Mao Zedong?

[safeduck]

Do you think Mao Zedong was a good leader. I see these as the pros and cons of him:

Pros - Industrialised China.
Got rid of Japanese invaders.
Provided a better standard of living for most of the Chinese people.
United China.

Cons - His mistakes in the great leap forward resulted in millions of deaths.
His Cultural Revolution led to mass murder.
It seems like he used a lot of propaganda to brainwash his people.

So what do you guys think Mao Zedong? What about Maoism also?

[Black_Rose]

Do you think Mao Zedong was a good leader. I see these as the pros and cons of him:

Pros - Industrialised China.
Got rid of Japanese invaders.
Provided a better standard of living for most of the Chinese people.
United China.

Cons - His mistakes in the great leap forward resulted in millions of deaths.
His Cultural Revolution led to mass murder.
It seems like he used a lot of propaganda to brainwash his people.

So what do you guys think Mao Zedong? What about Maoism also?
Mao is a great revolutionary, a good political philosopher and guerrilla warfare theorist, and a poor administrator.

[Krano]

Probably the greatest Guerilla warfare fighter, but not that great leader of a country.

[mrmikhail]

Probably the greatest Guerilla warfare fighter, but not that great leader of a country.

This is about all that he can be praised for (though perhaps not the greatest). His policies of not irritating Chinese peasants while fighting the civil war is also to be praised I suppose, it was at least logical (Whereas Nationalist forces just stole outright from peasants).

Otherwise though the GLF was just stupidity, led to mass famine, the industry it did create produced mostly grossly substandard wares. The cultural revolution was nothing more than an attempt to get the political power he had lost after his failed policies back, nothing but mass murder as you stated. His later policies, such as opening up to the west led to the Capitalism it has today, and so on.

Also as I said with the GLF the industry he did create was not up to any standard, it did improve with Soviet help, but China's modern industrial capacity came with US and western investment after the Mao-Nixon meetings.

[farleft]

I think the China we see today has much more to do with Deng Xiaoping then it does Mao.

[Broletariat]

Great romantic bourgeois revolutionary in an era when bourgeois revolution was impossible.

Who cares about his skills as a leader, did he abolish Value relationships (the fact that we're talking about one man doing this is a pretty damning fact)? No? Then he was a Capitalist.

[ColonelCossack]

I always thought it was "Tse-Tung", not "Zedong".

Not that it really matters, or is relevant...

As people have said, I think he was an excellent revolutionary, but not that good at leading the country. though he's by far preferable to Xiaoping, in my opinion.

[ColonelCossack]

Great romantic bourgeois revolutionary in an era when bourgeois revolution was impossible.

Who cares about his skills as a leader, did he abolish Value relationships (the fact that we're talking about one man doing this is a pretty damning fact)? No? Then he was a Capitalist.

Marx didn't "Abolish" any value relationships, nor did Bakunin or anyone like that- they (strongly) advocated their abolishment. Does that make them capitalists?

[Bronco]

Marx didn't "Abolish" any value relationships, nor did Bakunin or anyone like that- they (strongly) advocated their abolishment. Does that make them capitalists?

Didn't realise that Marx had held power in a country for almost three decades

[ColonelCossack]

Didn't realise that Marx had held power in a country for almost three decades

Good point. :blushing:

However, I do think that Mao wanted to abolish value relationships, and the reason he didn't was probably for practical reasons like, oh, I don't know, the whole bourgeois world being against him. Also, it might take more than three decades to wholly abolish value relationships, especially when you consider that China wasn't industrialised and he didn't have unlimited resources. There would still be bourgeois elements in China after the revolution, as shown by the fact that China is now capitalist, and it would not have been easy to totally eliminate these.

[mrmikhail]

I always thought it was "Tse-Tung", not "Zedong".


"Zedong" and "Tse-Tung" are both transliterations of his name and accepted as correct.

[ColonelCossack]

"Zedong" and "Tse-Tung" are both transliterations of his name and accepted as correct.

OK I see.

Phonetically, which is more accurate?

[mrmikhail]

Good point. :blushing:

However, I do think that Mao wanted to abolish value relationships, and the reason he didn't was probably for practical reasons like, oh, I don't know, the whole bourgeois world being against him. Also, it might take more than three decades to wholly abolish value relationships, especially when you consider that China wasn't industrialised and he didn't have unlimited resources. There would still be bourgeois elements in China after the revolution, as shown by the fact that China is now capitalist, and it would not have been easy to totally eliminate these.

Mao also had to deal with problems within his party challenging his leadership (namely Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping) who wanted to do as the Vietnamese had done with Ho Chi Mihn and keep him on as a token figure head leader with symbolic, rather than actual power. Even while Mao was "in power" these men opened up trade with the West and tried to end many of Mao's programs...which led Mao to call for the Cultural Revolution and then his eventual loss of power entirely.

but was Mao a capitalist? no. his China was a deformed worker's state, not a capitalist state.

[mrmikhail]

OK I see.

Phonetically, which is more accurate?

I believe they, again, are both correct as the "ze-dong" and "tse-tung" have the nearly same sound when pronounced

[Broletariat]

Good point. :blushing:

However, I do think that Mao wanted to abolish value relationships, and the reason he didn't was probably for practical reasons like, oh, I don't know, the whole bourgeois world being against him. Also, it might take more than three decades to wholly abolish value relationships, especially when you consider that China wasn't industrialised and he didn't have unlimited resources. There would still be bourgeois elements in China after the revolution, as shown by the fact that China is now capitalist, and it would not have been easy to totally eliminate these.

The fact that we're talking about the desires of one man is all that needs to be seen.

The whole china affair clearly had nothing to do with Communism.

[Potato]

OK I see.

Phonetically, which is more accurate?

Well, neither is really more accurate because it's a matter of what transliteration system we use but if we use English orthography (I'm guessing that's what you meant) then I'd say Tse-Tung is closer. Still, I'd prefer using Zedong becuse that's the form using pinyin, the official and more widespread transliteration system. The same system that uses Beijing instead of Peking.

[ColonelCossack]

The fact that we're talking about the desires of one man is all that needs to be seen.

The whole china affair clearly had nothing to do with Communism.

But people like Marx etc. were all individuals that wanted rid of capitalism, too. Do we write them off as well?

Anyway, I'm repeating myself, so whatev. :p

[S.Artesian]

I think the China we see today has much more to do with Deng Xiaoping then it does Mao.


I think Deng Xiaoping has much more to do with Mao than Maoists care to admit.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

FWIW, "Tse Tung" is the older transliteration system known as Wade-Giles. "Ze dong" is the Pin yin system, favored by the PRC government. Until a few years ago the ROC govts on Taiwan held out and used Wade-Giles, now they also use Pinyin. Pinyin is much closer phonetically to spoken Mandarin but (IMHO) neither system is that good.

Also, Mao did not expel the Japanese from China. Japanese imperialism was slowed down greatly by fierce resistance but only left China after the Japanese empire collapsed.

Mao in his later years and the PRC leadership was desperately searching for a way out of the contradictions China was facing. Dengism was the chosen way out.This of course, created a new set of contradictions.

[Nox]

He was a great guy who did alot for the workers of China, however under his rule China was not socialist. It's the same story with Castro, the Bolsheviks, etc

[Nox]

OK I see.

Phonetically, which is more accurate?

They are both just as accurate.

In my opinion, it's much easier to learn to pronounce Chinese correctly using pinyin.

[Broletariat]

But people like Marx etc. were all individuals that wanted rid of capitalism, too. Do we write them off as well?

Anyway, I'm repeating myself, so whatev. :p

Marx actually wanted rid of Capitalism as per his actions, Mao on the other hand......

[promethean]

Do you think Mao Zedong was a good leader. He may have been a great leader, but he was the leader of a capitalist state.


I see these as the pros and cons of him:

Pros - Industrialised China.
Got rid of Japanese invaders.
Provided a better standard of living for most of the Chinese people.
United China.

Cons - His mistakes in the great leap forward resulted in millions of deaths.
His Cultural Revolution led to mass murder.
It seems like he used a lot of propaganda to brainwash his people.
Mao did not get rid of the Japanese invaders. In the Second Sino-Japanese war, which was the name given to the war fought by the invading Japanese and the Chinese, the stalinists in the CPC and the nationalists in the KMT, formed a Second united front, which lasted till the end of World War II. In this war, the KMT was the larger force and suffered more casualties. Mao was not really a very well known or important figure even within the CPC until about 1937, when after the Long March, he settled in Yan'an and began to publish his works and cultivate a personality cult, which lived on well after his death. He later got rid of any potential challengers, like Peng Dehuai, and established his unquestioned leadership.


What about Maoism also?Maoism is the name given to the theories of Mao Zedong. It was the official state ideology of the Chinese state.


He was a great guy who did alot for the workers of China, however under his rule China was not socialist. It's the same story with Castro, the Bolsheviks, etcHe did not actually do much for workers, as far as I know. In his early days (early 1920s), he did participate in the forming of trade unions of mining workers, but later gave up working among the working class entirely and concentrated on the country side and helping peasants in their struggles against landlords to obtain land for individual cultivation. The CPC itself had little to do with the working class after 1927. When the Shanghai Commune was crushed and many communists were slaughtered by Chain Kai Shek, most of the surviving communists fled to the countryside and abandoned any connections to the working class. After becoming the boss of the new capitalist state, Mao ruthlessly repressed any sort of working class opposition and banned all strikes. This banning of strikes happened in every other stalinist state.

[promethean]

It is also to interesting to note that the founder of the CPC in 1920, Chen Duxiu, considered in China to be the Father of Chinese communism, joined the Trotskyist international Left Opposition in 1927. He later abandoned Trotskyism as well and became a sort of libertarian socialist, though he continued to support the Allies in the second World War.

See: Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International (http://www.marxists.org/archive/broue/1983/09/chenduxiu.htm).

[tbasherizer]

There's something about Mao that I admire. His sheer ruthlessness and willingness to use massive force to absolutely crush his enemies in every respect is morbidly fascinating. He managed to ride the tumultuous waves of Chinese history, only losing when he died at an old age.

That aside, the only thing I really dig about him ideologically is the idea of mass line, or at least my interpretation of it. The quasi-two-way exchange of ideas between the party and the people has given my interesting ideas for agitprop techniques. I can't really evaluate him in the somewhat meta terms I'm seeing him described in here, as I can't be totally sure how many deaths he was directly responsible for, whether those deaths were intentional or accidental, and a bunch of other factors.

He really mangled Marxism though, and contributed to the propaganda arsenals of anti-communists, so I think the world communist movement would have been better without him.

[RED DAVE]

Anyone who thinks that Maoism is a worthwhile offshoot of Marxism, I urge to try to form a left-wing organization and put fortha revolutionary strategy based on the works of Mao.

What you will discover, if you are honest, that politically you end up not with the working class but in another place entirely, straddling, at best the working class and other classes and, at worst, in an alliance against the working class.

Pay no attention to rhetoric, Maoist or any other kind. Watch what political groups do. For example, any Maoist (or any other Marxist) who has paid attention to events in Nepal, should be deeply politically nauseated at what happened.

RED DAVE

[Homo Songun]

Anyone who thinks that Maoism is a worthwhile offshoot of Marxism, I urge to try to form a left-wing organization and put fortha revolutionary strategy based on the works of Mao.
:laugh:



Pay no attention to rhetoric, Maoist or any other kind. Watch what political groups do. For example, any Maoist (or any other Marxist) who has paid attention to events in Nepal, should be deeply politically nauseated at what happened.

True. Although its more like political indigestion for me personally. :D That said, Mao is no more responsible for Prachanda's hijinks than Trotsky is for Gerry Healy being a rapist and a sociopath.

At any rate, since the "capitalist" UCPNM's "betrayal" of the Revolution for parliamentary cretinism, they have passed laws ending hereditary debt, bondage to the land, and discrimination of LGBT people, amongst other nauseating things... I'd say if it gives a grouchy old Trot an upset stomach, so be it :D

[Mike X]

Chairman Mao was a great leader and visionary!

However, beware of the 'cult of personality' which is the antithesis of socialism. It is not the efforts of any one individual but the everyday work of the Party that is essential for successful revolution.

'Great leaders' are speakers who give voice to the correct Party Line. The erroneous idea of the 'cult of personality' will eventually result in failure for the Socialist cause. The proof of this is obviously Stalin-ism in the USSR.

What a wonderful thing the USSR could have been were it not for the 'cult of personality', combined with a mindless bureaucracy....

[Homo Songun]

Marx didn't "Abolish" any value relationships, nor did Bakunin or anyone like that- they (strongly) advocated their abolishment. Does that make them capitalists?

Did not Marx say of Socialism:


...the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

?

Although to be honest, I don't understand what Broletariat means by 'abolish Value relationships' and why that is his criterion for socialism instead of Marx's, which is (by most accounts) the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat)

[Jose Gracchus]

Labour vouchers are not money (no more than a "train ticket" is), and even the "lower phase" of communism (identical with Marxian socialism) does away with value, capital, money, and commodity production. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the class rule of the proletariat under capitalism, until the abolition of the existing order of things and the formation of a material human community. One is free to dismiss the Marxian account, if one wishes to. But you will seldom get good reasons why Marx should be butchered and prostituted for this-or-that Great Leader's opportunism or abandoned in favor of some new utopian or bourgeois socialism.

[Black_Rose]

Jose, I respect your erudition.

Could you comment on this:

www.henryckliu.com/page115.html (http://www.henryckliu.com/page115.html) (Mao and Lincoln: Demon and Deity)
www.henryckliu.com/page116.html (http://www.henryckliu.com/page116.html) (Mao and Lincoln: Great Leap Forward not all bad)

Best wishes...

[Hiero]

Maoism is the name given to the theories of Mao Zedong. It was the official state ideology of the Chinese state.

I was called Mao-Zedong Thought.

[Hiero]

Anyone who thinks that Maoism is a worthwhile offshoot of Marxism, I urge to try to form a left-wing organization and put fortha revolutionary strategy based on the works of Mao.

What you will discover, if you are honest, that politically you end up not with the working class but in another place entirely, straddling, at best the working class and other classes and, at worst, in an alliance against the working class.

Pay no attention to rhetoric, Maoist or any other kind. Watch what political groups do. For example, any Maoist (or any other Marxist) who has paid attention to events in Nepal, should be deeply politically nauseated at what happened.

RED DAVE

They will also take our jobs!

[black magick hustla]

, they have passed laws ending hereditary debt, bondage to the land, and discrimination of LGBT people, amongst other nauseating things... I'd say if it gives a grouchy old Trot an upset stomach, so be it :D

:shrugs: nothing particularly unique, you dont have to have anticapitalist rhetoric to do that

[RED DAVE]

Pay no attention to rhetoric, Maoist or any other kind. Watch what political groups do. For example, any Maoist (or any other Marxist) who has paid attention to events in Nepal, should be deeply politically nauseated at what happened.
True. Although its more like political indigestion for me personally. :D That said, Mao is no more responsible for Prachanda's hijinks than Trotsky is for Gerry Healy being a rapist and a sociopath. Actually, clever as the quip is, it's dead wrong.

It can be systematically shown, and it hs been shown here on many threads, both before and after the pariliamentary betrayal by the UCPN(M), that they were, in fact, following the key element of Maoism, the bloc of four classes, which yokes the working class with the "native' bourgeoisie and leads to the triumph of the latter. This is what happened in China, and it's what happened in Nepal.

And, his affair with Frieda Kahlo notwithstanding, Trotsky did not advocate rape, nor was he a psychopath.


At any rate, since the "capitalist" UCPNM's "betrayal" of the Revolution for parliamentary cretinism, they have passed laws ending hereditary debt, bondage to the land, and discrimination of LGBT people, amongst other nauseating things... I'd say if it gives a grouchy old Trot an upset stomach, so be it :DAny liberal capitalist regime can do the same. And what you are doing is making my point: that Maoism is the left cover for state capitalism and/or private capitalism.

RED DAVE

[Homo Songun]

:shrugs: nothing particularly unique, you dont have to have anticapitalist rhetoric to do that
Right on two counts, since we are talking about antifeudal acts as opposed to anticapitalist rhetoric. But as I said, nauseating, who cares, etc.

[Homo Songun]

Labour vouchers are not money (no more than a "train ticket" is), and even the "lower phase" of communism (identical with Marxian socialism) does away with value, capital, money, and commodity production.

This is false, Marx explicitly states that labor continues to be a commodity under Socialism.

But I think the bigger issue is that while Marx was indeed a prophet, he was far too scientific of a thinker to think of socialism as being some kind of Rapture, after all one of his most famous quotes:


What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

He does accept the word "certificate" while criticizing the German social democrats programme, but in the overall context of that particular passage he is drawing the exact opposite conclusion that you seem to be doing:


Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

The "real relation" being of course, class rule.


The dictatorship of the proletariat is the class rule of the proletariat under capitalism, until the abolition of the existing order of things and the formation of a material human community.

It seems unlikely to me that Marx makes capitalism a necessary condition of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, given that elsewhere he equates it with Socialism aka the lower stage of communism.


One is free to dismiss the Marxian account, if one wishes to. But you will seldom get good reasons why Marx should be butchered and prostituted for this-or-that Great Leader's opportunism or abandoned in favor of some new utopian or bourgeois socialism.

Ironically, you have more in common with the Utopians than Marx here. But if ignoring key components of Marx makes it easier for you to bang on Mao, then I guess its a trade-off. :shrugs:

[Jose Gracchus]

Marx specifically indicated socialism, or any change in material social relations, cannot be simply 'enacted' by decree. How, logically speaking, can it be consistent with the event of the 'seizure of power', therefore?

Lenin never claimed soviet power was identical with the lower phase of communism. Even Marxist-Leninists do not believe the USSR "constructed socialism" [supposedly identified with the lower phase of Marxian communism/socialism, yet retaining commodity production] until the 1930s. Yet no one disputes that the ML line was that the dictatorship of the proletariat was established in October 1917. Therefore, how could "socialism" be equivalent to "the dictatorship of the proletariat" if the latter came without the former for over twenty years?

But please, quote-and-word-monger. I am not strongly connected with the use of Marx as a doctrinal incantation or marketing gimmick. I am simply pointing out how Maoism cannot really be considered to be reconcilable with Marxian categories, as they are defined, as a matter of fact. Yet you elect to speak logical absurdities (see above) and quote-monger. I believe it is you who is afraid of letting go of the "Marx" brand-name.

[S.Artesian]

This is false, Marx explicitly states that labor continues to be a commodity under Socialism.

Reference please. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme he states that:


Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products.... since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labor

Clearly, with socialism, labor power is no longer organized as a commodity, as a source for exchange.

When he talks about the new society emerging from the old, its transition, here too Marx is explicit that labor does not exist as value, as the system of production is no longer value production.

Moreover, the labor certificate is NOT money in that it cannot command the labor of others. It is not a trading platform; its is not an exchange relationship.



It seems unlikely to me that Marx makes capitalism a necessary condition of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, given that elsewhere he equates it with Socialism aka the lower stage of communism.



Again, please explain. Capitalism and the proletariat are expression of the relationship of labor to the conditions of labor; labor to the means of its own reproduction. Neither exists without the other... so how could capitalism not be a necessary condition for the achievement of the class rule of the proletariat?

Unless of course, what so many misperceive as "feudalism" "neo-feudalism" "semi-feudalism" is actually capitalism running up against the limits of its own organization, the limits of its own ability to reproduce its relations of classes.. unless of course what appears as semi-feudalism etc. is really the uneven and combined development of capitalism. In that case uneven and combined development is an international manifestation of capital's growth, penetration and the limits to that growth, and then the solution to the problem is in the international extension of the proletarian revolution.

Again in TCotGP, Marx doesn't equate "socialism" with dictatorship of the proletariat, or with the "lower stage of communism." He talks of communist society as it emerges from capitalist society. He describes how the rough egalitarianism of this lower stage is a necessary, but still limited development. He contrasts the emergence to the developed "higher phase of communism."

IIRC, the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" does not appear in TCotGP, and Marx hardly uses the word "socialism" at all-- and when he does it uses it almost sneeringly as if the word itself betrays the ignorance and superficiality behind the Gotha Programme.

So where does Marx equate dictatorship of the proletariat with communism?

[Homo Songun]

Clearly, with socialism, labor power is no longer organized as a commodity, as a source for exchange.
Not exactly. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/mao-zedongi-t165332/index.html?p=2311830#post2311830)


...what so many misperceive as "feudalism" "neo-feudalism" "semi-feudalism" is actually capitalism running up against the limits of its own organization, the limits of its own ability to reproduce its relations of classes.. unless of course what appears as semi-feudalism etc. is really the uneven and combined development of capitalism. In that case uneven and combined development is an international manifestation of capital's growth, penetration and the limits to that growth, and then the solution to the problem is in the international extension of the proletarian revolution.

Really Sartesian, you should be a little ashamed of yourself. I've seen more than one poster here patiently explain to you the Maoist concept of 'semi-feudalism' in precisely these terms, mainly because that is what they actually mean by it. But what exactly is this tangent apropos of?


So where does Marx equate dictatorship of the proletariat with communism?

I never claimed this, so it's not something I have to answer for. Jose Gracchus claimed that Marx wrote of the DoTP as being necessarily capitalist, so I asked him to point out where this happened. I suspect we'll be waiting for some time. Actually, the dictatorship of the proletariat is Socialism, the period of workers' rule still marked by various "birthmarks of the old society", for example, exchanges of commodified labor.

[S.Artesian]

Not exactly. (http://www.revleft.com/vb/mao-zedongi-t165332/index.html?p=2311830#post2311830)


You emphasize the wrong part of that statement Mr. Katz. Try this:

[QUOTE]But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.


Marx in his reference to "distribution of the latter" is speaking of the individual means of consumption.

Labor organized as a commodity is labor-power expressed as wage-labor for the production of value, for the accumulation of value separate and apart from the satisfaction of need or use. Marx does not speak of labor receiving a wage, but receiving a portion of the total social working day. And this portion, in the "first phase" of communism is not determined by individual effort, intensity, etc. but simply through being a constituent part of the social working day.

Marx says:


The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. That equality of exchange exists, under capitalism, with all commodities [as an ideal, abstract, or average condition] except with the exchange with labor-power. If such a condition could exist under capitalism-- there would be no surplus value to aggrandize; objects of production would not exist as commodities. There would simply be no capital.

The "principle" of the exchange of commodity-equivalents is a principle that obscures the reality of the exchange between capital and wage-labor. The laborers do not received the same amount of labour which they have provided. They receive the equivalent to only a portion of that labor-- the portion equivalent to the means of subsistence necessary to reproduce them as laborers.

That's why in TCotGP, labor vouchers do not function as money-- because labor-power is no longer a commodity, bought and sold.







Really Sartesian, you should be a little ashamed of yourself. I've seen more than one poster here patiently explain to you the Maoist concept of 'semi-feudalism' in precisely these terms, mainly because that is what they actually mean by it. But what exactly is this tangent apropos of?


Really Shmuel, you should know by now that I am completely shameless. You've seen more than one poster obscure the significance of uneven and combined development in order to justify the ideological commitment to class collaboration with the bourgeoisie and suppression of workers movements. This is apropos of the subject of Mao Zedong, just to refresh your memory.



I never claimed this, so it's not something I have to answer for. Jose Gracchus claimed that Marx wrote of the DoTP as being necessarily capitalist, so I asked him to point out where this happened. I suspect we'll be waiting for some time. Actually, the dictatorship of the proletariat is Socialism, the period of workers' rule still marked by various "birthmarks of the old society", for example, exchanges of commodified labor.


What you've claimed is the dictatorship of the proletariat is immediately socialist, proposing "socialism" as somehow distinct from communism.

You propose this "socialism" so that you can ideologically justify the assertion that socialism requires labor-power to continue to be expressed in value production as a commodity itself. Marx explicitly rejects this in the CotGP.

Marx points to the limitations of the "lower phase" of communism in that its suppression of value production, suppression of labor-power as a commodity is unfinished, incomplete, constrained by the very principle of equality in distribution that emerges in overthrowing the organizing principle of of capitalist production.

In short you call it, as Mao did, "socialism," but in practice your socialists, like Mao's, become nothing but the historical analogue-- different origin, same function--of capitalism's capitalists

[Aurora]

Great romantic bourgeois revolutionary in an era when bourgeois revolution was impossible.

If Mao was a bourgeois revolutionary but bourgeois revolution was impossible then what was the nature of the Chinese Revolution? Contradictory no?





IIRC, the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" does not appear in TCotGP,
It does, one of the few times it appears, "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

[Jose Gracchus]

Who cares? No power or political current in history, practically speaking, identified "socialism" with the "dictatorship of the proletariat", to say nothing of the fact, as shown earlier, that even the Stalinists contend that the DOTP existed since Oct 1917, but socialism was only successfully constructed in the 1930s.

The same goes for Mao's rule in China (which I might add was inaugurated with promises to integrate the 'progressive bourgeoisie', make a thorough 'democratic revolution', and all-in-all not repudiate capital ownership unless they must). In fact, the development of a fully-integrated model on the Stalinist form was more a reaction to the abandonment of the mainland economy by the indigenous bourgeoisie and the stranglehold Western imperial capital had on global trade, isolating and withholding trade from the new Chinese state. Like in Cuba, the geopolitical tendencies as such were to oblige a power unable to participate in the Western system to develop an autarchic USSR-model for development.

Furthermore, "semi-feudalism" is simply logical idiocy and totally illiterate. It is just a Stalinist watchword for anything that gives them the excuse to reduce themselves to the task of 1790s Jacobins, and claim a land-reform gives them Marxoid street credit. It is devoid of substantive content.

[Homo Songun]

This conversation is taking on an air of the ridiculous, a sure sign of a priori ideological commitments being in play. It is really simple actually, and it doesn't require any exegesis of how much weight Marx intended for a particular clause of one of his sentences. The issue is how to define socialism. On the one hand, the "left" communist line here can be not unfairly summed up as:


even the "lower phase" of communism (identical with Marxian socialism) does away with value, capital, money, and commodity production.On this view, socialism is bound up with a particular arrangement of distribution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Marx never hewed to this. He clearly ridiculed the utopians (Lasalle and company) in the Critique of the Gotha Programme that mistook secondary contradictions of socialism (money, "tickets", whatever) for the primary one (in actuality, which class rules). It bears repeating:


Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

Socialism's relevant characteristic is the dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the transition between the prior mode of the means of production and Communism, and as such is a continuum towards some end, not a predetermined state of affairs regarding distribution. While socialism is not a zero-sum game, because the workers either rule or they do not, workers rule does not automatically invalidate the fact that, in Marx's words, Socialism "emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges." A series of edicts abolishing this or that cannot preclude "fifteen, twenty, fifty years" of struggle to change "existing conditions, but also to change yourselves" (Marx). That is why the USSR claimed to building Socialism rather than enacting it. As Lenin put it, Communism does not happen "at one stroke, by a miracle, at the bidding of the Virgin Mary, at the bidding of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in the course of a long and difficult mass struggle." But that is the difference between a scientific attitude and striking a pose.

The difficulty for "left" communists here is that if they acknowledge Marx in this regard it puts Mao (whatever his warts) in a much more reasonable light than they care for. Thus the silly gyrations. Not my problem, though. :rolleyes:

[Jose Gracchus]

How come neither Stalin nor Mao thought that socialism was equivalent to the DOTP? As noted before, no one disputes the DOTP in Oct 1917, but 'socialism', is said to be constructed in the 1930s. But I guess that's "left communism" at work. I think Stalin's a revisionist too, since he proposed socialism could be achieved in a single country, where the state, money, commodities, and purportedly "non-antagonistic classes" still existed. The point being that socialism has never been identified, even my Maoists historically, as identical with the dictatorship of the proletariat. For instance, Maoists purport that the working-class is dominant in both "new democracy" and "socialism", so both would exhibit the DOTP as per Mao, while obviously the DOTP is not identical with socialism, which is your claim.

I mean the examples are literally endless. The Paris Commune was "the dictatorship of the proletariat", the "political constitution" for the "emancipation of labor", yet Marx held it was "not socialist" and could not be.

You're playing word-games so you can make up some novel definition of socialism ex nihilo, that even your infamously bankrupt sectarian wing does not uphold. Since it is some ad hoc fabrication you came up with, I don't see why anyone should take it seriously. You're just whistling Dixie out of your ass and hoping no one notices

Socialism is not "[working]* class rule" since by definition socialism is the abolition of classes. So no, it has nothing to do with secondary attributes of distribution, but with the fact that the abolition of capitalist relations and thus classes has not yet occurred. If it had, there would be no state, since the state is an apparatus for the rule of classes over other classes, and in socialism there are no classes. Money implies an exchange-economy and private--thus class--property, and thus classes must exist, which means no socialism, since socialism is characterized by the absence of class.

*(Can't take it for granted Maoists aren't going to play hard-and-fast with which class rules, especially given the fiction of the Bloc of Four Classes)

[S.Artesian]

This conversation is taking on an air of the ridiculous, a sure sign of a priori ideological commitments being in play. It is really simple actually, and it doesn't require any exegesis of how much weight Marx intended for a particular clause of one of his sentences. The issue is how to define socialism.

What's ridiculous is that you make claims as to how Marx envisioned a transition, the "lower phase" of communism, and when challenged, you blithely ignore the challenges, and the refutation, continue to skip on down the road.

After all, you were the one who introduced highlighting particular clauses in Marx's writings, all the better to ignore the actual content of the writings; and the actual organization of labor proposed in the writing.

As for the definition of socialism, Marx defines it by the organization of labor, the relation between labor and the condition of labor. If labor-power is a means of exchange, individually or collectively, then you don't have socialism.

But that's important only for those who think Marx was dead serious in his critique of capital in Capital.

[S.Artesian]

Oh.. and Shmuel..... before I forget, this:


While socialism is not a zero-sum game, because the workers either rule or they do not, workers rule does not automatically invalidate the fact that, in Marx's words, Socialism "emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges." A series of edicts abolishing this or that cannot preclude "fifteen, twenty, fifty years" of struggle to change "existing conditions, but also to change yourselves" (Marx). That is why the USSR claimed to building Socialism rather than enacting it. As Lenin put it, Communism does not happen "at one stroke, by a miracle, at the bidding of the Virgin Mary, at the bidding of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in the course of a long and difficult mass struggle." But that is the difference between a scientific attitude and striking a pose.

is just gobbledy-gook obfuscation of the real issue... which is, what has been the result of these so-called efforts at building socialism? The result has been the collapse of, not socialism which certainly had never been achieved, but the remnants of the so-called transition efforts themselves and the restoration of capitalism, a capitalism dominated by the very international capital the "national revolution," the so-called "socialism in one country" was supposed to vanquish from the borders.

Sure a transition takes time, but transition has a real content to it. It actually has to be a transition, moving towards the elimination of labor as a commodity, not to the restoration of that condition. The content of the transitions you endorse, hold up as socialism, is the reversal of revolution.

Now that's the difference between a materialist analysis, and an ideological recuperation.