.
"'Left-Wing' Communism..."-Vladimir Lenin, 1920.
"Dialectics"-Vladimir Lenin, in his _Selected Works_ XI, International,
NYC, 1943.
_Dialectical and Historical Materialism_-Joseph Stalin.
"Foundations of Leninism"-Joseph Stalin, 1939.
_Problems of Leninism_-Joseph Stalin, International, Moscow, 1934.
"On Contradictions"-Mao Tse-Tung, 1937.
_The Problem of Compromise in Politics..._-Alexander Lebedev, Novosti,
Moscow, 1989.
"On the Philosophy of Contradictions: the Sino-Soviet Dispute
as a Case Study in Communist Conflict Thinking"-George Damien, _Orbis_ 11:4,
Winter 1968, p. 1208.
The Dialectical Structure of the Great Chinese Proletarian Cultural
Revolution"-George Damien, _Orbis_ 14:1, Spring 1970, p. 19.
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_ZIG-ZAG_ is archived at (ftp) etext.archive.umich.edu: /pub/Politics/ZigZag.
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_ZIG-ZAG_ wants to buy:
_Revolution Lobby_-Allen Brownfeld_
_Prophets or Useful Idiots_-James Tyson
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Seeking hangman's rope from capitalists. V. Lenin, Red Square, Kremlin.
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