Hi r/MaoSpontex! I'm undertaking some translation work for fun and someone pointed me to some Mao-Spontex documents. I made a wordpress site for if in case I decide to continue, but for now I have a translated document that I'll also paste here. The formatting is much nicer on wordpress, but to each his own.

(find the original here)

Notes: I’m not espousing any of the ideology translated here, I’m just looking for things to translate from French because I like doing it. This’ll also be my first translation work, so I appreciate any feedback.

I translate the term “avant-garde” as “vanguard” in most cases here. Contextually, it seems to make more sense than referring to the avant-garde movement or anything similar would, and that’s what the term most literally means. However, it’s a bit open to interpretation in some cases.

There are also couple of other similarly ambiguous words that could mean “vanguard” but seem to be referring to a general “forefront of a movement” rather than to a literal vanguard in the leftist sense, so this translation reflects that.

[[The original text has some notes in single brackets, so I use double brackets for my own notes and additions]]

CONCEPTS WITHOUT ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA PAGES The JCR: Les Jeunesses communistes révolutionnaires, The Young Revolutionary Communists. A French youth Trotskyist organization connected to the French Trotskyist political party Revolutionary Communist League (league communiste révolutionnaire, or LCR). It was dissolved in 2008, and the LCR soon followed in 2009.

The PSU: La Parti Socialiste Unifié, the Unified Socialist Party. A former French socialist political party. Dissolved in 1990.

The CFDT: Confédération française démocratique du travail, French Democratic Confederation of Labor. A French national trade union center that still exists today.

The UNEF: Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, National Union of the Students of France. The main French student union.

The UJCML: Union Des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Leninistes, Union of The Young Communist Marxist-Leninists. A Maoist youth organization dissolved in June 1968 that birthed The Proletarian Left (Gauche Proletarienne).

All other abbreviations/people/concepts have English Wikipedia pages, which are linked when mentioned.

TRANSLATION [Extract from the Notebooks of the Proletarian Left, No. 1, April 1969]

We must ask ourselves why deep affinities bind, even after quite some time, some of the Trotskyists and PSU.

These affinities have led to Charlety.

[Allusion to the May 27 meeting at Charlety called by the PSU, CFDT, UNEF, JCR, and a few other unions. Pierre Mendès-France, a French politician from the Radical Party, was present at the tribune]

And as there doesn’t seem to have been any self-reflection on this point, as there has been on others, we are right to ask ourselves many questions.

Let’s recall the the essential facts: The ex-JCR, in the first semester of May constitutes the secular arm of UNEF; in the weeks that follow, it concentrates in faculties and emerging coordinations; in the decisive week from the 24th to the 31st it finds itself once again with the PSU during the protests on the 24th at the Charlety stadium.

At last, from that moment, noting the Gaullist counteroffensive, it decides that it is time to fall back, its task is to organize the forefront and, especially as the agitation of the masses was perpetuating itself, it needed to protect this nascent vanguard from the temptations of adventurism, from extremism.

The supporters of the “proletarian resistance” were thus rewarded by the label of “extremist”.

That was when we evoked the great shadows of the past; we remembered that the labor movement took years after “the massacre of the Commune” to regain its strength.

Where did these ideas come from?

Less from textbooks and memory than they do from the revisionist P.C.

What followed would amply demonstrate this; the slogan of the Commune, “solo funebre” [[not French, Google translate says “funeral only” in Italian but it’s not a slogan I’m familiar with]] for the working class is Waldeck Rochet‘s favorite slogan.

As we can see, the question arises: why the political proximity of the ex-JCR and the PSU?

Vanguard Theory

Its most striking expression is that of “repetition”, 1968 is the general repetition of the French socialist revolution. [[this sentence is a bit vague because I’m not sure of the history behind it to make it clearer, the term translated as “repetition” can also mean “rehearsal”]]

Ah, but the effect becomes frankly burlesque when one analyzes the content of this repetition[[/rehearsal]].

Basically, if in [[19]]68 it didn’t work, it’s because there was no vanguard; if there was no vanguard, at the decisive moment the vanguard militants didn’t have the means to penetrate the masses with the vanguard theory of “workers’ control”, the idea of “revolutionary transition”.

This “repeats”[[/”rehearses”]] Trotsky’s transition program written in 1938. That’s not all, this program is a repetition[[/rehearsal]] of Lenin’s 1917 program.

And like everyone knows, [[19]]17 was preceded by the 1905 repetition[[/rehearsal]]. The class struggle is a theater where one always performs the same play.

Such vanguard theory would have held strong, repeated[[/rehearsed]], the first vanguard play performed onstage, the Bolshevik Revolution: that’s what has been missing in [[19]]68.

Let’s analyze the strategy of the ex-JCR during the revolutionary storm in light of this thought.

The ex-JCR is the vanguard because it says so, but in [[19]]68 this vanguard organization wasn’t capable of functioning in an vanguard way, [[sic]]

Two results: it responded to the changes in the balance of power as though it dominated politically; it marketed itself as vanguard even though it really wasn’t but could have been.

Thus, is the week of the 24th to the 31st decisive? Why was the power vacant? Simply because if instead of the PCF–CGT there had been the vanguard it would have happened differently: the power would have been taken (and we [[the Proletarian Left/Gauche Proletarienne]] would have taken it)…

All the same, since the PCF wasn’t responding to the counter-offensive of power on the 31st, since from then on power was no longer to be taken, the objective could only have been to protect the vanguard (which…instead of the PCF would’ve changed the face of history).

We see the practical results: this imaginary identification ended up following the balance of power as decided by the PCF.

We are the revolutionary shadow cast by the PCF.

The proletarian resistance is inadmissible in this order of ideas.

Effectively its objective is to upset the Gaullism-PCF game.

It wants the working-class power, ideologically repressed by revisionism, to express itself with the help of student revolutionaries.

This expression is the dawn of a proletarian party.

A party born of the revolutionary class struggle of the masses (workers and student revolutionaries) against enemies, the counter-revolution: power and its revisionist accomplice.

Two movements: one where one proclaims onself (by thought or word) a vanguard and this leads to a “paradoxical” political practice.

Or another where one builds a vanguard, the guiding nucleus of the people’s cause.

So then we start with reality. Which means, among other things, that the fact is that the masses don’t yet recognize us as a vanguard.

To transform this reality is to demonstrate in real life how we have advanced history.

Petit-Bourgeois Revolutionarism

We’ve seen how the idea of a vanguard gives itself in thought to that which is being materially created. We have seen that such thinking requires followup.

Indeed this imagined vanguard is forced to start with the reality that those who are in the place that it desires (the direction of the working class) produce. In other words, it follows (criticizing).

What remains to be analyzed is the following fact: what is is this specific case the actual position adopted by this vanguard in words?

If the vanguard isn’t at the front lines, where is it?

The facts show that the ex-JCR places itself to the “left” of the PSU. Why this position?

To answer this question it’s not enough to say “guiding” the same movement (the student movement). It is not a coincidence that they found themselves close companions; other political groups had a mass influence in the student revolutionary movement and did not take up this putschist position. (ex-March 22, ex-UJCML). [[I don’t know if putschist is a common leftist term, but it seems to be related to taking part in coup d’etats]]

This camaraderie must therefore not only have been facilitated by a common social movement (the student movement), but by a political convergence. That’s what needs to be understood.

The ideological convergence was noticeable well before May: the theories of Mandel, ex-JCR theorist who adapted Trotsky’s transition program to the conditions of our time, have met and fused with the theories of petit-bourgeois socialism to make “revolutionary reform” theory.

The idea of “workers’ control” has become “reform of anticapitalist structures”.

The idea of “counter-power” has been amalgamated with that of “double power”, counter-power for reformist revolutionaries consists of pitting one policy against another, in the power of decision a power against decision; for example, opposing employer’s policies is the unions’ power, opposing the plan is the counter-plan, opposing the model of civilization is another model of civilization.

Evidently, this concept starts with the forms of imperialist despotism (extensions of despotism, new phenomena of distribution of power) and opposes it with a line of “reformist” action: instead of determining a policy that radically opposes the actual structure of despotism, one proposes a policy that, espousing the forms of despotism as they appear, is nothing more than the renewal of the classic reformism tactic: the imaginary “picking away” at power, the refusal of its destruction because of the refusal to concretely pose the question of the rifle which is the pillar of imperialist despotism.

Apparently in the Trotskyist case, this is radically different since the concept of armed insurrection is invoked. But this is only for appearances.

Let’s consider Trotksy’s transition program, the baseline.

It appears to repeat all the points of the Bolshevik agenda of 1917.

But there is a catch: the concept of workers’ control in [[19]]17 is subordinate to a concrete context where it gets all its meaning.

Disengaged from this context, it loses all its meaning. What is this context?

The existence of the Soviets, of a red power invented by the masses.

What is the essence of this power? This is a revolutionary power because it combines, thanks to the leading action of the Bolsheviks, two essential conditions: the support of the masses and the rifle.

It’s a power because its base is a mass base and its pillar, the embryo of the army, is constituted[[/constitutional]].

In other words to end up in a situation like that of 1917 one would not require having their “party line of workers’ control” (Lenin never had this, it was at most a secondary element of the party line) but especially require having settled the question of the unified armament of the revolutionary classes (and not only of the proletariat), of the real majority of the people. [[“of the revolutionary classes” is repeated twice in this paragraph, once before and once after the parenthetical, but I left it out because it seemed to be a mistake or typo of some sort]]

(The real majority which doesn’t, of course, have anything to do with an electoral majesty, is the majority of the active masses of the people, who were consciously mobilized by Bolshevik revolutionaries).

A flaw as you can see!

In 1917, the Soviet [[sic]] was an unprecedented form of unified armament of the revolutionary classes.

We know the secret of the affair: the inter-imperialist war had abolished the distance between town and country (a fundamental problem of the revolution put in place), this same war had given the rifle to the peasant: he was the soldier.

The principal question of the revolution is that of power, that is to say before the dictatorship of the proletariat that of the revolutionary war: it is not, and for good reason, the question of workers’ control (or self-management).

When one claims to have re-enacted the grand night out of May [[19]]68 with the line of workers’ control, what is being done other than forgetting the rifle, even if one also talks about armed insurrection and the pickets which are the first detachments?

Do we believe that we’ve invented the solution to this problem in one month?

In other words, we do not consider it a problem.

In the context of May [[19]]68 where the violence was never politico-military but always politico-ideological (indeed, it was not so much to annihilate the enemy as it was to awaken friendly forces), we understand that this oversight of the rifle is again becoming current.

Trotsky’s followers and supporters of the extra-parliamentary peace movement (PSU) are on the same ground. We can understand the moving unification at Charlety.

We can see how the social base (ideological anti-authoritarian rebellion of petit-bourgeois character) and ideological base (mix of Trotskyist transition theory and revolutionary reformist transition theory) join forces to give us Charlety.

All of this is cemented by the position vis-a-vis revisionism called “Stalinist bureaucracy”.

Just as the PSU supposes left unity and its tactic is to put pressure on the left to “renew” socialism; the tactic of Trotskyists is to put pressure on the Stalinist bureaucracy, a workers’ party but with a flaw (rejecting the line of workers’ control).

This is how at Charlety the pressure of revolutionary reformism joins forces with the pressure of the “workers’ control” ideology; a double pressure that had to overcome revisionism.

The facts: far from being overcome, revisionism has come out reinforced by Charlety, so there are some strange avant-gardes.

I read the interview, and while intrigued by this I am still quite confused on it? Are there any Mao-Spontex documents in English that I can read?

Also, is it important for me to read some Mao?

Feel free to add corrections, ask questions, etc.

Mao Zedong Thought struggled to formally and fully break with Orthodox Marxism Leninism. The People's Republic of China had begun life experimenting with the decentralized command economy but suffered a debilitating blow due to the failure in its attempt at stepping beyond merely nationalizing industry and instead attempting to fully democratize it by including the masses of every station in life in the industrialization. The Great Leap Forward was an attempt at destroying the cultural and economic distance between the peasantry and the urban proletariat and to abolish the necessity of traditional labor roles and proclivities based on one's environment. At the subsequent Lushan Conference the Maoists faced significant criticisms. The Rightist and Bolshevik leaning faction of the party demanded that Economic matters should be considered over the Political, profit be reintroduced, Professionalism in Industry and the Military be prioritized, the Mass Line should be abandoned, Communes dismantled, and traditional labor roles reinforced. The Maoists demanded that the Rightists retract their attacks on the Maoist platform and abandon the reintroduction of Right Wing policies or face a second Revolution.

What is the Cultural Revolution?

At the conclusion of the Lushan Conference the figurehead of the Rightist factions was removed from power and Mao was relinquished of some of his duties and responsibilities. The following years saw the Liu Shaoqi administration reintroduce privatization, market influence, pricing reform, labor organizing around profitable output, political ties between China, Japan and Western Europe were strengthened, and a complete rollback of the proletarianization of the peasantry.

The threat of a second uprising would eventually be realized through the Cultural Revolution.

The beginnings of the Cultural Revolution started with Leftist Party members forming committees to identify “Capitalist Roaders” and organize propaganda and hegemonic superiority. The concept of Cultural Revolution was solidified and disseminated. The masses joined first with college professors and students writing the Big Character Posters and ultimately with mass mobilization. Industry was restored to the workers, corrupt Party functionaries were targeted, eventually moving up to the highest members of the Party. All were targeted regardless of prestige with a struggle against hierarchy. Party members who worked against political organizations, the mobilized masses and natural labor formations, and revisionists, specifically members like Deng Xiaoping, who would send out "discipline teams" to quell workplace unrest, specifically to make sure that orthodox Party members maintained control. Mao continuously broke with the then Party Leadership and advocated that the Cultural Revolution proceed without the Party influencing it. The more the orthodox Party resisted, the more radical the CR became, to the point where they adopted the Four Olds/16 Points campaign, where the destruction of tradition became a concrete goal. It even began adopting concepts familiar to Left Communists, such as the Great Disorder which has parallels to organic democracy. They began directly confronting the police forces as counter revolutionary, demanding the abolishment of worker roles such as "experts" and "professionals" as symptoms of traditional hierarchy.. Urban students were seen to have been alienated from the proletariat so they adopted the down to the countryside movement.

While all of this was embraced by Mao earlier, at some point he reneged on his many of his endorsements and positions. The earlier proclamations that lead to the destruction of specialist roles were reversed, military specialists were for a third time embraced, those that advocated for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution began to advocate for subservience to the PLA. After Lin Biao's death there was significant problems and political struggles between the Orthodox party, the representatives of the CR, and the PLA. As the Cultural Revolution slowed in "progress", the sloganeering that earlier praised Mao began to change to "Revolution even without the Great Helmsman".

What is Mao Spontex in regards to France 1968?

France 1968 saw significant social upheaval. Unions and Students rose up against De Gaullist policies and politicians as well as the entrenched Communist incumbents. The Communist Parties, via their influence over Unions and control of the workplace, stressed organization over social upheaval. The Mao Spontex slogan of “It is Right to Rebel” was in direct contradiction to the incumbent position of social order.

Basic tenets of Mao Spontex is opposition to the Unions but was also opposed to many of the the Student organizations of 1968 as an extension of the intelligentsia, some specific gripes being that Revisionist Elements, members too close to the incumbent Parties, or otherwise incorrectly anticipated the events of 68. Their focus included organizing the migrant workers in France, confronting the state, overturning traditional labor relations and all out violent agitation in the workplace. The confrontation of "xiaoban" little bosses in the factories, in the Unions, what they literally called "the bosses police", the advocacy of destroying the reliance on "experts" and "professionals", the hostility to the idea that the visible members of the group were the "leaders". Identifying the Communist Party of France as Revisionists. They successfully identified the contradiction between the laborers who produced and those who had access to the levers of the economy.

Mao Spontex is often described as "Maoist Anarchism" but there are very specific differences between the two and the similarities are only superficial. Mao Spontex even adopted PPW like posturing, with guerrilla like activity advancing to strategic defense to strategic equilibrium. Similarities only because the early phases embraced "unarmed violence".