In Memory of Jan Myrdal: Revolutionary Activist, Writer, and Reporter

July 1927-October 2020

Jan Myrdal has died following a lifetime of articles, polemics, and historical works which have been of remarkable service towards the revolutionary movement. In particular, Myrdal excoriated the moral claims of apologists for the citadels of capitalist-imperialism. Late in his life, Myrdal was invited to report on the red base areas inside India, a tribute to his lifetime of work which resulted in one of his greatest contributions to the International Communist Movement, his 2010 text Red Star Over India. Myrdal’s lifetime of revolutionary activism and writing serve as an example that should be emulated by the newer generation of revolutionary activists.

In some ways, Myrdal was exposed to the hypocrisy of the liberal-bourgeois establishment by virtue of his birth. His mother and father were the pinnacle of the Swedish and international liberal intelligentsia. His father, “left”-liberal Gunner Myrdal, “shared” a Nobel prize with neoliberal economist Dr. Friedrich A. von Hayek by virtue of the Nobel Committee’s insight that the two perhaps were on the same side after all. Jan’s sister became a bourgeois academic “ethicist”, and married Derek Bok, the man twice called in as a relief-pitcher by Harvard’s corporate board, a person whose bureaucratic dullness was seen as the right antidote to controversies between students, faculty, and university management.

But Jan rebelled against the path of service to the power elite laid out for him, dropping out of high school as a teenager to become a communist. His rebellion did not stop there. Following World War Two, especially following Khrushchev’s theory of “peaceful co-existence,” the European communist parties generally followed a backward march towards revisionism. A series of policies and stands that capitulated to the dominant establishment followed. The intellectual class–with whom Myrdal was well-acquainted–played a key role on this venture. In turn, Myrdal dissected the representatives and advocates of these trends with an introspective wit.

Myrdal continued to break away from the establishment in the early 60s following his 1962 visit to the countryside in revolutionary China, a visit he documented in his work Report from a Chinese Village. His observations of a people in the process of collective struggle and transformation of society resulted in a personal and political reexamination for Myrdal. The outcome was his denunciation of various forms of European chauvinism and imperialism, and his endorsement of the Maoist revolutionary camp. Myrdal remained committed to this path until his death.

Myrdals' writings tend to be wide-reaching in scope, jumping between places, times, the personal, historical, and even his own dreams, in an effort to weave together a multifaceted analysis of class formations and political tendencies. He often used himself as the object of investigation, subjecting himself to a relatively unfiltered probing of his psychological makeup and shortcomings, including aspects of internalized misogyny. In a situation in which so many of his former comrades had given up the fight, Myrdal’s self-criticism and analysis was relevant to many people who were committed to stay on the revolutionary path. This was captured by the title of his acclaimed book Confessions of a Disloyal European (1968).

In the experience of many of our comrades who joined the struggle to reestablish a Maoist movement in the United States over the past decade, Myrdal’s writings have played an important role in providing education on the frontlines of international revolutionary struggle, in particular through his writing on the Indian revolutionary movement. His books Red Star Over India (2010) and India Waits (1980) are very important resources for clarifying the nature of contemporary Indian society and the ongoing revolutionary movement there.

It was in part because of the clarity of his analysis of the Indian situation in his 1980 text that three decades later, on the eve of 2010, Jan Myrdal received a phone call while in Sweden. This was an invitation from the central committee of India’s Communist Party (Maoist)–a party banned by the Indian state–to travel the forests of the country to learn about the movement and to share the information with the world.

A few weeks later, Myrdal, at 82 years of age, was ushered into the underground in Delhi, and from there taken to the jungle areas in Dandakaranya to see the movement firsthand, and to meet members of the party’s leadership. These included (now former) General Secretary Ganapathy and party spokesperson Azad, the latter of whom was assassinated by the state on his way to attend a discussion on the subject of possible peace talks with the government shortly after Myrdal’s visit.

Myrdal’s resulting book was something of a present-day version of Edgar Snow’s text Red Star Over China, the book that broke the story to the world about the Chinese revolutionary movement then thriving in the country’s hinterland. Myrdal reminds his audience though that his two week visit to the Indian comrades was far shorter than Snow’s four month visit to the Yan’an base area. As such he emphasizes the importance of his interviews with Indian party leadership. These remain posted on his book’s website at http://redstaroverindia.se/.

Myrdal at times played the role of a rebel contrarian in Sweden, where he consistently bucked intellectual trends. He sometimes focused on the hypocrisy of his opponents at the expense of addressing their criticisms head on. This tendency was most evident in his statements on the Khmer Rouge. Myrdal was a member of a delegation of the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association that toured Cambodia in 1978 during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. During this trip he interviewed Pol Pot. Later when other members of the group publicly denounced the regime of Pol Pot, Myrdal declined to do the same. Instead, he argued that if the leadership of the Khmer Rouge were brought to trial it should be on the condition that the US architects of mass-bombing of Cambodia in the years before the Khmer Rouge be tried as well. In other remarks he later said it was undeniable that there were many deaths during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and possibly as many as those killed during the US bombing campaigns.

One gets the sense that Myrdal may have withheld criticism of the Khmer Rouge because he thought his audience needed first to be confronted with the hypocrisy of promoting foreign intervention in Cambodia as a benevolent force. For Myrdal, this imperialist deceit included both the workings in the region of western international law, which he reminds us was at play during the closed door trial in 1970 that sentenced Prince Norodom Sihanouk to death. Along with Prince Sihanouk other members of the deposed government we also sentenced to death. The trial was part of the western engineered coup against the Cambodian government, which at the time was inclined towards supporting revolutionary developments in Vietnam and China. The same deceit was also shown in the world powers' acquiescence to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978, an invasion that Myrdal stated created a new norm for disregarding basic respect for territorial sovereignty. He argued that this precedent was useful for the architects of future genocidal wars, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In his book The Silk Road, compiled during his travels in 1976, Myrdal asked Chinese Communist Party members in Xinjiang about their criticism of Stalin. These question were particularly relevant in Xinjiang given that, under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union had pursued a foreign policy of aligning with the despotic warlord Sheng Shicai, who inflicted significant losses on the region’s revolutionary forces in the 1930s.

The comrades in Xinjiang replied that they have many deep criticisms of Stalin (along with certain praise), but explained that such criticisms were an internal matter, not to be advanced internationally given the damage such open criticism would have presented to the international movement. At the time the leaders of the Soviet Union were using criticism of Stalin to justify their full-scale restoration of capitalism, and were promoting similar revisionist politics internationally. Therefore the CCP pursued a policy of critical support of Stalin, but were not always public with all of their criticisms.

Myrdal at times seems to have been putting forward a similar logic in some of his later intellectual struggles with the conventional wisdom of the Sweden and European liberal elite. But unlike the comrades in Xinjiang, Myrdal seems to have been acting at times as a party of one.

For instance, there has been extensive criticism of the politics of the Khmer Rouge, and not just from the liberal establishment. In 1999, the publication A World to Win published an in depth critique of the regime from a Maoist perspective in the article “Condescending Saviours: What Went Wrong with the Pol Pot Regime.”

And yet Myrdal seems to have been mostly silent on such analysis and critiques, relegating his commentary for an audience of the liberal intelligentsia for whom he refused play the part of a prodigal son. In a 2011 article on the subject, Myrdal writes (in very roughly translated Swedish): “Of course I could now write in [the Swedish daily newspaper] Aftonbladet that when in 1978 in Kampuchea mass murder was going on around me but that out of gratitude to the hosts who offered food–or out of consideration for my friendship with Pol Pot, I wanted then to say nothing about it. For which I am now ashamed. If I did this with a sufficiently convincing sense of shame, I would soon after death have a beautiful afterward in both Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet–not to mention kind words in Swedish Radio and Expressen. But that would be a lie by me. I did not see any mass murder. I have nothing to be ashamed of in what I wrote about what I saw. What we saw really saw, however, does not interest [writer] Peter Fröberg Idling. That side of reality is of no interest to ¦ Idling or the current Swedish media.”

But of course, Mydal’s observations were and are of interest to others beyond the mainstream. (That being said, our understanding of Myrdal’s writings is limited by the fact that much of it remains in Swedish, still to be translated, and it is likely we are unaware of a great deal of writing by Myrdal on the subject.) His observations of what he saw, and what he really thought of the Khmer Rouge were and still are of interest to us. And for an experienced activist, writer, and reporter, it seems highly unlikely that he encountered no evidence of mass murder in 1978.

On the other hand, it was precisely through Myrdal’s dialectical analysis of liberal and other bourgeois intellectual trends that he was able to make one of his most substantial political contributions, his dismantling of the ideological armor of the oppressor classes.

His work in this respect is vast, including commentaries on Indian, Chinese, and Cambodian history, not to mention published work on the Swedish writer August Strindberg. His work on international subjects was informed by extensive travels abroad, and in depth dialogue with many historical figures, including many notable revolutionaries. Myrdal’s positions following the counter-revolutionary coup in China in 1976 were not without significant errors. Such pitfalls were somewhat inevitable though in an international movement that had lost a significant source of clarity and pole of revolutionary orientation. However, after visiting China in the early 1980s, he became clear on the nature of the “Great Reversal” that was then taking place.

This consideration, which also can be seen as one of the question of “who are our friends” did not escape Myrdal’s careful and thoughtful attention either. In many essays he advanced the importance of dialectical analysis of individuals in the movement, including those with whom we maintain serious disagreements, but whose arguments and ideas when analyzed according to what is right and wrong, provide essential lessons. Put another way, Myrdal offers us important insight into the principle of unity-struggle-unity over the course of a lifetime of experience in the international movement.

As he stated:

When it comes to our own friends, comrades, and even classics we do not write hagiographies; we see them as Cromwell said when he was to be portrayed: “With warts and all.” All of us who on any level have had some years and decades of activism in popular and so-called Left movements have experience of individuals either changing color, becoming renegades, or in fact having been placed among us by the ruling class. (Remember that Mussolini was once a well-known socialist.) But that is not so interesting. Above all there always are discussions. Sometimes they tend to be acute. There have been and are many political conflicts among those that have considered themselves as Marxists. How are they to be seen and handled? The relations between Friedrich Engels and Franz Mehring give an answer: Engels was able to, on the one hand, point out that he and Mehring had been “in different camps” in a situation where necessarily “he who is not for us is against us” and, at the same time, note “that we have come to be in the same camp.” This an important statement (like when Mao Zedong made the distinction between the different types of contradictions) ¦ Engels thus viewed Franz Mehring and his work comprehensibly. This is important. I have here referred to both Franz Mehring and David Ryazanov. But they engaged in sharp, very sharp, polemics against each other. It is not only possible but necessary both to evaluate these polemics and see what in them was correct and what not and at the same time regard and use both Mehring and Ryazanov as important Marxist scholars.¹

Myrdal was one of the few (William Hinton also comes to mind) who struggled through the challenges of the “Great Reversal” in China on personal and political fronts to map out a way forward for revolutionary writers and historians.

It is our sincere hope that comrades in the United States and throughout the world read Myrdal’s works and follow his example in contributing a lifetime of efforts of struggle, criticism and self-criticism in the service of the international revolutionary movement!