Notes on Mao Tsetung

Notes on Mao Tsetung

Albert Langer

2 September, 1980


1.  In the four years since Mao Tsetung died, "Maoism" appears to have been virtually extinguished - both in China and throughout the world. Many who once claimed to follow Mao's line in the international communist movement have joined in the chorus of attacks on that line from China and Albania. Others who defend Mao against those attacks do so rather backhandedly - dismissing Mao's line on international affairs since the Nixon visit of 1972 as some sort of an aberration, or as the work of his enemies in the Chinese leadership. Very few indeed still unequivocally support what all "Maoists" claimed to support before Mao died - both the international line of a united front especially directed against the Soviet Union and a domestic line of continuing the revolution through struggles against revisionism such as the Cultural Revolution.

2.  Mao's policies were abandoned in China within a month of his death. Doesn't this prove there was something drastically wrong? No, it proves Mao's analysis of the situation in China was basically correct. If Mao had claimed everything in the garden was lovely, the revolution had won final victory and so on, then events would certainly have proved him wrong. But he was notorious for insisting on the exact opposite - that there was a continuing real and serious danger of capitalist  restoration which would require further major upheavals like the Cultural Revolution to overcome. Events proved him right. The practical consequences of Chinese revisionism are further proving him correct as China sinks deeper into debt with mass unemployment and inflation while class polarisation extends in city and countryside.

3.  The fact that a poor and backward country like China should develop modern industry along a capitalist road similar to that followed by Europe in previous centuries is hardly surprising.  What would have been surprising is if the revolution in China had proceeded smoothly without reversals, unlike every other revolution and contrary to the explicit expectations of its leadership.  The reversal following Mao's death does not show Mao's failure, unless not being immortal counts as a failure.  Rather it shows the immense personal contribution Mao made as an individual historical figure of such stature that even in his eighties he was able to prevent the reversals that took place as soon as he was no longer around to prevent them.  Mao's "personality cult" becomes easier to understand.  He personally was that important!

4.  This brings up the question of Stalin.  Many "Maoists" have been happy to avoid the Trotskyist taunts of "Stalinist" with the mealy mouthed formula "Stalin made mistakes".  The arguments runs that since Khrushchev followed Stalin, the foundations of revisionism must have been laid in Stalin's time.  Of course this is true in one sense, and is just as true for Mao and China.  But it really doesn't take us very far.  In evaluating Stalin and Mao one has to first ask what side they where on.  In both cases it is clear they were on the opposite side to their revisionist successors.  In both cases socialism was reversed immediately and dramatically after the death of a revolutionary leader (having lasted slightly longer in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin than it did in China under Mao).  I think Stalin did make important mistakes which Mao avoided, and Mao's legacy provides a much sounder basis for recovering from the setback.  But Mao was unequivocally a Stalinist at the same time as being quite explicit about Stalin's mistakes and I think he was quite right to defend Stalin's reputation as a revolutionary leader.

5.  This also brings up the question of the "gang of four".  It is suggested that they were overthrown because they made mistakes in being more "left", rigid, doctrinaire and inflexible than Mao and that if they had followed a more "Maoist" line then the revisionists would not have succeeded in overthrowing them so quickly.  Certainly the "four" were not historical giants like Mao, capable of unifying the party and country around their own personalities.  Although even if they had been, it is hard to see how a revolution can simply go on forever without reversals.  The openly anti-Mao riot in Tien An Men Square in April 1976 suggests that Mao himself would have been overthrown before long.  But attempting to separate the "four" from Mao misses the point that they were never in power separate from Mao (as Stalin held power separate from Lenin for decades).  If the "four" had been overthrown after a couple more years of "struggle against Teng Hsiaoping's right deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts", with the opposition becoming stronger as the "four" grew more isolated, then it would be appropriate to analyse their mistakes separately from Mao's.  But it is quite clear that they went when Mao went, and never had much chance to make their own mistakes.

6.  Related to this is Charles Bettelheim's criticism of the "four" (or five) for alienating intellectuals and being despotic.  This comes back to the question of "Stalinism" and can be taken further back to Kautsky's critique of Lenin's Bolshevism.  It amounts to criticising the Maoists (or Leninist's) for not surrendering power to the bourgeoisie much earlier. 

7.  There is no reason to doubt the Chinese revisionists' claims that their policies are popular and that they did not come to power sooner because they were forcibly and arbitrarily repressed.  Those "Maoists" who concluded that since the "four" were unpopular they must be wrong sound as though they are taking a very "left", pro-masses position.  Actually this kind of "faith in the masses" is the quintessence of conservatism.  It can be restated simply as "the conventional wisdom is always right", "don't rock the boat", "be like everybody else", "accept things as they are".

8.  A revolutionary's "faith in the masses" is faith that they can change themselves and in so doing, change the world, and that they (and no "saviours from on high") are the only force that can do so.  If the majority of the people were already conscious revolutionaries, then the revolution would be over (and it would be time to start another one).

9.  Mao's "left" and "anarchist" streak and willingness to tear down established structures has considerable appeal in the west, as indeed it should have.  But Mao was also head of the world's largest hierarchy - the 30 million strong Communist Party of China, whose organisation was strictly centralised from the standing committee of the political bureau of the central committee down to grass root cells.  If Mao as a revolutionary had not headed the Chinese hierarchy then some counter-revolutionary would have.  The argument that revolutionaries should not take part in hierarchies is an argument that they should not hold political power (since the concept of political power involves hierarchy).  In the real world that means the "democratic" bourgeoisie should hold political power and revolutionaries should protest about it and wait for the millennium when people will be different and hierarchies will no longer be necessary, before trying to change anything. 

10.  If Mao had not been willing to be a bureaucrat and to repress opposition then he would not be under attack for it (or be accused of being senile while others did it).  But then he would just be a nice guy with romantic visions about what a better world would be like instead of a political leader who helped bring about major changes directly affecting a quarter of the world's people and indirectly affecting the rest.  Both elements are essential in Maoism - "anarcho-Stalinism" would be a fair summary of the contradiction.

11. This raises the question of Mao's "leftism" generally. Actually Mao was notoriously on the far right of the Chinese Communist Party through most of its history. It was Mao who formed the United Front with Chiang Kai-shek, redesignating the Red Army as Chiang's 8th Route and New 4th Armies and formally acknowledging Chiang's leadership of the war against Japan. Most of the four volume "Selected Works" are devoted to struggles against sectarianism and dogmatism in the various "left" lines that arose in opposition to Mao's.

12. Likewise during the Cultural Revolution, a good deal of Mao's energy was spent combating Lin Piao and the ultra-left. When Maoists wanted to overthrow revisionists in the Chinese Communist Party, the "ultra-left"wanted to overthrow everybody, thus allowing the revisionists to escape. This is not some feature of "inscrutable Chinese politics". It is common enough here too. Standard committee practice is to prevent reforms by demanding that everything be solved at once so that no practical changes can actually come to fruition. What could be more natural than to respond to criticism by saying "we are ALL sinners"? It is interesting to note Bettelheim's criticism of the Maoists lack of a modern class analysis of Chinese society when they had at least identified the party bourgeoisie as the enemy class, while Bettelheim implicitly adopts the ultra-left and self defeating analysis of "cadres" as the enemy.

13. Indeed if one looks closely at the politics of "left sects" in western countries like Australia, even the more extreme right wing revisionist ones, isn't "leftist" sectarianism, dogmatism and subjectivism of the kind Mao fought an essential characteristic of their impotence? Mao is relevant in the west not because of his views on agrarian reform but because of his practical approach to making revolution - his insistence on the mass line and on building a movement that is actually part of the real politics of the country it is in.

14  The West has seen successful mass based reformist parties like the Social Democrat, Labor and Eurocommunist  parties and we have seen small revolutionary propaganda circles inspired by revolutions abroad. But we have never yet seen a real mass based revolutionary party in the West and it is therefore important to study how sterile "fringe" politics was overcome by Mao in China (and Lenin in Russia).

15. Naturally Mao's line on international affairs since the Nixon visit has not been popular with the sectarian left in Western countries. Nor would Mao's United Front with Chiang Kai-shek have been popular among people in China with a similar outlook. (The fact that the Chinese parrots support Mao's international  line does not make them any the less sectarian, subjectivist and dogmatic than average - on the contrary they are notoriously more so. They do not support this line independently, but simply parrot it, and in doing so, discredit it.)

16. When Mao stood out against the line of "peaceful coexistence", "detente" and so on, Maoists were a very small and apparently isolated minority on the left in Western countries. But our insistence that "US imperialism is the number one enemy" gradually took hold as the Vietnam war proved its correctness. Today it is the "conventional wisdom" on the left, and like all conventional wisdom, is already obsolete. When Mao shook hands with Nixon and said the Soviet Union was the main enemy he dissipated a great deal of the prestige that Maoism had acquired in Western countries as a result of our stand on the US and Vietnam.

17. We are back to being an isolated minority. Of course if Mao had not taken that stand and had continued mouthing platitudes that everyone would agree with about the nasty Americans and their CIA then we would still be popular. The trouble is we would be proved wrong, in the same way that Khrushchev was proved wrong. The only way Maoism can become popular again is by being proved right again. The Chinese revisionists are doing their best to prove us right with their disastrous policies in China and the Soviet Union is doing its best to prove us right with its invasion of Afghanistan, support for Vietnamese aggression against Kampuchea and so on. Events are taking their course and little effort will be required to reap the harvest.

18. But the real test for Maoists is not whether we can become popular by supporting Mao's line in China or on international questions, but whether we can develop a Marxist-Leninist (Maoist) line of our own for winning the revolution here. Mao couldn't do that for us. We have to do it ourselves.