******************************************************************************** ******************************************************************************** ******************************************************************************** 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 OCCASIONAL INTERNET ================================================================================ 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. ================================================================================ _ZIG-ZAG_ is archived at (ftp) etext.archive.umich.edu: /pub/Politics/ZigZag. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _ZIG-ZAG_ wants to buy: _Revolution Lobby_-Allen Brownfeld_ _Prophets or Useful Idiots_-James Tyson -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seeking hangman's rope from capitalists. V. Lenin, Red Square, Kremlin. ******************************************************************************** ******************************************************************************** ********************************************************************************