There is no say without investigation. Yang Heping should carefully read the history of international communist movements before speaking. The so-called dispute over the Chinese Communist Party before liberation is a struggle over methods, and after liberation is a struggle over directions, but it is simply due to a lack of historical knowledge, thus conflating the internal party struggles that occurred during the founding of the country as “contradictions among the people.” Moreover, Yang also solemnly declares, “Most people agree with the revolutionary direction.” He completely fails to understand the class nature and class basis of Chen Duxiu’s surrender, the reasons behind Qu Qiubai and Li Lisan’s “leftist” errors, and what conspiracy methods Wang Ming used to become a central leader. The reason these opportunists could come to power is fundamentally because the early leadership organization of the Chinese Communist Party was composed of petty bourgeois intellectuals, not proletarianized, which led to the Chen Duxiu路线 that feared the bourgeoisie and surrendered, the blindly impulsive Qu Qiubai and Li Lisan路线 reflecting petty bourgeois fanaticism, their unwillingness to do the hard work of rural base construction and mobilizing peasants, holding the idea of entering big cities to enjoy life, and thus incited urban riots. Although Yang Heping claims to be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, he never conducts detailed class analysis, nor can he explain the reasons behind each historical phenomenon, misleading people and having a very bad influence. Yang Heping’s speeches have never involved historical materialism; he likes to speak arbitrarily according to his own imagined experience, saying whatever comes to mind without investigation, research, or study, to the point that he can say “the essence of the struggle over路线 is a struggle over methods,” which is extremely crude subjective idealism! Yang Heping also talks a lot about how the Leninist path and Mao Zedong’s path are “different,” and explains with extremely crude idealist reasons, nonsense like: “Lenin needs to purify the revolutionary队伍,” while “Mao Zedong… 's struggle environment… (is) among” revolutionaries." Is there any more chaotic logic than this? Yang Heping offers no explanation based on any historical background of international communist movements, but simply states that Lenin needed to purify the队伍 (he also did not explain why), then arrogantly claims Mao worked among “revolutionaries,” as if Mao started revolution after cleaning up the revolutionary阵地 in advance? Absolutely absurd! Due to his complete ignorance of the history of international communist movements and his lack of learning, Yang Heping speaks recklessly. The internal party struggle faced by Mao Zedong is not at all less optimistic than Lenin’s; since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, a large number of petty bourgeois elements and even ambitious figures have infiltrated (such as Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai), because the party’s leadership base was weak and long dominated by these elements. In this situation, ideological struggle is very necessary, and theoretical criticism is very necessary, and Mao Zedong also carried out such criticism and struggle. Mao’s “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” sharply criticized those inside and outside the party opposing peasant movements, and Mao’s “Firebrand Can Start a Prairie Fire” also fiercely criticized opportunists like Lin Biao who propagated defeatism during the land revolution war. Why can’t Yang Heping see all this? Moreover, Yang Heping foolishly claims that Lenin was always the majority within the party, and Mao was often in the minority, which is also nonsense! Lenin gained majority at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but by the 1906 Stockholm Congress, he was in the minority, yet he did not lose heart and persisted in struggle. This is written in Stalin’s “On Lenin,” which emphasizes Lenin’s perseverance during minority periods and his principled spirit, daring to oppose the trend. Stalin also repeatedly mentions that Lenin was in the minority after the failure of the 1905 revolution, during the international social democratic movement in World War I, and during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. If Yang Heping is not deliberately distorting facts, then he is simply ignorant and does not understand these facts at all! Lenin often was in the minority but still坚持原则斗争, which is exactly the embodiment of his revolutionary spirit of “opposing the潮流”! Yang Heping here slanders Lenin and Mao Zedong! Yang Heping also claims that “those who hold male chauvinist思想 are not ruling阶级, not state machinery, and have no tools of repression,” and concludes that they are “ideological认识问题.” What思想 is this认识问题? In class society, isn’t it the思想 of a particular阶级? Shouldn’t we criticize those who, under patriarchy, hold fascist male chauvinist思想 to oppress women? Yang Heping’s statement fully proves that he has not read or seriously studied Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” Engels explicitly states: “The modern individual家庭 is based on the公开 or隐蔽 family slavery of women,” “In the家庭, the husband is the资产者, while the wife is equivalent to the无产阶级.” Yet Yang Heping completely denies that矛盾 among the masses also has class character, and denies that the路线斗争 within the party also has class contradictions, merely acknowledging the existence of revisionists on the surface but refusing to recognize the思想基础 that produces revisionists! Furthermore, Yang Heping actually claims to have a “反潮流” spirit, daring to openly oppose his导师’s statements. He opposes the idea that marriage in capitalist society is合法的 prostitution, saying this is too extreme. Previously, in debates about male chauvinism, he could not explain the historical origins of patriarchy and its表现 in class society. These two facts, plus the previous example, fully demonstrate that Yang Heping at least has no understanding of Marxist women’s liberation theory. Yang Heping’s raw video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ZBj5gB93I
Time is tight, written hastily, the writing is not systematic enough, and the logic is not rigorous enough. Please forgive me.
Get a simple understanding of this episode of the video, and I am truly shocked by Yang Heping’s ignorance and incompetence. Yang Heping at this moment has seemingly transformed into a Kautsky-like figure. Back then, during the 1900 Second International Paris Congress, the various factions of the German Social Democratic Party debated the issue of Müller-Liang joining the cabinet. When the revolutionary factions and Bernstein’s faction quarreled endlessly, Kautsky stepped forward and said, “This is a strategic issue, not a principle issue,” treating the struggle between the two lines within the German Social Democratic Party as a matter of strategy, or in Yang Heping’s preferred words, as a “method dispute.” He then proposed a notorious “rubber stamp resolution,” which did not condemn Müller-Liang’s counterrevolutionary activities of joining the cabinet. What was the final result? It objectively created a legal theoretical basis for Müller-Liang’s entry into the cabinet, making the Müller-Liang faction, which was eager to rely on the bourgeois government, even more unscrupulous.
Yang Heping now, that is, guiding today’s “left circle” (Yang Heping might prefer to call it “leftist”), believes that the current ideological stance is not Marxism, but opportunism—under the environment of Anna Kist, Trotskyism, Western Marxism, and revisionism—talking extensively about so-called “line disputes being essentially method disputes.” Isn’t the effect of this similar to Kautsky’s attempt to reconcile the two factions and two lines within the Second International, secretly maintaining the revisionist line of the Second International? Is Chairman Mao’s struggle with Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, and Wang Ming a “method dispute”? If one has studied the history of the international communist movement and the history of the Chinese Communist Party; if one has seriously studied Chairman Mao’s instructions on line struggle and class struggle, then it is not difficult to understand that this kind of line struggle is essentially class struggle—it’s the struggle between the proletarian revolutionary line represented by Chairman Mao and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois line represented by people like Chen Duxiu. Yang Heping’s viewpoint is a perspective that denies class struggle; he often talks about “unity” and “using methods to handle contradictions among the people,” but in fact, he has already lost sight of who is a friend and who is an enemy.
Yang Heping’s so-called “before liberation is a method dispute, after liberation is a direction dispute” is a very vulgar metaphysical thought. There used to be a school of thought in the Soviet Union called the Dobrushin school, which believed that in the initial stage of the development of things, there are only differences, not contradictions; contradictions only appear in the middle stage of development. Yang Heping’s philosophical thought is exactly this kind of metaphysical thinking. According to the Dobrushin school, before the liberation of China (the initial stage of contradiction development), there were no debates over the road or direction (or class), only debates over methods, and only after the liberation (during the development of contradictions) did the dispute over direction emerge, which seems to make sense. Chairman Mao, in 1937 (note, this is before liberation as Yang Heping claims), in his “On Contradiction,” refuted the Soviet Dobrushin school and expounded the general principle of contradiction. Mao said: “The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has two aspects of significance. One is that contradictions exist in the development process of all things; the other is that in every development process of a thing, there exists a contradiction movement from beginning to end.” Whether before or after liberation, the fundamental nature of the Party has not changed, so how can we conclude that class struggle within the Party only exists after the founding of the country and not before? Mao also said: “Contradictions and struggles among different ideas within the Party occur constantly; this is a reflection of the social class contradictions and the contradictions between new and old things within the Party. If there were no contradictions and the ideological struggles to resolve them, the life of the Party would cease.” Please learn these words, Yang Heping.
Now, Chen Duxiu’s surrender to Chiang Kai-shek and the subsequent 412 counter-revolutionary coup and massacre of so many Communists are considered internal contradictions within the people. Chen Duxiu’s act of surrender was also with good intentions, only the method was inappropriate and took a wrong turn. Truly absurd!
Yang Heping’s statement is actually a defense of revisionism while simultaneously justifying himself. If, as Yang Heping says, “the struggle over the line is essentially a struggle over methods,” then according to this logic, even if the revisionist group represented by Deng Xiaoping launches a military coup to restore capitalism, as long as they verbally admit that the “ultimate goal is to realize communism,” then all their reactionary measures to promote capitalism can be interpreted as “methods” of “realizing communism.” Yang Heping has completely disregarded his own dignity in order to support the revisionist dogma. I believe he is very aware that the ultimate effect of such words is to deceive the masses and prevent them from recognizing the essence of the revisionist red skin of Zhongxiu, but in order to pursue his own pragmatic interests of revisionism, he still insists on his own set of tricks.
This statement is like what the current middle school history and politics textbooks say: they describe the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Hundred Days’ Reform, the Xinhai Revolution, and the New Democratic Revolution all as “exploring the path to salvation and survival,” claiming that Li Hongzhang’s original intentions were good, only the methods were wrong, confusing the differences between classes; they also say that the difference between socialist China and current capitalist China is just a matter of method, saying “a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches mice, is a good cat,” implying that the wrong methods were used before and now the correct methods are being used, completely ignoring the issues of communist revolution or capitalist restoration.
“In a class society, everyone lives within a certain class position, and all kinds of思想 are inevitably stamped with the mark of class.” The struggle between two classes in society must inevitably be reflected within the Communist Party, which is the line struggle between Marxism within the party and various forms of revisionism. The content and essence of this line struggle is class struggle, not some “dispute over methods” as Yang Heping claims. Moreover, what methods are not serving a particular class? Is Chen Duxiu’s attempt to directly surrender to Chiang Kai-shek’s counter-revolutionary coup, a “method” used by the proletariat? Is Wang Ming’s call to “resist the enemy outside the national borders” in the face of a stronger enemy a method used by the proletariat? Yang Heping also slanders Lenin for “accepting Trotsky” during the October Revolution, and Mao Zedong for “uniting people with ideological issues” before the founding of the People’s Republic. Clearly, he does not understand Mao Zedong’s principle of “adhering to Marxism, rejecting revisionism, uniting without division, and being open and honest without conspiracy.” He cannot see the arduous struggle Lenin and Mao Zedong undertook to oppose bourgeois lines within the party, and to establish a correct revolutionary line for the Soviet Union and China. Yang Heping also does not understand what is the contradiction between enemies and ourselves and what are contradictions among the people. He should read Mao Zedong’s “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” Even his so-called “contradictions among the people” are manifestations of class struggle; various思想 also represent the interests of specific classes, and there can be no pure “dispute over methods.”
Why not post this as a Bilibili dynamic?
It is highly unlikely to be posted successfully; even if it is, it will be immediately blocked, reported, or even cause the association’s promotional account to be shut down. Because the Zhongxiu platform does not allow true Marxism to appear. The reason why Yang and similar figures can be so prominent is because they do not pose any real threat to Zhongxiu.
Or do we have comments on this, see the forum for details?
I commented in the comment section of Yang Heping’s YouTube video, and I also tried commenting in the Bilibili comment section before, even lowering the political sensitivity. As a result, I couldn’t post anything. This shows that Bilibili simply cannot accommodate comments with truly Marxist content.
Understood, it seems that this Yang Heping is also more form than substance.