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Title: Why Mao? Author: Noel Ignatiev Date: September 2, 2019 Language: en Topics: Maoism, United States of America, critique of leftism, PM Press Source: Retrieved on 14th November 2021 from https://blog.pmpress.org/2019/09/02/why-mao/
Why, in spite of its long list of crimes[1] and the reality of modern
China, does Maoism continue to attract adherents among revolutionaries
in the U.S.? Part of the answer is that Maoism represents in many
people’s minds the triumph of the will (no reference intended to Leni
Riefenstahl’s film of that title).
Marxism came to China around the time of the May Fourth Movement (1919),
when Chinese students, enraged at the government’s subservience to
foreign powers, turned to the West for new ideas. It arrived as one of
many imports; particularly important was the philosophy of Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Emerson argued for the supremacy of the will; here are some
quotes from him, picked off the internet: “Do not go where the path may
lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “To be
yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else
is the greatest accomplishment.” “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
“Our greatest glory is in never failing, but in rising up every time we
fail.” “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it
happen.” “Passion rebuilds the world for the youth.” “Every revolution
was thought first in one man’s mind.”
And the following (especially appealing to many young Americans): “An
ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
If Emerson stressed reliance on will, Marx discovered the link between
communism and the proletariat. Addressing the same questions Mao
addressed, and writing at about the same age Mao was when he became a
radical, Marx wrote:
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of
civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is
the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character
by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no
particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which
can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in
any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis
to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot
emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of
society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in
a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only
through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a
particular estate is the proletariat.
Maoism was the synthesis of Marxism and Emersonianism, and that was the
secret of its triumph in China, a country with a tiny proletariat, and
its appeal to a new generation of radicals in the U.S., a country where
the proletariat appears to be diminishing in numbers and coherence.
The history of Maoism is well known: After reactionaries crushed the
workers’ movement of 1925–27 and slaughtered Communists in the cities,
Mao led a faction of the Party to the countryside. There they built a
peasant army that, as everyone knows, overthrew the feudal regime and
brought the CP to power. I am in awe at Mao’s accomplishment in getting
fastidious Chinese students, schoolteachers, librarians (he himself was
a librarian), and mandarins, more steeped in class prejudice than any
other people on earth, to go and live with peasants and eat out of
filthy bowls and pick lice out of their bodies. It was one of the most
heroic episodes in history, and one of the greatest revolutions.
Looking back after nearly a century, it is evident now that the dust has
settled that Communism in China did not bring about the “complete
re-winning of man” but was the banner under which the old, reactionary,
patriarchal, feudal society was overthrown and a capitalist society
built up in its place. Although Mao and his comrades called themselves,
and undoubtedly believed they were, Communists, the revolution they
carried out was not a communist revolution, nor could it be, because it
was not based in the proletariat, and when it comes to revolution,
communist and proletarian are interchangeable terms.
People looking for substitutes for the working class (and consequently
infatuated with Maoism) need to ponder that lesson. Sometimes an ounce
of theory is worth a ton of action.
Lastly, a word on the “mass line”: The Maoist notion of the “mass line”
(from the masses, to the masses) omits, and by omitting denies, the
active role of the Marxist organization in refracting the mass movement
into its different tendencies and then seeking to clarify the different
implications of those tendencies. Instead it substitutes a notion of the
Party as a neutral recorder, modestly serving the masses. It is
disingenuous, even hypocritical, because while declaring its adherence
to the formula “from the masses, to the masses,” it also insists that
the Party is the “leading force,” invariably short-circuiting the part
where the “masses” make up their own minds. (The same criticism applies
to the Zapatista formula “To obey is to lead.”) The view of the Party as
the “leading force” is especially popular among those who see no social
force that because of its position in society can give shape to the
entire movement, and therefore fall back on the Party, an organization
of people of no particular class who come together voluntarily on the
basis of political agreement, to perform that function.[2] (The Marxist
organization may indeed be the “leading force,” but it has to win its
position every day; during the entire period of transition from
capitalist society to communism, the period sometimes known as
“Socialism,” there can be no other leadership than the soviets, workers’
councils, etc. and even they can only be provisional.) The vanguard
party may not be reactionary everywhere—even C.L.R. James acknowledged
its value in backward countries; but it is out of place in a country
where the working class is “disciplined, united, organized by the very
mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
[1] My favorite of Mao’s crimes, which I have seen nowhere in print,
comes from a professor of Chinese Studies at Harvard who lived in China
for years. He reported that in the last years of his life Mao became
infatuated with an 18-year-old female railway worker. He brought her to
live with him in the Forbidden City, where she became for a while his
intermediary to the outside world. She was the one Communist officials
meant when they made statements beginning, “A spokesman for Chairman Mao
declared.” According to the professor, the arrangement was an open
secret among those in the know. I believe it. The irony is, it may have
been the only recorded case in history of the actual dictatorship of the
proletariat.
[2] I maintain that the working class in large-scale industry, transport
and communications is the only social force capable of performing this
function on a world scale, but that view is of course debatable and
moreover its meaning in different situations is not always easy to see.
The faction that emerged on top in China after 1927 did not solve the
problem of what it meant (if ever they gave it serious consideration).
Forty years later, workers in Shanghai declared the Shanghai Commune (a
deliberate reference to the Paris Commune, based on direct democracy);
shortly afterwards all talk of the Commune ended, and the Party line
became the Three-in-one committees, according to which one part of the
state administration was to be drawn from the existing cadres, one part
from the People’s Liberation Army, and one part from the new forces—in
other words, the coopting of the insurgents. Some Italian comrades
visited China right after and asked Mao why he abandoned the Commune.
His reply: China has 20 million proletarians; how do you expect them to
maintain proletarian rule in a country of 680 million peasants? He may
have been right. The results are there for all to see. Could total
defeat have been worse than what actually transpired? (We could ask the
same question about the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt.)