Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, by Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, NLB, £3.95, 341 pp.
Daily Life in Revolutionary China [by Maria Antonietta Macciocchi], [Monthly] Review [Press], £5.85, 505 pp.
Since the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU and Togliatti's theses on 'polycentrism', the Italian Communist Party has permitted [more open] dissent within [its ranks] than its counterpart in France. [illegible] ensured that [it] generalizes [a] theory and practice of the [illegible] appeared to [illegible] well-illustrated by [illegible] the unevenness of Italian capitalism, but no political conclusions flow from this. [illegible: Macciocchi is an intellectual of] long standing, who was [illegible on the staff of] l'Unità [illegible] were sifted [illegible when she was chosen] as a candidate for Naples, she readily agreed. Letters from Inside the PCI recount her experiences as a parliamentary candidate, in the form of letters written to Louis Althusser, providing up-to-date information and demanding [that] it be processed in the theoretical [labo]ratory in Paris (i.e. Althusser's head) [illegible] obviously [illegible] apparatus and the way it fought elections. Some of her descriptions certainly add [up to a damn]ing indictment of the PCI's [illegible, but her own so]lutions amount at best to a [illegible] naive populism. Althusser's well-meant advice of 'learn from the masses' is interpreted as 'serve the people' or as instant street-therapy and consciousness-raising' sessions. What is totally absent from the Letters is any understanding of the need to encourage the self-activity of the masses, to institutionalize this self-activity by constant agitation and initiatives for creating organs of dual power and thus concretely posing the question of workers' power in relation to Italian society as a whole. This is the absent centre of Macciocchi's book and for a leading member of a mass party commanding the support of millions of workers not to pose the question of power is a somewhat serious omission. Nevertheless her descriptions of the Neapolitan slums, the sub-proletariat, child-labour, the plight of Italian workers forced to sell their labour-power outside Italy, make it a book worth reading. The enthusiasm of many rank-and-file members of the PCI — like the lift-boy in her hotel and the PCI members who look up to Che Guevara as a symbol against the bureaucracy are but two examples — is made very clear. But Macciocchi is not capable (and nor, for that matter, is Althusser) of providing them with the answers they need and towards which they are instinctively groping. After all, Maria Antonietta Macciocchi [ends up winning] the election and becomes a member of Parliament. Despite her doubts, fears, pangs of conscience she knows that her victory is not a personal one. It is the apparatus which has ensured it and the apparatus must therefore not be disturbed too much. The game is over. Macciocchi is firmly within the fold and a part of the PCI bureaucracy (though she was not re-adopted as a candidate in the next Paris elections in 1972).
A useful part of the book is a long letter written after the election, in which Althusser expounds his views on May 1968; these are a sophisticated apology for the physical and political impotence and class-collaborationism pursued by the French Communist Party. Althusser concentrates his wrath on the 'petty-bourgeois ultra-left students' and the 'groupuscules'. He is forced to admit that the PCF had become isolated from the students and intellectuals and this helped to push the youth towards ultra-leftism and adventurism. What the nature of this 'ultra-leftism and adventurism' was is not specified by our latter-day Plekhanov. Was it ultra-left to fight on the barricades on the night of 10 May? Was it adventurist to march to the factories? Was it incorrect to ruthlessly expose the manoeuvres of the PCF and CGT bureaucrats who were trying desperately to restore the status quo? Althusser is not interested in these questions, but merely in providing a theoretical rationale for the PCF's reformism and giving it a left cover. For those who are still puzzled as to why Althusser remains in the PCF or why the PCF continues to utilize his membership, his comments on May 1968 will provide part of the answer.
Daily Life in Revolutionary China
While Macciocchi's Letters, despite their political shortcomings, nevertheless retain a semi-critical stature, the same can not be said about her travel diaries entitled Daily Life In Revolutionary China. Here she seems to have completely lost her critical faculties and the result is not surprising; essays in apologetics, 'a dilettante journalism, reportage with a "left" slant' (as Trotsky described some of the literary output which the 'friends of the Soviet Union' produced after visits to Stalin's Russia). Macciocchi is the ideal visitor/guest. She accepts everything, questions nothing and proceeds, somewhat loosely, to try and provide theoretical rationalizations for what she is told is happening or has happened. After a bureaucrat explains to her the 'line' on culture and objects of art and describes the destruction of some of the latter by Red Guards (applying Mao's line on combating revisionism in art!), Macciocchi can write by way of comment: 'Every fact, every episode of this first day leads us to one and the same conclusion: a genuine, new and difficult revolution has occurred here.' It is on 'honoured guests' such as this that the bureaucracy flourishes. She justifies the personality cult, the repressive code of morality (Macciocchi's 'sea of purity'), the magic power of Mao's writings (she actually believes that dockers in Tientsin made a crane increase its productivity after they had read Mao On Contradiction!), etc. All this is categorized by Macciocchi as attributes of 'a socialist society underpinned by Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Tse Tung'. This approach has nothing whatever to do with either Marxism or Leninism. It is the debased approach of a Western liberal educated inside a Stalinist party. The contradictions in Macciocchi's book are today so flaring and obvious that one is embarrassed on her behalf. The Ninth Party Congress, she writes, saw the victory of Mao and Lin Piao's line. But what happened to Lin Piao after the Congress? Can a bizarre ritual (for that is what the 9th Party Congress was), in the course of which Lin is anointed Crown Prince (even Stalin refrained from nominating a successor), be considered the conference of a party which supports 'proletarian democracy' and the spirit of the Paris Commune? It is difficult for Macciocchi to provide an answer because she is incapable of even posing the correct questions.
The Chinese Revolution is without doubt the single most important event in the history of the working class since October 1917. No one can deny that the revolution has qualitatively transformed the lives of millions of Chinese workers and peasants by taking China out of the capitalist world market. No revolutionary can question the heroism of the Chinese Red Army nor many of the tactics adopted by Mao and Chu Teh after the 1927 debacle. We should also understand that for the Chinese C.P. to make the revolution it had in practice to break from the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, without which break a revolution would have been impossible. But to admit all these facts cannot change the serious deformations which have existed in China since 1949: the lack of soviet-type organs of workers' power, the lack of inner-party democracy (except, to a limited extent, for a very brief spell in the fifties), the failure to project the revolution internationally, the existence of cultural censorship, the bureaucratization and statization of the trade unions, etc. Any Leninist would try and understand and explain the reasons for these deformations. [He] would try and relate them to aspects of the 'cultural revolution'. A forthcoming book by Livio Maitan (to be published by NLB later this year) does take up these questions and attempts to provide a Marxist analysis of developments in China. Macciocchi and her supporters would do well to study Maitan's text. If she did, her simplistic repetition of Althusser's mistaken analyses might appear even to her as a trifle absurd and unrelated to the social reality of China. Her statement that the critique the Chinese make of Stalin is the only critique from the left, whereas Trotsky's critique was from the right, is the most blatant piece of Stalinist falsification from both her and her French mentor, who undoubtedly supplied her with this particular gem. What critique have the Chinese made of Stalin? Does On the Question of Stalin constitute a critique of Stalinism? Only the most myopic apologist could reply in the affirmative. It has been precisely the failure of the Chinese leadership to break with many ideological aspects of Stalinism which has prevented them from understanding either the problem of bureaucracy or the real origins of 'peaceful co-existence'. Certainly we can agree with Macciocchi that Stalin was opposed to the Chinese Revolution, and that Mao and the CCP were successful only because they disregarded Stalin's views. But unfortunately the CCP leadership failed to draw the necessary lessons from this fact. Which is why they find themselves isolated inside Eastern Europe and the USSR. To appeal to the masses in the USSR and Eastern Europe invoking the memory of Stalin is to display a total inability to understand the nature and role of Stalinism in Europe. In any case it hardly signifies a left critique of Stalinism.
What is also somewhat surprising is that Macciocchi, as a representative of the PCI, fails to take up the Chinese characterization of the USSR as a 'fascist', 'capitalist' state run by the 'new Tsars'. This is a somewhat serious omission not only for a member of the PCI, but also for anyone who claims to be a Marxist. Recent events have shown the danger of this characterization of the Soviet Union: it is the USSR which is now regarded by the Chinese as the enemy number one — rather than US imperialism. The repercussions of this particular mistake (the new-found détente with US imperialism, the preserver of the status quo in Asia) will within the next few years provide the Macciocchis of this world with even more problems — problems which, if Daily Life is any indication, she will simply not be able to understand. Tariq Ali.