Class Warfare

This section of the course focuses on two topics:  first, how class warfare (class struggle) is waged as a deliberate strategy to win popular support before communists take power (e.g., ‘social justice’ rhetoric); and second, how communist regimes typically persecute and kill ‘class enemies’ after taking power, as occurred in Soviet Russia and Communist China (‘kill the kulaks!’). 

Strategy and Seduction

• “Lenin: The Great Strategist of the Class War” by A. Lozovsky (1924 pamphlet) - how Lenin used the working class and the peasants to bring about his revolution.
  
  
• Forward to “Deception of the People with Slogans of Freedom and Equality” by V. Lenin (1919) -wherein Lenin urges the peasants to ally with the workers to fight the remnants of the bourgeoisie, and expresses the “class struggle” thusly: “the capitalist state (under the freest and most democratic republic) have always and everywhere, in all countries, helped the rich to rob the working people, helped the speculators and the rich to grow richer at the expense of the poor who become poorer.”
  
  
• THESES AND RESOLUTIONS OF THE SIXTH CONGRESS OF THE COMINTERN (1928 – esp. Part IV) - how communists see everything through the lens of ‘class struggle’ and view the supposed maneuverings of the bourgeoisie to ‘weaken and divide the proletariat and Communist Parties’
  
  
• Class Conflict, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict (“Marxist Perspectives”)
  
  
• ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ (slogan) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_of_the_world,_unite!
  
  
• Spreading the Revolution Abroad - “hopes were high that workers all over the world would join the Bolsheviks in the battle against international capitalism”
  
  
• “The Theory of Class Warfare”, Marxist Origins of Communism, III
  http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/marx3.htm
  
  
• Marxist Social Justice by Carl Teichrib (key section in long article) - “method of arousing envy, often disguised as virtue”
  
  
• Marx’ View of Class Conflict by R.J. Rummel
  
  
• RUSSIA STARTLED BY AUSTRIAN NEWS: Bolsheviki, Immersed in Home Problems, Surprised at Revolt Stalin Predicted. PRESS WAXES ECSTATIC Believes Workers Will See Only Hope in Communism and Class Warfare.  New York Times, February 18, 1934. By Walter Duranty (notorious shill for the Soviets, some say paid agent)
  
  

Disposing of Class Enemies (“Kill the Kulaks!”)

• The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression - Nicolas Werth, Stéphane Courtois et. al, (1999). (full text in various formats here).  See Chapter 7 – Forced Collectivization and Dekulakization

 

• Wikipedia pages:
  Kulak - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak
  Dekulakization - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
  Landlord Classicide - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlord_Classicide_under_Mao_Zedong
  
  
• Utopia and Terror in the 20th Century
  Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius Ph.D.
  University of Tennessee
  Lecture Six – how Lenin went after class enemies
• Stalin killed millions…., was it genocide? by Cynthia Haven – key paragraphs on dekulakization
  
  
• Stalin’s Forced Famine 1932-1933 – two paragraphs on kulaks
  
  
• China – “The Bloody Golden Age” by Joshua Dill (2016) (“the CCP instructed the population in its class war-based outlook, seeking to make it complicit in the revolution’s bloody implementation”)
  
  
• Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China's Cultural Revolution by Fens Jicai – Based on interviews with 100 people who lived through it.  Their stories are disturbing and utterly compelling.
  
  
• Mao's Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals - The most authoritative work on the Cultural Revolution.  Shows it as masterminded by Mao and spinning out of control. 
  
  
• The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by Chen Ruoxi - A collection of eight stories highlighting the absurdism of the Cultural Revolution.  (Wikipedia page)
  
  
• The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui (Mao’s personal physician) - A clear window into the life and mind of Mao, and why he incited and prolonged the Cultural Revolution.
  
  
• Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng – “haunting, inspirational account of Nien Cheng's six-and-a-half years as a political prisoner during Communist China's Cultural Revolution.
  
  
• Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China  by Jung Chang – personal account of the Cultural Revolution (Chapter 15, et seq.)

 

• Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag by Harry Wu and Carolyn Wakeman– Harry Wu’s 19-year imprisonment in China’s laogai forced labor camps stemmed from communist China’s purge of class enemies (Wu’s father was a banker).  Wu was forced to denounce his own upbringing and himself in front of a group in self-criticism sessions.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
  
  

Contemporary Scene

• Hayek: Social Justice is a Meaningless Conception (1977 William F. Buckley ‘Firing Line’ episode – 14 min video)
  
  
• Class Warfare: The New Bigotry by Charlotte Hays – Barack Obama’s ‘you didn’t build that’ remark and other attempts to stir up class hatred.
  
  
• Social Justice Politics And Class Warfare by David Fiorazo - “… we have a media and an administration selling class warfare and massive spending – and people are buying it.”
  
  
• “The Class Warfare lies infecting Social Justice, in theology and in secular philosophy” by Vic Biorseth – “Conjuring Fixed Social Classes into being, where classes do not exist, is necessary for Marxism to incite class warfare.”
  
  
• “Education Association Convention Touts ‘Social Justice’ and Class Warfare” by Larry Sand – “… ethnic studies will become pure Alinsky fare, a never-ending barrage of revolutionary, America-bashing screeds, serving only to keep us in race, ethnicity and class ghettos.”
  
  

Exercises

• How do communists wage class warfare?  What are their methods?
  
• Why did Lenin think workers in different countries had more in common with each other than with other classes in their own countries?  How did that play out in World War I?  What attempts did Leninist Russia make to bring about world revolution? What was the fallout for communism when the hoped-for ‘international revolution’ failed to occur?
• What did Lenin mean by the term ‘useful idiots’ and how have they been used to carry on class warfare?
• America doesn’t have classes or a history of formal aristocracy the way Europe does.  How have communists tailored class warfare to the American context?  What explains the continuing appeal of the term ‘social justice’ to young American audiences?
• What role did class struggle play in the French Revolution?
• Deconstruct as propaganda and argue against this victimization story:
  Battling Smug, Empathy-Challenged One-Percenters – The Class Struggle In America