LU Dingyi [Old style: LU Ting-yi] (1906-1996)
A long-term member of the Communist Party of China who became one of the first targets of
the Cultural Revolution. He was the second most prominent individual in the rightist clique
led by Peng Zhen (the mayor of Beijing), and displayed various other rightist tendencies
at various times in relation to ideology, education and culture.
Lu Dingyi joined the CCP in 1925 when he
was a college student in Shanghai. In 1945 he was elected to the Central Committee and
became the head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Party where
he reported to Liu Shaoqi. In 1959 he also became a deputy
premier and an alternate member of the Politburo, and retained all these positions until
his downfall in May 1966.
In 1956 Lu gave a speech “Let a Hundred
Flowers Blossom, a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend!” which seemed at the time to
support that slogan of Mao’s. However, during the Cultural Revolution this speech was
criticized as a distortion of Mao’s line. [Whether it really was a distortion of Mao’s
line at that time has been disputed by the sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar in his
book The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 1.] In any case it did become
quite clear later on that rightists were perverting this slogan to enable revisionist
criticism of Mao and socialism.
In 1964 a five-person “Cultural Revolution
Small Group” (CRSG) was formed at Mao’s urging to lead the criticism of revisionist and
bourgeois works in the cultural sphere. [This was before the GPCR, properly speaking,
got underway.] Beijing mayor Peng Zhen was the director of this group, and Lu Dingyi the
deputy director. In 1961 a vice-mayor of Beijing, the non-Marxist, non-Party member
Wu Han, reissued a play he had written earlier,
Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, whose real target at this
point was Mao for dismissing Peng Dehuai as Minister of
Defense of the PRC (because he was a rightist). This is just the sort of thing that the
Cultural Revolution Small Group (CRSG) was supposed to be on the lookout for and
criticize; but they did nothing even though it took place right under their very noses.
Worse yet, when Yao Wenyuan issued a revolutionary
critique of Wu Han’s allegorical play in Shanghai in 1965, this CRSG suppressed Yao’s
critique in Beijing—just the opposite of what they were commissioned to do! For reasons
like this Mao condemned the CRSG and called the Propaganda Department of the CCP a
“palace of the King of Hell”. And Lu Dingyi’s fate was thus sealed.
Lu Dingyi was removed from office because
he was a rightist and in cahoots with other rightists. However, there was some strange
secondary conniving going on as well. Apparently Lu’s wife, who it seems was mentally
unbalanced, spread the rumor that Lin Biao’s wife (Ye Qun)
engaged in loose sexual behavior both before and after her marriage to Lin. This outraged
Lin, and Lu Dingyi denied he had anything to do with his wife’s rumor-mongering. It has
also been alleged (in at least one bourgeois source) that Lu Dingyi himself directly
criticized Lin Biao for “simplifing” and “vulgarizing” Mao’s ideas, something which was
in fact often true of Lin. These things have raised suspicions in some quarters about
Lin Biao’s real motives when after the charges of rightism were leveled against Peng Zhen
and Lu Dingyi, Lin claimed (apparently without any good evidence) that this group was
planning a coup d’etat! This is the sort of messiness that abounds in the history of the
GPCR and which confuses the central issues. Regardless of the personal squabbles, and
regardless of whether Lin Biao’s charges were true or not, it is clear that the Lu
Dingyi and his cohorts did in fact deserve to be replaced.
In 1979, after the capitalist-roaders
seized power following Mao’s death, Lu Dingyi was rehabilitated and was given high
ceremonial positions. He died on May 9, 1996, unlamented by Maoist revolutionaries.
A few of Lu Dingyi’s writings are available
at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/China/Individuals/index.htm#LuDingyi
LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY [Book]
An important philosophical work by Engels, first published in 1886. This work is available
online in several places, including:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/index.htm
“In Ludwig Feuerbach (the full title is Ludwig Feuerbach and
the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy) Engels shows how the advance was made from
Hegelian idealist dialectics to materialist dialectics, and from mechanical to dialectical
materialism.
“Feuerbach
was a German philosopher of the mid-19th Century who turned from Hegelian idealism to
materialism, and whose work had a big influence on Marx and Engels. This book by Engels,
published in 1888, was originally written as a review article on a book on Feuerbach by
C. N. Starke.
“The following are its principal contents.
“1. Engels explains the basic difference
between materialism and idealism. It arises from the question—which is prior, spirit or
nature? Idealism says that spirit is prior to nature. Materialism says that nature is
prior to spirit. Material being is prior to mind and ideas.
“Modern idealism has been specially
concerned with the question whether we can gain reliable knowledge of material things, of
the external world, and concludes that such knowledge is impossible. Engels refutes this
view, and shows that practice demonstrates that our ideas can and do constitute a true
reflection of external material reality.
“2. He shows that the materialism of the
past was mechanical materialism. Its great limitations were
(a) that it conceived of
the motion of matter as exclusively mechanical motion, and could not grasp other forms of
motion of matter, such as chemical or living processes;
(b) that it could give
no account of development and evolution, either in nature or, still less, in history and
human society.
“3. He explains the essence of Hegel’s
philosophy and of the advance from Hegel to dialectical materialism. Hegel considered
every process of change and development as being a mere reflection of the self-development
of the ‘Absolute Idea,’ which ‘does not only exist, where unknown, from eternity, but is
also the actual living soul of the whole existing world.’ Marxism threw over such
‘idealist fancies’ and ‘resolved to comprehend the real world, nature and history, just
as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist
fancies.’
“Engels shows that dialectical materialism
regards the world as a complex of processes, not as a collection of ‘ready-made things.’
Dialectics is ‘the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and
of human thought.’
“4. He discusses the essential ideas of
historical materialism, as the application of dialectical materialism to the sphere of
human society. He shows that the driving force of history is the class struggle, and that
classes and class struggles are rooted in economic conditions. He goes on to discuss the
economic foundations of the development of the state and of law, and then of political
and social ideology, of religion, philosophy, etc.
“In criticising Feuerbach’s ‘philosophy
of religion and ethics,’ Engels attacks the approach which deals with abstractions such
as ‘humanity,’ instead of with ‘real living men as participants of history.’
“As appendix are added Marx’s eleven
Theses on Feuerbach, notes by Marx in 1845
in which he summarized his own ideas as opposed to mechanical materialism.” —Maurice
Cornforth, ed., Readers’ Guide to the Marxist Classics (1952), pp. 25-26.
LUMPENPROLETARIAT
The lowest social class consisting primarily of those pushed down and out from other social
classes, including especially from the working class (proletariat) but also from the
petty bourgeoisie, from the peasantry (in countries
where that class still exists), and even from the bourgeoisie itself in some cases. Thus, the
declassed individuals from other classes, who have fallen upon severely hard times,
and who try to survive as best they can by hand-to-mouth methods, as beggars, vagrants, living
on the streets, or as prostitutes and pimps, through petty thievery or other small-scale crime,
as drug addicts or as street level drug dealers, by sponging off of relatives or others, and
through help from individual or small-scale charities and soup kitchens, and from the very
inadequate government welfare programs where such programs actually exist.
The word ‘lumpenproletariat’ was coined by
Marx and Engels in their early work, The German Ideology
(1845-46). ‘Lumpen’, in German, originally meant “rags”, and later evolved to refer to those
dressed in rags, beggars and scoundrels. The modern lumpenproletariat, whether dressed in rags
or not, often amounts to those who are the dregs of society and in many cases the most extreme
victims of capitalist society. Are they therefore potentially revolutionary? In some cases,
certainly. But their conditions of life (which Marx & Engels refer to in the first quotation
below), which leads them into an isolated, individual struggle for existence and thus often into
a bitter and extreme individualist perspective (“I have no choice but to look out for myself,
so to hell with everyone else”), generally prevents them from seriously engaging in real
revolutionary struggle—unless they come under strong, organized and disciplined revolutionary
proletarian leadership. The lumpenproletariat is overall characterized by a lack of class
consciousness and solidarity.
There have been a few attempts to build a
revolutionary movement with the lumpenproletariat as a major part of its core, but these have
not been at all successful. One such abortive attempt was made in the U.S. during the early
1970s by a split-off from the Revolutionary Union led by the Stanford
University professor Bruce Franklin. That effort, which hoped to base itself on the revolutionary
student movement in combination with lumpen elements which it considered were leading the Black,
Chicano and other national liberation movements in the U.S., fell apart before it could hardly
even get seriously underway. (See Venceremos
Organization.) Before that futile attempt, though, Franklin did write an interesting
article, “The Lumpenproletariat and the Revolutionary Youth Movement” (1969), which appeared
in the RU’s Red Papers 2 and is also available separately online at:
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-2/franklin.htm In that
1960s-1970s era the Black Panther Party also had a
strong pro-lumpenproletariat focus (see Huey Newton quote below), which—along with vicious
attacks on the Panthers by U.S. government agencies—were an important reason for its collapse.
At the present time, though, it is mostly just a few isolated anarchists who still favor a
revolutionary strategy centered on the lumpenproletariat.
It is true, however, that as the current social
and economic crisis of the U.S. and world capitalist system continues to worsen, and as more
and more jobs disappear because of automation and the rapid
development of artificial intelligence, the size
and importance of the lumpenproletariat in modern society is bound to increase, perhaps very
rapidly at some points. For this reason, any rational strategy of social revolution will have
to take this into consideration and find ways to involve the best sections of the
lumpenproletariat in mass struggle under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. (See
LUMPENPROLETARIANIZATION entry
below.)
“The ‘dangerous class’, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively
rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be
swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however,
prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” —Marx & Engels,
Communist Manifesto (1848), ch. 1.
“On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of
Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with
a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means
of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the
bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley
slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [street people in Naples], pickpockets, tricksters,
gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders,
ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated
mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred
element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A ‘benevolent society’ —
insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the
expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the
lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he
personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class
upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans
phrase.” —Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ch. 5.
“Why the future upswing should be ‘characterised’ by a sharp conflict of
pauperised petty bourgeois is not evident at all. Nor does there appear to be any reason why
the pauperised town petty bourgeoisie should be brought in just at this moment.
Lumpen-proletarians are sometimes distinguished for their sharp conflicts, and sometimes for
their amazing instability and inability to fight.” —Lenin, “A Caricature of Bolshevism”
(April 4 (17), 1909), LCW 15:383.
“Apart from all these [other classes], there is the fairly large
lumpen-proletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen
who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all. ... One of China’s
difficult problems is how to handle these people. Brave fighters but apt to be destructive,
they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.” —Mao, “Analysis of the
Classes in Chinese Society” (March 1926), SW1:19.
“China’s status as a colony and semi-colony has given rise to a multitude of
rural and urban unemployed. Denied proper means of making a living, many of them are forced to
resort to illegitimate ones, hence the robbers, gangsters, beggars and prostitutes and the
numerous people who live on superstitious practices. This social stratum is unstable; while
some are apt to be bought over by the reactionary forces, others may join the revolution. These
people lack constructive qualities and are given to destruction rather than construction; after
joining the revolution, they become a source of roving-rebel and anarchist ideology in the
revolutionary ranks. Therefore, we should know how to remold them and guard against their
destructiveness.” —Mao, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” (December
1939), SW2:325-6.
“As the ruling circle continue to build their technocracy, more and more of
the proletariat will become unemployable, become lumpen, until they have become the popular
class, the revolutionary class.” –Huey Newton, “Supreme Commander” of the Black Panther Party,
quoted in: Garrett Epps, “Huey Newton Speaks at Boston College, Presents Theory of
‘Intercommunalism’”, The Harvard Crimson, November 19, 1970, online at:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1970/11/19/huey-newton-speaks-at-boston-college/
[Epps also reported: “The Panthers seek
to organize the ‘unemployable’ elements of society, or ‘lumpenproletariat,’ Newton said,
because they form the only revolutionary class in technological society.” The
Black Panther Party was internally torn between
proletarian tendencies and lumpen tendencies. Leaders such as
Fred Hampton represented the best of the proletarian
revolutionary tendencies, while–unfortunately–Party co-founder and top leader Huey Newton,
represented some of the destructive lumpen tendencies which were a major part of the reason
for the eventual disintegration of the BPP. –Ed.]
LUMPENPROLETARIAT AND FASCISM
It has sometimes been argued that the lumpenproletariat is the social base for
fascism. It is more correct to say that part of the
lumpenproletariat may become a part of fascism’s social base, and be used as a violent
tool by the ruling class against the working class. Most of the actual social base for fascism,
however, is located in the increasingly desperate petty
bourgeoisie in times of economic crisis and social breakdown. Even sections of the working
class itself, i.e., the least class conscious sections, and the most easily fooled and bamboozled
sections, may become part of the social base of fascism. Demagogues can easily fool severely
victimized and desperate people from all social classes into supporting fascism, even though that
form of capitalist society is always instituted and directed by the bourgeoisie itself for its own
purposes (i.e., to keep the masses down and under tight control).
“Fascism is not a form of state power ‘standing above both classes—the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie,’ as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not ‘the
revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,’ as the British
Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government
of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power
of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working
class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy,
fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
“This, the true character of fascism,
must be particularly stressed because in a number of countries, under cover of social demagogy,
fascism has managed to gain the following of the mass of the petty bourgeoisie that has been
dislocated by the crisis, and even of certain sections of the most backward strata of the
proletariat. These would never have supported fascism if they had understood its real character
and its true nature.”
—Georgi Dimitrov, “The Fascist Offensive
and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against
Fascism”, Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International
(Aug. 2, 1935), online at:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm
[Dimitrov’s point is that fascism is
still the rule of the capitalist class even though it may have a “social base” of support in
the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, and even sections of the working class itself.
—Ed.]
LYNCHINGS — Political
“On the night of April 4, 1918, nearly a year to the day that the
United States entered World War I, Robert Paul Prager, a 30-year-old German immigrant,
and by some accounts a radical socialist, was lynched by a mob of ‘patriots’ outside
Collinsville, Ill., a small market center and coal-mining town of 4,000, located 12
miles across the river from St. Louis.
“Prager was a sacrificial lamb, a
casualty of the wartime madness. His lynching was an extreme case, but it was not an
aberration. In the months leading up to America’s entry into the war and during the
year and a half that the nation was an active participant, the federal government
whipped the American public into a superpatriotic froth with a calculated program of
propaganda, and attacks on German aliens and German Americans were all too common.”
—Jay Feldman, “U.S. government has long history of whipping up fears and repression”,
Sacramento Bee, Aug. 21, 2011, p. E3. This article was adapted from Feldman’s
book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy
in Modern America (2011).
“A Missouri lawmaker has called for the lynching of whoever threw
paint on a Confederate statue. State Rep. Warren Love called for the unknown vandals
to be ‘hung from a tall tree with a long rope.’ He later denied he was referencing
the hanging murders of blacks in the South. ‘That’s just a Western term,’ he said,
‘and I’m very much a Western man.’” —“Only in America”, The Week, Sept. 15,
2017, p. 6. [The impulse to lynch people, for both political and racist
reasons, is by no means ended in this horribly vicious and reactionary
capitalist-imperialist country. —Ed.]
LYSENKOISM
This is a term that has come to mean something like letting political wishful
thinking triumph over scientific fact, or even letting politics dominate and determine
what scientific truth “actually is”.
In the Soviet Union under Stalin and
Khrushchev, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko (see above) propagated a quack theory of genetics
based on the supposed inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, even before
the discovery of the central role of DNA in inheritance, the science of biology (and
genetics specifically) had determined that (at least normally) there is no such thing as
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The giraffe’s neck is long not because its
ancestors stretched theirs during their lifetimes, but because the ancestors with naturally
longer necks survived, while those with shorter necks died before they could reproduce.
(Counterpoint: Recent research seems to show that there really are some exceptional
circumstances where there can be some inheritance of acquired characteristics, as with
certain bacteria, but the fact remains that even if this is so it is only in highly
atypical situations.) There were prominent geneticists in the Soviet Union who knew this
full well, such as Nikolai Vavilov, and who were persecuted and sometimes imprisoned for
their Mendelian views by Lysenko and the Soviet government. (Vavilov himself was arrested
in 1940 and is said to have died of starvation in a Siberian labor camp around 1943.)
Lysenko was welcome to his own opinions about genetics, but the persecution of those who
disagreed with him was the crime, which was made much worse by the support of Stalin (and
later Khrushchev) and the force of the state.
It is not entirely clear, however, how much
direct damage Lysenko and his theories actually did to Soviet agriculture, though certainly
there was some significant damage over the long run due to his disruption of genetic
research. There were many other problems in agriculture, some of them probably much more
important. For example, the brutal “top-down” method of agricultural collectivization
carried out by Stalin in the 1930s led to the death of many peasants, the destruction
of much of the livestock and to serious crop shortages. The continuing failure to use
the mass line to mobilize the peasants to work in their own
collective interests remained a major obstacle to the expansion of agricultural production.
And insufficient industrial support was also given to agriculture over a period of decades.
Unfortunately the Lysenko episode has led
to some widespread invalid conclusions, even among some Marxists, such as that any
“government interference” in science is unjustified, and that scientists and other experts
should be basically unrestricted in their activities. Of course any government will
appropriately promote and fund those scientists and those theories which it has confidence
in. And any government would be within its rights to restrict certain kinds of experiments
or technologies for which there is good reason to believe that there are serious potential
dangers for the people. Moreover, a socialist government in particular, will certainly
find it necessary to criticize bourgeois ideas that scientists, just as any other segment
of society, may still promote.
However, it is true that socialist society
should also allow, especially in the natural sciences, “a hundred flowers to bloom, and a
hundred schools of thought to content” (as Mao poetically put it). In looking at the
experience of socialism in both the Soviet Union and China it seems clear that overall
there was not enough freedom of thought and expression in the sciences, nor was
there sufficient allowance (and even encouragement!) of new and minority ideas and
views. On the other hand it, it was certainly necessary and correct to strongly criticize
views and theories insofar as they had a bourgeois ideological component, and sometimes
this was also insufficient! Of course this will generally be much more central and
important in the social sciences than in the natural sciences.
See also:
INSTRUMENTALISM
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A great Chinese writer, probably the greatest of the Twentieth Century, and also a firm and
very influential revolutionary. He is widely viewed as the most prominent individual in modern
Chinese literature.