ideological aims

[reddevil]

when a party calls itself "maoist" you know where they stand. when they call themselves trotskyists you know where they stand. but most communist parties today simply call themselves "marxist-lennist" which could mean just about anything.

[Holden Caulfield]

saves them having to say that they are Stalinists usually, that name tends to make people flee wildly

[Led Zeppelin]

Please don't post inane threads like this in Theory.

Moved to Learning.

[el_chavista]

when a party calls itself "maoist" you know where they stand. when they call themselves trotskyists you know where they stand. but most communist parties today simply call themselves "marxist-lennist" which could mean just about anything.
Aren't "marxist-lenninist" a superset to "maoist" and "trotskyist" revolutionaries?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

The short version: Maoists believe in something they call the 'mass line', which in fact turns out to be the 'mass lie', since there is no actual evidence that the masses were involved in formulating it.

Long version: repeat the above, only more slowly.:rolleyes:

[Oneironaut]

Rosa-

I have read your point of view of Maoists in other threads and you have me convinced to a certain degree. However, just because the "mass line" may not have been used historically, does that automatically diminish the ideology? I think the idea of a "mass line" is wonderful. Historically, it may have been a "mass lie", but I don't see it as a fault in Maoism but merely that the Maoist comrades in China didn't execute it properly.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

RP, the bottom line is that the 'mass line' is not the mass line, but expresses the petty bourgeois line of the CCP, with it's top-down approach to 'socialism'.

Now, if you are happy with that, fine. But, at some point, this appraoch to socialism will clash with the mass of workers, at which point bottom-up socialism, with a genuine 'mass line', will kick in.

You can't stop the class war by trying to hijack the alleged view of the masses, and substituting for it the minority view of a party, no matter how well-intentioned.

The irrational and emotive response I received from the Maoists here was just a tiny foreview of the authoritarian approach they would all adopt toward genuine workers' democracy (which attituide we saw on open display in China, and eslewhere where this top-down approach to 'socialism' takes hold), or even a demand for it, as if it were a crime even to question the received view.

After all, all I did was ask for something as innocuous as evidence that this was indeed the 'mass line', for goodness sake! You can imagine what they'd do to me if they were in power, or would do to anyone who questioned the 'mass lie'.

[Black Sheep]

A link to what the mass line is, please..
wikipedia is being a ***** :sneaky:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Mauroprovatos, sorry can't help you, but check this thread out:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/mass-line-vs-t87244/index.html

[Oneironaut]

RP, the bottom line is that the 'mass line' is not the mass line, but expresses the petty bourgeois line of the CCP, with it's top-down approach to 'socialism'. Now, if you are happy with that, fine. But, at some point, this appraoch to socialism will clash with the mass of workers, at which point bottom-up socialism, with a genuine 'mass line', will kick in.
.

-As I said, you have me fairly convinced in regards to the CCP, but how does this reflect on other Maoists in separate countries? The idea of a "mass line" is a fundamentally good idea, just China didn't pull it off. They made mistakes that we need to learn from. For example, if Nepal's Maoists actually enacted a "mass line" approach from the bottom-up, would it change your opinion?


You can't stop the class war by trying to hijack the alleged view of the masses, and substituting for it the minority view of a party, no matter how well-intentioned.

- I couldn't agree with you more. However, the "mass line" as an approach does not hold alleged views of the masses. Just because the CCP maybe made it this way, how does that refute the ideology behind it?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

RP:


The idea of a "mass line" is a fundamentally good idea, just China didn't pull it off. They made mistakes that we need to learn from. For example, if Nepal's Maoists actually enacted a "mass line" approach from the bottom-up, would it change your opinion?

Once more, there is no evidence from any of these other countries that the 'mass line' involved the masses, but even if there were, this sort of approach to socialism is top down, where the masses are seen as passive onlookers while the 'conscious' minority of professional revolutionaries fight for, or build socialism for them.

This leads to the masses being oppressed and exploited by a new ruling class, as we have seen so many times.


I couldn't agree with you more. However, the "mass line" as an approach does not hold alleged views of the masses. Just because the CCP maybe made it this way, how does that refute the ideology behind it?

The ideology behind this form of substitutionism is exposed well here by Hal Draper:


Socialism’s crisis today is a crisis in the meaning of socialism. For the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves “socialist” in one sense or another; but there has never been a time when the label was less informative. The nearest thing to a common content of the various “socialisms” is a negative: anti-capitalism. On the positive side, the range of conflicting and incompatible ideas that call themselves socialist is wider than the spread of ideas within the bourgeois world.

Even anti-capitalism holds less and less as a common factor. In one part of the spectrum, a number of social democratic parties have virtually eliminated any specifically socialist demands from their programs, promising to maintain private enterprise wherever possible. The most prominent example is the German social-democracy. (“As an idea, a philosophy, and a social movement, socialism in Germany is no longer represented by a political party,” sums up D.A. Chalmers’ recent book The Social Democratic Party of Germany.) These parties have defined socialism out of existence, but the tendency which they have formalized is that of the entire reformist social democracy. In what sense are these parties still “socialist”?

In another part of the world picture, there are the Communist states, whose claim to being “socialist” is based on a negative: the abolition of the capitalist private-profit system, and the fact that the class which rules does not consist of private owners of property. On the positive side, however, the socio-economic system which has replaced capitalism there would not be recognizable to Karl Marx. The state owns the means of production – but who “owns” the state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a collectivist system – a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated with “socialism,” in what sense are these societies “socialist”?

These two self-styled socialisms are very different, but they have more in common than they think. The social democracy has typically dreamed of “socializing” capitalism from above. Its principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and economy is per se socialistic. It bears a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing something called socialism from the top down, and of equating statification with socialism. Both have their roots in the ambiguous history of the socialist idea.

Back to the roots: the following pages propose to investigate the meaning of socialism historically, in a new way. There have always been different “kinds of socialism,” and they have customarily been divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the underlying division is something else. Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism-from-Above and Socialism-from-Below.

What unites the many different forms of Socialism-from-Above is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact. The heart of Socialism-from-Below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands, mobilized “from below” in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”: this is the first sentence in the Rules written for the First International by Marx, and this is the First Principle of his lifework.

It is the conception of Socialism-from-Above which accounts for the acceptance of Communist dictatorship as a form of “socialism.” It is the conception of Socialism-from-Above which concentrates social-democratic attention on the parliamentary superstructure of society and on the manipulation of the “commanding heights” of the economy, and which makes them hostile to mass action from below. It is Socialism-from-Above which is the dominant tradition in the development of socialism.

Please note that it is not peculiar to socialism. On the contrary, the yearning for emancipation-from-above is the all-pervading principle through centuries of class society and political oppression. It is the permanent promise held out by every ruling power to keep the people looking upward for protection, instead of to themselves for liberation from the need for protection. The people looked to kings to right the injustices done by lords, to messiahs to overthrow the tyranny of kings. Instead of the bold way of mass action from below, it is always safer and more prudent to find the “good” ruler who will Do the People Good. The pattern of emancipation-from-above goes all the way back in the history of civilization, and had to show up in socialism too. But it is only in the framework of the modern socialist movement that liberation from below could become even a realistic aspiration; within socialism it has come to the fore, but only by fits and starts. The history of socialism can be read as a continual but largely unsuccessful effort to free itself from the old tradition, the tradition of emancipation-from-above.

In the conviction that the current crisis of socialism is intelligible only in terms of this Great Divide in the socialist tradition, we turn to a few examples of the two souls of socialism.

More here:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm

[Oneironaut]

Rosa-

You make a very convincing argument. On a side note, I do not consider myself a Maoist, I am simply trying to look at how we can establish socialism with an open and critical eye. I believe the focal point of our disagreement probably devolves to my relatively limited comprehension of Maoism. Is the "mass line" advocated by Maoists always "from the masses, to the masses"? Or are there Maoists who drop off the last half of that phrase?

In other words, to be a Maoist automatically forces you to approach socialism from the top-down perspective? Are current Maoist rebel groups still advocating this top-down (archaic IMO) approach? If this is the case, it further disenfranchises myself from Maoism...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, the brochure, as it were, says "from the masses, to the masses", but it seems to be just "to the masses". And that should not surprise us, since the top down approach to socialism in general regards, and then treats the masses as an ignorant lump, too dim or disorganised to fight their own battles (or, if they live in the 'west', the workers have all been bought off by imperialist super-profits) without a band of revolutionary 'saints' to lead them.