Paul Mason’s reply to John Ross of Socialist Action on Xi Jinping’s China annihilates Ross’ apologism and makes many valuable points.
Mason sets himself the task of defending Marxism against its traducement by the Chinese elite. But his own comments about Marxism are confused.
“Stalin faced no significant alternative form of Marxism”, claims Mason. “Even his opponents within the Soviet bureaucracy, from Leon Trotsky to Nikolai Bukharin, adhered to the same rigid historical method that was killing them. They knew nothing of Marx the humanist, Marx the philosopher of alienation, Marx the eco-socialist. They held to a rigid set of sociological certainties even as capitalism and fascism falsified them.”
Trotsky was not part of Stalin’s bureaucracy; he was expelled from the Russian Communist Party in 1927, before the consolidation of the new bureaucratic ruling class - the early stages of which he was purged for opposing. The claim he (and indeed Bukharin) knew nothing of the multifaceted, intellectually expansive “Marxes” Mason describes is as nonsensical as the claim that his ideas were “rigid sociological certainties”.
In the 1930s Stalinism steamrollered the anti-Stalinist left. But it was the ideas Trotsky helped develop which inspired the best attempt to regroup and rally a genuine Marxist movement, independent from and against Stalinism, one which made important contributions to working-class struggle and the fight for human liberation.
This is not to say Trotsky’s ideas were adequate in every respect: far from it. See our Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism.
Mason’s dismissal of Trotsky is particularly odd given those he cites as representatives of a “critical, flexible, heterodox and humanist Marxism”. Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci, for instance, are both extremely valuable and important – but both were much closer to Stalinism than Trotsky was (which is not to say that either was a Stalinist).
Mason also cites Chen Duxiu – one of the key founders of the Chinese Communist Party, who then became one of the key founders and leaders of… Chinese Trotskyism.
He cites “the stories of Peterloo, the Chartists and the Wobblies”; he could also have cited the tremendous history of working-class struggle in China. But Mason’s primary focus as stated here seems to be not on working-class struggle, not how on Marxism can strengthen its influence in the labour movement and working class, but on “global academia”.
