Boris Leibson's book rests on a single claim, made in its opening pages and never afterwards doubted. Comparing Maoism with anarchism and with Trotskyism, he writes, "we find that, despite some differences between them, they all belong to the same species." Everything follows from that. Bakunin's secret Alliance inside the First International, the Barcelona anarchists of 1873, Trotsky's trade-union theses of 1920, the Fourth International's open letters to Peking, the Red Guards of 1966 and the students on the Paris barricades of 1968 are all specimens of one disorder, "petty-bourgeois revolutionism," which Leibson treats less as a political tendency than as an epidemiological fact — he uses the language of disease, diagnosis and epidemic throughout. It is an extraordinarily ambitious piece of classification, and the reader's task is to work out what is holding it together.
About the author the volume tells us almost nothing: "D. Hist." and a "lecturer at a higher educational establishment." That reticence is itself informative. But the footnotes are not reticent, and they identify him. They cite the Comintern Executive's October 1930 letter on the Li Li-san group; the stenographic report of the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (Moscow, 1930); the 1934 Moscow collection Strategy and Tactics of the Comintern in the National-Colonial Revolution; and a 1966 Moscow volume on Lenin's fight against petty-bourgeois adventurism. These are not the reading of a generalist. They are the working materials of a Comintern historian with access to party archives, writing from inside the Soviet party-academic apparatus. The Russian form of the name on the title page is Leibzon. Eleven years later Progress dropped the reticence: the back cover of his Unity, Solidarity, Internationalism (1981) describes him as "Professor Boris Leibzon of the Moscow Academy of Social Sciences", the Central Committee's own graduate institution, and "a leading Soviet authority on the international communist movement." In 1970 the export reader was not told that.
The date matters more than the author. The copyright page carries one line — "First printing 1970" — with no printing history behind it, so this is not one of the Progress volumes whose spine hides an earlier edition. But the text is a little older than the spine: the year 1970 occurs once in the whole book, in that printing line, and nothing in it postdates April 1969. This is a manuscript closed in the second half of 1969 and issued the following year, and it was written in the shadow of a very particular eighteen months: the Cultural Revolution at its height; the Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in April 1969, which installed Lin Biao as Mao's designated successor; the armed clashes on the Ussuri River in March 1969 — Damansky to the Russians, Zhenbao to the Chinese — which brought two nuclear states to the edge of war; and the international meeting of communist parties held in Moscow in June 1969 to consolidate the anti-Chinese majority. Progress Publishers commissioned this book as export ammunition. Its intended reader is a cadre of a Western communist party who is losing members simultaneously to pro-Peking splinters and to a post-1968 far left recruiting out of his own youth organisation, and who needs a single argument that disposes of both.
That requirement shapes the book's most revealing passage, which is not about China at all. Complaining of those who hold that "a revolutionary must make revolutions," Leibson insists that "earnest, conscientious work in a socialist country is also an expression of revolutionism, that a diplomat pursuing the peaceful policy of a socialist country is also working for the revolutionary cause"; revolutionism today, he goes on, "is expressed not by fighting on barricades but by working to improve the socialist system, by raising its economic and military potential, by increasing its spiritual wealth." This is the détente-era Soviet state describing itself, and it supplies the measure by which every current in the book is judged. The last sentence of the volume states the rule outright: all those who "split the anti-imperialist front place themselves outside the ranks of the revolutionaries, no matter what loud phrases they use as camouflage."
Once that criterion is visible, the sociology stops working. Leibson is careful to say that petty-bourgeois revolt has often been progressive — the Jacobins, the Narodniks, Sun Yat-sen, José Martí — and that the revolutionary democrats leading newly independent states towards "non-capitalist development" deserve support: "Marxists consider it their duty to support them." In 1970 that meant, among others, the officer-led regimes of the Arab world and Africa then in receipt of Soviet arms. So a category defined by class origin turns out to include governments of soldiers and civil servants when they are friendly, and to exclude revolutionary socialists when they are not. The class analysis is not doing the sorting. Alignment with Moscow is doing the sorting, and the class vocabulary is applied afterwards.
It is worth being exact about that vocabulary, because the easy complaint against Soviet polemic — that it says "opportunism" too often — does not hold and should not be made. Leibson is a light user of the standard deviation words: opportunis- appears seventeen times in his 48,700 words, a rate of 3.49 per ten thousand, and revisionis- twenty times. The Fourth International's own Tenth World Congress documents run at 1.69 per ten thousand; the average across the 195 Progress volumes held here is 1.55. Nobody is convicted by a frequency table. What is distinctive in this book is which words carry the weight: adventuris- fifty-six times, 11.49 per ten thousand, and the title's own petty-bourgeois ninety-six times, 19.70. The diagnosis is the vocabulary, and it is a diagnosis of class origin.
Two questions can be put to it, and both can be counted. The first is whether the charge is ever cashed out into a described act that could be shown not to have happened. On China it repeatedly is, which is why the Chinese chapters are worth reading. On Trotskyism it never is: the POUM "engineered an uprising", the Trotskyists were "exposed as double-dealers and provocateurs", and no date, place, document or perpetrator is supplied for either. The second question is the harder one — whether the category could, in principle, apply to the author's own side. Eleven passages in this book place a deviation word within two hundred characters of "the C.P.S.U.", "the Soviet Union" or "the U.S.S.R." In all eleven the Party is the subject doing the combating: it was "implacable in the fight against Right-wing opportunism", it "displayed new vigour in exposing the adventurist nature" of permanent revolution, it "smashed the Leftist adventurists". Not once is it the object of the charge. And when the book does concede a fault at home — the personality cult, the "unwarranted reprisals", the "violations of socialist legality" — none of the taxonomy is available for it. The word used is "distortions", which names no species and diagnoses no class.
Leibson wrote twice more for Progress, and both volumes are in this series, so the instrument can be watched over eleven years. In The Revolutionary Vanguard (1977), written with Mikhail Basmanov, petty-bourgeois has fallen to 3.56 per ten thousand and adventuris- to 0.86, while opportunis- has climbed to 8.96 and revisionis- to 10.36: the sorting has moved from a class to a doctrine, and the new test is the attitude to the Party. By Unity, Solidarity, Internationalism (1981) the whole apparatus is down — petty-bourgeois 0.62, adventuris- 0.49, opportunis- 2.84 — and Trotsky, named 207 times in the book you are holding, appears exactly once. The volume of 1970 is the high-water mark of a schema its own author quietly abandoned. That is worth knowing before reading it. This is not the settled doctrine of Soviet Marxism; it is one instrument at its maximum extension, shortly before it was put down.
The historical chapters show the cost. On Trotsky, Leibson's method is to quote Lenin's polemics of 1910–1914 at length — "windbag," "hero of the phrase," the man who "has never had any 'physiognomy' at all" — and then stop. He concedes in a single clause that "In 1917, when revolutionary events were quickly coming to a climax, Trotsky came close to the Bolsheviks," and never says what that came to: election to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Sixth Congress in August 1917, the chairmanship of the Petrograd Soviet from September, and the Military Revolutionary Committee that organised the insurrection. The book also quotes Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" of December 1922 for the clause about Trotsky's "excessive self-assurance and... excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work." The same document calls Trotsky the most able man in the Central Committee, and its postscript of January 1923 proposes removing Stalin from the post of General Secretary. Leibson uses the Testament as a character reference and suppresses it as a political document.
Then there is what the book will not say at all. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek, Pyatakov and Rakovsky are absent — and absent under the misspellings a scanner produces, and under the -ovsky/-owski and -sky/-ski forms a Soviet translator might have chosen, which is a check worth running, because in Leibzon's own 1981 volume a name reported as missing turned out to be present in a mangled spelling. Here the silence is real. The year 1937 does occur twice, and neither time does it mean 1937: once as the date of two lectures by Mao, once inside the title of a Soviet monograph on wartime aid to China. What remains is one sentence, in the chapter "No Squeamishness About Means": "When the Trotskyists were finally exposed as double-dealers and provocateurs, they found themselves in a social vacuum." That is the prosecution's vocabulary, minus the prosecution. Fourteen years after the Twentieth Congress, the book's only acknowledgement is a quotation from the 1967 CPSU Theses conceding "unwarranted reprisals and other violations of socialist legality" and immediately adding that "These distortions, for all their gravity, did not alter the nature of socialist society." Leibson names one Left Oppositionist economist, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, and does so only to reject his views on piece rates. Preobrazhensky, co-author of The ABC of Communism and the theorist of "primitive socialist accumulation," was shot in 1937. The book's readers in Milan and Manchester were not told.
The treatment of Spain is a compressed version of the same technique. Leibson writes that "At the most critical period of the Civil War in Spain, the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) engineered an uprising against the Republican Government in Barcelona." The Barcelona May Days of 1937 began when police moved to seize the CNT-held telephone exchange; the fighting that followed was a defensive reaction by anarchist and POUM workers, and the POUM leadership was pulled into it rather than launching it. George Orwell, who was there and in the POUM militia, described the sequence in Homage to Catalonia (1938). What Leibson omits is the sequel: the POUM was outlawed in June 1937 and its leader Andreu Nin was seized, held outside Republican jurisdiction and killed, his death never accounted for. On the Aragon collectives the historiography is genuinely divided — coercion in some villages is well documented, voluntary and productive collectivisation in others — and Leibson reports only the first, while passing over the dissolution of the Council of Aragon by force in August 1937.
One of the book's operations can be checked directly against the document it is describing, and it should be, because it is the clearest case in the volume. Leibson reports that in September 1960 "the so-called Fourth International sent an open letter to the Central Committee of the C.P.C., in which it applauded its stand, saying that it coincided with Trotskyist positions", and he quotes it: "The Fourth International," the letter read, "which from the moment of its foundation has been fighting . . . against the ideas against which you are fighting today, supports you." The letter exists. It is dated 10 September 1960, it is addressed to the leadership and members of the Chinese Communist Party, and the International Secretariat printed it in Fourth International no. 11. Leibson has closed his quotation marks one clause early. The sentence goes on. The Fourth International "stands on your side in the fight against the opportunist conceptions" — and then, in the words Leibson does not print — "of the leadership of the CP of the USSR and of most of the leaderships of the Communist Parties all over the world."
Nor is the letter applause. Its complaint against Peking is that the quarrel is being conducted dishonestly — that the argument is being addressed to third persons, staged as a quarrel with the Yugoslavs when the real target is Moscow. And it is worth noticing what its charge against the Soviet leadership consists of, since that charge uses the same word Leibson uses. It is cashed out into events: "It was the policy of peaceful coexistence that at Yalta divided the world into spheres of influence, that led the Italian and French Communist Parties to hand over the power and arms to their weakened bourgeoisies, that brought the Greek revolution to defeat." A reader may think every one of those claims wrong. Each of them is the kind of claim that can be shown to be wrong. "Petty-bourgeois revolutionism" is not.
The same asymmetry runs through the book's apparatus, and it is countable. There are 114 footnotes. The Chinese sources are given scrupulously in the text, by paper, issue and date. Lenin is cited by volume and page — Collected Works vol. 16, p. 391; vol. 20, p. 160 — so his insults can be looked up and read in context. Not one footnote in the book cites a work by Trotsky or a document of the Fourth International. Where Trotskyists are quoted — the open letters, the claim that the "Chinese have worked out a theory directly related to the theory of permanent revolution" — the quotation marks stand empty of provenance. This proves less than it looks: our own tradition does the same when it is in a hurry, and Mandel's Critique of Eurocommunism characterises Berlinguer and Carrillo without quoting either. But it means that of all the opponents in this book, the Fourth International is the one whose words a reader could in principle check — and the one instance that can be checked was cut in the direction the argument required.
None of which means the book is worthless. It is not, and saying so plainly is necessary, because the chapters on China contain real work. Leibson reads Chinese, or has readers who do. He cites Renmin ribao, Hongqi, Wenhui bao, Jiefang ribao and the army paper Jiefangjun bao by issue and date; he quotes Liu Shaoqi's 1939 Yan'an lectures on the party's peasant composition; he reconstructs the 1958 communes and the backyard furnaces, the collapse of the "great leap," and the "learn from the People's Liberation Army" campaign of 1964 from Chinese sources rather than from denunciation. The chapter "'Barracks Communism'" documents the stripping of authority from the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and the conversion of "economism" into a term of abuse for any demand about wages and conditions — which is to say, the destruction of the only organisations Chinese workers had. That is a workers'-movement criticism, and it is correct.
His figures on the CPC's social composition are the most useful thing in the book. By 1927, he reports, 58.3 per cent of members were workers; by 1949 the party had about seven million members, "only four per cent of whom were workers." Whatever one makes of the conclusions he draws, that transformation is the central fact about the Chinese revolution's social character, and the anti-Stalinist left was saying so too.
The same is true of his verdict on the Ninth Congress: "The delegates to it were not elected, but appointed. Chief among them were the military, who have become the backbone of the regime," and, flatly, "The Party has in fact ceased to exist." He goes further, warning that the Maoist group has taken a road "fraught with the danger of degeneration into a military-bureaucratic dictatorship similar to Asiatic despotism." The Lin Biao affair of 1971 made that look prescient.
And on the army he was not alone. The Fourth International's Ninth World Congress met in April 1969, in the same weeks as the gathering in Peking, and its resolution on the Cultural Revolution names "the outrageous cult of Mao; the absence of elections and democratic institutions controlled by the workers and peasants; the increased authority of the army under Lin Piao" — printed, with Livio Maitan's accompanying "Report on the 'Cultural Revolution' in China", in Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969. Ernest Mandel, writing as Ernest Germain, had been over the same ground earlier still: "The Cultural Revolution: An Attempt at Interpretation", written in 1967 and printed in the International Socialist Review vol. 29 no. 4 (whole no. 187), July–August 1968, reconstructs the Red Guard movement from Maoist papers and dispatches by name and date, exactly as Leibson does, and reaches the conclusion that the mobilisation was "supposed to exert pressure on the bureaucracy rather than one which was supposed to sweep it out."
But the convergence should not be overstated, and where it breaks is instructive. Maitan, reading the same congress in "The Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party" (Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 27, 28 July 1969, following his "Toward the Congress of the Chinese CP — the Contradictory Components of the Maoist Line", vol. 7 no. 7, 24 February 1969), concluded almost the reverse of Leibson on the central point. The congress, he wrote, "essentially represented a reorganization and reaffirmation of the party" as the instrument of command in every sphere of Chinese life, and the new statutes were "a reflection in statutory terms of the fundamentally bureaucratic nature of the regime". Leibson said the party had ceased to exist; Maitan said it had been rebuilt as an instrument of command. On the evidence of the following decade Maitan was nearer right, and Leibson's flat sentence reads as polemical overshoot rather than prescience.
The deeper difference is the diagnosis, and it is the whole argument of this introduction in one line. Both traditions rejected Mao's account of the Cultural Revolution as a proletarian revolution. The Fourth International's resolution called it "a phase of sharp public conflict in an intrabureaucratic struggle between divergent tendencies in the topmost circles of the Chinese Communist party leadership" — a bureaucracy, which is the same category that tradition applied to Moscow, and to itself when it looked for the social pressures on its own sections. Leibson called it petty-bourgeois revolutionism, a category which, on the count above, never once attaches to Moscow in his own pages. Two hostile readings of the same Chinese press, and the distance between them is not the evidence. It is whether the naming instrument can be turned on the hand holding it.
That is not an abstract test, and it is not one our own side passes by assertion. In March 1940 The New International — then still the journal of the American Trotskyists, before Max Shachtman took the magazine with him at the split the following month — printed Trotsky's "A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party", written in December 1939. The category in Leibson's title is there applied by Trotsky to the leadership minority of his own organisation, by name: "It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency." One can think that judgement wrong, or unfair to Burnham and Shachtman, and many in the tradition have. The point is only that the sentence is available to be written. Nothing of its shape occurs anywhere in Leibson.
Leibson even lands one honest blow on Trotsky. In the chapter on "barracks communism" he recalls that Trotsky, at the Ninth Party Congress in 1920, defended the militarisation of labour on the ground that "man strives as a rule to evade work, it can be said that man is a rather lazy animal," and that in Terrorism and Communism he treated intimidation as an instrument of policy. Trotsky did argue this, and the anti-Stalinist tradition has never had a comfortable answer. Lenin opposed him in the trade-union dispute, as Leibson correctly notes. That the man who later wrote the sharpest analysis of Soviet bureaucratic rule had earlier proposed labour armies is a fact his admirers should hold, not hide.
But the framework cannot explain what the book itself documents. Every feature Leibson attributes to the peasant social base of Maoism — the personality cult raised to hysteria, the criminalisation of disagreement, the militarisation of labour, the mobilisation of youth against the party apparatus, the rewriting of party history around one man — had close Soviet precedent within living memory of his readers. His own text concedes the cult, the reprisals, the violations of legality. In Moscow these are "distortions" that leave "the nature of socialist society" untouched; in Peking the identical practices are class characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie. A category that yields sociology for one state and absolution for the other is not a category. It is a verdict looking for evidence.
The point is sharpest on 1968. Leibson devotes a paragraph to the French May: ten million on strike, a regime shaken, and then "the country's ruling forces succeeded in strengthening their positions with the help of the Maoist, Trotskyist and anarchist groups," so that the bourgeois press was right to say that "if ultra-revolutionary groups had not existed in France, they should have been invented." This was the French Communist Party's line, and the book gives no account whatever of what the PCF and the CGT actually did — channelling the general strike into the Grenelle wage settlement and the June elections. The reply is in the archive and can be read against him: Pierre Frank, "Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership in France," Intercontinental Press vol. 6 no. 22, 10 June 1968, and the United Secretariat's "First Lessons of the Revolutionary Upsurge in France," vol. 6 no. 24, 24 June 1968.
And then the silence that decides the book. Czechoslovakia does not appear in it. Not the Prague Spring, not Dubček, not the entry of five Warsaw Pact armies in August 1968, not the doctrine of limited sovereignty advanced in Pravda a month later. A volume printed in 1970, on the theme of false revolutionism as a danger to socialism, which finds space for the Karlovy Vary conference of 1967, the Japanese elections of 1967, the Ussuri clashes and the Paris barricades, has nothing to say about the largest military action inside the socialist bloc in its own lifetime. The omission is not carelessness. It is the place where the framework would have broken. The Czechoslovak reformers were not ultra-left, not adventurist, not petty-bourgeois: they were a communist party leadership pursuing economic reform and the relaxation of censorship, and they were removed by tanks. "Petty-bourgeois revolutionism" cannot process them, so they are absent. The answer Leibson could not print was published at the time, and it was published before the event as well as after it. Intercontinental Press vol. 6 no. 28, 2 September 1968, carries two declarations of the United Secretariat: "End the Soviet Occupation of Czechoslovakia!", issued on 22 August, and — printed in the same issue — "Defend the Right of the Czechoslovak Workers and Peasants to Self-Determination!", issued on 1 August, three weeks before the tanks moved. See also "Czechoslovakia — First Balance Sheet, First Lessons," vol. 6 no. 33, 7 October 1968; and Ernest Mandel, "The Present Stage of Workers Self-Management in Czechoslovakia," vol. 7 no. 15, 21 April 1969. There is a final irony for the reader of this book. In the winter of 1969–70, as Petty-Bourgeois Revolutionism went to press, the normalised Czechoslovak authorities announced that they had uncovered a Trotskyite plot. The United Secretariat of the Fourth International answered on 21 January 1970 with a declaration "On the 'Trotskyite Plot' in Czechoslovakia", printed in Intercontinental Press vol. 8 no. 5, 9 February 1970, which sets the discovery in its sequence: "After Dubcek's elimination from the government, after the purge of the Central Committee, the repression is becoming all-pervasive. Now they have discovered a 'Trotskyite plot.'" The word Leibson was using to name a species was, in the same season, being used to frame an indictment.
Read this book, then, for what it is: a competent Soviet dossier on the Cultural Revolution, assembled by a serious historian working with an instrument calibrated to one question. Its Chinese material deserves attention, and some of its judgements have worn better than the Western enthusiasms of 1970. Its failure is instructive precisely because Leibson was not a fool. Near the end he writes, generously, that "Marxist-Leninists do not think that there are sincere and honest revolutionaries only among them" — and then, in the very next paragraph, rules that whoever splits the anti-imperialist front stands outside the ranks of the revolutionaries. The generosity and the rule cancel each other, and the rule is the one that governs the book.