I'm having doubts with Maoism

[Comrades Unite!]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

[Hexen]

I think you should stick to the source material which is Marxism and ignore everything else (Leninism/Stalinism/Trotskyism/Maoism/etc).

[Comrades Unite!]

Yeah that's what I'm thinking of doing.

I feel Leninism adds the unnecessary Vanguard, Why not just leave it at Proletarian State?

[JPSartre12]

I'm not qualified to answer this question fully, because I'm neither a Maoist nor well-read in Maoist theory. But for what it's worth, let me throw in my two cents :cool:

I would argue that China was never socialist - not before Mao, not during Mao, and not after Mao. Sure, there are Chinese political elements that like to describe themselves as "socialist" and "communist", but that's only a cosmetic title. In practice, China hasn't abolished capitalism, there are still market mechanisms, it is engaged in world-scale trade with capitalist nations, and the means of production are not communally owned by workers and run in a democratic fashion.

I'd say that they have a bit more of an anti-capitalist mentality than in other countries (say, the jingoistic frenzy in the U.S.), but they're still more or less capitalist.

[Art Vandelay]

So let me ask a questions.

Shoot.


1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

The word totalitarian was created in an attempt to discredit communism by linking it with fascism, despite the fact that they are opposite ends of the political spectrum. Which is why I refrain from using it. Mao was indeed an authoritarian, but this is not grounds for criticizing him.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

I think that Maoists sincerely think that their views will lead to the liberation of the working class, yes.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

Mao didn't even get rid of all private property, how anyone could claim it was socialist is beyond me; Mao didn't even claim it was socialist.

[Hexen]

Why not just leave it at Proletarian State

"Proletarian State" is a oxymoron.

[RedHammer]

Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions. Fair criticisms, but make sure you are actually learned in the history and not just basing your criticisms on popular opinions.



1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

No


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?


Yes, but remember, Maoism is in many respects an adaption of Marxism-Leninism to third world conditions. Hence the added focus on the peasant classes.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

We can argue this all day long. What I will say is that China under Mao made some important achievements and lifted a billion people out of the oppression of foreign imperialism.

[Art Vandelay]

"Proletarian State" is a oxymoron.

No its not.

[Comrades Unite!]

Are you sure?Lenin claimed that the bourgeois state was dismantled and the proletariat one will be the one to wither like a whore that lost three dollers.

Nevermind, NRZ arrived on the scene.

[Terminator X]

Yeah that's what I'm thinking of doing.

I feel Leninism adds the unnecessary Vanguard, Why not just leave it at Proletarian State?

Have you studied anarchism?

[Comrades Unite!]

Yeah, I disagree with it.

[RedHammer]

Yes, I disagree with it.

Is your primary aversion to the "Vanguard" an aversion to authoritarianism?

[Comrades Unite!]

Yes my theory of the vanguard is Authoritarian.

[RedHammer]

Yes my theory of the vanguard is Authoritarian.

All revolutions are authoritarian; it's an attempt by one class to seize power and impose their class authority.

[jookyle]

I think the basic tactics of Maoism(but not in say, an orthodox Maoist sense) may still hold validity for contemporary developing/third world nations. However, the "popular democracy" theory I'm very much against.



1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

1. No.

2. Kind of. Maoism was made to tackle the problems China at the time. At the time there was a bigger "peasant" population in China than there were workers. And of course, the plans to make these peasant farmers and what not into industrial workers led to many problems.

3. I think China under Mao was always aiming for socialism but never quite making it there. Whether it was because of Mao's poor decisions or the level of the bourgeoisie allowed into the party because of the new democracy, China was never able to get there, IMO.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

Others talked about why we should not use this term.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

Maoists can be very "for the worker" (as you put it) while I believe Maoism is not "for the worker". Maoist "New Democracy" is a highly class collaborationist doctrine, in my opinion, and should be opposed.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I do not think China was a socialist society. It contained/contains generalized commodity production, the law of value, wage labor, the state, etc.

As for your apprehension to the idea of a party because it is "authoritarian" you may want to know that many view authoritarianism-libertarianism as representing a false dichotomy. For example, communists believe in the confiscation of the property of the bourgeoisie. To the bourgeoisie, this is a very "authoritarian" act while, to the proletariat, this is a "libertarian" act.

The vanguard party, I would argue, is a vitally important organ of proletariat class rule. This party, made up of the most revolutionary and class-conscious members of the proletariat class, would be essential for any revolution and this party could overcome the immediatist and workerist tendencies that can easily show themselves within the factory councils, trade unions, etc.

[Comrades Unite!]

All revolutions are authoritarian; it's an attempt by one class to seize power and impose their class authority.

Yes but that is one class subduing another as Engels so greatly said in his work ''On Authority'' But I feel the Vanguard doesn't work, I don't like the idea of it to be honest.It does seem like a system easily abused

[Brosa Luxemburg]

It does seem like a system easily abused

And the workers' councils, trade unions, etc. don't?

Both systems have their obvious faults, but they have their benefits as well. I think they all have a purpose and a certain relationship with other organs that I would consider to be organs of "proletariat class rule".

[Welshy]

This isn't about maoism but if you are having an aversion to the idea of a vanguard you might want to check out council communism, deleonism, impossibilism SPGB style, or maybe if you are just tired of leninism but still recognize Lenin's contributions you might want to check out orthodox marxism I'm sure DNZ and Ghost Bebel would be more than happy to help you out with questions. You may also want to check out German/Dutch left communism. Most tendencies that aren't Maoism, Brezhnevite Marxism-Leninism, or Trotskyism aren't going to be terribly big or necessarily relevant, some like council communism and deleonism are almost non-existant now, so if you care about size then you aren't going to be too happy.

[Manic Impressive]

The word totalitarian was created in an attempt to discredit communism by linking it with fascism, despite the fact that they are opposite ends of the political spectrum. Which is why I refrain from using it. Mao was indeed an authoritarian, but this is not grounds for criticizing him.
That sounds like some conspiracy theory bullshit. What you smoking?

All revolutions are authoritarian; it's an attempt by one class to seize power and impose their class authority.
The difference being an 'authoritarian regime' is a dictatorship of a small group of people. This is antithetical to Marxism which relies on "the vast majority of the class acting in the best interests of the class". The reason for this is if you try it with a minority you end up with more people fighting you than on your side. Also a revolution is only authoritarian if you happen to be in 0.6% of the world population. It's a semantics argument but you are intentionally misunderstanding what he is saying.

OP do this

I think you should stick to the source material which is Marxism and ignore everything else (Leninism/Stalinism/Trotskyism/Maoism/etc).
Don't listen to me or anyone else, don't take our word for it, go read it and make your own mind up.

(and by It I mean every word Marx ever wrote :lol:)

[Brosa Luxemburg]

I would suggest looking into left communism and/or Orthodox Marxism (the two tendencies that I fall most in-line with) or just say "fuck tendencies" and read the basics of Marx and Engels (which would be the better option if you are new to Marxism).

[Zostrianos]

1) Yes, it's authoritarian, and the main reason why I could never support it

2) No, especially when you consider the millions of people who died because of the Great Leap Forward

3) Real socialism? No. Millions of dead, countless lives destroyed, gratuitous destruction of chinese culture. There's nothing socialist about that. I think Maoism was an abomination, an embarrassment to real Marxism.

[The Douche]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

1) There is no such thing as "totalitarianism" it is just a buzz-word.

2) I think that many Maoists sincerely want the liberation of the working class. I do not think that Maoism provides us with the necessary tools to accomplish that task though.

3) No. I think the masses were mobilized for socialist revolution, but that it was not carried through.



Regarding proletarian states:

What is it? What purpose does it serve? What shape does it take? Under what conditions does it exist?

Why/how would an institution which has no homeland or nation (the proletariat) have a state?

[Comrades Unite!]

I would suggest looking into left communism and/or Orthodox Marxism (the two tendencies that I fall most in-line with) or just say "fuck tendencies" and read the basics of Marx and Engels (which would be the better option if you are new to Marxism).

I think I will just be a Marxist.

[RedHammer]

1) Yes, it's authoritarian, and the main reason why I could never support it

2) No, especially when you consider the millions of people who died because of the Great Leap Forward

3) Real socialism? No. Millions of dead, countless lives destroyed, gratuitous destruction of chinese culture. There's nothing socialist about that. I think Maoism was an abomination, an embarrassment to real Marxism.

Are you going to provide examples and sources for your claims, or what?

[Zostrianos]

Are you going to provide examples and sources for your claims, or what?
Here's for a start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Historical_relics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine

[RedHammer]

Here's for a start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Historical_relics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Famine
No, I meant evidence that he actually intentionally murdered people. People dying from famines =/= murder. People died from famines before Mao, too. They still die from famines in capitalist countries all over the world.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I don't think the great leap forward is an example of Maoism being Anti-worker. It was intended to feed people, it wasn't a scheme to kill them.

[Zostrianos]

No, I meant evidence that he actually intentionally murdered people. People dying from famines =/= murder. People died from famines before Mao, too. They still die from famines in capitalist countries all over the world.

He admitted it himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[121] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-120) However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121) the number of deaths range between 2 million[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121)[123] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-122) and 5 million.[124] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-123)[125] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-124) In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[126] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Philip_Short-125) perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) were sent to "reform through labour" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai) camps where many perished.[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[128] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-127) which were often exceeded.[118] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Yang_Kuisong-117) He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[129] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-128)

Plus there's all the people murdered by the Red Guards in the late 60's

[Ocean Seal]

The most important point about Maoism is that its class basis is not proletarian therefore it cannot claim to be socialism. Maoism is anti-imperialism, a method for developing the third world, not a socialist platform. A socialist platform is fairly close to impossible in the third world.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

He admitted it himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[121] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-120) However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121) the number of deaths range between 2 million[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121)[123] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-122) and 5 million.[124] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-123)[125] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-124) In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[126] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Philip_Short-125) perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) were sent to "reform through labour" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai) camps where many perished.[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[128] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-127) which were often exceeded.[118] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Yang_Kuisong-117) He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[129] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-128)

Plus there's all the people murdered by the Red Guards in the late 60's

That's him killing landlords during the revolution, not him in a room stroking a white cat, while intentionally planning famines to kill millions of people.

[Drosophila]

He admitted it himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[121] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-120)

That source has been demolished by numerous China scholars. I don't really like Maoism, but I don't like bad history either. Copying & pasting paragraphs from Wikipedia might be useful for general information, but not for specific details like this.

[The Jay]

All revolutions are authoritarian; it's an attempt by one class to seize power and impose their class authority.


I've actually had enough with this saying. Using that logic you could call majority-vote democracy authoritarian. A socialist revolution would certainly be authoritarian from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, but not necessarily from the perspective of the proletariat. Talking from the perspective of the bourgeoisie is pointless in most cases, especially on this site. Due to this, saying that authoritarianism is alright just because we support revolution is a conflation of the bourgeois and proletarian perspectives. I want a revolution. I want that revolution to be democratic from my perspective.

[Le Socialiste]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

Totalitarianism has little to no real relevance as a strictly scientific term. It's origins lie in the Italian fascist movements of the 1920s, before it was picked up as a form of anti-communist propaganda by various governments seeking to discredit the left. Maoism isn't totalitarian, but it is collaborationist. It postulates that cooperation between the classes (four, according to Mao) makes for a uniquely harmonious society. It doesn't seek the end of class society, it perpetuates it. It asserts the supersession of those interests most applicable to the material state of the laborer with that of the party. Lastly, Mao appealed to nationalism as a means of furthering and maintaining the revolution. It is, above all else, an aberration.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

No.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

No.


I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

What motions?

[Le Socialiste]

Why/how would an institution which has no homeland or nation (the proletariat) have a state?

Not to nitpick, but the proletariat is hardly an institution.

[Zostrianos]

The anti rightist movement is a good example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Movement

[Yuppie Grinder]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

1) Totalitarian is a meaningless liberal buzzword.

2) No. Maoists might be "for the liberation of the working class", but you could say the same thing about Fabians. They don't have a solid conception of socialism or how to get there.
It's not fanatic cults like Maoism that are going to build the next mass working class socialist movement.

3) No. Under Mao China made a speedy transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism. May died from starvation in the process.

[Ilyich]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

1) As has been said, the word 'totalitarianism' is a liberal invention meant to clump together anything they don't like. By using the myth of totalitarianism, liberals have been able to tie fascism (almost universally agreed to be evil) to anything else they don't like (often a workers' state either in the process of building socialism or restoring capitalism) thereby dragging it down to fascism's evil level. Despite its obviously reactionary origins, however, I do find there are times and places for the use of the word 'totalitarianism' and I do know what you meant when you asked the first question. So, is Maoism totalitarian or does it advocate totalitarianism? No, I might say it advocates authoritarianism as it supports the subjection of certain classes (the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) by certain other classes (the peasantry and the proletariat). I consider "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_65.htm) an interesting piece. The question of the existence of 'totalitarianism' in Mao's China is a complicated one and it cannot be answered in a forum post. It takes a book. However, I will say that, whatever the nature of Mao's China, it vastly improved the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants and workers, enormous compared to those executed, imprisoned or otherwise repressed.

2) If by worker you mean proletarian, then not really. Maoism is not so much a doctrine for the liberation of workers in advanced industrial capitalist countries as it is for third world peasants.

3) No, that is all I have to say.

[Homo Songun]

On casualties in the Great Leap Forward, an accounting that runs counter to prevailing bourgeois opinion:

http://www.maoists.org/mao.htm

I think Joseph Ball's reasoning is compelling. But the interesting thing for me whether or not you agree with him is his description of how the received opinion about the allegations of millions of deaths really only picked up steam in the 1980s. This coincides quite neatly with the geopolitical needs of the imperialists vis-a-vis the changing role of the Soviet Union in this time period. We should be cautious about swallowing claims without firm evidence, even if we oppose Maoism. What goes by "common knowledge", or rather bourgeois opinion any any given topic, goes through similar twists and turns according to the prevailing trends. Just look at anarchism. In the 1880s, it was all bearded bomb-throwers, and nowadays we have all this nonsense about Black Blocs and green scares.

On the block of 4 classes, New Democracy and the like:

In the first place, these concepts weren't really a prescription for Chinese society, it was a description of what was really going on. "Seek truth from facts." Due to the nature of capitalism in the third world, the proletariat would have to command any successful revolution. The main thing Mao prescribed in this case was simply that the proletariat should have an independent line.

In the second place, "class collaboration" in virtue of itself is not a negative nor a positive thing. As the poster islandmilitia points out here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/permanent-revolution-and-t173036/index.html?p=2470193#post2470193), it depends on who is collaborating on behalf of whom. When Trotsky incorporated the Czarist officer caste into the Red Army, he held their families hostage as an insurance policy. That ensured their collaboration with the Bolsheviks, did it not? So from the perspective of the Leninists at least, it was hardly a negative. (IMO, it caused later problems, but it stopped the Black Hundreds and the imperialists so w/e)

People should read the source documents on New Democracy and the United Front for themselves. They are very concise and not difficult to read. They very easily disprove that Mao somehow advocates or proposes that some other class than the working class leads the revolution and society. As he says, "the revolution cannot succeed without the modern industrial working class, because it is the leader of the Chinese revolution and is the most revolutionary class." He takes pains to demarcate the two tasks of the Party's strategy in an undivided revolutionary process -- overthrow the imperialists, and overthrow the bourgeoisie: "Both are bad and should be completely destroyed."

[Zealot]

He admitted it himself
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[121] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-120) However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121) the number of deaths range between 2 million[122] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Cambridge_history_of_China-121)[123] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-122) and 5 million.[124] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-123)[125] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-124) In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[126] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Philip_Short-125) perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) were sent to "reform through labour" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai) camps where many perished.[127] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Valentino-126) Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[128] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-127) which were often exceeded.[118] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-Yang_Kuisong-117) He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[129] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao#cite_note-128)

Plus there's all the people murdered by the Red Guards in the late 60's

Did you even read the source used there? It's perhaps the most terrible piece of "academic" writing I've read in a while. What's her source for these so-called "killing quotas"?


Mao set quotas for his political movements, as I know from personal experience. I was a student of Chinese at Shandong University, class of 1956, at the beginning of the Anti-Rightist Movement, when it was announced that our year had been allocated seven rightists; it was 1958 before I was labeled part of that rightist contingent. According to what one of the more decent of the Party members among my classmates told me privately, this happened because the “quota” had not been met... According to him, perusal of the case files showed that of the 105 students in our year, rightist data had been gathered on ten. Then why were only eight eventually labeled rightists? Probably because the “quota” had been reached.Her source is basically herself and an unidentified classmate who was apparently a member of the CCP from way back in the day. But wait! She quotes Mao as well, so it must be true!


On May 15, two weeks after the order mentioned above, Mao issued another kill quota: “On the question of executing counterrevolutionaries, in the rural areas the proportion has reached one out of every 1,000 individuals, while in the northwest and in the urban areas it is one for every 2,000, so mass executions should be halted immediately.”4 Given that the population of Shanghai at that time was four million, 2,000 individuals would have had to be executed in order to meet the quota and put an end to mass executions.That sounds bad...really bad. But there's an explanation: she simply misunderstood what Mao was saying; Mao was simply giving his assessment of the situation and discovered the proportion of the number killed for every 1,000 people i.e. there was no killing quota.

However, there's also another explanation: This quote doesn't even exist! The source she provides for this quote is The Party's Mass Line Must Be Followed In Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_13.htm). A million dollars to the person who finds that non-existent quote in this piece.

[Costello74]

'Comrades Unite' how well does Maoism sit with the SP of Ireland lol?

I'm not well read in Maoism but I like the book of his quotations lol.

[Zostrianos]

Did you even read the source used there? It's perhaps the most terrible piece of "academic" writing I've read in a while. What's her source for these so-called "killing quotas"?


Yale's Jonathan Spence in his book also mentions it:

Mao himself, as instigator and manipulator of the war on Korean soil, slowly began to assume the same total roles in his supervision of the Chinese people. Though such campaigns were focused on individuals, they also had an abstracted quality, a certain tokenism and quota-meeting aspect that promised harmony for the majority if the correct percentage of victims could be found. (Mao zedong, p 131)

The Cambridge paper "Reconsidering the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries" also mentions those very quotas (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1809176)

Unfortunately, the full text is unavailable though (I think it's a pay per download)

[Zealot]

Yale's Jonathan Spence in his book also mentions it:

Mao himself, as instigator and manipulator of the war on Korean soil, slowly began to assume the same total roles in his supervision of the Chinese people. Though such campaigns were focused on individuals, they also had an abstracted quality, a certain tokenism and quota-meeting aspect that promised harmony for the majority if the correct percentage of victims could be found. (Mao zedong, p 131)

The Cambridge paper "Reconsidering the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries" also mentions those very quotas (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1809176)

Unfortunately, the full text is unavailable though (I think it's a pay per download)

Someone who says Mao was an "instigator and manipulator" of the imperialist war in Korea, and then used these almighty powers to manipulate the Chinese people, doesn't sound very credible. And that quote is a lot different from saying that Mao had "quotas" stipulating how many people should be killed in a specified city on his command, presumably just for fun.

[RedHammer]

Someone who says Mao was an "instigator and manipulator" of the imperialist war in Korea, and then used these almighty powers to manipulate the Chinese people, doesn't sound very credible. And that quote is a lot different from saying that Mao had "quotas" stipulating how many people should be killed in a specified city on his command, presumably just for fun.

Exactly. And this is all presumptuous; how many people have capitalist regimes murdered?

They have no moral high ground to criticize Mao.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Regarding proletarian states:

What is it? What purpose does it serve? What shape does it take? Under what conditions does it exist?

Why/how would an institution which has no homeland or nation (the proletariat) have a state?

I'm sure you've heard this a million times before but for the sake of the thread and OP:

The Proletarian State/Dictatorship of the Proletariat
This will not answer everything, it's already bound to be borderline wall-of-text

What is it? It is a State, an armed body of people with institutions of legitimate force* with institutions that are set up to reflect that. The State as an institution of force exists to protect and enforce one class' power in society.

*Legitimized by the fact that is its the most forceful and most organized element in society and that it is the institution of the ruling class.

What purpose does it serve? The State is the product of class society, and the assertion of Proletarian power does not mean the immediate dissolution of class in society. Therefore, when the Proletariat is 'in power' it will (argued) have its own State to enforce it's(class) will and resist attacks upon it(class).

What shape does it take? The Soviet system(for example), AFAIK, was a system of federated Soviets. It existed with a hierarchy of bodies which at the top was the Supreme Soviet and at the lowest was the Soviet. The workplace was also considered to be a part of the State and the property, by extension, of all workers. At each level of the Soviet system, there were elected Deputies who were able to be recalled by the body that elected them. There were prisons, a standing army, police, and intelligence services as well.

There are also ideas such as federations of communes, syndicalism and so on that, on a large scale, would virtually have the institutions of the State come into being through these forms of organization by necessity if they were to exist in class society.

Under what conditions does it exist? The overthrow of the Bourgeoisie by the Proletariat is unlikely to happen simultaneously on a global scale and so the State is needed to maintain class power and repel advances by the international Bourgeoisie from other places on the planet where Capital still rules. It theoretically will cease to exist once the Proletariat is in power globally and when the basis for the resurgence of the Bourgeoisie is eliminated. At such a point, class ceases to exist and the State therefore ceases to be relevant or exist in its current definition.

Why/how would an institution(?) which has no homeland or nation (the proletariat) have a state? As I said in the last paragraph, it is highly unlikely that Proletarian revolution will happen globally all at once. Yes, the Working Class has no homeland, and neither do the Capitalists, but there are 'international sections' of classes. In the world today, Capital is virtually global. But, in some parts, its position in society is on surer footing than in other places. Say in Greece or Spain the rule of Capital were to be replaced with the rule of the Working Class, workers there would need institutions to defend their newly gained power from Capitalists elsewhere who are attempting to reassert their position in this or that locale*.

*Historical examples: Allied intervention in Russian Civil War, German and Italian intervention in Spanish Civil War, Bay of Pigs invasion.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As stated before in this thread: Revolution is an act of force, an authoritative act. An oppressed class rises and topples its respective ruling class. That ruling class has the institution of the State to forcibly maintain its rule, and the oppressed class is tasked with abolishing that State.

Totalitarianism does nothing to explain the make up of a society or its class relations. Liberal Democracy is 'libertarian' whereas Fascism is 'totalitarian' but they are still the same societies* in that they are Bourgeois societies. In both of them, exploitation still exists, wars for profit are still conducted, and the repression of working class organization(or other forms of progressive/radical organization) still carried out. Like Oscar Wilde said(Zizek quoting Wilde):

"The worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it... Charity degrades and demoralizes... It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property"

To be clear, I'm not arguing Fascism is a better society to live in if you want to make revolution tomorrow. My argument is that the division of the world into totalitarianism and libertarianism is useless for analysis and understanding what must be done. How forceful the ruling class is in one society compared to another is not to be disregarded though.

*Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were obviously far more heavy handed than the US in repressing working class organizations/ers, homosexuals, national minorities or religious minorites.

[Art Vandelay]

That sounds like some conspiracy theory bullshit.
Well it is in fact the truth, look it up if you'd like.


What you smoking?

Pot.

[Art Vandelay]

Given the fact that there seems to be some talk in this thread about "totalitarianism" and authortarianism and somewhat of a debate on the matter, it is perhaps fitting to link Engels short article (in response to Bakunin I believe) entitled On Authority.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

My favorite part :D :


Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

[Sea]

My advice is to set aside the whole labels thing for a while. Granted as you may know I'm not a big fan of the concept of tendency in the first place, so that may influence what I'm saying, but by all means if you're doubting Mao don't hesitate to take a break from calling yourself a Maoist.

You don't need to be a hardliner to agree with some of his ideas.

[islandmilitia]

Real socialism? No. Millions of dead, countless lives destroyed, gratuitous destruction of chinese culture. There's nothing socialist about that. I think Maoism was an abomination, an embarrassment to real Marxism.

Just to pick up on the whole "destruction of Chinese culture" argument about the Cultural Revolution, I think in the first place, it's important to point out that a large part of recent academic research on the Cultural Revolution has been about looking at the new forms of culture that were developed during that period, and the ways in which specific cultural innovations and artifacts were intended to achieve a synthesis between Chinese cultural forms on the one hand and diverse elements from Western cultural traditions on the other - so if you read Paul Clark's The Chinese Cultural Revolution, the author talks at length about how many of the eight model performances sought to balance Chinese and Western musical instruments, for example, which was something which had not hitherto been done, and how ballet performances, ballet being an originally Western art form, made imaginative use of distinctly revolutionary stage props, like weapons. Mobo Gao has also carried out academic work in this area. Moreover, it is further significant that even though the position of the current Chinese state is one of complete rejection and negation when it comes to the Cultural Revolution, there is, in China today, still some level of recognition that the Cultural Revolution also witnessed real cultural advances which remain of value in the present, above and beyond their nostalgic significance - most remarkably, one of the eight model performances, the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, is still part of the repertoire of the National Ballet of China, and when you watch it, it's quite clear why, because it's a fantastic work.

In broad terms, then, even the academic consensus about culture during the Cultural Revolution no longer supports the narrative about there being wholesale destruction of Chinese culture alongside the rejection of anything identifiably Western. I think a further problem with the argument about cultural destruction is that its proponents do not really ask why there might have been the destruction of cultural sites like temples or who was doing these acts, so that the explicit or implicit tendency is to say that cultural destruction was carried our by a homogenous Red Guard movement that was so much under the control of a manipulative Maoist faction that it unthinkingly destroyed the cultural artifacts that they should have been seeking to preserve. If we think more carefully about the question of who and why, however, and if you set the issue of cultural destruction against the work that has been done on the sociological composition of different Red Guard factions, what you find is that cultural destruction was carried out by those Red Guard factions who, being comprised of the sons and daughters of party cadres and PLA officers, actually had the greatest stake in the state quo, and who came into conflict with the Red Rebel factions, who were drawn from classes like the petty-bourgeoisie. As such, for me, a more meaningful way of understanding cultural destruction is to see it as a profoundly conservative response from individuals and groups who had an interest in preventing the Cultural Revolution from accomplishing its real aim, which was to introduce radical changes in the basic social and political organization of Chinese society.


It postulates that cooperation between the classes (four, according to Mao) makes for a uniquely harmonious society

Mao did not say that the bloc of four classes would form the basis of a "uniquely harmonious society", whatever that means. The bloc of four classes was emphasized by Mao as a tactical concept at a specific historical juncture, during the middle of the Sino-Japanese War, when the KMT and the CPC were putting forward different visions of how the Chinese nation would best be able to unite in order to fight against the Japanese and carry out a rejuvenation of China. His aim was to create the broadest possible coalition in order to isolate the internal and external enemy, and to work with forces like the national bourgeoisie only for as long as it would be progressive and necessary to do so. This is why, having defeated the KMT by winning over important members of the national bourgeoisie, and after the initial period of national reconstruction over 1949-51, Mao did break with the national bourgeoisie, through the five-anti campaign, which ultimately resulted in the wholesale nationalization of large sections of private enterprise.

[Manic Impressive]

Well it is in fact the truth, look it up if you'd like.
I already looked it up before posting that's why I'm sure you are talking out your arse.

The notion of "totalitarianism" a "total" political power by state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Amendola) who described Italian Fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism) as a system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship).[9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-regime-8) The term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile), Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism). He used the term “totalitario” to refer to the structure and goals of the new state. The new state was to provide the “total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.”[10] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-9) He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens.[11] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-10) According to Benito Mussolini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini), this system politicizes everything spiritual and human:


As an example, he stated that "We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess', like the formula 'art for art's sake'. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess."

[Art Vandelay]

I already looked it up before posting that's why I'm sure you are talking out your arse.

The notion of "totalitarianism" a "total" political power by state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Amendola) who described Italian Fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism) as a system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship).[9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-regime-8) The term was later assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile), Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism). He used the term “totalitario” to refer to the structure and goals of the new state. The new state was to provide the “total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals.”[10] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-9) He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens.[11] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian#cite_note-10) According to Benito Mussolini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini), this system politicizes everything spiritual and human:


As an example, he stated that "We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess. We must condemn once and for all the formula 'chess for the sake of chess', like the formula 'art for art's sake'. We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess."

It was also used in an attempt to tie together the experience of the USSR with the experience of Nazi Germany; in an attempt at discrediting communism. Now perhaps I was wrong about its origin, but I certainly wasn't "talking out of my arse," as that was indeed one of its uses and where it was popularized.

[Aussie Trotskyist]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

GET DOWN! FLAME WAR INCOMING!

But to add my personal opinion, I can understand where you are coming from. Particularly if you where taught in high school (and believed) that Stalin and Mao where dictators. I still hold that grudge against them personally, but I've come to accept working with people who support them.

But to the issues of totalitarianism. I think that the term 'totalitarian' can in some respect be applied to socialism in its earliest stages. As the bourgeoisie uses the state to oppress the proletariat under capitalism, the proletariat uses the state to oppress the bourgeoisie in socialism. However, it is supposed to be the proletariat, not a bureaucracy that controls the state (as Trotsky argued in The Revolution Betrayed).

I also think the Prague Spring had the right idea. The Bourgeoisie was eliminated, and they opted to move forward with socialism.

[Tim Cornelis]

The word totalitarian was created in an attempt to discredit communism by linking it with fascism, despite the fact that they are opposite ends of the political spectrum. Which is why I refrain from using it. Mao was indeed an authoritarian, but this is not grounds for criticizing him.

I really resent it when people use these kind of meaningless dismissals and semantic gymnastics. Many words have dubious origins, for example "antisemitism." Today it is used as "anti-Jewish" while "semites" refers to both Arabs and Jews. So today I'm frequently told that "Arabs can't be anti-semitic." But in reality, the origin of a word is not always relevant.

Totalitarianism is simply a word that describes a particular mode of organisation, like authoritarianism, libertarianism, parliamentarianism, democracy, dictatorial, tyranny, etc.

We could play meaningless semantic games over the words "tyranny" or "democracy" as well, its origing was to describe a benevolent leader who sympathised with the plight of the poor in Ancient Greece. Today, its meaning is almost the oppose.


It was also used in an attempt to tie together the experience of the USSR with the experience of Nazi Germany; in an attempt at discrediting communism. Now perhaps I was wrong about its origin, but I certainly wasn't "talking out of my arse," as that was indeed one of its uses and where it was popularized.

This indeed sounds like a conspiracy. Liberal: "let's use totalitarianism, hitherto only used for fascism and Nazism to discredit communism while we know it's not accurate." In reality, academics saw similarities in state structure and conduct between fascist states and the Soviet Union. There is nothing inaccurate about it, and hence your dismissal is in fact fallacious.

Totalitarianism is an accurate description of a particular mode of organisation, then why not use it when applicable?

[islandmilitia]

Totalitarianism is an accurate description of a particular mode of organisation, then why not use it when applicable?

I don't think totalitarianism is a meaningful conceptual device. Even if it were the case that totalitarianism corresponded in an empirical sense to a particular mode of organization, that wouldn't necessarily make it meaningful, because just because a given number of societies happen to share a given set of formal or organizational features, that doesn't mean that they should necessarily be grouped together under the same conceptual label (like totalitarianism) when their joint possession of surface-level features actually obscures more fundamental historical and social differences. So, even if it were the case that, say, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany shared the features that are identified through the concept of totalitarianism, like the party-state political form, it doesn't then follow that those societies should be grouped together, because they ultimately arose from very different social forces and belonged to distinct historical trajectories. The issue, in other words, is how useful concepts like totalitarianism are in explaining historical development and getting to the heart of what drives particular societies, so some level of empirical validity is not in itself enough to make totalitarianism useful or meaningful as a concept. The same is true of other analytical concepts that are part of bourgeois thought, like Huntington's notion of the clash of civilizations - even if Huntington's civilizational categories did in some sense correspond to cultural similarities between certain societies, we would do well to ask how useful these categories are in actually explaining the evolution of geopolitics, as opposed to say, Marxist accounts of imperialism which deploy concepts like world-systems and combined and uneven development.

The more obvious and serious weakness of totalitarianism as a concept is that it does not actually have empirical validity after all, to any extent, and with reference to any society, be it Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. In theoretical terms, as deployed by analysts like William Kornhauser, the concept of totalitarianism was understood to mean a condition where the state exercises total domination over society, to the extent that the distinction between state and society is actually obliterated, and there is no scope for autonomous intermediate structures between the atomized citizen and the state. This description does not bear any resemblance to any society because societies are always more complex - the state and ruling class always embody multiple internal groups and factions which often have complex relations with one another, there are various forms of subaltern resistance that always exist in opposition to the official ideology, and societies are always subject to various kinds of external and internal pressures which require the ruling class to constantly adjust and reconfigure its position. The theory of totalitarianism does not allow for these complexities, and as such does not even possess the minimum of empirical validity, let alone explanatory power.

What is it about totalitarianism which makes you think it is valuable?

[Leo]

To get back to the original questions:


1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

Totalitarian is a rather meaningless word, but Maoism has certainly been very repressive.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

It never really claimed to be so. It was an ideology with more focus on the peasant than the worker, although it is hard to say it was all that much for the peasant. It was the ideology of the Chinese national bourgeoisie.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

Not even remotely.

For more on Maoism, click here (http://en.internationalism.org/ir/094_china_part3.html).

[islandmilitia]

It was an ideology with more focus on the peasant than the worker, although it is hard to say it was all that much for the peasant. It was the ideology of the Chinese national bourgeoisie.

What does it mean to say that Maoism was both focused "on the peasant" and the "ideology of the Chinese national bourgeoisie"? At most you might argue that the Maoist development model accomplished the developmental tasks that could not be fulfilled by pre-1949 dependent capitalism, but even if you accept that argument, it seems obvious that the national bourgeoisie as it existed before 1949 was largely abolished during the early 1950s, and was replaced with a distinct class of state managers and party cadres. As such, it can hardly be said that the national bourgeoisie came to power in 1949, because their privileges and positions were revoked within a short period of time. In fact, a large segment of the Chinese bourgeoisie fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong around the time of the revolution precisely because they were afraid of what would happen if they remained on the mainland, and their presence in those two areas was one of the factors which allowed for Taiwan and Hong Kong to undergo such rapid development themselves, as a result of the capital and assets brought in as part of the influx of actual capitalists. In addition, it was from overseas Chinese capitalists (again, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, though partly from Southeast Asia as well) that China received its first wave of foreign investment in the 1980s, in the early reform period. All of this begs the question of why the national bourgeoisie fled and why investment came from outside China in the 1980s if the whole of Maoism was led and based around the national bourgeoisie anyway. On that note:


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I think that to ask this question relies on a problematic understanding of what socialism is, because it views socialism as a static mode of production, rather than as a constant process of social and political change, the latter being Mao's own understanding of socialism. Following the latter approach, I would say that there was, throughout the period 1949-1976, a struggle between a basically state-capitalist model on the one hand, and, on the other, the attempts of forces within the CPC to go beyond capitalism. Mao himself had, I think, a highly ambiguous role in that struggle, which is evident above all from his function during the Cultural Revolution, in that the Cultural Revolution was both initiated by Mao and ultimately also reigned in due to his intervention in 1968/69. For that reason, in thinking about Maoism as a praxis, we need to carefully consider whether Maoism is the same as Mao's own thoughts and policies, or whether we should understood Maoism as a radical distillation of the most radical trends from the whole of the Chinese Revolution, which would include individuals beyond Mao and possibly exclude Mao himself at specific junctures.

These essays on the CSG site might provide some more food for thought: http://chinastudygroup.net/category/chinese-revolution/

[Art Vandelay]

I really resent it when people use these kind of meaningless dismissals and semantic gymnastics.

I find this accusation funny coming from the guy who uses "semantic gymnastics" to somehow describe a revolution as a libertarian process, a claim most anarchists would scoff at.


Many words have dubious origins, for example "antisemitism." Today it is used as "anti-Jewish" while "semites" refers to both Arabs and Jews. So today I'm frequently told that "Arabs can't be anti-semitic." But in reality, the origin of a word is not always relevant.

Okay, but this doesn't really relate to the usage of totalitarianism.


Totalitarianism is simply a word that describes a particular mode of organisation, like authoritarianism, libertarianism, parliamentarianism, democracy, dictatorial, tyranny, etc.


And the authoritarian - libertarian scale is a false dichotomy.


We could play meaningless semantic games over the words "tyranny" or "democracy" as well, its origing was to describe a benevolent leader who sympathised with the plight of the poor in Ancient Greece. Today, its meaning is almost the oppose.

I am not arguing that the meanings of words do not change over time, so all of this is highly irrelevant. For example the word gay, to describe homosexuals was originally invented by gay rights activists as an acronym: Good As You; which didn't stop it being adopted by bigots who used it in a malicious fashion.


This indeed sounds like a conspiracy. Liberal: "let's use totalitarianism, hitherto only used for fascism and Nazism to discredit communism while we know it's not accurate." In reality, academics saw similarities in state structure and conduct between fascist states and the Soviet Union. There is nothing inaccurate about it, and hence your dismissal is in fact fallacious.

Totalitarianism is an accurate description of a particular mode of organisation, then why not use it when applicable?

Because as a communist I judge things by their class character not some liberal buzz word attempted at tying together the two opposite ends of the political spectrum. Fascism is liberal democracy in decay, communism is the form of social organization which is the expression of the interests of the proletariat class. They have nothing in common, hence why I don't use the word.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.



1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

I'm not sure if Maoism is "totalitarian" but...it is based on on a strategy of peasant based guerrilla warfare, not on working class struggle. This is not at all to minimize both the horrendous oppression peasants faced/are facing and the revolutionary potential of peasants. The problem is a guerrilla warfare based strategy is, obviously militarily based and hence, undemocratic.This is nor just an abstract point-when Mao took power in in 1949 one of the first things he did was crush strikes and disband worker's councils.There were some very important gains in the Chinese Revolution, some may consider it the second most important event in human history.This revolution though, like others, was rolled back. There can be no doubt that China today is thoroughly capitalist.Why did this happen?

The Cultural Revolution essentially was Mao enlisting the urban working class to fight his own enemies in the Chinese ruling class.When they served his purpose, he began a crackdown on his former allies. "The Black Hand is me", he admitted.

It is understandable why people become Maoists but I feel this is a dead end. In the US the once vast Maoist "New Communist Movement" vanished, leaving only the RCP-a personality cult around Bob Avakian, on one hand, and the Freedom Road groups, who support Obama.There are reasons why this movement collapsed, most notably their lack of faith in a revolutionary working class strategy.

http://www.revolutionintheair.com/reviews/goldner.html

It is interesting that Jean Quan, the mayor of Oakland who cracked down on the Occupy movement in that city, was eiother a member or was very close to the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist group which fought the Klan in North Carolina in the 70s, but since then became absorbed into the Democratic Party. "Marxist-Leninists for Mondale". This shows the ultimate implosion of this movement.

You might be interested in "The Tragedy of The Chinese Revolution" by Harold Issacs. It discusses the disastrous advice Stalin and his regime gave to the Chinese Communist party in the 1920s/30s. It takes place before Mao came to prominence but it sets the ground for evaluating what later happened. Its a good read.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/isaacs/1938/tcr/index.htm


Anyway, I am glad you are exploring other alternatives.

[Comrades Unite!]

BTW, When I talk of Totalitarianism I simply mean that particular form of government, Liberal and Conservative agendas do not interest me.

If a revolt were to occur in Ireland, would they take on a minor ideology such as Maoism?or just your good ole Marxism.

Also certain Maoists(Not on this site,the fellow Maoists are good here)just annoy the juju out of me, with their ''HEY GUYS I AM A MARXIST-LENINIST-MAOIST-JUCHEIST-GUEVARIST'' shit like that makes it look like some mad cult, MRN2 and JimProfitCommie certainly don't help either.
Also, if Mao committed a problem, then most Maoists simply ascribe it to ''Bourgeois'' sources, now it is a clear problem that the Papers always spew shit like that but Maoists like to completely undermine things like the Great Leap Forward.

Also I'm sick of something I am guilty of aswell, the word Proletariat.
According to Engels, we are NOT proletarians, ever since welfare and other just things came around the proletariat ceased to exist.
:hammersickle:

[Art Vandelay]

BTW, When I talk of Totalitarianism I simply mean that particular form of government, Liberal and Conservative agendas do not interest me.

As communists, we judge things by their class character; to us the word totalitarian is meaningless. There may have, in the past, indeed been left-wing or right-wing governments which were highly authoritarian and or controlling of the populaces which populated them; however this doesn't mean that they should be grouped together in one big ole family, under the banner of totalitarianism.


Also I'm sick of something I am guilty of aswell, the word Proletariat.
According to Engels, we are NOT proletarians, ever since welfare and other just things came around the proletariat ceased to exist.
:hammersickle:

This, is just simply flat out wrong.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

"Totalitarian" is a legitimate term to use. It was invented by Mussolini as a self description of his regime. It was also later used by Trotsky as a description of the Stalinist regime that developed in the Soviet Union. The term simply means a system or society in which the state has complete control of all means of political expression.This was obviously true in the fSU, in China under Mao and in other parts of the world. Use of this term does not mean that one is a secret liberal. Freedom of expression and freedom to organize on the part of the working class is an integral part of socialism.

The term "proletarian" came from ancient Rome and meant "one who can reproduce". The function of the Roman proletariat was to breed. They were not quite the same as our modern working class. Today the term can be used interchangebly for "working class".

[Raúl Duke]

Maoism makes sense in a "3rd world" aspect with its primacy of rural workers than in the 1st world. Being a Maoist in a "1st world" nation sounds kinda absurd.

Maoism also includes a dose of class collaborationism (i.e. "bloc of 4 classes, etc").

[Art Vandelay]

"Totalitarian" is a legitimate term to use. It was invented by Mussolini as a self description of his regime. It was also later used by Trotsky as a description of the Stalinist regime that developed in the Soviet Union. The term simply means a system or society in which the state has complete control of all means of political expression.This was obviously true in the fSU, in China under Mao and in other parts of the world. Use of this term does not mean that one is a secret liberal. Freedom of expression and freedom to organize on the part of the working class is an integral part of socialism.


I didn't claim that use of the term made one a "secret liberal" rather that the term was popularized by liberals who attempted to bridge the gap between two opposite ends of the political spectrum. You can use it if you like (and I have read Trotsky's use of it in the USSR in War and don't agree with it) but I will continue to base my analysis of differing forms of social organization on their class character.

[Drosophila]

Maoism makes sense in a "3rd world" aspect with its primacy of rural workers than in the 1st world. Being a Maoist in a "1st world" nation sounds kinda absurd.

This might be one of the most often spouted criticisms of Maoism. Just because Mao lived in a peasant-strong place doesn't mean all Maoists believe in only peasant liberation.


Maoism also includes a dose of class collaborationism (i.e. "bloc of 4 classes, etc").

New Democracy was only meant to be a transitional phase for China only. I don't think many Maoists today would advocate using New Democracy in an industrialized nation.

[Comrades Unite!]

Maoism can be applied to the first world, of course things such as new democracy will be discarded.

[islandmilitia]

This is nor just an abstract point-when Mao took power in in 1949 one of the first things he did was crush strikes and disband worker's councils

This is inaccurate, not because the CPC came to power through working-class insurrection, but because there did not really exist workers' councils for Mao or the CPC to disband. As Lucien Bianco points out in their classic study Origins of the Chinese Revolution, at the time of the CPC's victory the working class was relatively passive even in China's most important industrial centers - so in the port city of Tianjin, for example, which had one of the largest working-class populations in the whole of China, you had a situation in early 1948 where there was a pronounced economic slump, in part as a result of deliberate KMT government policy, just as the armies of the CPC were surrounding the city from the north, and at the same time as the pro-CPC General Union was holding its Sixth Congress, and yet, in spite of those conditions, the working class of Tianjin was remarkable only through the absence of any forms of insurrection or strike activity. This lack of response was also present in other cities, and it can be traced both to the systematic repression of the labour movement under the KMT and Japanese occupation governments and also to the fact that the extreme severity of the post-1945 economic crisis had produced high levels of unemployment and inflation, combined with falling industrial output, so that the working class was itself highly unstable and in no position to launch a whole set of urban insurrections. This was not really the fault of the CPC, and obviously Mao was not carrying out mass repression of the working class in this context.


The Cultural Revolution essentially was Mao enlisting the urban working class to fight his own enemies in the Chinese ruling class.

Why then was it necessary for Mao to initiate such a huge political process if it was only about getting rid of individual members of the ruling class? The dismissal of Peng Dehuai during the Great Leap Forward (constantly cited by bourgeois historians as evidence of the lack of internal party democracy and of Mao's unwillingness to accept criticism) would suggest that Mao was perfectly capable of using his political prestige to get rid of individuals from the party leadership. Similarly, given that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were removed from power early in the Cultural Revolution, saying it was about a faction fight within the CPC does't explain why the activist phase of the Cultural Revolution had to go on for a full three years, rather than Mao simply ending it as soon as he had accomplished his alleged goal of getting rid of Liu and Deng. So I don't think your conspiratorial thesis has much explanatory power.


The term simply means a system or society in which the state has complete control of all means of political expression.This was obviously true in the fSU, in China under Mao and in other parts of the world.

It is not "obviously true", it is not true at all, it ignores the ways in which workers and peasants in those societies were able to manipulate the discourses of the state itself in order to pursue independent social and political goals, it ignores the ways in which pre-revolutionary discourses and forms of knowledge were also invoked in certain contexts in order to express resistance to the state, just like James C. Scott's "hidden transcripts". Elizabeth Perry talks at some length about the first dynamic in her book on the working class during the Cultural Revolution, Proletarian Power, and this (http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/content/111/2/405.full.pdf) article by SA Smith is a look at the role of hidden transcripts just after the Great Leap Forward. At an empirical level the concept of totalitarianism does not correspond to the complex nature of politics and social movements in the societies where it is supposed to be applicable, and by dismissing the possibility of resistance to the state in theoretical terms it also removes agency and consciousness from the oppressed.

[Art Vandelay]

People need to keep in mind that Maoism was simply Marxism-Leninism adapted to the material conditions of China. To say that the Bloc of 4 classes is a corner stone to the ideology is a caricature; as far as I know, any Maoists I have met in real life, think that it was a strategic theory only for China or where the proletarian does not make up a demographic majority. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Maoism, but don't make it out like they think that revolutions in all countries should be handled like the one in China.

[Lucretia]

Yale's Jonathan Spence in his book also mentions it:

Mao himself, as instigator and manipulator of the war on Korean soil, slowly began to assume the same total roles in his supervision of the Chinese people. Though such campaigns were focused on individuals, they also had an abstracted quality, a certain tokenism and quota-meeting aspect that promised harmony for the majority if the correct percentage of victims could be found. (Mao zedong, p 131)

The Cambridge paper "Reconsidering the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries" also mentions those very quotas (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1809176)

Unfortunately, the full text is unavailable though (I think it's a pay per download)

Here is the relevant portion from that journal article:

After evaluating the execution plans submitted by local authorities, Mao soon worked out a scale for different regions to follow in carrying out executions, which was then ratified by a special CCP Central Committee meeting. It was agreed to ‘‘use 0.1 per cent of the population as a standard and to execute half of this figure first, and then wait and see how the situation develops.’’23 With this decision, Mao changed his earlier directives and told responsible officials in Shanghai and Nanjing:


Shanghai is a big city of six million people. Considering the fact that among the 20,000 arrested people in Shanghai only 200 were executed, I believe that in the year of 1951 at least 3,000 bandit chiefs, professional brigands, local tyrants, secret agents and sectarian leaders who committed serious crimes should be executed. During the first half of the year, at least 1,500 should be executed. Please consider whether or not these figures are appropriate … Nanjing has already executed 72 people and another 150 executions are planned. This figure seems too small. Nanjing is a big city of a half million people and used to be the KMT’s capital. Therefore, it appears that more than 200 reactionaries should be killed there … more executions ought to be made in Nanjing.24Mao’s political design for carrying out executions by quota reflected his own subjective deduction about how to differentiate the ‘‘enemy’’ from ‘‘us.’’ Convinced – a priori – that social classes should be categorized into revolutionary, middle and counterrevolutionary groups, and that hard-line counterrevolutionaries accounted for less than 1 per cent of the population in all regions, Mao believed that the execution of roughly 0.1 per cent of the population would dispatch the worst counterrevolutionaries, would not run to excess and would certainly not risk killing the innocent. In view that in the past the executions in different regions were restricted by legal procedures, Mao urged the Government Council to issue ‘‘Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on punishment of counterrevolutionaries’’ on 21 February.

According to the Regulations, any of the following activities, either actually performed or merely ‘‘attempted,’’ now fell under the category of ‘‘counterrevolutionary crimes’’: collaboration with imperialism; agitating, enticing and bribing government officials; arming rebellious forces and militias; rallying and arming rebellious mobs; participating in secret agent or espionage organizations; organizing or using feudal sects for counterrevolutionary purposes; looting and sabotaging public property and facilities; murder with poison; forging public documents and certificates; inciting the masses to oppose the government or split among themselves; fabricating and distributing rumours; illegally crossing international borders; attacking or escaping from prison; and harbouring counterrevolutionary criminals. As for the death penalty, sentence would depend on whether or not the person charged was a ‘‘leading criminal’’ involved in a ‘‘serious case.’’ Either characterization could result in a death sentence or life imprisonment. But the Regulations failed to specify what ‘‘counterrevolutionary purposes’’ and ‘‘serious cases’’ entailed.25 The result was to give more discretion to the masses and officials at different levels to determine counterrevolutionary cases.

Since the principal purpose of the zhenfan campaign was to mobilize the masses, designated targets of the Regulations, such as secret agents, spies, and various actual or intended ‘‘active’’ counterrevolutionaries, rapidly yielded insufficiently large numbers of enemies. Most of the crimes perpetrated by enemy agents and spies listed in the Regulations often did not directly concern the masses, so they could not be readily used for mass mobilization. Within a few days after the Regulations were issued, therefore, Mao began to include new targets in the campaign, particularly ‘‘local tyrants’’ hated by the masses and ‘‘historical counterrevolutionaries’’ (lishi fangeming 历史反革命) who incurred blood debts (xuezhai血债) in the past: ‘‘without seeing some of these local tyrants executed at the beginning [of the campaign], the masses will not dare to stand up.’’26

But who the ‘‘local tyrants’’ were, and what standard ought to be used to measure degrees of ‘‘popular hatred’’ was unclear. Without any concrete criteria to follow, many local Party officials simply fulfilled the task of executions according to the quotas handed down from above. Reports circulated that in many places ‘‘local tyrants’’ were not charged with any concrete crimes and were executed simply because they were labelled as such by some individuals. A typical example happened in Shanzhou, Henan, where county and township officials arrested some 6,000 people in less than a month, of whom 800 were killed.27 In Guizhou province, all the 81 county magistrates who remained in office during the last days of the KMT regime were executed. Virtually all the old township heads around Chengdu, Sichuan, were labelled as counterrevolutionaries and executed.28

In other areas, local Party officials had been reluctant to carry out large-scale executions of counterrevolutionaries because they did not want to terrorize the middle classes and disturb the local economy. The Party committee in Shanghai had always been particularly mindful of the city’s position as an industrial and commercial centre and worried about the impact of too harsh a zhenfan campaign. But now, urged by Mao, the Shanghai Party committee made a ‘‘profound self-criticism’’ about its hitherto conservative stance, and reported to the CCP Central Committee that in addition to the 1,068 arrests and some 100 executions already made, another 10,000 people would be arrested. Targets were set for 3,000 of these to be executed, 4,000 imprisoned and 3,000 ‘‘controlled.’’29

Footnotes:

23 ‘‘Mao Zedong to comrades [Deng] Xiaoping, [Rao] Shushi, [Deng] Zihui, [Ye] Jianying, [Xi] Zhongxun, and to be conveyed to comrades [Bo] Yibo and Gao Gang, 20 April 1951,’’ document no. Jianxi/001/835/78, Archives of Sichuan Province. Also see Li Changyu, ‘‘Mao’s ‘Killing quotas,’ advancing social justice,’’ China Rights Forum, No. 4 (2005), pp. 40–43.

24 Mao Zedong, ‘‘Directive on the work of suppressing counterrevolutionaries in Shanghai and Nanjing, 12 February 1951,’’ original in the Central Archives.

25 ‘‘People’s Republic of China’s regulations on punishment of counterrevolutionaries,’’ Renmin ribao, 22 February 1951, p. 1.

26 Mao Zedong, ‘‘Comments on the transmitted Luo Ruiging report on inspection of the zhenfan work in Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangxi, 25 February 1951,’’ JYMW, Vol. 2, p. 138.

27 ‘‘Report by Henan province on the work of suppressing counter-revolutionaries, 13 January 1951,’’ document no. Jiankang/1/2570/17, Archives of Sichuan Province.

28 Yuan Xi, Yi sou yan yu ren pingsheng: Feng Lanrui chuan (A Life through Misty Rain: Biography of Feng Lanrui) (Beijing: Qixi chubanshe, 1999), p. 103.

29 ‘‘Shanghai municipal committee’s zhenfan plan, 15 March 1951,’’ document no. A1/23/124/24, Archives of Shanghai Municipality.

[Geiseric]

Maoism is complete horse shit, Mao was Stalin's tool in china, and he purged communists just like Stalin did, without instituting proletarian democracy. If you look at how he gained power, it was through a peasants (i.e. populist) war, in the midst of the defeats Stalin forced on the old CPC, not proletarian revolution. The great leap foward was as insane as Stalin's "5 year plan in 4 years," and yielded the same process of building modern capitalist productive forces, ALTHOUGH private property wasn't ever abolished as it was in the U.S.S.R, meaning Mao was a plain old capitalist. And when you criticize him, as with MLs towards Stalin, the only excuse from the cultists who call themselves Maoists is "dengist revisionism!" Maoism doesn't apply to 3rd world countries any more than Stalinism applied to Russia, both were only possible with the barrel of a gun pointed at the mass of workers and poor peasants who were totally fucked over.

[Zukunftsmusik]

Why/how would an institution which has no homeland or nation (the proletariat) have a state?

You don't have to have a nation or "homeland" to have a state. There have existed other forms of states than the modern nation-state, you know.

State is a means of class rule. A proletarian state would simply mean that the proletariat supress the class opponent(s) by means of institutions to "express" (I didn't find a better word right now :unsure:) their rule, ie a state.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Also I'm sick of something I am guilty of aswell, the word Proletariat.
According to Engels, we are NOT proletarians, ever since welfare and other just things came around the proletariat ceased to exist.
:hammersickle:

Wait, what? :confused:

Just because there are welfare programs doesn't mean that the bourgeoisie doesn't exploit the worker, the worker doesn't sell his labor power to the bourgeoisie, etc. etc. This makes no sense, and I highly doubt that Engels said that "When capitalist society institutes welfare programs to give concessions to the proletariat, the proletariat will not exist."

[Rusty Shackleford]

Maoism is complete horse shit, Mao was Stalin's tool in china, and he purged communists just like Stalin did, without instituting proletarian democracy. If you look at how he gained power, it was through a peasants (i.e. populist) war, in the midst of the defeats Stalin forced on the old CPC, not proletarian revolution. The great leap foward was as insane as Stalin's "5 year plan in 4 years," and yielded the same process of building modern capitalist productive forces, ALTHOUGH private property wasn't ever abolished as it was in the U.S.S.R, meaning Mao was a plain old capitalist. And when you criticize him, as with MLs towards Stalin, the only excuse from the cultists who call themselves Maoists is "dengist revisionism!" Maoism doesn't apply to 3rd world countries any more than Stalinism applied to Russia, both were only possible with the barrel of a gun pointed at the mass of workers and poor peasants who were totally fucked over.

the CPC was not the total tool of the Comintern. They worked together, but there were times when the Comintern Line got in the way of the CPC line and the CPC only made face value changes to fit into the Comintern. (9th Route Army i believe)

As for class collaboration. What was the situation of China from 1911 on?

It was a short-lived bourgeois nationalist state and then fell back into warlordism and feudalism on top of being a playground for Japanese and other national imperialism(s) The majority of the population was not proletarian and only in the cities did the proletariat exist. Prior to being pushed back to yunan, they were mostly organized in the cities. I think Zhou Enlai organized the shanghai strike that involved smuggling 500 rifles into the city and so on. it ended pretty badly though.


So what if it was mostly fought for by peasants. Did not peasants fight in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War? Was not the Russian Imperial Army(which large sections defected/shot their officers and marched home into the Red Army) "Peasants with guns"? But was not the program of the bolsheviks proletarian?

The program of the CPC was proletarian. China had other factors to take into account though. They were fighting a war of anti-colonialism/imperialism, national liberation and unification.

Is it not a communist program to bring classes forward? Did not large sections of the peasantry become proletarian as a result of the revolution?

As for the Bloc of 4 classes, yes, it is class collaboration. Yes the CPC was trying to work with the KMT to defeat japan. But this is because the first priority was to resist imperialism and establish a unified China.


also, to call the chinese revolution populist is pretty low. is not "peace bread and land" a bit populist then too?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I'm not qualified to answer this question fully, because I'm neither a Maoist nor well-read in Maoist theory. But for what it's worth, let me throw in my two cents :cool:

I would argue that China was never socialist - not before Mao, not during Mao, and not after Mao. Sure, there are Chinese political elements that like to describe themselves as "socialist" and "communist", but that's only a cosmetic title. In practice, China hasn't abolished capitalism, there are still market mechanisms, it is engaged in world-scale trade with capitalist nations, and the means of production are not communally owned by workers and run in a democratic fashion.

I'd say that they have a bit more of an anti-capitalist mentality than in other countries (say, the jingoistic frenzy in the U.S.), but they're still more or less capitalist.
I would agree that China was never socialist -- but I would also argue that the CCP lead a revolution that overthrew capitalism in China. It was a huge step forward for the Chinese proletariat. Mao was a Stalinist. The CCP was a peasant-based party that was, under the pressure of the circumstances, pressed to overthrow the Guomindang. They would have preferred some kind of alliance with the KMT. I would not fault the leadership for trading with the imperialist countries -- especially if it is to their advantage. The problem is that they are and have always been nationalistic and do not fight for world revolution. And since the late 70s the increasing size and power of the private sector in the Chinese economy makes the possibility of counterrevolution and a restoration of capitalism more likely.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

"Totalitarian" is a legitimate term to use. It was invented by Mussolini as a self description of his regime. It was also later used by Trotsky as a description of the Stalinist regime that developed in the Soviet Union. The term simply means a system or society in which the state has complete control of all means of political expression.This was obviously true in the fSU, in China under Mao and in other parts of the world. Use of this term does not mean that one is a secret liberal. Freedom of expression and freedom to organize on the part of the working class is an integral part of socialism.


The problem with the term "totalitarian" is that it has no class character. It was and continues to be used by the US ruling class to describe Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR. As if they were similar. If it had a more functional meaning in the past, that is no longer true.

Now as for Mao and the GCPR -- let's be real here. It was a power struggle within the Chinese bureaucracy. Mao was not doing so well in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Turns out that small scale smelting of steel is probably not a great way to move forward. That and a couple of failed harvest (due to bad weather) really mad things grim in China. So, the more "liberal" for want of a better term, wing of the CCP was ascendant. Mao's principle base of support was in the Army. He leveraged that and his popularity among idealistic youth, to smash his opponents through the cultural revolution. Why did he let it go on so long? Well, I think he couldn't simply stop it once it was in motion. Also, it served his purposes. A comrade of mine used to like to say, "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Neither proletarian, cultural, great, nor a revolution." Kind of sums it up.

[Tim Cornelis]

I find this accusation funny coming from the guy who uses "semantic gymnastics" to somehow describe a revolution as a libertarian process, a claim most anarchists would scoff at.

Ad hominem/tu quoque.


Okay, but this doesn't really relate to the usage of totalitarianism.

Nope.


And the authoritarian - libertarian scale is a false dichotomy.

Strawman.


I am not arguing that the meanings of words do not change over time, so all of this is highly irrelevant. For example the word gay, to describe homosexuals was originally invented by gay rights activists as an acronym: Good As You; which didn't stop it being adopted by bigots who used it in a malicious fashion.


Because as a communist I judge things by their class character not some liberal buzz word attempted at tying together the two opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Liberal is the biggest buzzword here.


Fascism is liberal democracy in decay, communism is the form of social organization which is the expression of the interests of the proletariat class. They have nothing in common, hence why I don't use the word.

Strawman.



What is it about totalitarianism which makes you think it is valuable?

Well, what makes the words "authoritarian," "oppressive," "repressive," etc. valuable? They describe certain arrangements or situations, and are therefore useful to describe those arrangements or situations.

A word is valuable when it reduces complex explanations to a single word. For example, "happy" instead of "this weird pleasurable feeling I enjoy when something positive has happened" (or something).

Similarly, "totalitarian" is used to describe an ultra-repressive type of state. When there is a state that is "beyond conventional authoritarianism," why not use a word that accurately describes such an arrangement.


There may have, in the past, indeed been left-wing or right-wing governments which were highly authoritarian and or controlling of the populaces which populated them;

Then why refuse to use the word "totalitarian" if it's applicable to these types of government?

Authoritarian, oppressive, etc. these kinds of words have in themselves the same class analysis as totalitarian. Yet I have no doubt you are willing to use these words when they are applicable.


The great leap foward was as insane as Stalin's "5 year plan in 4 years," and yielded the same process of building modern capitalist productive forces, ALTHOUGH private property wasn't ever abolished as it was in the U.S.S.R, meaning Mao was a plain old capitalist.

I'm no authority on the subject, so perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Maoist China went further in terms of attempting to achieve socialism. In the People's Communes money was internally abolished (hardly capitalist), and all was collective property.

Now, people's communes were rural, so perhaps your assertion that private property was perpetuated may apply to urban areas--though I would like to see that substantiated.

[Peoples' War]

So let me ask a questions.

[QUOTE]1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?Marxism-Leninism in practice has been totalitarian, regardless of what people are going to say about the invention of the word. Totalitarian, oligarchical, despotic, etc. In theory, it is bound to end up that way as well, because the theory is flawed to begin with.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?No. It's revisionism of Marxist theory, as is all "Marxism-Leninism". Socialism in one country is impossible, regardless of how Stalin justifies it, and is counter the idea of world revolution. Marxist-Leninists justify the abolition of the power of the soviets, show trials, etc.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.No. They didn't even establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, as the workers of Russia had done.


I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.
It's good to always question what you believe in. I used to be a Stalinist, and I refused to read anything else but Stalin and those favorable of him.

You can search different topics at marxists.org and you can look for critiques of Maosim and Maoist china.

The Socialist Equality Party used to have a non-DWS view on China, which was pretty good imo. Now they are back to DWS.

[Art Vandelay]

Ad hominem/tu quoque.

I literally reversed the argument that you used against me; if its an ad hominem, then it goes both ways.


Nope.

Strangely compelling. :rolleyes:


Strawman.

You either don't know what a strawman is, or you misread my post.


Liberal is the biggest buzzword here.

I actually only use it to describe actual liberals or those with convictions whose origins can be traced back to liberal thought.


Strawman.

Once again no it is not.


Well, what makes the words "authoritarian," "oppressive," "repressive," etc. valuable? They describe certain arrangements or situations, and are therefore useful to describe those arrangements or situations.

Yes but what matters is the class character of the institutions which are "authoritarian," "oppressive," etc..The dictatorship of the proletariat will be a highly authoritarian thing and for good reason.


A word is valuable when it reduces complex explanations to a single word. For example, "happy" instead of "this weird pleasurable feeling I enjoy when something positive has happened" (or something).

Similarly, "totalitarian" is used to describe an ultra-repressive type of state. When there is a state that is "beyond conventional authoritarianism," why not use a word that accurately describes such an arrangement.

Because of the connotations which are attached to it; because of the reason it was popularized. Because it does not assess the class character or the "totalitarian" institution.


Authoritarian, oppressive, etc. these kinds of words have in themselves the same class analysis as totalitarian. Yet I have no doubt you are willing to use these words when they are applicable.

No they don't:confused: Not when the word totalitarian was popularized in an attempt to string together the USSR and Nazi Germany. It ignores class character.

[Tim Cornelis]

I literally reversed the argument that you used against me; if its an ad hominem, then it goes both ways.

Exactly, you reversed the argument rather than retort mine: tu quoque (i.e. "oh well you do that too/something similar").


Strangely compelling. :rolleyes:

It was meant as in "Nope, you are right." not as "nope, you are wrong."


You either don't know what a strawman is, or you misread my post.

Ad hominem.

Jk,


"Fascism is liberal democracy in decay, communism is the form of social organization which is the expression of the interests of the proletariat class. They have nothing in common, hence why I don't use the word."

This is a strawman because it misrepresents what I was saying. I was talking about state-structures, not communism.


"And the authoritarian - libertarian scale is a false dichotomy."

I did not read the 'scale' part, and thought you said 'authoritarian - libertarian false dichotomy'.


I actually only use it to describe actual liberals or those with convictions whose origins can be traced back to liberal thought.


Okidoki.

Once again no it is not.



Yes but what matters is the class character of the institutions which are "authoritarian," "oppressive," etc..The dictatorship of the proletariat will be a highly authoritarian thing and for good reason.

Right, but you use those words, but you refuse to use the word "totalitarian" as if it could not exist.


Because of the connotations which are attached to it; because of the reason it was popularized. Because it does not assess the class character or the "totalitarian" institution.

Authoritarian does not assess the class character of an authoritarian institution alone.

"Fascism is a totalitarian reaction necessary to suppress escalating class antagonism." (of course a simplification).


No they don't:confused: Not when the word totalitarian was popularized in an attempt to string together the USSR and Nazi Germany. It ignores class character.

Irrespective of its origin, its use today does not necessitate that.

[human strike]

Don't worry, there are plenty more tendencies on the shelves for your enjoyment and entertainment.

http://i40.tinypic.com/21dkd9l.png

[Auberouge]

even if you don't believe in Leninism, good quotes from a great one..

“On the question of the relationship between the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution, Mao Tse-tung takes the standpoint of the chiefs of the Second International, who were the first to attack and distort the Marxist-Leninist theory about the rise of the revolution and came out with the thesis that between the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution, there is a long period, during which the bourgeoisie develops capitalism and creates the conditions for the transition to the proletarian revolution. In conformity with the policy of the ‘equal right to land,’ the kulak stratum, in the forms which have existed in China, has retained great advantages and profits. Mao Tse-tung himself gave orders that the kulaks must not be touched, because this might anger the national bourgeoisie with which the Communist Party of China had formed a common united front, politically, economically and organizationally.”

— E. Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution.



According to ‘Mao Tsetung thought’, a new democratic regime can exist and socialism can be built only on the basis of the collaboration of all classes and all parties. Such a concept of socialist democracy, of the socialist political system, which is based on ‘long-term coexistence and mutual supervision’ of all parties, and which is very much like the current preachings of the Italian, French, Spanish and other revisionists, is an open denial of the leading and indivisible role of the Marxist-Leninist party in the revolution and the construction of socialism.”

— E. Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution, p. 399

[Comrades Unite!]

Don't worry, there are plenty more tendencies on the shelves for your enjoyment and entertainment.

http://i40.tinypic.com/21dkd9l.png

Haha this is good.
Those are some good quotes from Hoxha.

[Hexen]

I would suggest looking into left communism and/or Orthodox Marxism (the two tendencies that I fall most in-line with) or just say "fuck tendencies" and read the basics of Marx and Engels (which would be the better option if you are new to Marxism).

The Tendency Wars is one of the contributing factors that divided the socialist/communist movement hence damaged it.

I think we need to abandon tendencies and go back to basics (Marx & Engles) and go from there.

[Hiero]

Don't worry, there are plenty more tendencies on the shelves for your enjoyment and entertainment.

http://i40.tinypic.com/21dkd9l.png


That is the feeling I get, and I guess I was there years ago when I first joined, this persistence to find an ideology. It really is a consumerist and identiy logic.

[Art Vandelay]

The Tendency Wars is one of the contributing factors that divided the socialist/communist movement hence damaged it.

I think we need to abandon tendencies and go back to basics (Marx & Engles) and go from there.

No yeah, you're totally right; we've just been arguing over nothing this whole time.

[islandmilitia]

The Tendency Wars is one of the contributing factors that divided the socialist/communist movement hence damaged it.

I think we need to abandon tendencies and go back to basics (Marx & Engles) and go from there.

No, the reverse is true, the failure of the revolutionary left has been largely due to the failure of revolutionaries to openly break with and condemn the forces of vacillation and opportunism. The unavoidable fact is that when revolutionary organizations have come to power, they have been able to do so only through a series of prior breaks and struggles against other political forces on the left, such as the break between the chauvinist Second International on the one hand and the revolutionary communists (centered around the Bolsheviks) on the other. In this light, there is simply no historical basis to assume that discarding meaningful ideological differences (e.g. on the nature of the parliamentary state) will somehow produce a disciplined revolutionary movement. All this talk of "tendency wars" smacks of a desire to avoid open ideological confrontation and difference in favor of a superficial though maybe rhetorically appealing form of "unity". We need more ideological struggle, more ruthless rejection of opportunism, more wars against social democracy and the reformist left.

[RedHammer]

What's wrong with MRN2? Aside from his defense of North Korea, he makes good informative videos.

Maoism is not that relevant to the First World, anyway. Mao contributed to the dialectic and theory, but the tactics of Maoism are not intended for the First World, so don't worry that much about it.

[Hexen]

No, the reverse is true, the failure of the revolutionary left has been largely due to the failure of revolutionaries to openly break with and condemn the forces of vacillation and opportunism. The unavoidable fact is that when revolutionary organizations have come to power, they have been able to do so only through a series of prior breaks and struggles against other political forces on the left, such as the break between the chauvinist Second International on the one hand and the revolutionary communists (centered around the Bolsheviks) on the other. In this light, there is simply no historical basis to assume that discarding meaningful ideological differences (e.g. on the nature of the parliamentary state) will somehow produce a disciplined revolutionary movement. All this talk of "tendency wars" smacks of a desire to avoid open ideological confrontation and difference in favor of a superficial though maybe rhetorically appealing form of "unity". We need more ideological struggle, more ruthless rejection of opportunism, more wars against social democracy and the reformist left.

I think you maybe missing the point that Lenin didn't follow Marx which he originally intended for the revolution to take place in industrial based societies not in feudal agricultural based societies like Russia was at the time which is where Lenin failed which the other tendencies since then are derived from Leninism. So being a "Leninist" "Maoist", etc is literally repeating the same mistakes from the past.

[islandmilitia]

I think you maybe missing the point that Lenin didn't follow Marx which he originally intended for the revolution to take place in industrial based societies not in feudal agricultural based societies like Russia was at the time which is where Lenin failed which the other tendencies since then are derived from Leninism. So being a "Leninist" "Maoist", etc is literally repeating the same mistakes from the past.

Nope, you're missing the point, because you're ignorant of the complexities of what Marx had to say about the prospects for revolution in societies like Russia and you are apparently committed to a grossly dogmatic perspective on the development of revolutionary theory and strategy. In the first place, towards the end of his life, Marx did come to recognize that revolution might take place in Russia despite the low level of capitalist development, and that it would possibly take place on the basis of pre-capitalist institutions like the peasant commune. This shift in Marx's thought represents a change away from the relatively more linear concepts of history which can be found earlier in Marx's theoretical development. You should read his letter to Vera Zasulich in order to better appreciate Marx's changing positions, rather than replicating the highly simplistic characterizations that are so often made by bourgeois common sense regarding Marx's theory of history, such as the allegation that Marx was committed to technological determinism. This is related to the broader point that there is actually no "authentic" Marx to which contemporary revolutionaries might return, because Marx, as a human being in concrete historical conditions, presents a plurality of positions, rather than a stable and homogenous set of arguments . In the second place, all this is assuming that Marx's arguments should be the be all and end all of contemporary revolutionary strategy, but an alternative (anti-dogmatic) perspective takes account of the changes undergone by capitalism since Marx's death and the corresponding theoretical innovations and debates (which extend beyond "Leninism", whatever that means) that have taken place in order to understand those changes - especially the formulation of theories of imperialism, and the articulation of concepts like combined and uneven development.

If all the above is too complicated for you, I would suggest you not be a patronizing fool and do some reading before you make such silly assertions about socialism only being able to emerge in industrialized countries or about Russia being a "feudal society".

[Tim Cornelis]

No yeah, you're totally right; we've just been arguing over nothing this whole time.

Forgive me comrade! Forgive me for my meaningless rhetorical and semantical assertions!

WJTBPdVpdMc

Now let's get this revolution on the road.

[Comrades Unite!]

I urge Revleft to tell everybody(even the anarchists) that only Marxism is allowed, everybody else is to be banned(The Stalinist's,Maoists,Leninists)

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I say we go a step further, anyone who has come into contact with these suspect groups shall be banned!

[Comrades Unite!]

How about a bit more?
Firing Squads!

[Comrades Unite!]

Anyhow, What do you think of Stalin, apply my original questions but switch Mao and China to Stalin and USSR.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

^ So I guess you mean Stalinism?

1. Do you think Stalinism is "totalitarian"?

People have talked about the use of this word so I won't answer the question.

2. Do you think Stalinism is really for the worker?

Absolutely not. It is a theory that believes in many flawed things with a "case record" per se that doesn't look too good.

3. Do you think Stalinist Russia was socialist?

Not at all and I think that Stalinism itself is a bourgeois ideology. Actually, the quote in my signature is a quote bashing Stalinism.

[Comrades Unite!]

I like your quote.

But then why is their so many Stalinist's?

[Brosa Luxemburg]

I like your quote.

But then why is their so many Stalinist's?

Well, ask a Stalinist (M-L). Figure out why they think what they do. I would be glad to tell you why I am opposed to Stalinism, but don't just take what I say as some holy truth (as you shouldn't from any Stalinist). Read Stalin, Stalinists, along with writings opposed to Stalinism, etc. and figure it out for yourself.

If you want I can give you a list of writings.

[Comrades Unite!]

Well, ask a Stalinist (M-L). Figure out why they think what they do. I would be glad to tell you why I am opposed to Stalinism, but don't just take what I say as some holy truth (as you shouldn't from any Stalinist). Read Stalin, Stalinists, along with writings opposed to Stalinism, etc. and figure it out for yourself.

If you want I can give you a list of writings.

Yes, I would like some writings.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Yes, I would like some writings.

I'll PM some stuff to you.

[Ismail]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?There is no such thing as "totalitarian." See: http://theredphoenixapl.org/2009/09/10/the-myth-of-totalitarianism/


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?No. Mao Zedong preached in effect that the peasantry played the leading role in the civil war, while during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" the role of students and the army was elevated above the workers.

Ideologically Maoism is another revisionist ideology, one which goes against the line of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. For one analysis of its revisionist views on economics (in this case the Chinese attack on Stalin in regards to the relationship between industry and agriculture) see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/shanghai.htm


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.No, the Chinese revolution was bourgeois-democratic in character and carried out a number of progressive economic reforms and measures in line with this.

Yet China continued to maintain a capitalist economy.

See as an example: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/chinecon.htm

[Tim Cornelis]

There is no such thing as "totalitarian." See: http://theredphoenixapl.org/2009/09/10/the-myth-of-totalitarianism/

This article attacks the origins of the word "totalitarianism" but does not refute its meaning. Thus a red herring. It also conflates authoritarianism and totalitarianism by stating:


Take a look at what happened to Fred Hampton, George Jackson and Anna Mae Aquash. Take a look at Kent State, where the National Guard murdered unarmed student protesters.

This is not a characteristic of totalitarianism.

[Jimmie Higgins]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

I'd say it's problematic and is not a path to "the self-emancipation of the working class".

I think the basic issue is that these ideas don't see the project of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Maoism sees creating liberated bases from which essentially an army of ex-peasants can organize from and attack capital from without to then liberate workers.

Just think about the famous ideas of where change comes from according to Marx vs. Mao... change comes from a gun or from class struggle? Power comes from a gun or does worker's power come from working class self-emancipation?

It's not true that workers couldn't be organized in China, the CP had many organizers in a highly concentrated industrial working class it's just that the repression by the nationalists destroyed Communist connections to industrial areas and made it hard for workers to create new networks.

Repression created Mao's strategies - he didn't choose to hold out in provincial "red bases" these were the cards that he was dealt and he seems to have made a virtue of necessity.

[Comrade Hill]

This article attacks the origins of the word "totalitarianism" but does not refute its meaning. Thus a red herring.


Did you even read the entire article? It refutes its meaning right here:


The word “totalitarian” is used often in place of, or as a supplement to, the word “dictatorship,” which actually does have a meaning. A dictatorship, or a rule by a single class unrestricted by any laws, can exist, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is called “totalitarian.” However, liberal democracies are dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, and they are not called totalitarian.

The criteria often given by those that have a definition of “totalitarian” are:

All facets of society are controlled directly by the dictator and the government through force; the dictator dominates all areas of life without exception.
A highly militaristic society which glorifies the military and the police, as well as other armed forces of the dictator and the ruling government.
There is no separation of powers; judiciaries, legislative and executive are all controlled by the dictator or the ruling party.
The dictator or the party controls the thinking of the masses.
There is no freedom of speech or religion, no freedom of the arts and no freedom of the press except that which glorifies the dictator.
Political repression is practiced on those that dissent from the dictator or ruling party.
Torture of incarcerated persons and political prisoners.
Forced or compulsory military conscription.
Subordination of the individual in favor of the dictator and the ruling government.

The word "totalitarian" has no class basis or material meaning. It's the author of the word "totalitarianism" that confuses the word with "dictatorship." You see, the thing is that the state is just one aspect of the material world. There was more to the Nazi dictatorship than just "Hitler" or the government. This is what the word "totalitarianism" tells us, that a dictatorship is a dictatorship by a state, and not by a certain class. It is a distortion of what the word "dictatorship" actually means.


This is not a characteristic of totalitarianism.

Are you now making up your own definition of what "totalitarianism" is? According to Hannah Arendt and other liberal scholars, this is indeed a characteristic of "totalitarianism," unless what the National Guard did was somehow an "accident." A dictatorship and "totalitarianism" are considered the same thing.

[Zostrianos]

Totalitarianism is a valid term for the characteristics it encompasses. A term doesn't have to take class into account to be legitimate.

[Zostrianos]

The word "totalitarian" has no class basis or material meaning. It's the author of the word "totalitarianism" that confuses the word with "dictatorship."


Totalitarianism differs from conventional dictatorships by its specific characteristics. Not all dictatorships are totalitarian. Totalitarianism specifically refers to the cultic, all encompassing systems we saw in Fascism, Nazism, and sadly the corrupted forms of Marxist thought (Maoism, Stalinism, Juche), as well as religious theocracies (modern Saudi Arabia, and Iran, as well as the Church from late Antiquity to the 17th century would fall under this category)

[Comrade Hill]

Totalitarianism is a valid term for the characteristics it encompasses. A term doesn't have to take class into account to be legitimate.

If it's a term that is used to describe "dictatorships," then it sure does have to take class into account. Otherwise, you get a distorted view of what dictatorships are. I am only a novice Marxist and I understand this.

Okay, so now totalitarianism means a dictatorship with a cult? You know, it's a bit much to distort the meaning of an already distorted word. According to the inventors of the word "totalitarianism," there are more than one characteristics. Can we really compare the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, by using the one-sided analysis that there was a cult, restriction of freedom of speech, etc? If we can't, then what the hell does "totalitarianism" mean? As Marxists, or hell even non-Marxists leftists, how can we possibly get anywhere by using the propaganda tools of the bourgeoisie?

I think Ismail pretty much summed up this thread. Abandoning Maoism doesn't have to mean abandoning Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism also doesn't have to mean worshipping a cult, or silencing any criticism.

[RedHammer]

Anyhow, What do you think of Stalin, apply my original questions but switch Mao and China to Stalin and USSR.

♥ Stalin

1) I think Stalin's Russia was dictatorial, but again, "totalitarian" is an arbitrary meaningless concept
2) Yes, it was for the worker, because it was a necessary part of getting the country ahead considering what a shithole it was when Stalin took charge
3) It was definitely closer to socialism then than Kruschev and beyond

[Geiseric]

Stalin waited as long as he could, untill the Kulaks insurrections were out of hand, before he actually ablolished private property.

Oh contrare, in Georgia he was trying to de-nationalize the economy in the mid 1920s, and put it in the hands of Kulaks, in exchange for political support.

He denied that a planned economy could be successful, and killed everybody who suggested that they implement it over the N.E.P. Once he finally started collectivization (after the Kulak risings of 1924 - 1928), it was too late, and millions of people died. The planned economy is probably the only thing he ended up doing that was progressive in the sense that it took property away from rich peasants (and poor peasants, he didn't really care about Lenin's thought that the poor peasants were allied with the workers).

And if the purges and the forced confessions, broadcasted so everybody in Russia could hear it, along with the Cult of Personality he built around him and Lenin (specifically their relationship) and the lack of democracy on any level isn't "totalitarian," I don't really know what would qualify (except for fascist countries, but they were buddies with Stalin untill Barbarosa, and were supported by the USSR's state on many occasions including the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, splitting up Poland, building up Germany's army, the "help" given to the republic in killing revolutionaries in the Spanish Civil War, and third periodism from the Stalin controlled KPD springs to mind).

[DrZaiu5]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

1) I'm not sure about totalitarian but it is definitely authoritarian, far too much so for my liking. That's one of the reasons why I'm not a big fan. Are you looking for a less authoritarian form of Communism to follow?

2) I don't think Maoism made the workers much better off if that's what you mean. He may have had the intention of making workers better off but if he did then it didn' work.

3) No, China was not socialist.

[Ismail]

Totalitarianism differs from conventional dictatorships by its specific characteristics. Not all dictatorships are totalitarian. Totalitarianism specifically refers to the cultic, all encompassing systems we saw in Fascism, Nazism, and sadly the corrupted forms of Marxist thought (Maoism, Stalinism, Juche), as well as religious theocracies (modern Saudi Arabia, and Iran, as well as the Church from late Antiquity to the 17th century would fall under this category)So what makes the Stalin-era USSR "totalitarian" and the Lenin-era USSR not? Lenin reviewed lists of anti-Soviet intellectuals to deport, instituted the Red Terror, and other "totalitarian" measures. Portraits of Lenin hung in many-a-peasant's houses where the icons of Saints used to reside. Lenin's cult was big, just not as big as Stalin's.

The word is basically just used to denigrate countries which liberal and conservative capitalists don't like. Capitalism is all-encompassing, any alternative is seen as either unthinkable or impracticable. You have plenty of bourgeois economists who locate "capitalism" in ancient times (and often contrast it with "socialism" in the same periods.) Capitalism becomes the fundamental basis of humanity itself and the innate system of human nature.

[Lucretia]

So what makes the Stalin-era USSR "totalitarian" and the Lenin-era USSR not? Lenin reviewed lists of anti-Soviet intellectuals to deport, instituted the Red Terror, and other "totalitarian" measures. Portraits of Lenin hung in many-a-peasant's houses where the icons of Saints used to reside. Lenin's cult was big, just not as big as Stalin's.

The word is basically just used to denigrate countries which liberal and conservative capitalists don't like. Capitalism is all-encompassing, any alternative is seen as either unthinkable or impracticable. You have plenty of bourgeois economists who locate "capitalism" in ancient times (and often contrast it with "socialism" in the same periods.) Capitalism becomes the fundamental basis of humanity itself and the innate system of human nature.

Yes, let's take tactics, completely strip them of their context, ignore the extent to which and the purpose for which they were put into place, then pretend that Lenin was the political equivalent of Stalin. :rolleyes:

[Ismail]

Yes, let's take tactics, completely strip them of their context, ignore the extent to which and the purpose for which they were put into placeWere Lenin's measures "totalitarian" or not? Stalin certainly didn't initiate "totalitarian" actions in an environment of peace and tranquility, so I don't see that point either.

FYI Lenin's call for deporting anti-Soviet intellectuals was taken after the civil war, in 1922. Doesn't change if an action is "totalitarian" or not anyway. Don't forget that a great many users of this word have labeled Robespierre "totalitarian" as well.


then pretend that Lenin was the political equivalent of Stalin.Nah, politically Stalin was only General Secretary of the Party, Lenin was Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (i.e. head of government.) Lenin's position was more powerful, whereas Stalin didn't use "General Secretary" personally after the early 30's and the title was abolished in 1952. :D

[Zealot]

Totalitarianism is just a buzz word which doesn't describe the economic or even the in-depth political nature of a state and is often used to describe any state that one simply doesn't like.

[Lucretia]

Were Lenin's measures "totalitarian" or not? Stalin certainly didn't initiate "totalitarian" actions in an environment of peace and tranquility, so I don't see that point either.

FYI Lenin's call for deporting anti-Soviet intellectuals was taken after the civil war, in 1922. Doesn't change if an action is "totalitarian" or not anyway. Don't forget that a great many users of this word have labeled Robespierre "totalitarian" as well.

I think the point you're missing is that political systems, not individual tactics in the abstract, are "totalitarian" -- a term which I'm not a particularly big fan of anyway. Tactics which in one situation might be a means to resist exploitation, in another context might be used to strengthen it.

Or, to be more frank, the use of state repression in one instance might be meant to preserve a workers' state (as happened under Lenin), and in another instance might be used to entrench a class state (as happened under Stalin). This is evidence by the dramatic changes that characterized the Soviet state and its relationship to the people and even the party following Stalin's consolidation of power.

It's just incredibly fallacious logic to just point at similar tactics in two completely different contexts, then use the existence of those tactics as evidence that the contexts were the same, or that the people employing them shared the same approach to politics.

[Ismail]

I think the point you're missing is that political systems, not individual tactics in the abstract, are "totalitarian" -- a term which I'm not a particularly big fan of anyway. Tactics which in one situation might be a means to resist exploitation, in another context might be used to strengthen it.Yet according to advocates of "totalitarianism" Robespierre was "totalitarian" (or a precursor to "totalitarians") because he used such measures.


Or, to be more frank, the use of state repression in one instance might be meant to preserve a workers' state (as happened under Lenin), and in another instance might be used to entrench a class state (as happened under Stalin).As Lenin pointed out, there is no "people's state," every state is ruled by a class. Lenin's task was to defend the workers' state, Stalin's task was to consolidate it.


This is evidence by the dramatic changes that characterized the Soviet state and its relationship to the people and even the party following Stalin's consolidation of power.Yes, the rightists were defeated, Trotskyists were defeated, bureaucracy was fought against (during the Great Purges, as Getty and others have noted, the anti-bureaucratic struggle was particularly acute), and socialism was built in the main.


It's just incredibly fallacious logic to just point at similar tactics in two completely different contexts, then use the existence of those tactics as evidence that the contexts were the same, or that the people employing them shared the same approach to politics.Yeah it is, that's why "totalitarianism" is a dumb word. If you can apply it to Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USSR under Stalin, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy (not to mention the Church in the 18th and 19th centuries), then evidently it's so loose as to be pretty much worthless. Various commentators have called the USSR under Lenin "totalitarian" as well, and they indeed can do this since the definition is vague and, as said, useless. But that's to be expected of a term from bourgeois political science.

[Tim Cornelis]

The word "totalitarian" has no class basis or material meaning. It's the author of the word "totalitarianism" that confuses the word with "dictatorship." You see, the thing is that the state is just one aspect of the material world. There was more to the Nazi dictatorship than just "Hitler" or the government. This is what the word "totalitarianism" tells us, that a dictatorship is a dictatorship by a state, and not by a certain class. It is a distortion of what the word "dictatorship" actually means.

That is not a refutation of the word totalitarianism. Belarus is a dictatorship but by no means totalitarian.


[Totalitarianism is a form] of government that subordinates all [most] aspects of its citizens' lives to the authority of the state, with a single charismatic leader as the ultimate authority. The term was coined in the early 1920s by Benito Mussolini, but totalitarianism has existed throughout history throughout the world (e.g., Qin dynasty China). It is distinguished from dictatorship and authoritarianism by its supplanting of all political institutions and all old legal and social traditions with new ones to meet the state's needs, which are usually highly focused.


Are you now making up your own definition of what "totalitarianism" is? According to Hannah Arendt and other liberal scholars, this is indeed a characteristic of "totalitarianism," unless what the National Guard did was somehow an "accident." A dictatorship and "totalitarianism" are considered the same thing.

No they are not. I don't think the National Guard operated on orders of the president, but even if it did that does not mean the US is or even was totalitarian. There was a lack of a single-party state, extreme repression of dissent, state control over trade unions, subversion of economic conduct to the state (regardless of in who's interest), etc.

No word has an inherent "class analysis". Saying "totalitarianism does not have a class analysis" is not a criticism as it is a word, of course it has no class analysis. Neither does any word.

I wouldn't consider Saudia Arabia or Iran necessarily "totalitarian," but it's often difficult to differentiate between a highly authoritarian and totalitarian regime.

[Lucretia]

Yet according to advocates of "totalitarianism" Robespierre was "totalitarian" (or a precursor to "totalitarians") because he used such measures.

As Lenin pointed out, there is no "people's state," every state is ruled by a class. Lenin's task was to defend the workers' state, Stalin's task was to consolidate it.

Yes, the rightists were defeated, Trotskyists were defeated, bureaucracy was fought against (during the Great Purges, as Getty and others have noted, the anti-bureaucratic struggle was particularly acute), and socialism was built in the main.

Yeah it is, that's why "totalitarianism" is a dumb word. If you can apply it to Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USSR under Stalin, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy (not to mention the Church in the 18th and 19th centuries), then evidently it's so loose as to be pretty much worthless. Various commentators have called the USSR under Lenin "totalitarian" as well, and they indeed can do this since the definition is vague and, as said, useless. But that's to be expected of a term from bourgeois political science.

You're not chatting with "advocates of totalitarianism theory." You're chatting with me, so let's not bring stupid shit that they might say into this discussion as evidence that what I say is wrong. They can speak for themselves, and I speak for myself.

Of course there is no "people's state," and nobody suggested as much. What I suggested was that Lenin and those in party sometimes employed brutal tactics for the purpose of preserving a state whose power was rooted in the participation of and support of the industrial workers (a class), and that Stalin employed similar tactics while overseeing a quite different state. It is literally impossible to wade through the historiography on the history of the Soviet state in the late 1920s and not concede that its relationship to workers underwent a fundamental transformation that was evidenced in the explosion of secret police and other apparatuses, the surveillance and intimidation of party members, etc. This is where virtually all Trotskyists, including so-called "orthodox" ones and state capitalists, are all in agreement. And it's because it is undeniable. Only somebody who wants to grant the Soviet state a permanent birthright of proletarianism regardless of what it does would disregard its extreme degeneration (into what I think was undoubtedly a class society, though other Trotskyists would disagree). But if you're going to do this, you might as well grant capitalism a permanent birthright as a progressive mode of production. Why not? Well, because actions and processes which take place in one context might assume a different meaning in other contexts. Of course. And so it goes with "totalitarian tactics."

If you think suppressing workers en masse in order to rapidly industrialize for the sake of competing military and economically with the west is "building socialism," then you must think that all repressive industrialization taking place on the backs of workers is "building socialism." And since such happens under capitalist industrialization, you must think that capitalism is a process of "building socialism." It is, in a manner of speaking, insofar as it lays the groundwork for its triumph, but it is not gradually introducing socialist content to production relations. That happens through a dramatic qualitative rupture known as revolution.

[Homo Songun]

I'd say it's problematic and is not a path to "the self-emancipation of the working class".

I think the basic issue is that these ideas don't see the project of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Maoism sees creating liberated bases from which essentially an army of ex-peasants can organize from and attack capital from without to then liberate workers.

Just think about the famous ideas of where change comes from according to Marx vs. Mao... change comes from a gun or from class struggle? Power comes from a gun or does worker's power come from working class self-emancipation?

I'm presuming this is your rather tortured interpretation of the famous phrase attributed to Mao, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". In truth it has nothing to do with Mao's theory of change or the dialectical process. Rather the quote is taken from an essay of his discussing the politics of the so-called warlord period in Chinese history, the period of bureaucrat capitalism after the 1911 revolution when law and order broke down in China and civilian officials relied on militias and armies to secure their respective power bases. The context is as follows:


Since the Revolution of 1911, all the warlords have clung to their armies for dear life, setting great store by the principle, "Whoever has an army has power."

Tan Yen-kai, a clever bureaucrat who had a chequered career in Hunan, was never a civil governor pure and simple but always insisted on being both the military governor and the civil governor. Even when he became President of the National Government first in Canton and then in Wuhan, he was concurrently the commander of the Second Army.

There are many such warlords who understand this peculiarity of China's. There have also been parties in China, notably the Progressive Party, which did not want to have an army; yet even this party recognized that it could not get government positions without some warlord backing. Among its successive patrons have been Yuan Shih-kai, Tuan Chi-jui and Chiang Kai-shek (to whom the Political Science Group, formed out of a section of the Progressive Party, has attached itself).


A few small political parties with a short history, e.g., the Youth Party, have no army, and so have not been able to get anywhere.


In other countries there is no need for each of the bourgeois parties to have an armed force under its direct command. But things are different in China, where, because of the feudal division of the country, those landlord or bourgeois groupings or parties which have guns have power, and those which have more guns have more power. Placed in such an environment, the party of the proletariat should see clearly to the heart of the matter.

Communists do not fight for personal military power (they must in no circumstances do that, and let no one ever again follow the example of Chang Kuo-tao), but they must fight for military power for the Party, for military power for the people. As a national war of resistance is going on, we must also hght for military power for the nation. Where there is naivety on the question of military power, nothing whatsoever can be achieved. It is very difficult for the labouring people, who have been deceived and intimidated by the reactionary ruling classes for thousands of years, to awaken to the importance of having guns in their own hands. Now that Japanese imperialist oppression and the nation-wide resistance to it have pushed our labouring people into the arena of war, Communists should prove themselves the most politically conscious leaders in this war. Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the "omnipotence of war". Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.On the other hand, Mao's dialectics are most famously expressed in his essay On Contradiction. While the scope of the essay is much broader than just socialist revolution, I refuse to accept that an honest and intelligent person can read it and feel justified in using it as a basis for the claim that Mao thinks socialism is something other than "the self-emancipation of the working class" !

[Paul Cockshott]

I do not think China was a socialist society. It contained/contains generalized commodity production, the law of value, wage labor, the state, etc.

No. In the communes which embraced majority of population distribution was on the basis of a labour point system as advocated by Marx.

[Comrade Hill]

That is not a refutation of the word totalitarianism. Belarus is a dictatorship but by no means totalitarian.


Well, this brief phrase isn't a refutation of my post, or the article on the Red Phoenix.



No they are not. I don't think the National Guard operated on orders of the president, but even if it did that does not mean the US is or even was totalitarian. There was a lack of a single-party state, extreme repression of dissent, state control over trade unions, subversion of economic conduct to the state (regardless of in who's interest), etc.


Oh so now dissent has to be extremely repressed. You hide behind words like "extremely," yet there is no elaboration of that in the definition of totalitarianism. Why have state controlled unions when you can bust them up? Why have the subversn of economic conduct to the state when the conduct can be carried out by a private elite? There we go, no more totalitarianism. This word is a mere propaganda tool for the ruling class, it tells us nothing about the class composition of certain nations.



No word has an inherent "class analysis". Saying "totalitarianism does not have a class analysis" is not a criticism as it is a word, of course it has no class analysis. Neither does any word.


Everything in society has a class basis. Even words, phrases, decisions people make, etc. Even the word totalitarianism has a class basis. It's just a vague term that can be applied to many different governments, regardless of their class compostion, which serves the ruling class's interests. I'm not really sure where I ever said that a word is a "class analysis," but there certainly are words that help us with class analysis.



I wouldn't consider Saudia Arabia or Iran necessarily "totalitarian," but it's often difficult to differentiate between a highly authoritarian and totalitarian regime.

If its so confusing, then why are you trying to explain the difference? You will find that once you stop using the word "totalitarianism," things will become much clearer. This is not because the word totalitarianism is some "complex term" that only a few can understand, it's because it's a completely made up term that has no existence anywhere on this earth, besides in the minds of historical idealists and bourgeois political scientists. Not that you're a historical idealist or a bourgeois political scientist, it's just that for some reason, you find the terms they make up to be particularly useful for analyzing the real world.

What I'm trying to figure out is, why in the world is this word so attractive to you? What kind of "scientific meaning" does this word even have? Is there any system in the world where the "state's needs" are not highly focused? Can we really just come up with words and use them? I'm still waiting for an answer. This is the same question that the Red Phoenix article poses. Please prove to me how this word is not useless.

[Comrade Hill]

No. In the communes which embraced majority of population distribution was on the basis of a labour point system as advocated by Marx.

With 2 opposing classes?

Mao advocated for the "peaceful transition" to socialism, but I'm not too sure he was successful in establishing a socialist system.


In our country the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie comes under the category of contradictions among the people. . . . In the period of the socialist revolution, exploitation of the working class for profit constitutes one side of the character of the national bourgeoisie, while . . . its willingness to accept socialist transformation constitutes the other. . . . The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited. . . . But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled can . . . be resolved by peaceful methods.


The new-democratic revolution . . . is developing in all other colonial and semi-colonial countries as well as in China. . . . Politically, it strives for the joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes.

I'm no expert, but I'm iffy on whether Marx would've called this the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or the "first stage of communism." A "labour point system" with different classes does not sound like socialism to me. Didn't North Korea adopt something like this as well?

[Ismail]

You're not chatting with "advocates of totalitarianism theory." You're chatting with me, so let's not bring stupid shit that they might say into this discussion as evidence that what I say is wrong. They can speak for themselves, and I speak for myself.And you admit that "totalitarianism" is not a word you'd prefer to use, so what's your point?


It is literally impossible to wade through the historiography on the history of the Soviet state in the late 1920s and not concede that its relationship to workers underwent a fundamental transformation that was evidenced in the explosion of secret police and other apparatuses, the surveillance and intimidation of party members, etc.Actually as Robert W. Thurston and others have noted, right up until the Great Purges people like Vyshinsky were seeking to bring Soviet law onto a more effective and fairer basis. The "explosion of secret police and other apparatuses" is also known the development of a state in a situation where the vast majority of the population are accustomed to feudal methods and where the state machinery itself was hitherto in a rather inefficient (and in fact into the 30's and 40's still inefficient) mess, as Getty and others have pointed out.

As for surveillance and "intimidation of party members," you mean oppositionists who were trying to form factions, and in fact into the 30's such factions were still being formed by both "leftists" and rightists alike.


If you think suppressing workers en masse in order to rapidly industrialize for the sake of competing military and economically with the west is "building socialism," then you must think that all repressive industrialization taking place on the backs of workers is "building socialism."No, I think that eliminating the bourgeoisie and its remnants (NEPmen), liquidating the kulaks as a class and establishing socialist relations of production, was building socialism. The policy of rapid industrialization was due, as anyone could tell you (Sheila Fitzpatrick for a start), to obviously well-grounded fears of external invasion, mainly Japan and (after 1933) Nazi Germany.

[Optiow]

I have great respect for Maoist groups and individuals throughout history and the world. I think Mao was a great man, just like Marx, Lenin and other comrades were. Did he get everything correct? No. But I'd link with a Maoist any day to make revolution. To ignore what Mao brought to socialist theory would be to disregard other theoreticians like Trotsky or Lenin.

Learn from them all, for they all have something to teach.

[Ismail]

What did Mao "bring" to socialist theory? The mass line isn't particularly original (he admitted he got it from Lenin and Marx), his economic policies aren't worth emulating, the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" effectively destroyed the vanguard role of the Party in favor of the "revolutionary enthusiasm" of students and the armed forces, and obviously neither the Bolsheviks nor, say, the Albanian Communists neglected the peasantry (whereas Mao effectively claimed it had a leading role), so there's nothing particularly original there either.

Then there were such "contributions" as the "Three Worlds Theory," which was an outright call for allying with US imperialism against Soviet social-imperialism. Towards the end of his life he also began developing his own bastardization of the dictatorship of the proletariat, much like how in the 40's and 50's he had his "Bloc of Four Classes." Is it any wonder that Stalin saw Mao as a Tito-esque figure, as Mao himself complained in 1956?

[Tim Cornelis]

Well, this brief phrase isn't a refutation of my post, or the article on the Red Phoenix.

Dictatorship is not synonymous with totalitarianism.


Oh so now dissent has to be extremely repressed.

Obviously, if that's new to you then you might want to look into totalitarianism.


You hide behind words like "extremely," yet there is no elaboration of that in the definition of totalitarianism.

[Totalitarianism is a form] of government that subordinates all [most] aspects of its citizens' lives to the authority of the state, with a single charismatic leader as the ultimate authority ... It is distinguished from dictatorship and authoritarianism by its supplanting of all political institutions and all old legal and social traditions with new ones to meet the state's needs, which are usually highly focused.

The bold part includes the extreme suppression of dissent.


Why have state controlled unions when you can bust them up? Why have the subversn of economic conduct to the state when the conduct can be carried out by a private elite? There we go, no more totalitarianism.

That makes no sense. You are not attacking the word "totalitarianism" you are attacking the motivations behind it. Moreover, this implies as if such a system has never existed--which is ludicrous.


Why have state controlled unions when you can bust them up?

Ask the leaders of a totalitarian regime. Perhaps they could not be subverted otherwise.


Why have the subversn of economic conduct to the state when the conduct can be carried out by a private elite?

Ask the leaders of a totalitarian regime. Perhaps because this "private elite" may be under attack by the working class, therefore subverting economic conduct to the authority of the state one may be able to pacify the working class.


There we go, no more totalitarianism.

You are 100% right. If you strip totalitarianism of its characteristics there is no more totalitarianism.


This word is a mere propaganda tool for the ruling class, it tells us nothing about the class composition of certain nations.

Blah, blah, blah.


Everything in society has a class basis.

Including totalitarian regimes.


Even words, phrases, decisions people make, etc. Even the word totalitarianism has a class basis. It's just a vague term that can be applied to many different governments, regardless of their class compostion,

So can democracy, monarchy, parliamentarianism, capitalism, dictatorship, autocracy, authoritarian, elitist, oligarchy, and most politically charged words for that matter. But I suspect you have no problem with those words.


which serves the ruling class's interests. I'm not really sure where I ever said that a word is a "class analysis," but there certainly are words that help us with class analysis.


If its so confusing, then why are you trying to explain the difference? You will find that once you stop using the word "totalitarianism," things will become much clearer. This is not because the word totalitarianism is some "complex term" that only a few can understand, it's because it's a completely made up term

Like any word. But what about democracy, monarchy, state, government, parliamentarianism, capitalism, dictatorship, anarchism, autocracy, authoritarian, elitist, oligarchy, plutocracy, and most politically charged words for that matter.

Should I stop using these words because "they are made up" and are sometimes difficult to define?


that has no existence anywhere on this earth,

...


What about besides in the minds of historical idealists and bourgeois political scientists. Not that you're a historical idealist or a bourgeois political scientist, it's just that for some reason, you find the terms they make up to be particularly useful for analyzing the real world.

Sure, because I'm not afraid of association fallacies.


What I'm trying to figure out is, why in the world is this word so attractive to you? What kind of "scientific meaning" does this word even have? Is there any system in the world where the "state's needs" are not highly focused? Can we really just come up with words and use them? I'm still waiting for an answer. This is the same question that the Red Phoenix article poses. Please prove to me how this word is not useless.

Totalitarian is as useful as these words: democracy, monarchy, state, government, parliamentarianism, capitalism, dictatorship, anarchism, autocracy, authoritarian, elitist, oligarchy, plutocracy.

These words convey a meaning which makes communication easier. Perhaps it is difficult to give a 100% accurate description of totalitarianism, but everyone (well most people) immediately know what you mean, and hence it's valuable. The same with emotions, no one can define "love" or "happiness" or "hatred" 100% accurate or so that everyone agrees with that definition, yet everyone knows what you mean when you say those words.

I would think this is common sense.

[Comrade Hill]

So can democracy, monarchy, parliamentarianism, capitalism, dictatorship, autocracy, authoritarian, elitist, oligarchy, and most politically charged words for that matter. But I suspect you have no problem with those words.


I don't see how "capitalism" or "dictatorship" can be compared to politically charged words. Nevertheless, those are all words that have concrete meanings. "Elitist" isn't a form of government, neither is parliamentarianism. Some of those words are vague, some of them aren't. However, they aren't so vague that they don't imply class. Thus, they have scientific meanings.

Allowing a worthless word like "totalitarianism," which implies a form of government that is somehow different from a "dictatorship" devoid of any class, to sit beside these words is a pretty one-sided and naive thing to do. There are no "totalitarian" dictatorships, because the state never has "total control" of societies. There are capitalist dictatorships and there are socialist dictatorships, or feudal dictatorships. The forms of government could be a Republic, autocracy, monarchy or what have you, if you want to give them more concrete terms.

When I said the word "totalitarian" has a class basis, I wasn't implying that "totalitarianism" actually exists. I was merely talking about the origins of the word. You can choose to ignore the origins of the word and pretend like they don't matter, but books have been written about this to convey the definition of "totalitarianism." We can't discuss the meaning of "totalitarianism" without seeing how it is used as a word, in the abstract.

[Paul Cockshott]

I'm no expert, but I'm iffy on whether Marx would've called this the "dictatorship of the proletariat" or the "first stage of communism." A "labour point system" with different classes does not sound like socialism to me. Didn't North Korea adopt something like this as well?

My point was to challenge the idea that there was generalised commodity production and generalised wage labour in China in the late Mao period. The communes made up the bulk of the population and these were not based on wage labour but on labour points. This was a direct attempt by the Chinese communists at that time to apply the theory in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In the mid 70s there was a big campaign to encourage mass study of this little book.

One of Mao's key theoretical points was that socialism was a long historical period during which classes and class struggle still exist. This has been born out by history. The idea that classes are eliminated as soon as socialism is established is pure idealist apriorism not based on any study of history.

[Ismail]

One of Mao's key theoretical points was that socialism was a long historical period during which classes and class struggle still exist. This has been born out by history. The idea that classes are eliminated as soon as socialism is established is pure idealist apriorism not based on any study of history.Class struggle still exists in the period of socialism, yes. Classes exist too, but not antagonistic ones. Neither view is unique to Mao; what is unique to him is the idea that antagonistic classes necessarily exist and that the Party must become an arena between them, which was used to justify both rightist policies (the "Hundred Flowers") and then "leftist" policies (the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.")

[Hit The North]

One of Mao's key theoretical points was that socialism was a long historical period during which classes and class struggle still exist. This has been born out by history. The idea that classes are eliminated as soon as socialism is established is pure idealist apriorism not based on any study of history.

Whether idealist apriorism or not, I'd like you to show us where socialism has been established in history.

[islandmilitia]

Class struggle still exists in the period of socialism, yes. Classes exist too, but not antagonistic ones.

What makes you so confident in asserting that the classes that exist under socialism are not antagonistic? Mao's conception of class is one that acknowledges both subjective and objective dimensions, so in the first place he and others were sensitive to the fact that the legal expropriation of pre-revolutionary classes like the landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie still leaves behind large numbers of individuals who have an interest in reversing the gains of socialism and reinstalling a comprador regime. As such, for Mao, the whole of the socialist period is characterized by a struggle between the forces that led the revolution and the forces which exercised economic and political power in the old society, especially when the latter retain influence and positions in the cultural and ideological sphere. More important than the lingering influence of pre-revolutionary classes, though, was Mao's recognition that the basic economic structure of socialist society itself has the capability to produce new antagonistic forces, because socialist society, arising as it does from the old society, is necessarily confronted with various contradictions and various forms of inequality, such as the inequality between skilled and unskilled labour, between the cities and the countryside, and between the cadres and the general population, as well as the contradiction between the socialist relations of production and the backward productive forces. Mao was conscious that these inequalities and contradictions are what produce the ideological influence of capitalism over the cadres, on a spontaneous and ongoing basis, unless they are actively combatted through constant social and political revolution. This is entirely consistent with Lenin's recognition that "small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale".

If, on the other hand, you deny the existence of all antagonistic classes and class struggles, then how can you explain the ultimate collapse of socialism in China, or in Albania for that matter? You either make the international factor the only relevant force or you resort to entirely conspiratorial formulations which have no sense of revisionism being an imminently material force in socialist society. I'm not even saying any of this as a Maoist, but I at least think that Mao was able to acknowledge certain key issues and debates that remain relevant for future attempts to build socialism. I fail to see any similar relevance when it comes to Hoxha or Albania.


the Party must become an arena between them

No, Mao did not argue this either, he did not say that the party "must" become an arena for contending classes, he recognized that this simply is the case whether it is desired or not, because the bourgeoisie can and does arise within the party on the basis of the underlying contradictions and inequalities of socialist society. If you assert that the party is impervious to revisionism and will only ever embody a single set of class forces, you are simply blind to the complex nature of socialist society. The conclusion that Mao drew was that there must be spaces for the exposure of the bourgeois forces that emerge within the party, and that there must be a process of constant ideological, social, and political transformation in order to drag out those forces and prevent their further emergence. Part of that process is the fight against all those structures which separate the cadres from the workers and peasants, hence why the Cultural Revolution prioritized the involvement of cadres in productive work and introduced changes to the division of labour throughout Chinese society.


My point was to challenge the idea that there was generalised commodity production and generalised wage labour in China in the late Mao period. The communes made up the bulk of the population and these were not based on wage labour but on labour points.

Your point also ignores that the work point system in the communes was not in itself sufficient to secure socialism, because, as Zhang Chunqiao pointed out, even in the 1970s the main part of point distribution and asset ownership was still at the level of the work team rather than the commune or brigade levels, such that there was still scope for extensive inequality. The Cultural Revolution did not ultimately do a good enough job of rooting out that inequality and other sources of inequality in China.

[Rafiq]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

Taking into account the fact that "Totalitarianism" is nothing more than Liberalist rhetoric, and only exists as such, in the abstract, of course not. "Maosim" isn't really a system, it's a supposed current of Marxian thought.


2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?


As Maoism is petite bourgeois, no. It's important to understand, though, that the proletariat were an overwhelmingly demographic minority in Feudal China.

Though I don't really know where exactly your question resides. What is "Much for the worker"? Is Maoism the ideological embodiment of the interests of the proletarian class? No. "Maoism" wasn't responsible for the massive rise in a standard of living in China, the transition from Feudalism to a mutated form of the capitalist mode of production is.


3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.


There isn't a problem calling it socialist. After all, Socialism is an ideology, and as far as we're concerned, not a system (Or so we think). For one, many get pissed off when people use the term "Communist State". Western powers adhered to such a usage, because they defined a "Communist" state as a state with a ruling Communist party, Communists in power. It's largely an accurate definition as well. Communism for us isn't some kind of abstract Utopia in which we have to utilize our resources to achieve or actualize, and create some sort of bizarre spectrum in the process. Communism for us is a process, a process involving the destruction of the bourgeois state and the conquest for state dictatorship on behalf of the proletarian class. Mao was one of the last romantic Bourgeois revolutionaries to exist, and nothing more. That doesn't mean, though, that we have to stoop to cheap moral criticisms.

But as far as we're concerned, Maoism as a current of Marxism is an abomination, an extreme vulgarization. Mao wasn't always wrong, as a matter of fact, he could be insightful sometimes. But overall, Maoism, appears to me, as simply a vulgarization of an already vulgarized current of Marxism, i.e. Marxism Leninism ('Marxism Leninism on cocaine').


I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.


I don't quite catch you here. Anyhow, while I would advise any Marxist to stay away from Maoism, I think, for the most part, the great majority of whatever doubts you have regarding Maoism are largely unsubstantiated and insufficient. There are other ways to critique Maoism, you know.

[islandmilitia]

But as far as we're concerned, Maoism as a current of Marxism is an abomination, an extreme vulgarization. Mao wasn't always wrong, as a matter of fact, he could be insightful sometimes. But overall, Maoism, appears to me, as simply a vulgarization of an already vulgarized current of Marxism, i.e. Marxism Leninism ('Marxism Leninism on cocaine').

Whilst (again) not a Maoist, I find this line of argument to be the crassest form of Eurocentrism. By saying that Maoism is an "abomination" you make absolutely no attempt to consider why it is, in terms of the tactics and strategies deployed, that Maoist organizations have been able to develop sizable social bases and mount prolonged military challenges against the bourgeois state in societies such as India, and you also make no attempt to understand why Maoism has been able to present itself as a set of valuable theoretical interventions to individual theorists and large sections of radical youth. Instead, you disqualify Maoism from even being included as a component of the Marxist tradition, apparently because it does not proceed from the same assumptions as those tendencies which emerged in a Western context, and instead you give Maoism meaning only through a category ("romantic bourgeois revolutionary") which is derived from the European historical experience and carries with it the suggestion of Maoism being outmoded and retrograde. Your Eurocentrism is only confirmed by your thoughtless characterization of China as "feudal", which is itself a category derived from the European experience, and one that does not in any way engage with the complexities of the Chinese social formation before 1949. After all, I would see one of Mao's major interventions as being his characterization of China as a hybrid social formation, "semi-feudal, semi-colonial", based on a reciprocal relationship between imperialist penetration and pre-capitalist ruling classes. This contrasts with those elements of the Marxist tradition (including Trotsky's own comments on China's social relations) which see capitalism as eliminating pre-capitalist social relations and ruling classes in a relatively straightforward manner.

Why not begin with a little humility, instead of this Western arrogance?

[Geiseric]

Maoism was Stalinism in China, nothing different! He even let capitalists keep their property, it wasn't a planned economy like Russia always had. Maoism is class collaborationism with marxist sounding rhetoric, and what we see as china today is simply the natural progression of where Maoism led. The results were the same as Stalinism, and just as devastating.

[islandmilitia]

Maoism was Stalinism in China, nothing different! He even let capitalists keep their property, it wasn't a planned economy like Russia always had. Maoism is class collaborationism with marxist sounding rhetoric, and what we see as china today is simply the natural progression of where Maoism led. The results were the same as Stalinism, and just as devastating.

In two sentences you simultaneously manage to claim that Maoism was exactly the same as Stalinism and that the Maoist economy radically differed from the Soviet one in allowing capitalists to keep their property. If the latter is true, and if the Soviet economy "always had" complete state ownership, then how can it be that there are no fundamental differences between Maoism and Stalinism? Such a basic logical contradiction does not say much about your seriousness on this subject. Of course, the assertion about capitalists in China being allowed to keep their property is not true. The private capitalist sector was largely eliminated through the Five-anti Campaign in 1952 and after that point former capitalists were largely hired as managers and payed interest on their former property, up until the Cultural Revolution. The experience of Maoism did differ from Stalinism in Russia, and it did so in ways that make Maoism still relevant today as a potential mode of socialist development. For example, Maoism prioritized the closure of the gap between the cities and the countryside by promoting the development of rural industries as part of the commune system and by encouraging transfers of knowledge from urban educational institutions to the rural areas, especially during the Cultural Revolution, which were measures that were simply not undertaken in the Soviet Union, because Stalinism did not emphasize balanced development in the same way. There was, generally speaking, no equivalent of the Cultural Revolution - a massive process of political participation and conflict - at any point in the history of the Soviet Union. Like the other post, your comments have a basically Eurocentric logic, because they uncritically assume that a category derived from the European (in this case, Russian) historical experience can be straightforwardly extended to a non-European society (China) with no concern for its unique historical conditions and its autonomous revolutionary history.


and what we see as china today is simply the natural progression of where Maoism led. The results were the same as Stalinism, and just as devastating.

The ideological operations of the Chinese ruling class and China's workers would suggest otherwise, in that a large part of what the ruling class has done ideologically over the past thirty years has been the rejection of key elements of the Maoist period (the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward) whereas the memories and institutions of the Maoist period have emerged as a key part of the oppositional inventory of important sections of the Chinese working class, so that Maoism is invoked as a basis for critique against the current state. Again, how do you square your blanket assertion about Maoism being Stalinism with the central position of Maoism in contemporary Chinese oppositional politics, given that the same phenomenon is not present to anywhere near the same degree in Russia and Eastern Europe?

[Rafiq]

Whilst (again) not a Maoist, I find this line of argument to be the crassest form of Eurocentrism. By saying that Maoism is an "abomination" you make absolutely no attempt to consider why it is, in terms of the tactics and strategies deployed, that Maoist organizations have been able to develop sizable social bases and mount prolonged military challenges against the bourgeois state in societies such as India, and you also make no attempt to understand why Maoism has been able to present itself as a set of valuable theoretical interventions to individual theorists and large sections of radical youth. Instead, you disqualify Maoism from even being included as a component of the Marxist tradition, apparently because it proceed from the same assumptions as those tendencies which emerged in a Western context, and instead you give Maoism meaning only through a category ("romantic bourgeois revolutionary") which is derived from the European historical experience and carries with it the suggestion of Maoism being outmoded and retrograde. Your Eurocentrism is only confirmed by your thoughtless characterization of China as "feudal", which is itself a category derived from the European experience, and one that does not in any way engage with the complexities of the Chinese social formation before 1949. After all, I would see one of Mao's major interventions as being his characterization of China as a hybrid social formation, "semi-feudal, semi-colonial", based on a reciprocal relationship between imperialist penetration and pre-capitalist ruling classes. This contrasts with those elements of the Marxist tradition (including Trotsky's own comments on China's social relations) which see capitalism as eliminating pre-capitalist social relations and ruling classes in a relatively straightforward manner.

Why not begin with a little humility, instead of this Western arrogance?

Save me your pretentious ramblings.

Mao's "contributions" to Marxian theory are utterly distasteful. The "three worlds theory" for one, is petite bourgeois in nature. I really can go on as to why Maoism is crazy as fuck, but it would appear to be a waste of my time, anyway, since it would be dismissed as "Eurocentricist". Even Mao himself recognized that Feudal relations were existent within China.

Here's what I said:


As Maoism is petite bourgeois, no. It's important to understand, though, that the proletariat were an overwhelmingly demographic minority in Feudal China.

Though I don't really know where exactly your question resides. What is "Much for the worker"? Is Maoism the ideological embodiment of the interests of the proletarian class? No. "Maoism" wasn't responsible for the massive rise in a standard of living in China, the transition from Feudalism to a mutated form of the capitalist mode of production is.


Of course Feudalism in China largely differed from Feudalism in Europe. Even if I said, so you wouldn't get all pissy, "Semi Feudal, Semi Colonial" instead of Feudal, my fucking point would still stand. Now piss off.

[Lucretia]

And you admit that "totalitarianism" is not a word you'd prefer to use, so what's your point?

Actually as Robert W. Thurston and others have noted, right up until the Great Purges people like Vyshinsky were seeking to bring Soviet law onto a more effective and fairer basis. The "explosion of secret police and other apparatuses" is also known the development of a state in a situation where the vast majority of the population are accustomed to feudal methods and where the state machinery itself was hitherto in a rather inefficient (and in fact into the 30's and 40's still inefficient) mess, as Getty and others have pointed out.

As for surveillance and "intimidation of party members," you mean oppositionists who were trying to form factions, and in fact into the 30's such factions were still being formed by both "leftists" and rightists alike.

No, I think that eliminating the bourgeoisie and its remnants (NEPmen), liquidating the kulaks as a class and establishing socialist relations of production, was building socialism. The policy of rapid industrialization was due, as anyone could tell you (Sheila Fitzpatrick for a start), to obviously well-grounded fears of external invasion, mainly Japan and (after 1933) Nazi Germany.

Your post amounts to just defending the practices I brought up as somehow necessary to preserve the ruling regimes in those countries. You seem to be missing the point: in the process of preserving the ruling regimes, the people were suppressed and lacked control over the state and the economy. This is not socialism and is not a transition to it except insofaras capitalism can be called a transition to socialism.

[Hiero]

Just think about the famous ideas of where change comes from according to Marx vs. Mao... change comes from a gun or from class struggle? Power comes from a gun or does worker's power come from working class self-emancipation?

Mao didn't say any of that, or not what you're implying. You have worded that really wierd.

[islandmilitia]

The "three worlds theory" for one, is petite bourgeois in nature

This is utterly devoid of content. What does it mean to say that the "three worlds theory" is "petite bourgeois"? In the first place it is problematic to assume that there was such a thing as a coherent "three worlds theory" invented by Mao (as opposed to a loose set of ideas which were expressed and deployed in different ways at different points during the Maoist period) but simply saying that such a theory was "petite bourgeoisie" does nothing in terms of analysis - does this mean it was developed by the petite bourgeoisie, that it served the interests of some existing petite bourgeoisie within China, or what? You also do not provide any discussion as to how any such "three worlds theory" relates to Mao's thought in more general terms - to what extent should it be viewed as central, does it contradict or extend on other ideas like New Democracy, to what extent do Mao's ideas have to be swallowed as one body of arguments, as opposed to there being scope for a more discriminatory approach?


Even Mao himself recognized that Feudal relations were existent within China.


Of course Feudalism in China largely differed from Feudalism in Europe

You are mixing up different things here. Mao developed the category of "semi feudal, semi colonial" to describe the conditions that obtained in China as a result of its exposure to imperialism, beginning in the nineteenth century. The point of this category is that it differs from a conception of feudalism as a pre-capitalist mode of production and does not simply mean that "feudal relations were existent within China", instead, it is intended to articulate the combined and complex nature of China as a social formation, and the ways in which imperialism reinforced pre-capitalist social forces, at the same time as giving them a new character, specific to the imperialist context. This is different from doing what you did, describing pre-1949 China as "feudal", because your characterization carries with it no sense of China being a complex social formation, which is precisely what Mao was seeking to get at. That is a downright Eurocentric characterization not only because of your unthinking use of a European historical category (without any discussion of what feudalism means and why it is applicable to China at any point in history) but also because it is entirely consistent with the Orientalist representation of China as essentially backward and unchanging. You make the situation even more confusing by virtue of the fact that Mao did actually use the concept of feudalism to refer to part of China's dynastic history, before the nineteenth century, whilst remaining absolutely conscious that historical feudalism in China differed radically from the experience of "semi-feudal, semi-colonial" society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In simple terms, you overlook the very different uses that Mao assigns to "feudalism" and "semi-feudal, semi-colonial" in his historical and socio-political analysis.

Finally, there is no need to tell me to "piss off", if you cannot respond, then just don't reply at all.

[thälmann]

While iam not a maoist, i think i have to make different things clear here or defend certain aspects:

1. i think it is kind of strange to say that mao said there is a peaceful transition to socialism. the only thing he sayid, is that after a bloody, democratic revolution, which brings the communist party to power, is it possble to deal with certain parts of the bourgoisie with peaceful means( not to shoot them or put them in whatever camps etc.), if they accept it. that may be wrong, but has nothing to do with peaceful transition. ( of course we are talking here about oppressed nations)

2. as far as i know mao never said that the peasents can lead a revolution. quite the contrary, he said that under imperialism, EVERY revolution must be lead by proletariat, democratic or socialist. the block of four classes was only for the democratic revolution in china.

3 i think there exists class struggle under socialism, even antagonistic one. thats why we need the dictatorship of the proletariat.

4. i think there are certain things from mao that were new, for example the military strategy fpr semifeudal oppressed countries. the komintern insurrections strategy in those countires was a desaster, while the peopleswar stratgy was successful in china, vietnam, cambodia, laos etc.

[Ismail]

Your post amounts to just defending the practices I brought up as somehow necessary to preserve the ruling regimes in those countries. You seem to be missing the point: in the process of preserving the ruling regimes, the people were suppressed and lacked control over the state and the economy. This is not socialism and is not a transition to it except insofaras capitalism can be called a transition to socialism.Apparently keeping former Party oppositionists in check constitutes "the people [being] suppressed and lack[ing] control over the state and the economy." Never mind that, again, the Great Purges saw a rise in anti-bureaucratic activity, in increased democracy (not only the first Supreme Soviet elections which Sarah Davies, J. Arch Getty, etc. have noted were actually not predetermined in the results of what candidates would win, but even internal Party democracy), etc. For one example of this in the trade unions see: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/110.5/goldman.html


This is utterly devoid of content. What does it mean to say that the "three worlds theory" is "petite bourgeois"? In the first place it is problematic to assume that there was such a thing as a coherent "three worlds theory" invented by Mao (as opposed to a loose set of ideas which were expressed and deployed in different ways at different points during the Maoist period)Mao had Deng Xiaoping, who had been recently rehabilitated, deliver a speech to the UN announcing the doctrine of the Three Worlds Theory. Mao endorsed the content of the speech. Both bourgeois and foreign Maoist observers immediately understood the significance of the new policy and many disputes emerged within the latter camp. Just two years later the Albanians were openly criticizing the policy as anti-Marxist.

It wasn't a vague policy or some sort of catch-all for Chinese foreign policy from 1949-1976; Hua Guofeng was able to elaborate on it in response to the Albanian polemics and said polemics (as well as other, foreign Maoist polemics) were clear on exactly why it was anti-Marxist.

[Paul Cockshott]

Class struggle still exists in the period of socialism, yes. Classes exist too, but not antagonistic ones.

If there is no antagonism between them why do they struggle?

The triumph of forces advocating restoration of capitalist economic relations accross most of the former socialist block seems evidence that the class stuggle
there was over very fundamental issues involving fundamental conflicts of class interest.



Neither view is unique to Mao; what is unique to him is the idea that antagonistic classes necessarily exist and that the Party must become an arena between them, which was used to justify both rightist policies (the "Hundred Flowers") and then "leftist" policies (the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.")

I would have though that it is pretty obvious that if you have a one party system, then conflicting class interests will be represented within that one party.

[Paul Cockshott]

Whether idealist apriorism or not, I'd like you to show us where socialism has been established in history.

The requirement for an economy to be socialist is the elimination or reduction to a relatively small scale of exploiting property owning classes. This implies the establishment of public or collective ownership of the main productive resources of the society. This stage had certainly been reached in the USSR by the 50s and had been achieved in China by the early 70s.

[Paul Cockshott]

Your point also ignores that the work point system in the communes was not in itself sufficient to secure socialism, because, as Zhang Chunqiao pointed out, even in the 1970s the main part of point distribution and asset ownership was still at the level of the work team rather than the commune or brigade levels, such that there was still scope for extensive inequality. The Cultural Revolution did not ultimately do a good enough job of rooting out that inequality and other sources of inequality in China.
That is a valid criticism of the way the work point system worked. But that does not support the claim that was being made that there was generalised capitalist commodity production.
I agree that a work point system should not be so local as to be at the work team level, it should be extended to be a single work point system accross the whole state.

[Hiero]

This is utterly devoid of content. What does it mean to say that the "three worlds theory" is "petite bourgeois"?

Typical Marxist-Leninist box themselves in with Marxist rhetoric. You can't just disagree with something and say it is wrong, it has to be a class wrong, it has to be 'petite bourgeois'. Which doesn't really say anything about the petite bourgeois.

[Ismail]

If there is no antagonism between them why do they struggle?I was unaware that the proletariat and collectivist peasantry struggle against each other. If they do then that's indicative of a serious problem.


The triumph of forces advocating restoration of capitalist economic relations accross most of the former socialist block seems evidence that the class stuggle
there was over very fundamental issues involving fundamental conflicts of class interest.Probably because by the 80's those parties had within them state-capitalist and market-capitalist forces competing for influence. The latter, supported by international imperialism and able to take advantage of mass discontent, gained the upper hand, especially with the support of the USSR under Gorbachev.


I would have though that it is pretty obvious that if you have a one party system, then conflicting class interests will be represented within that one party."The class struggle in the ranks of the party, as a reflection of the class struggle going on outside the party, has nothing in common with Mao Tse-tung's concepts on the 'two lines in the party'. The party is not an arena of classes and the struggle between antagonistic classes, it is not a gathering of people with contradictory aims. The genuine Marxist-Leninist party is the party of the working class only and bases itself on the interests of this class...

Mao Tse-tung, however, conceives the party as a union of classes with contradictory interests, as an organization in which two forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the 'proletarian staff' and the 'bourgeois staff', which must have their representatives from the grassroots to the highest leading organs of the party, confront and struggle against each other."
(Enver Hoxha. Imperialism and the Revolution. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1979. pp. 400-401.)

[islandmilitia]

I was unaware that the proletariat and collectivist peasantry struggle against each other. If they do then that's indicative of a serious problem.

Just as well, because the poster you responded to was talking about the proletariat and bourgeoisie. I gave a summary of Mao's conception of class struggle under socialism in my last post, but you didn't respond.


"The class struggle in the ranks of the party, as a reflection of the class struggle going on outside the party....

This is quite obviously a distortion of how Mao and others understood the revolutionary party and the origins of revisionism. Hoxha makes it seem as if Mao embraced the presence of different class lines within the party as a positive goal and believed that the party should actively set itself up as an arena in which multiple classes would be able to exist. Mao did not argue anything of the sort, the point, as I've already emphasized, is that class antagonisms emerge within the party due to the contradictory nature of socialist society itself, and Mao's concept of the Cultural Revolution was about waging a violent struggle against bourgeois class forces within the party precisely in order to prevent the party from falling under their control. Like I said, the party embodies antagonisms whether you want it to or not, and to that extent the notion of a homogenous party can only ever be entirely abstract and idealistic, it cannot ever be obtained in the actual material process of building socialism, because it is impossible to conceive of a socialist society that is devoid of any and all contradictions. What Mao did was put forward a series of perspectives on how antagonisms within the party should be handled, which is through ideological debate and through the experience of the Cultural Revolution. You can see this very clearly if you look over some of the key documents in which the aims of the Cultural Revolution were discussed. So, if you read this (http://www.massline.org/PekingReview/PR1966/PR1966-25f.htm) Hongqi editorial, published early on in the Cultural Revolution, the overwhelming emphasis is on the consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Cultural Revolution is described as a "life-and-death struggle" - hardly the same as a willing acceptance of multiple class lines always being present within the party.

[thälmann]

i think islandmilitia said it quite correct here. and generally i think the albania- china debate is very unscientifically often. at this point fron the "albanians". the points i mentioned earlier were also not adressed, so i guess i was right there

[Ismail]

Just as well, because the poster you responded to was talking about the proletariat and bourgeoisie.If the bourgeoisie are allowed to join the Party then that, too, suggests something is seriously wrong with said Party. By the time socialism is constructed in the main the bourgeoisie should long have ceased to exist as a class.


Hoxha makes it seem as if Mao embraced the presence of different class lines within the party as a positive goal and believed that the party should actively set itself up as an arena in which multiple classes would be able to exist.Mao did in fact do this in the 1940's and 50's, hence the "Hundred Flowers" and the "Bloc of Four Classes" before that.


Like I said, the party embodies antagonisms whether you want it to or not, and to that extent the notion of a homogenous party can only ever be entirely abstract and idealistic, it cannot ever be obtained in the actual material process of building socialism, because it is impossible to conceive of a socialist society that is devoid of any and all contradictions.The Party does not "embody" antagonisms, it is a weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat and necessarily defends this dictatorship and expresses its interests so long as it maintains the proletarian ideology and fights for it. Antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions exist under socialism and are only solved with the worldwide triumph of the socialist system and the abolition of classes under communism.


The Cultural Revolution is described as a "life-and-death struggle" - hardly the same as a willing acceptance of multiple class lines always being present within the party.As Hoxha noted, the Cultural Revolution was a putsch in which the leading role of the Party was liquidated.

[∞]

No its not.

Yes it is.

[Art Vandelay]

Yes it is.

Care to explain why? This should be amusing.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Let me begin with a short intro and then we will progress to my question.

When I became a Commie, I cared for the workers liberation,I cared that the worker would be free'd from Capitalism.
Then I became a Maoist as most of you know, Now I feel that Maoism isn't for the worker moreso for the ruling state, maybe I'm just going through the motions but I feel Mao was overtly Authoritarian and betrayed the worker on a number of occasions.

So let me ask a questions.

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian?

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker?

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course.

I don't know if I'm going through motions or what.

I studied Mao a lot in high school and up to a few years ago considered myself a Maoist, so I think I see where you're coming from.

1. I'm not sure "Totalitarian" is the word I'd use, for reasons that others pretty much outlined above. Like any current of ideology that draws its inspiration from Leninism, however, it does rely at least to some degree on the idea of a "vanguard". The 'vanguard' idea was developed out of a relatively unindustrialized Russia, where the vast majority of the country could not by any stretch be called a class-conscious proletariat at the height of capitalism. The authoritarianism we saw historically was almost inevitable where intellectuals took it upon themselves to "guide" the workers to socialism/communism in a sort of Machiavellian quest. China was mostly rural and 'undeveloped' in a capitalist sense, as well.

2. I think many people and movements that call themselves Maoist have honestly believed and still do believe that they are acting in the interest of workers, and in many cases they may even be an improvement if they could manage to replace reactionary international bourgeois governments. That said, Maoism in theory and as seen in China relies on a manipulation of the dialectic---in short, they sacrifice an uncompromisingly proletarian point of view for one that sees nationalists and others as desirable allies because of "particular contradictions". Pragmatism and "realism", for Mao and others, took the place of socialism and materialism. This is not to say they faced no threats worth concern over, but a "joint dictatorship of the revolutionary classes" causes more of a problem than a solution, including mismanagement and a continued privileged class, and makes the existence of capitalist-roaders in the party predictable, with results that we see today.

3. No. I've always admired Mao's call to "bombard the party headquarters", but where I think he failed was in calling on workers to attack capitalist roaders inside a vanguard party, rather than seeing to begin with what becomes of vanguard parties, generally speaking, because they try to act as a "short-term" replacement for a spontaneously acting proletariat-for-itself. I wouldn't dismiss every impact Maoism had on China as entirely negative or anything that simplistic, but Maoist China was hardly socialist (and modern China...yeah, I think we can all agree they are very far from socialist at this point).

[Hit The North]

The requirement for an economy to be socialist is the elimination or reduction to a relatively small scale of exploiting property owning classes.

From which manual did you get that "definition"?


This implies the establishment of public or collective ownership of the main productive resources of the society.Equally, it could imply the establishment of "public" or "collective" ownership of the main productive resources by an unaccountable, state bureaucracy. It seems to me that your definition is narrow and economistic and pays little attention to the political and social features that should attend a socialist society, as a consequence of the direct producers being in charge, such as greater individual freedom and the most extensive mechanisms for democratic participation. But even from the economic point of view, your definition of socialism seems to hinge on the formal ownership of economic enterprises whilst ignoring the actual relations of production that prevail within them. Is a socialist society one in which the workers are divorced from control over the productive process; subordinated to the discipline of the division of labour in production; and subjected to the dominance of accumulation through the imposition of various regimes of managerial control? Because all these features persisted under your two examples.


This stage had certainly been reached in the USSR by the 50s and had been achieved in China by the early 70s.So you are arguing that the USSR under Kruschev and then Brezhnev and China under Soong Ching-ling were socialist? Even from a restricted Leninist interpretation of socialism, he at least demands the dictatorship of the proletariat. Where did this exist except as a nominal front for authoritarian parties? Meanwhile, your definition would also mean that North Korea could be considered socialist.

And good luck convincing workers today that these represent a social model worth fighting for!

[Paul Cockshott]

The elimination of exploiting property owning classes was the unquestioned goal of the historical socialist movement ranging from social democracy to the mainstream communist parties.
You get it from the 1892 programme of German Social Democratic Workers Party (“Private ownership in the instruments of production, once the means of securing to the producer the ownership of his product, has to-day become the means of expropriating the farmer, the artisan, and the small trader, and of placing the non-producers – capitalists and landlords – in possession of the products of labor. Only the conversion of private ownership of the means of production – the land, mines, raw materials, tools, machines and the means of transportation and communication – into social ownership and the conversion of commodity production into socialist production, carried on for and by society, can production on a large scale and the ever-increasing productivity of social labor be changed from a source of misery and oppression for the exploited classes, into one of well-being and harmonious development.” – Article 5, Erfurter Program.) rules of the British Labour Party Clause IV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clause_IV) to the last Programme of the CPSU (http://eurodos.home.xs4all.nl/docu/cpsu-texts/cpsu86-1.htm#Transition).

We know now that the political forms adopted by the 20th century social democratic and communist parties were not sufficient to secure socialism in the long run, and I would not advocate these, but the basic economic principles of socialism have been uncontroversial in their meaning until the counter revolutions of the 1990s.

[NorgeKommunistAntiIsrael]

1)Do you think Maoism is Totalitarian? No, not totalitarian, but authoritarian. :tt2:

2)Do you think Maoism really is all that much for the worker? What do you mean? :confused:

3)Do you think China was even Socialistic?During Mao of course. Yeah, I think so, mostly, but he had some violations of Marxist theories.:star2:

[Goblin]

1) No

2) In the third world maybe

3) No, but i still think Mao was a genuine leader who truly wanted socialism

[Hit The North]

The elimination of exploiting property owning classes was the unquestioned goal of the historical socialist movement ranging from social democracy to the mainstream communist parties.


No one is denying it. The doubt is whether any of your examples had abolished class exploitation and whether an economic system that retains a private sector, a wage economy and commodity production can be characterised as socialist.

Re. your sources, from the opportunist Erfurt Programme (which neglects to give even one mention to the dictatorship of the proletariat); Sydney Webb (a British bourgeois socialist); and a triumphal document from 1986 USSR, five years before its collapse. They are hardly brimming with revolutionary credentials!


We know now that the political forms adopted by the 20th century social democratic and communist parties were not sufficient to secure socialism in the long run, and I would not advocate these, but the basic economic principles of socialism have been uncontroversial in their meaning until the counter revolutions of the 1990s. Or whether these were able to secure socialism at all.

And, of course, to be consistent with your criticism against "idealist apriorism" we should not allow the mistaken prescriptions of Kautsky, Lenin, or anyone else, to take precedence over the reality of historical experience.

[Paul Cockshott]

You are evading the point, socialists and communists all saw the decisive feature of socialism as being the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes. They were wrong to think this meant the end of classes in general or of the class struggle. Mao points this error out.

[Hit The North]

You are evading the point, socialists and communists all saw the decisive feature of socialism as being the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes. They were wrong to think this meant the end of classes in general or of the class struggle. Mao points this error out.

Actually, the point of contention between us is whether the USSR in the 1950s and China in the 1970s can be properly described as socialist.

Another point of contention is whether your description of socialism is accurate:

The requirement for an economy to be socialist is the elimination or reduction to a relatively small scale of exploiting property owning classes.

I'd also point out that this formulation does not require "the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes", merely their diminution.

Finally, I'll add that, yes, "socialists and communists all saw the decisive feature of socialism as being the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes," but for communists, at least, this was on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the direct producers - an element that you appear to ignore in your haste to anoint these regimes as socialist.

[Paul Cockshott]

Actually, the point of contention between us is whether the USSR in the 1950s and China in the 1970s can be properly described as socialist.

Another point of contention is whether your description of socialism is accurate:


I know it is, but what you are doing is elevating the recent squabbles of a few petty western leftist sects into a serious dispute as to what socialism was. What I was doing is pointing out the common meaning of the word socialism during the period when the socialist movement was a serious political force internationally.
The word socialism, to the political parties that had the support of millions meant a system of public ownership of industry and the progressive or total elimination of private producers. That is just a fact. That is what the word meant. Now you may think that the public ownership of industry etc is unappealing, that it is too unpopular to put forward nowadays, and there have obviously been significant politicians on the right of the labour movement, like Blair who share that view with you, and share your desire to redefine the word. But I have no sympathy with them.



I'd also point out that this formulation does not require "the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes", merely their diminution.
Yes because if you reduced the private section of the economy to say 4% with 96% of it being public, then the goals set out by the socialist movement would have been substantially achieved. We do not hesitate to call the USA in the 1920s as being basically a capitalist country, even though there remained a very much larger section of independent producers, and even though the capitalist mode of production was combined with the domestic mode of production. It is a question of predominance.


Finally, I'll add that, yes, "socialists and communists all saw the decisive feature of socialism as being the elimination of the capitalist and landlord classes," but for communists, at least, this was on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the direct producers - an element that you appear to ignore in your haste to anoint these regimes as socialist.

Quite so, and this discussion started out as being about Maoism. Maoism has quite adamant since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on the necessity to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, so this point was not in dispute.

[Hit The North]

I know it is, but what you are doing is elevating the recent squabbles of a few petty western leftist sects into a serious dispute as to what socialism was.

So, in other words, all attempts to critically challenge the "official view" of social democrats, state communist parties and the Western bourgeoisie, that the regimes in the USSR and China were socialist, are reduced to the petty squabbles of sects, whereas the self-serving definitions of the official movements of reformists and Stalinists are unquestionable? This at least indicates which side you are on in certain debates.


What I was doing is pointing out the common meaning of the word socialism during the period when the socialist movement was a serious political force internationally.And I was questioning the veracity of these claims in the light of actual historical experience.


The word socialism, to the political parties that had the support of millions meant a system of public ownership of industry and the progressive or total elimination of private producers. That is just a fact. That is what the word meant.I've conceded as much. Nevertheless, I will continue to argue that history has proven that state control of the economy is not sufficient grounds for supposing the existence of a socialist society. Again, we need to know which class is in charge; whether the proletariat is in charge of accumulation or subordinate to it.


Now you may think that the public ownership of industry etc is unappealing, that it is too unpopular to put forward nowadays, and there have obviously been significant politicians on the right of the labour movement, like Blair who share that view with you, and share your desire to redefine the word. But I have no sympathy with them.
Nice attempt to make me look like the rightist, but I have not made such an argument, so your disingenuous gambit is a fail. On the contrary, I am the one arguing that socialism is the work of a revolutionary proletariat taking control of society and revolutionising the relations of production, and you are the one reaching for hoary old social democratic prescriptions of nationalisations, etc.


Yes because if you reduced the private section of the economy to say 4% with 96% of it being public, then the goals set out by the socialist movement would have been substantially achieved. This just brings us back to the narrow and quantitative view you have of what constitutes socialism. Public ownership under the democratic control of the working class is one thing; "public property" in the hands of a centralised and unaccountable state apparatus is quite another. North Korea and Cambodia under the Kymer Rouge would also be poster boys for your version of socialism if the elimination of the private sector was a sufficient condition.


Quite so, and this discussion started out as being about Maoism. Maoism has quite adamant since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on the necessity to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, so this point was not in dispute.Yes, we know you're a sucker for the official line. But as Marx points out:


Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.

[Paul Cockshott]

So, in other words, all attempts to critically challenge the "official view" of social democrats, state communist parties and the Western bourgeoisie, that the regimes in the USSR and China were socialist, are reduced to the petty squabbles of sects, whereas the self-serving definitions of the official movements of reformists and Stalinists are unquestionable? This at least indicates which side you are on in certain debates.

And I was questioning the veracity of these claims in the light of actual historical experience.

Quote:
The word socialism, to the political parties that had the support of millions meant a system of public ownership of industry and the progressive or total elimination of private producers. That is just a fact. That is what the word meant.

I've conceded as much. Nevertheless, I will continue to argue that history has proven that state control of the economy is not sufficient grounds for supposing the existence of a socialist society. Again, we need to know which class is in charge; whether the proletariat is in charge of accumulation or subordinate to it.

Well you have conceded that the word socialism has denoted a goal of political movements intending to establish state control over the economy and eliminate
private capitalist ownership of the means of production.
But you are now wanting to say that you, and those in some leftist sects want to invent a new private meaning for word socialism, different from what it has meant up to now.
But when we look at what you wish it to mean, it focuses on the representative character of the state institutions - thus on the political superstructure not on the economic base.

Now criticisms of the political superstructure are a valid point to raise, but you must not confuse this with a critique of the economic institutions.

You concede that the USSR in the 50s , China in the mid 70s or North Korea today are what would be termed socialst economies on the basis of what that word has commonly meant in economic discourse, but you are critical of the political superstructure. Well in that case you are not far from Mao's own position that the superstructure had to be changed by the establishment of proletarian and peasant control over all social institutions: factories, communes, the army, the educations system, the cultural institutions like film theatre etc.



Nice attempt to make me look like the rightist, but I have not made such an argument, so your disingenuous gambit is a fail. On the contrary, I am the one arguing that socialism is the work of a revolutionary proletariat taking control of society and revolutionising the relations of production, and you are the one reaching for hoary old social democratic prescriptions of nationalisations, etc.


I have strong criticisms of social democracy and of the socialist movement since my position is more communist than socialist.

I dont actually advocate nationalisations, instead I advocate a law or constitutional provision giving employees the legal right to all value added - a model for the elimination of wage slavery analogous to that which applied to the abolition of chattel slavery.
This would eliminate capitalism but would not yet establish communism, you would be left with an essentially co-operative economy. That would then have to be transformed into a communist planned economy using non-transferable labour accounts over a period of years.

[Hiero]

Here is Samin Amir's article: What Maoism Has Contributed
(http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/what-maoism-has-contributed)
he polarization inherent to capitalist globalization—a major fact because of its worldwide social and political importance—challenges whatever vision we may have of how to surpass capitalism. This polarization is at the origin of the possibility for large portions of the working classes and above all of the middle classes of the dominant countries (whose development is itself favored by the position of the centers in the world system) to go over to social-colonialism. At the same time it transforms the peripheries into “storm zones” (according to the Chinese expression) in natural and permanent rebellion against the world capitalist order. Certainly, rebellion is not synonymous to revolution—only to the possibility of the latter. Meanwhile, reasons to reject the capitalist model in the center of the system are not lacking either, as 1968, among other things, has shown. To be sure, the formulation of the challenge advanced at a certain time by the Chinese Communist Party—“the countryside encircles the cities”— is by that very fact too extreme to be useful. A global strategy for transition beyond capitalism toward global socialism has to define the interrelationship between struggles in the centers and the peripheries of the system

[Hit The North]

Well you have conceded that the word socialism has denoted a goal of political movements intending to establish state control over the economy and eliminate
private capitalist ownership of the means of production.
But you are now wanting to say that you, and those in some leftist sects want to invent a new private meaning for word socialism, different from what it has meant up to now.


You really must pay attention. I have conceded that the abolition of private ownership over the means of production and distribution is a necessary step towards socialism but not, in itself, a sufficient step. It is imperative that ownership and control is in the hands of the direct producers. Now, rather than this being a "private meaning" it is a well established meaning within the tradition of Marxist socialism. The fact that I can draw upon Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, DeLeon and Draper, or Dunayevskaya, the Left Communist tradition as well as my own tradition of 'socialism from below' in the IST, is proof that I am not employing a private meaning to the word. As a sample, here is Marx writing about socialism in Capital vol 3:


In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch48.htm#r49
It is interesting that the sources you drawn upon in your definition unite German social democrats with British Fabians and the moribund Comintern of the mid 1980s. I'd suggest all of these sources are conservative assessments within the socialist movement of what constitutes "really existing socialism". A united thread between them is that none of them consider the dictatorship of the proletariat as a serious element within their definitions and all three are attempts to articulate a 'socialism from above'.


But when we look at what you wish it to mean, it focuses on the representative character of the state institutions - thus on the political superstructure not on the economic base.

Now criticisms of the political superstructure are a valid point to raise, but you must not confuse this with a critique of the economic institutions.
I understand your criticism here, but when control over the means of production is meant to be subject to the democratic decision-making of the direct producers, the division of the economic sphere of production and the political forms of administration collapses. Democracy ceases to be a simple political form and becomes a fully social form encompassing multi-dimensional social functions. The division of society into a base and superstructure is the product of class society and we would expect to see a convergence in the social spheres as class antagonism diminishes.

More simply, if my main complaint about the USSR and other forms of "really existing socialisms" is that the proletariat was still subject to the dominance of accumulation, rather than being in control of it, then I fail to see how my arguments can be reduced to mere issues of superstructure and governance, except by a slight of hand.


Well in that case you are not far from Mao's own position that the superstructure had to be changed by the establishment of proletarian and peasant control over all social institutions: factories, communes, the army, the educations system, the cultural institutions like film theatre etc.Perhaps - although I'll point out that Mao willing this to happen is another example of 'revolution from above' and rather puts the cart ahead of the horse. If the Chinese revolution had really been the self-emancipation of the workers and peasants, then they would already be in charge of the factories, communes, the army, etc. Meanwhile, allowing for the validity of Mao's insight, the real question is whether this did indeed happen: did the Chinese proletariat take over all social institutions? Did they become the active rulers of Chinese society? If so, how was this class rule eventually usurped and when?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Actually as Robert W. Thurston and others have noted, right up until the Great Purges people like Vyshinsky were seeking to bring Soviet law onto a more effective and fairer basis. The "explosion of secret police and other apparatuses" is also known the development of a state in a situation where the vast majority of the population are accustomed to feudal methods and where the state machinery itself was hitherto in a rather inefficient (and in fact into the 30's and 40's still inefficient) mess, as Getty and others have pointed out.

As for surveillance and "intimidation of party members," you mean oppositionists who were trying to form factions, and in fact into the 30's such factions were still being formed by both "leftists" and rightists alike.This is pure fantasy. And instead of intimidation, how about imprisonment, torture and execution. Ismail, you are left with a truly difficult task, apologizing for the monumental brutality of Stalin's regime against the most politically conscious elements of the proletariat. And as hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue, talking about "increasing class struggle" to explain the murder of hundreds of thousands of party members and their families is a prime example.

I think that it is fair to say that after the obliteration of the Right Opposition, there was almost nothing in the way of an organized opposition within the Party. In Lenin's day, the worst that might have happened to an oppositionist would have been expulsion from the party, comrade. Not murder, and the murder of everyone they ever had tea with. The term "totalitarian is useless because it lacks class content and is used, as you pointed out, to equate that which is not equal. And I disagree with Lucretia that capitalism was restored under Stalin. It was not. Stalin was the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution, to be sure. But as horrible as his regime was, it did not overturn the property relations established after the revolution. That's why Trotsky defended the USSR against attacks by the US and the other imperialist powers. If Trotsky was the opportunist/menshevik/traitor that Stalin and his ilk made him out to be he would not have defended the USSR.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I dont actually advocate nationalisations, instead I advocate a law or constitutional provision giving employees the legal right to all value added - a model for the elimination of wage slavery analogous to that which applied to the abolition of chattel slavery.
This would eliminate capitalism but would not yet establish communism, you would be left with an essentially co-operative economy. That would then have to be transformed into a communist planned economy using non-transferable labour accounts over a period of years.

Comrade, in some works you do (Czech preface) and in others you don't (Venezuela and EU transitions). To what extent would transfer of the means of production to public ownership be necessary during the transition (land, finance, natural monopolies, food production, "industry," retail, etc.)?

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

Pray to Mao, he will guide you my son. Everything is possible through the glory and genius of Mao Tse-Tung thought.

[Paul Cockshott]

Comrade, in some works you do (Czech preface) and in others you don't (Venezuela and EU transitions). To what extent would transfer of the means of production to public ownership be necessary during the transition (land, finance, natural monopolies, food production, "industry," retail, etc.)?

It is essentially a matter of tactics relative to the political situation at the time and the forms of state existing. In the political situation existing now in the EU where there is no competent state apparttus that could carry out planning on a continental scale of industry, nationalisation or perhaps more properly Unionisation of industry is unrealistic. In other cases it may be something that is still a good route. I think in China, where the state still owns some 70% of industry, a restoration of socialism would go via the restoration of a planned economy onto the existing state owned infrastructure along with the nationalisation of the foreign concessions. It might well be appropriate to raise the objective there though of an initial transfer of the private chinese firms into workers cooperatives. It all depends on a judgement about what line is likely to be able to win support.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In the EU context, comrade, would that not necessarily mean bringing in either Meidner or tax-to-nationalize regarding civilian industry? It may be gradual, but it would scare the pants out of the bourgeoisie. Also, isn't the ECB in a feasible position to exercise a monopoly over all financial services?

[The defense industry, I think, can and should be "Unionized" outright. I almost confused that with small-u unionization, with unions and all. ;) ]

[Paul Cockshott]

It is unnecessary to nationalise or change the ownership of the means of production as these have in general already been socialised in late capitalism, what is required is to abolish the relation of wage labour. Marx described both the joint stock company and workers cooperatives as the abolition of private ownership within the confines of capitalism. Private ownership properly speaking has been abolished in both cases. Removal of the relation of wage labour converts the former into the latter.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I don't know. The "stakeholder"-ship of the joint stock company would still be private insofar as only the immediate workers would own the company.

[Paul Cockshott]

Well yes the ownership would not be totally social, it would be a switch between the two forms of more limited social ownership that Marx describes.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

It is unnecessary to nationalise or change the ownership of the means of production as these have in general already been socialised in late capitalism, what is required is to abolish the relation of wage labour. Marx described both the joint stock company and workers cooperatives as the abolition of private ownership within the confines of capitalism. Private ownership properly speaking has been abolished in both cases. Removal of the relation of wage labour converts the former into the latter.
How on earth have these been "socialized" in late capitalism? They are privately owned. Because a company has stock that is publicly traded doesn't make it socialized. It merely has more owners. Most large corporations are controlled by large stockholders and their boards. That this differs from early 19th century capitalism is true. The role of wage labor is quite different in the states that have overthrown capitalism. Wages in and of themselves do not constitute capitalism.

[Paul Cockshott]

How on earth have these been "socialized" in late capitalism? They are privately owned. Because a company has stock that is publicly traded doesn't make it socialized. It merely has more owners.

I was reading this passage last week and what I wrote above was influenced by it

Conceptions which have some meaning on a less developed stage of capitalist
production, become quite meaningless here. Success and failure both lead here to a centralisation
of capital, and thus to expropriation on the most enormous scale. Expropriation extends here from
the direct producers to the smaller and the medium-sized capitalists themselves. It is the point of
departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production.
In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals.
With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private
production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in
the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social
products. However, this expropriation appears within the capitalist system in a contradictory
form, as appropriation of social property by a few; and credit lends the latter more and more the
aspect of pure adventurers. Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and
transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are
swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock-exchange wolves. There is antagonism
against the old form in the stock companies, in which social means of production appear as
private property; but the conversion to the form of stock still remains ensnared in the trammels of
capitalism; hence, instead of overcoming the antithesis between the character of wealth as social
and as private wealth, the stock companies merely develop it in a new form.

The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first
sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their
actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between
capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated
labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the
employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out
of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the
corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. Without the factory
system arising out of the capitalist mode of production there could have been no co-operative
factories. Nor could these have developed without the credit system arising out of the same mode
of production. The credit system is not only the principal basis for the gradual transformation of
capitalist private enterprises into capitalist stock companies, but equally offers the means for the
gradual extension of co-operative enterprises on a more or less national scale. The capitalist stock
companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from
the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the
antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.( capital 3 chapter 27)