IT’S HARD to believe today that in the 1970s, thousands of revolutionaries the world over looked to the Peoples Republic of China as an example of a society that was moving towards socialism—and that offered inspiration for making a socialist transformation in their own societies. Of course, today, the Western capitalist classes are more likely to be singing the praises of the PRC as books like China, Inc. line the shelves of bookstores and one Western firm after another opens factories in China. Today, you could even say that China seems like the most “capitalist” country in the world. Yet, 30-40 years ago, leftist intellectuals around the world were captured by the image of a country in permanent mobilization, transforming itself from a poor country under imperialism’s boot, to a model of socialism. Here’s an example of what I mean: “Well before the current movement, Chinese women were already vastly more liberated than we are in the US: day care is universally available and practically free; women are encouraged to enter all but the most strenuous occupation….Peasants, formerly illiterate old people, young students, workers, are reading and discussing The Critique of the Gotha Program, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism…The movement is what the Chinese say it is: part of a continuing effort to ‘unleash the activity of the masses,’ to create ‘people of wisdom.’” You might be surprised to find out that the author of those words in 1974, is none other than Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickle and Dimed, who I’d guess would be embarrassed to have this read back to her today.

 For the generation of activists and intellectuals that Ehrenreich represents, China, along with revolutionary Cuba, became an alternative of “real existing socialism” that challenged the gray and stodgy Soviet Union. While the USSR had been the lodestar for the previous of generation of radicals influenced by the Communist Parties, it was, by the 1960s, seen as either fatally flawed because of its Stalinism or an opposed to radical change because of its commitment to “peaceful coexistence” with the US. For a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the revolutionary left grew around the world, China and Maoism—its guiding political ideology—became influential in shaping a generation of radicals—a process in the U.S. that Max Elbaum described in his Revolution in the Air. But as Elbaum also shows, Maoism and the revolutionary organizations that claimed to uphold it in the U.S. collapsed virtually overnight in the late 1970s. Today, few people would call themselves Maoists. In some countries, like India and the Philippines, large communist parties formed in the late 1960s claim to follow Mao Zedong thought, but what this means other than maintaining guerrilla armies and a militaristic style of political work is open to interpretation.

  I’d like to argue four main points. First, that rather than being a challenge to Stalinism, Maoism was a different variant of Stalinism. Second, that the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the formation of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, while representing one of the greatest advances for the cause of national liberation from imperialism, had nothing to do with socialism—and made no contributions to the struggle for genuine socialism. Third, that much of the ideology of Maoism represents not an advance or contribution to Marxism, but a step backward to pre-Marxist ideas that have more in common with idealist philosophies like Christianity or Confucianism than they do with Marxism. And finally, that as a guide to action for revolutionaries around the world (and particularly in the US), Maoism or more particularly, the policies of the Chinese state, were mostly useless—and contributed to the collapse of Maoist currents and organizations around the world.

Maoism and the Communist Party

The first thing to understand about Maoism and the Chinese Communist Party that they led is that both are products of the defeat of a potential workers’ revolution in China in 1925-27.

At the turn of the 20^th century, China was a country in which an existing imperial dynasty had decayed to such an extent that it could no longer even defend its national territory. Foreign powers, like Britain, France, Russia and Japan and carved out pieces of Chinese territory for themselves. The combination of dynastic decay, economic backwardness and imperialist occupation turned the country into one of a series of fiefdoms run by local gangsters and mafiosi. The state was so weak and decentralized that when it fell to a revolution in 1911, the would-be leaders of the 1911 revolution, the Chinese bourgeosie led by the Guomintang Party of Sun Yat Sen, were too weak to impose order or economic development. So the warlords continued to dominate China, making and breaking alliances with different imperialist powers as they needed them.

   The outbreak of the First World War unleashed demands of workers and peasants. And after the allies decided to hand Germany’s possessions in China to Japan after war, a powerful nationalist movement, the May 4 Movement, developed in 1919.

All of this is the background for the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. The initial adherents to the party were a small group of intellectuals mobilized by the May 4 Movement. But the development of the class struggle in China throughout the 1920s transformed the party in a few short years from a handful of intellectuals to more than 50,000 members, most of them workers. The initial orientation of the CCP was, like that of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, was on the small but growing working class. But quite soon, the party revised this and subordinated itself to the nationalist GMT.

   The Comintern, the International organization of communist parties founded in 1919, developed a policy of support for genuine national liberation movements in the countries dominated by imperialism. The Comintern in 1920 urged its affiliate parties in the colonized countries to collaborate with nationalist forces like the Goumindang, but warned that the CPs “must not amalgamate” with the nationalists and must maintain the “independence of the proletarian movement.” In its initial year of existence, the Chinese Communists followed this policy.

   But within a year—and following the direct intervention of the Comintern’s representative, Borodin, in the CCP’s affairs—the Communists dissolved themselves into the Goumindang. This change of policy reflected less an assessment of revolutionary prospects in China as it was the beginnings of the degeneration of the Comintern under Stalin’s increasing grip. With the failure of revolution to sweep Europe, the Russian regime was left alone, ruined after years of civil war. Therefore the Russian and Comintern policy on China, authored by Stalin and Bukharin, sought to gain an ally that would contribute to stability on Russia’s borders—not a revolutionary upsurge in China. Since they were convinced that a “bourgeois revolution” was on the agenda in China, and since the Goumindang was the main political representative of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Stalin through the Comintern ordered the Communist Party to play second fiddle to the Goumindang.

   This focus on merchants was an example of another Stalinist revision of Marxism that Mao and the CCP adopted enthusiastically, the theory of the “Bloc for Four Classes.” In this idea, it was asserted that the new revolutionary bloc in the countries fighting imperialism consisted of peasants, workers, intellectuals and the “patriotic” capitalists. This idea had nothing in common with Marxism. Instead, it was Marxist-sounding description that actually mirrored the internal organization of the Goumindang. But the revisions of Marxist theory went hand in hand with the CCP’s practice. The Comintern accepted the Guomindang as an associate member, it transferred tons of arms to the Goumindang militias and Goumindang leader, warlord Chiang Kaishek, was hailed as a great revolutionary leader and made a member of the Comintern’s executive.

All of this was going while there was a gathering rebellion in the countryside and in the urban centers against the rule of the corrupt warlords. As the Goumidang advanced through the Northern and Central parts of China in 1926-27, peasant risings greated Chiang’s armies. And workers unions, many of them with communists in their leaderships, sprung into action in the liberated cities and coastal towns. In cities like Canton and later Shanghai, workers took over the city administration. In March of 1927, as Chaing’s forces advanced on Shanghai, the Shanghai General Labor Union called a general strike to paralyze the city in advance of Chaing’s arrival. Instead of solidarizing with the workers, the Goumindang stopped short of the city, allowing the thugs of warlord Sun Chang Fang to attack and weaken the workers. When Chaing’s forces arrived, he joined in with the repression of the working class that led to the execution of thousands of trade unionists.

This history is important to understand that the CCP’s rebuilding into a mostly peasant-based party under Mao’s leadership–in 1926, 66% of the party’s members were workers; in 1930, only 2.5 % were workers— had nothing to do with a strategic plan that saw the “revolutionary role of the peasantry.” It had to do with the disastrous defeats suffered at the end of the 1920s, and a 5,000 mile retreat into the countryside under Goumindang harassment, of what was left over of the CCP. Mao may very well deserve credit for managing to keep the CCP from completely falling apart, but the subsequent rebuilding of the party owed to external events and another change of line in the now-completely Stalinized Comintern. The main external event was the Japanese invasion of the country in 1937, and the change of Comintern line from the ultraleft Third Period to the Popular Front, Stalin’s policy of seeking allies with any bourgeois government or force that was prepared to ally with the USSR against the coming threat of war from Hitler and the Axis powers, including Japan. In China, this meant a reintroduction of the alliance with the Goumindang to fight the Japanese, with even more slavish devotion to Chiang Kai Shek.

Mao and the CCP grew in power and influence over the course of almost a decade of war in alliance with the Goumindang against Japan, and once Japan was defeated, a four year civil war with the Goumindang. The CCP was able to defeat Chaing because the Goumindang proved more interested in plundering China’s wealth than in fighting the Japanese. It’s important to note that the victory of the CCP was predominantly based on a military accumulation of forces, rather than a social upheaval. Mao did not define the enemy in class terms, but in terms of their relationship with the Japanese imperialists. The Communist armies confiscated the property of landlords and capitalists who openly allied with the Japanese, but left alone the property of those who either supported the Chinese national struggle or who pretended to. In place of encouraging peasants to overthrow the landlords, the CCP simply reduced land rents in the areas it conquered. Even this hardly radical policy marked a great improvement for a peasantry used to arbitrary landlord rule. This made the revolution popular in the areas where the Communists established governments (what they dubbed “Red Bases”). Mao’s famous phrase that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun…” comes from this experience. His idea of winning socialism had nothing to do with workers and peasants rising up but was conceived almost exclusively in military terms.

The People’s Republic of China

   The regime proclaimed on October 1, 1949, did cap one of the greatest nationalist revolutions in history. But that and socialism or socialist revolution are two different things. The state increasingly took over the economy to concentrate all its resources. From the start, the Peoples Republic made its main priority that of national development—developing the economy to make China a player on the world stage. And in specific, this meant, as it did in Russia the 1930s, the development of heavy industry at the expense of everything else, including workers wages, social welfare and education. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s right-hand man, denounced the idea of egalitarianism in wages as a “petty bourgeois outlook that encourages backwardness and hinders progress.”

   As China’s leaders in 1953 embarked on a series of 5-Year Plans modeled on those of Stalin’s Russia, they were starting from a much poorer material base than even Russia’s leaders had to work with in the late 1920s. And so this meant squeezing China’s workers and peasants to gain the target of 55 percent of investment to heavy industry. Acolytes of Mao in other countries pointed to statements like Zhou Enlai’s positively, to the effect that workers’ demands for higher wages were selfish “economism” and, at least in China, that the revolutionary consciousness of the people to restrain their selfish demands in the service of building socialism, was admirable. This appealed to a left in affluent countries in the 1960s and 1970s that thought of well-paid workers as being a hindrance to the development of socialist consciousness in their countries. But the Marxist gloss about “economism” and “petty bourgeois” attitudes and so on reflected China’s very real (and not-so-Marxist) plan to maximize investment in heavy industry at the expense of workers’ consumption.

The Great Leap Forward

The great Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys, one of the most astute and knowledgeable analysts of Maoist China once wrote that if Mao had died a few years after the founding of the PRC, he would have gone down in history as one of the greatest figures in China’s history. But, Leys continued, unfortunately for him—and more unfortunately for the Chinese people—Mao lived to 1976, which allowed him many opportunities to inflict several mad schemes on the Chinese population. The first of these was known as The Great Leap Forward in 1958.

At the end of the first five-year plan in 1958, the economy was beginning to stall and signs of peasant and worker discontent were obvious. Even party leaders thought it might be necessary to lift the yoke of sacrifice for accumulation from the workers and peasants. But Mao rejected them, asserting instead that China’s economy could be propelled forward by a huge mobilization of her human resources. Steel would be produced in furnaces in workers back yards; peasants would be herded into giant collective farms. Absurd targets—that China would overtake the US as a steel producer by the end of the 5-year plan, for instance—unhinged Chinese policy from any reference to reality. In the place of reality-based policy, Maoism offered voluntarism, the idea that sheer human willpower could overcome any obstacle. This went hand-in-hand with the creation of a personality cult around Mao. The Chinese people would be capable of superhuman things because their “Great Helmsman,” as Mao and his propagandists dubbed him, was capable of such things, too, like swimming the Yangstze River in twice the world record time!

Predictably, the Great Leap Forward produced a catastrophe. It is now estimated that as many as 30-50 million Chinese perished in famines caused by the policy. The backyard steel mills produced scrap and, at the same time, denied iron ore from China’s steel mills. The disaster produced splits in the ruling bureaucracy and Mao was removed from the central leadership for a time. So-called “rightists,” of which the Liu Shao Shi and Deng Xiaoping, who advocated greater use of private farming, piecework and stronger managerial control in productive enterprises, temporarily moved to the fore of the Chinese elite. But despite all of their pseudo Marxist rhetoric, the “leftists” like Mao and the “rightists” like Deng had the same goal in mind: developing China’s national economy through whatever means seemed most efficacious at the time. In fact, Leys points out that one really wanted to, one could mine Mao’s statements and writings for enough “rightist” statements that could hang 10 Liu Shao Shis and a dozen Deng Xiaopings!

The Cultural Revolution

   After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was demoted in the party. He maintained prestige left over from the revolution, but he had little effective power. So he decided in 1965 to launch a bid to regain his standing in the bureaucracy by attacking the bureaucracy. The vehicle for this was the Great Cultural Revolution, launched under the pretext that the refusal of one of the regime’s cultural journals to publish an essay by Mao on culture reflected the increasing hold in the party of those “determined to take the capitalist road.” To prevent this and to reclaim socialism, Mao urged millions of Chinese students and youth to form Red Guards, to denounce those in authority. To facilitate this, Mao shut down the country’s schools and universities for almost two years in 1966 and 1967. Mao’s “closest comrade in arms,” the Defense Minister Lin Biao, urged the Red Guards to “bombard the headquarters” of the party. Several years of chaos ensued…with youth-led mass meetings and demonstrations, street fighting, denunciations and show trials conducted against those in authority. But the mass mobilizations were simply encouraged as part of a factional struggle at the top of the bureaucracy.

   Completely unintended by Mao, the CR did actually encourage some people— both students and workers—to take Mao’s rhetoric about revolution seriously. This was seen in a flowering of demands for greater freedom and for self-organization of workers to take on repressive factory bosses. Political organizations formed that began to target the entire bureaucracy and regime as being enemies of socialism. In 1967-68, organizations of workers took over management of factories at the local level, tossing out party bosses.

   Mao would have none of this. And so he and the PLA looked to wind down the CR and to rebuild the authority of the party. Mao called himself the “black hand” that suppressed the “Red Guards.” By the early 1970s, the party was again asserting its role as authority in everything and curtailing the mass mobilizations. Now the primacy of military defense and the possibility of a new relationship with Washington was the order of the day. Lin Baio, thought to be an opponent of an approach to Washington, died in a mysterious plane crash in 1970. Two years later, the regime “revealed” that Lin Baio—Mao’s closest comrade and leader of the CR—was a “bourgeois careerist, conspirator, counter-revolutionary doble dealer, renegade and traitor” … and a capitalist roader. The circle of the so-called “left” around Mao (including his wife Jiang Jing) launched one final counter-attack against this shift in the wake of Chou En Lai. This group, known as the Gang of Four, lost its main protector when Mao died in 1976. The Gang of Four were quickly dispatched in a series of show trials, as the former “rightist” Deng Xiaoping, took total control over the Chinese state.

   Though most people today—and anyone who had a critical sense of what was going in China at the time—would think of the period of the Cultural Revolution as a disaster, it should be remembered that this the height of Maoism’s influence in the world left. This was the time when people like Ehrenreich, and more radical forces like the Black Panther Party, were seeing revolution and radicalism in China. Many radicals tried to imitate the style and practice of the CR in the West—using Mao’s Little Red Book of banal sayings in their political work, for instance. But it was a testament to shallowness of the radicalism of the period that when the regime made its move against the Gang of Four, hardly anyone came to their support.

Break with Russia

Maoism did not become a distinct current on the world left until after China and the Soviet Union broke ties openly in 1962. Until that time, China and the Soviet Union were seen as part of a unitary “socialist camp” in which China followed the lead of the Soviet Union. While subsequent Maoist rewriting of history made China the bearer of true socialism after the the 1956 accession to power in Moscow of Khruschev, who reintroduced capitalism in Russia and therefore became “revisionist,” the true reason for the split had more to do with global power politics. The USSR, trying to curry favor with nuclear powers in the U.S. and Britain, reneged on a deal to transfer nuclear technology to China in 1959. China was notoriously cavalier about its attitude to nuclear war [Mao reportedly told an Italian CP leader that it didn’t matter if Italy survived a superpower nuclear exchange because 300 million Chinese would survive and that would be enough to preserve the human race!]. It later the tried to convince the USSR not to sign the 1963 Atomic Test Ban treaty with the U.S. When Russia did sign the test ban, there was no going back to the postwar alliance.

   In any event, the split and the phony and pseudo-Marxist justifications for it led to splits in Communist Parties around the world, with small pro-China groups leaving the larger CPs. While at least as early as 1952, the Chinese thought their experience was generalizable to other countries, and the Chinese state tried to project itself a leader of a current of “Third Worldism.” Taking experience of the Chinese revolution, where the Red Bases of the rural areas encircled and conquered the cities, Lin Baio, Mao’s closest collaborator and head of the People’s Liberation Army, argued that the new force for world revolution was the undeveloped world. The future of the world revolution depended on peasant-based, guerrilla-led revolutions In Asia, Africa and Latin America that would encircle the “cities” (i.e. the Western powers) and overthrow them.

   China did offer aid to the Vietnamese revolutionaries, although probably not as much as Russia did. But the big turning point in China’s relations with the world came after Russia and China had border clashes in 1969. From then on, the Chinese regime became motivated in its foreign policy by an anti-Russian agenda that brought it into alliance with the U.S. and, as a result, with some of the worst right-wing regimes in the world. When Nixon—arch anti-communist and butcher of Vietnam—visited China and toasted Chairman Mao in 1972, there seemed to be no lengths to which the Chinese regime would go to show its allegiance to the Washington side of the Cold War.

   As it was used to doing, the Chinese regime developed a “theory” to explain this tactical shift. The Theory of the Three Worlds, announced in 1974 by Deng Xioaping, placed the USSR and US in the “first world” of the to superpowers, with the Third World being the countries oppressed by imperialism. The Second World, including Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Japan, vacillated between the two. The key struggle was between the Third World and the First, which held the twin evils of U.S. imperialism and USSR “hegemonism.” But as the 1970s wore on and the U.S.-China alliance became firmer, China’s denunciations of imperialism fell into the background and the denunciations of “hegemonism” became more strident.

   To list the foreign policy positions that this so-called socialist country now took is a chronicle of horrors that would warm any neoconservatives’ heart. It supported the right-wing government’s crushing of rebels in Sri Lanka in 1971 and opposed independence of Bangladesh in 1972. It supported the strengthening of NATO. During the Portuguese Revolution, it supported the Western-backed Socialist Party that led the counterrevolution against the left. In Angola, during the revolutions against the former Portuguese colonial regime, the Chinese backed the FNLA and UNITA—U.S./South Africa-backed guerrilla forces—against the main popular liberation force, the MPLA. China consistently supported the Shah of Iran. And when the Chilean military overthrew the Allende government in 1973, the Chinese regime was among the first to extend diplomatic recognition to the dictatorship and to deny refuge in its embassy from leftists fleeing repression. When fascist General Franco died, the Chinese regime sent condolences and representatives to his funeral. (Only a few months earlier, as Franco was on his deathbed, a radical British union had sent a telegram with the message “Die, you bastard, die.”).

   Needless to say, for those around the world who had been attracted to Maoism because it seemed to represent a radical challenge to imperialism than the USSR, this alliance with imperialism presented some problems… especially to radicals in the belly of the beast, where I’ll turn now.

Maoism in the US

The dominant revolutionary tendency was Maoism, which identified with Third World struggles. It tended to see the fundamental division in society as nation—between oppressed and oppressor nation (both inside the U.S. and internationally)—rather than class. Maoism had arisen as a force on the left in 1962, when the Progressive Labor Movement—later the Progressive Labor Party—left the Communist Party. The PL supported the Chinese Stalinists over the Russian Stalinists.

Maoism, in particular, gained ground for a couple of reasons: 1) a general identification with Third World liberation movements, like the one in Vietnam; and 2) a lack confidence in indigenous working-class forces as the catalyst for change in the U.S.

A perceptive analysis of this process, written by the two founders of the IS, explained it this way: “The unevenness of the radicalization process in its effect on the various sectors of the American population has faced the radical movement . . . with a growing sense of isolation. In the context of this sense of isolation from the bulk of the American people, under the impact of a great hunger for political identity, the affinity felt by most SDSers for revolutionary leaderships in the Third World was increasingly transformed into a primary identification.” Some of the revolutionary organizations that formed in this period did do very credible work in the trade unions , but their reference point and measuring stick was always the Black Power and other Third World liberation movements.

However, nearly as quickly as they rose, the revolutionary Maoist groups collapsed. The main reason for this was the shift in the political period—the end of the movements of the 1960s/1970s and the overall shift to that right—that started to set in following the mid-1970s recession. This affected all revolutionary groups and the Maoists were no exception. However, I think we can say that there were particular things about Maoist politics that made their collapse so much more sudden, and the fact that they left behind so little.

First, the Maoists inherited an essentially Stalinist analysis of many political questions. For instance, of Black liberation meant that the theoretical analysis of the question in the movement vacilated between an acceptance of the Communist Party’s Black Belt thesis—the idea that Blacks formed a nation in the South that could assert its right to independence in the future—and an equally wrong counterargument that Blacks are just part of working class and therefore have no need for special demands reflecting their self-determination. This would all seem an abstract discussion except that it had real world consequences during the struggle over busing in Boston in the mid-1970s. The main Maoist group at the time, the Revolutionary Union—the predecessors of today’s RCP—took a position rejecting busing, even printing a paper with the headline “People Must Unite to Smash Boston Busing Plan.” Other Maoists opposed the busing plan, some supported it.

A similar development that flowed from a Stalinist view of a revolutionary party that had to force subservience of non-party groups to it was the RU’s 1975 splitting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The RU controlled national office expelled VVAW chapters that agree to support fairly watered-down demands like “Decent Benefits for All Veterans” or recognize the RU’s leadership. As a result VVAW dwindled to a small rump. Later, the RCP took a sharp shift to the “left” into anarcho-adventurism when the leadership announced its support for the Gang of Four in 1976.

Meanwhile, the October League—which in 1977 became the CP-ML and was recognized in China as its U.S. affiliate—took similar sectarian positions that flowed from the Chinese regime’s proclamations of no “united front with revisionism,” meaning that they would not work with any group that had CPUSA members in it. One casualty of this was OL-engineered destruction of the Southern Conference Education Fund, a civil rights organization that had several Cpers and liberal sympathizers. When OL gained a majority on the organization’s board in 1975, they pushed through a resolution condemning Soviet Social Imperialism—that led to the decline and collapse of the organization.

Second, there was the fact that these groups tied themselves to a “revolutionary” regime that had no genuinely revolutionary intent. This led to some indefensible positions. Elbaum quotes some spokespeople for the RCP talking about how in order to be “tough” macho leaders of the working class—and to have something in common with their co-workers—-they couldn’t abide by homosexuality and denounced it as “petty bourgeois.” But Maoism’s outright homophobia also owed to the fact that China itself persecuted gays—and provided Marxist-Leninist sounding justifications for it.

   This was of a piece with all of the backward foreign policy positions that China took, and that Maoists found hard to defend. Imagine that you’re one of 20,000 people in a crowd in Madison Square Garden in 1974 rallying for self-determination and independence for Puerto Rico and you hear the intervention from the Workers’ Viewpoint Organization leader Jerry Tung, whose main point is to condemn equally U.S. imperialism and Soviet-Cuban penetration of the island. The followers of the CCP condemned the Puerto Rican Socialist Party—one of the best developments on the left in Puerto Rico in a generation—as being a catspaw for Cuba and the USSR.

   China’s and the Maoists’ alliance with the right in Angola was another source of embarrassment for Maoists. THe movement split into hostile camps over it, with Maoists like Carl Davidson of the October League arguing that the division of Angola showed the “sharp lines in the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism.” Apparently, the “Marxist-Leninists” in this fight were allied with Washington and South Africa.

   All of this flowed from the real elephant in the room, which was the Washington/Beijing alliance forged with the Nixon-Mao meetings in 1972. For years, Maoists tried to deny the obvious. But when they had to choose sides, they inevitably took positions that put them at odds with genuine anti-imperialism. Nigel Harris puts it well: “In so far as supporters of Mao are loyal to this thought and Beijing’s foreign policy, they are counter-revolutionary; in so far as they bend it to their instincts as workers, they are confused. No collective self-emancipation can result.”

Summing Up

Today what’s left of the Maoist left in the U.S. is either firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party or has degenerated into personality cultism. There were, and are, many serious and committed comrades who joined Maoist organizations because they wanted to fight for socialism and to change the world. But a nationalist ideology developed as, in truth, the ideology of a state capitalist regime, derailed them. And that is a tragedy. We can look back and wonder how it was possible that good revolutionaries would fall into this bizarro world of “social imperialism” and “rectification” and “no united fronts with revisionism,” but we shouldn’t be so smug. Because our job is not just to criticize misguided politics and bad ideas, but to build an alternative to them that puts the self-emancipation of the working class at its center.