From Marx to Mao or from Mao to Marx? - Once Again: Maoism

A Foreword

Marxism is in a deep crisis. Not only are we split into hundreds of different ideologies and beliefs but we are also split in our understanding and formulation of Marx's critique of capital. For a long time in my live I have been a Maoist. Not the Gonzalo-Thought kind that one might know from the Austin Red Guards or Tjen Folket in Norway but still subscribing to Maoist philosophy and his views on socialism, capital, democracy and so on. Now has come my time to review my former views and find their errors, I shall attempt to formulate a criticism of Maoism. I will try to be as diverse regarding the differing views and opinions on the topics that I am going to talk about, there is no doubt that I will be missing or lacking some things and facets of it, nonetheless I hope that my insights will be useful.

Mass Line and Democracy - Surrendering to Capital

What is the most immediate and interesting critique I can make of Maoism is its affirmation of democracy as the correct method for both the organisation of the party and the state. Although this might seem like a small issue or even a non-issue ("at the end are socialists not pro-democracy," one might ask) however this is indeed a major problem.

“The relation between the secretary and the committee members is one in which the minority must obey the majority.” [bold remarks from the source] The secretary should not, on the pretext that he was responsible for guarding the pass, violate the Party’s principle of democratic centralism and negate the decision by the majority. He should resolutely carry out democratic centralism, maintain Party collective leadership and rely on the ”squad members” to guard the pass instead of relying on himself.

-A Discussion on Party Democratic Centralism, Peking Review, #43, Oct. 22, 1971 

There is a big problem with "democratic centralism" that sits not within the centralism but within the adjective "democratic". Specifically it resides inside the democratic principle of organisation. Democracy is inseparable from the basic social relations and forms of capitalism. In democracy everyone is formally equal, his individual relations and conditions are suspended(!) in the eyes of the state and he is equal during circulation (while he is buying a commodity for example). The human being is nothing more than a commodity, he turns into the citizen, stripped of all concrete appearances and turned into an "ideal" free being, equal to everyone else. The state -the organisation of all citizens- thus is the total negation of all class organisation, as in the realm of the state no one is attached to a class or other forms of organisation; in the democratic state classes are non existent, they are destroyed and sublated into a fictive society of free and equal members.

The Maoist fetishisation of democracy has terrible consequences. In the party every members is now turned into an atomised worker, a free and equal member. Every opinion is worth the same, every draft has to be voted on and the leaders of the party are to be democratically decided by the majority. The party is the organisation of the most class conscious proletarians, its leaders are the most knowledgeable and experienced members of that class and know the Marxist programme in its fullest details. Why should there be a democratic decision on who is the most class conscious? Why can they be disposed or their drafts ignored? The correction of mistakes and wrong opinions needs no democracy, it is in fact the opposite, the equalisation of all members -abstracting from their knowledge, class consciousness and relations- leads to a wrong programme, it leads to trade-union consciousness and will not further any struggle, it will reinforce the rule of capital especially inside the party. For Lenin the Marxist programme is the most important aspect of the party, it determines its class outlook, so he speaks of the Iskra as the actual head of the party:

I should merely like to remark that the newspaper can and should be the ideological leader of the Party, evolving theoretical truths, tactical principles, general organisational ideas, and the general tasks of the whole Party at any given moment. But only a special central group (let us call it the Central Committee, say) can be the direct practical leader of the movement, maintaining personal connections with all the committees, embracing all the best revolutionary forces among the Russian Social-Democrats, and managing all the general affairs of the Party

-V. I. Lenin: A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 6

The programme is an ideal, that stands "above" the party and determines all its actions, everything has to be justified over how much it progresses the destruction of capital and its social forms, this is the only form of action a party has to take and this needs no democracy, it merely requires centralism. The addition of the adjective "democratic" to the word "centralism" does not imply that the party is fully democratic, it implies that democracy is subordinated to centralism. Centralism for Lenin means the centralisation of all forms of organisation and struggle to the communist party, particularly its core and its Marxist programme and not the "centralisation of correct ideas" from the "masses".

The mass line is indeed worse. Not only because it equalises peasants and proletarians and creates the "masses" (which is somewhat similar to the notation of citizens I used earlier before) but mostly because it requires the party to subordinate itself to these "masses" instead of imposing its program dictatorially. Maoists usually hide this problem behind the pretext that "the ideas of the masses have to be based on revolutionary programs and it has to be the result of objective research of material conditions" however they fail to see that the observation of that object too is historically and socially (i.e. by capitalism in this context) mediated and hence never "objective". The hand of capital is absolute and everything that is touched by it has to follow its logic, capital is indeed the Hand of Midas of our socio-historical epoch (we will later go in depth about this issue in the philosophy section). If the masses could find out the correct program and theory themselves by simply studying nature, why is a party even needed? Why did Lenin formulate the need of an "outside" body to bring consciousness into the masses and form the proletariat into a class? Whether it is democracy of the 1% or democracy of the 99% in its core it will always remain tied to capitalism, communism will always remain the negation of democracy. I have to emphasise that the alliance between peasants and proletarians is of utmost importance. An alliance does not require the two classes to be equalised however and abstracted from their concrete relations, it does the exact opposite.

The mass line and the fetishisation of democracy is indeed a capitulation in front of capital, the subordination of the core of the dictatorship of the proletariat and revolutionary organisation to capitalism, the democratic principle. 

Transition or Socialism - Stalinist Catechism for Beginners

So far I have seen two Marxist-Leninist conceptions of socialism:

1. Socialism is a mode of production, intermediary between capitalism and communism and contains elements in the sense of relations of productions of both. There is no class struggle (see Stalin), the means of production are nationalised and some form-determinations of capitalism still exist. (This is usually the Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism)

2. Socialism is the movement or transition from capitalism to communism, in which class struggle still exists, both capitalist and socialist relations prevail and the dictatorship of the proletariat still exists. (This is usually the Maoist conception of socialism)

Both conceptions have their own problems but I shall start with the first one:

1. The Maoist critique of the Stalinist conception is indeed not wrong. Socialism cannot be classless while at the same time having commodity production, money etc. similarly the nationalisation of the means of production is not anywhere a transition to communism, but the change of the actual relations of production are. The Stalinist conception is likely the worst and most vulgar conception of socialism, as it puts the form over the content (property ownership over the relations of production, although the latter is a part of a former which forms a totality) and is thus not different from the "idealism" Marxist-Leninists like to criticise. 

2. Now to come to the actual point, the Maoist conception is actually quite flexible and makes a lot of sense. Arguably it can even be confined with the Marxist conception of socialism. However there are some issues:

a) Marx and Lenin strictly separate the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism as two distinct historical stages. As for Marx socialism and communism are essentially the same thing, one aspect of the same totality, socialism is already classless and misses all capitalist form-determinations, the only thing that is preserved is so-called "bourgeois law". As for Lenin, he agrees with Marx' distinction and actually coins the term socialism for what Marx called "lower stage communism".

b) The Maoist conception is too broad and therefore allows socialism to be confused with capitalism, because socialism as a mere transition from capitalism to communism contains practically all form-determinations of capitalism, it is therefore essentially a capitalist society with a dictatorship of the proletariat, not more not less. Earlier I have mentioned that the DotP is historically opposed to socialism or lower stage communism, as the latter lacks all aspects of capital and the former one preserves them to an extent. Regarding this aspect it becomes quite obvious that the Maoist conception leads to some theoretical problems, confusing transition with (non-)mode of production and thus undermining historical materialism too, as it states that all class societies have their own association (mediation) and dissociation (separation) of economic agents. If socialism had the same dissociation and association of producers, what would make it fundamentally different from capitalism?

That said, let us look at another important aspect: The Maoist answer to the issues with the Soviet agrarian question. Mao himself criticised the Soviet collectivisation and agrarian policies. His criticism has essentially two larger points:

a) The Soviet Union puts too much pressure on the peasantry:

The Soviet Union has adopted measures which squeeze the peasants very hard. It takes away too much from the peasants at too low a price through its system of so-called obligatory sales and other measures. This method of capital accumulation has seriously dampened the peasants' enthusiasm for production. You want the hen to lay more eggs and yet you don't feed it, you want the horse to run fast and yet you don't let it graze. What kind of logic is that!

-Mao Zedong: On Ten Major Relationships; April 25, 1956

b) Socialist construction has to focus both on the light and heavy industry and not purely on the heavy industry, as in the Soviet Union.

We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of East European countries. The prolonged failure of the Soviet Union to reach the highest pre-October Revolution level in grain output, the grave problems arising from the glaring disequilibrium between the development of heavy industry and that of light industry in some East European countries -- such problems do not exist in our country. Their lop-sided stress on heavy industry to the neglect of agriculture and light industry results in a shortage of goods on the market and an unstable currency.

 -Mao Zedong: On Ten Major Relationships; April 25, 1956

Mao however never really criticised the way collectivisation was done in the Soviet Union (at least I am not aware of any direct criticism). Maurice Meisner's book however states, that Chinese communists were indeed aware of the problem of forced collectivisation. This "collectivisation from above" would result in a break-up of the Worker-Peasant-Alliance which is the pillar of the DotP. Maoist such as Bettelheim criticise the Soviet collectivisation and uphold Chinas collectivisation against them, most Maoists however are fond of both the Soviet and the Chinese collectivisation.

I entirely agree on the point, that Chinese collectivisation was voluntary and pretty much in line with Lenin's NEP. First of all a land reform was needed to return the plot to their owners, the peasant. This resulted in a huge mass of individual, isolated middle peasants and so called small production. At next agriculture had to be centralised and the peasant economy had to be incorporated into the state industry, i.e. here begins the struggle of the peasant against the Kulak and NEPman (speculants). The state has to win over the peasantry by giving them more profitable ways of organising their commodities and access to a better market, in no way should the state impose its policies from above on the peasantry and interfere into this class struggle. Centralisation is the main aspect here, if capitalism is the separation of the producer from his means of production then socialism is the integration of both into each other, i.e. it includes the total centralisation of the means of production into the hands of the proletarian state. Peasant individualism and small production are the absolute opposite of this, they entrench capitalist forms.

The People's Commune was not entirely of petty-artisanal kind, as its Russian counterpart - the Kolkhoz - but it did definitely entrench small production within China to a non-negligible extent. First of all we need to consider that the Commune, as much property it had "socialised" within itself, remained an individual producer. The Communes sold their products between themselves and the state. The fact that they used labour vouchers does not change the fact that the law of value was operating behind this exchange (as between all exchange in the capitalist mode of production). Thus the Communes never really abolished capitalist relations but instead even affirmed them. Furthermore the state was weakened in favour of these Communes:

The centralized bureaucratic economic apparatus was partially dismantled in favor of relative autonomy and decision-making authority for localities and basic production units. Administrative offices were emptied as officials were "sent down" (xiafang) to engage in manual labor on farms and in factories in the name of "simple administration."

-Maurice Meisner: Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic

We see henceforth that the Chinese state weakened itself in favour of the individual producer, for me a simple formula applies "whoever owns the land owns the state" (which was mentioned in Bordiga's work "The Solution of Bukharin"); there is a reason why Lenin favoured the nationalisation of all land in the April Theses. There are more interesting aspects of the Commune, the mobilisation of male peasants for irrigation and construction work left the women in the Communes to do the farm labour and other kinds of work on the plot. While this is a progress from the feudalist and patriarchal hierarchy that persisted in China before the Great Leap Forward, it is clearly a sign of capitalist relations, as capitalism demands an intense mobilisation of productive forces and a lengthening (i.e. intensification) of the work-day. The People's Commune is indeed something special and I could go into whole lengths talking about it. For my analysis of capitalist relations in China it warrants however, that the Commune was not the step forward that one could have expected, if gone the Leninist path of the development of the countryside.

Dialectics and Philosophy - Confusionism

I want to take away preliminary, that Maoist dialectics and epistemology is quite diverse and complicated. It ranges from simply narrating Stalin and Engels and their naive realism to the paradigm theory of Kuhn (as J. Moufawad-Paul explains in his book "Continuity and Rupture) to a purism containing Mao's philosophical notebooks and writings. There are however some connections and identical content.

One rather essential aspect is the reduction of "Engel's 3 Laws of Dialectics" to the Law of Contradiction. It states that the most fundamental and basic law of dialectics is the unity of opposites. Life and death e.g. are intrinsically connected through their opposition, where there is life there must also be death. Everything is interconnected through the principle of contradiction. Most importantly development has to be grasped through the contradiction, has a thing no inner contradiction, then there can be no movement, no development. External causes can only give rise to "mechanical movement" i.e. movement with no change in quality. 

The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.

-On Contradiction

Indeed this is a gigantic step forward from Engels! His reduction of dialects to "3 laws" is nonsense. Imagine someone would reduce natural sciences into three laws:

1. Matter attracts each other 

2. The speed of light is absolute

3. Organic entities replicate

Dialectics are not a method, not a formula that one can apply towards everything around him. These laws are already products of thought and just describing our process of thought and not dialectics itself. Why does Hegel call his philosophy a "logic"? Because it is the thinking of thinking and that is also the reason why he starts with the Science of Logic:

Logic on the contrary, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection and laws of thinking, for these constitute part of its own content and have first to be established within the science. But not only the account of scientific method, but even the Notion itself of the science as such belongs to its content, and in fact constitutes its final result; what logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge of what it is first emerge as the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition.

-Hegel, Science of Logic §33

Logic generates itself through thinking and reflection, these laws and definitions are the outcome of the logic and not its method. This is however also the reason why both Engels and Mao are wrong on this matter, even the law of contradiction is a product of thought, it cannot be presupposed in the logical activity. All laws are part of the whole and dialectics would be nothing without these laws, however it is important to recognise, that dialectics as a whole cannot be reduced to these individual laws, as there are numerous, possibly infinite laws within it. Instead one has to regard the whole and its single parts.

If you think that this might just be "Hegelian nonsense" then you might find the same logic in Marx's Kapital. He starts with the commodity, the smallest unit of bourgeois society and the most one-sided, abstract thing. He sees in the commodity a useful object, which fulfils a human want. However the very notion of use-value implies the existence of another thing in bourgeois society: Exchange-value. Thus use-value is suspended during exchange, for the only thing that matter during the act are the exchange-values of the commodities. However use-value is not simply destroyed or extinguished, it still remains and becomes the material bearer of exchange-value. Thus we have {use-value}-{exchange-value}, both are not destroyed, yet are opposites that find their differentiated unity in another thing: The commodity. Marx makes no presupposition in his logic or any "axioms", his development of this concept "the commodity" is simply conceptual/logical i.e. he starts with one non-determined thing and in the process of inquiry connects more concepts to it and determines it even further. We find that after we have seen the movement from the commodity to use- and exchange-value back to the real, actual commodity, that it is the differentiated unity and we do not assume that this is the case before analysing it.