Maoism and the Chinese Revolution Read online

  Mao’s embrace of Stalin’s assumptions was not a simple theoretical oversight. It arose from his effort to grapple with the conditions the Chinese Revolution would face in the years ahead. As an underdeveloped country in a capitalist world system, with little industry and backward peasant agriculture, China struggled to raise living standards above subsistence levels, let alone achieve the communist ideal of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” States in this situation have few options but to trade on the world market, purchase industrial goods, and accumulate capital by exploiting their own populations. Mao recognized these challenges but believed state control would allow revolutionaries to run the economy in the long-term interests of the proletariat. Yet strategies he formulated in Yenan would ultimately provide a justification for the party to act as a surrogate bourgeoisie and generate a new capitalist ruling class in the name of socialism.

  9. Mao and the Dialectic

  Mao also used Yenan period to deepen his philosophical acumen. For some time, Mao had been criticized by Wang Ming of the former 28 Bolsheviks group for his shallow understanding of Marxist philosophy. In Yenan Mao was finally able to address this criticism. In the late 1930s, Mao formed a philosophy study group among the CCP leadership, meeting in his room three nights a week. From these discussions Mao produced On Practice and On Contradiction, the two main philosophical texts of Maoism, in July and August 1937. In the same time period, Mao also produced Dialectical Materialism (Lecture Notes), which were used for internal party education but never published independently.28 These texts indicate Mao’s understanding of the link between thought and practice, as well as his relationship to Stalinist orthodoxy. They provide a window into the philosophy underpinning Maoist politics.

  Mao’s version of dialectics relied on a philosophical canon that had then recently been established in the USSR. Ten years prior, philosophical debate in the Comintern had led to the self-criticism of Georg Lukács and the ouster of Karl Korsch, Marxist philosophers who emphasized the subjective, creative aspects of human praxis in the process of dialectical change. Afterward, Soviet debates shifted toward the relationship of dialectical philosophy to natural science. A division then emerged among Soviet scholars between “dialecticians” and “mechanists”: dialecticians urged scientists to use dialectical philosophy to conceptualize and discover dynamic processes in the natural world, while mechanists rejected philosophy as scholasticism, and reduced social and mental phenomena to the properties of physical matter. Stalin stifled the debate in the 1930s, imprisoning and executing many scholars, and imposed his own synthesis of the two positions in the form of “dialectical materialism” or “diamat.” Diamat put forward a simplified schema of the dialectical process, and proposed that thought, social systems, and the natural world all progressed according to this general logic. The dialectic, in this sense, was an objective and universal law present in all known phenomena. Diamat would remain the official state philosophy of the USSR for decades.29

  Stalin’s state philosophy became the basis for Mao’s study of dialectics, through recently translated Soviet textbooks. In Yenan, Mao drew on texts such as A Course on Dialectical Materialism by Shirokov and Aizenberg (to which Mao gave nearly thirteen thousand characters of notation), and Dialectical and Historical Materialism and Outline of a New Philosophy by Mitin.30 Long sections of Mao’s Dialectical Materialism (Lecture Notes) are made up of verbatim, or slightly altered, transcriptions of these Soviet texts. The manuals served as the baseline through which Mao synthesized his reading of other first-generation Chinese Marxists such as Li Da and Ai Siqi, and of the Marxist texts that had been translated into Chinese years before: Engels’ Anti-Durhing and Dialectics of Nature, Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and brief selections from his Philosophical Notebooks, Marx’s Capital vol. 1 and Poverty of Philosophy, and Stalin’s On the Problems of Leninism. The resulting synthesis displays three defining characteristics.

  The first is a form of reductive materialism that minimizes social consciousness. In contrast with Marxists who view consciousness as an active and creative process shaped by social relationships, Mao’s philosophy reduces thought to physical matter itself, through a “reflection theory” of consciousness. In his Lecture Notes, Mao insists his philosophy differs from “pre-Marxist materialism (mechanistic materialism),” which he argues “did not emphasize the dynamic role of thought in knowledge, attributing it only with a passive role, and perceiving it as a mirror which reflected nature.”31 But just a few pages later, Mao takes up precisely this formulation: “So-called consciousness … is only a form of matter in movement. It is a particular property of the material brain of humankind. It allows material processes external to consciousness to be reflected in consciousness.”32 “Impressions and concepts,” he argues, are “the reflection of objective things, a photographic image and sample copy of them.”33 In Mao’s view, what we experience as consciousness is ultimately a property of our individual brain matter, and concepts themselves are only a kind of imprint of the world upon the matter of our brains. Later in his Lecture Notes, Mao carries this logic to its conclusion, arguing that Hegel’s idealist dialectic was simply a mirror image of the dialectical dynamic that exists in all physical matter, much like a law of physics.

  Mao’s formulation reworks ideas from Engel’s Dialectics of Nature and Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, both of which were reified in Stalin’s orthodoxy. In these works too, thought is not viewed as an active social medium but as a passive epiphenomenon upon which other matter leaves an imprint. Like Lenin and Stalin before him, Mao insists his view is different from the “mechanical materialism” of bourgeois science. But ultimately, he embraces a variant of this perspective. To council communist Anton Pannekoek, this variety of materialism was typical of revolutionary movements battling feudal regimes, which tended to draw upon the empiricism and positivism of bourgeois science in order to attack the ruling idealist ideologies.34 But the cost of this perspective is that human consciousness loses its inherently social character, and its creative capacity to interpret and transform the world. Instead it appears a passive reflection of matter, which may then be manipulated by specialists who comprehend the latter’s objective laws.

  A second feature of Mao’s writings is his belief that mental categories change through empirical observation and testing, rather than through internal contradictions within categories themselves, which are brought to the fore through practical engagement with the world. This tendency is best illustrated by contrasting Mao’s account of cognition with that of other Marxists. In Notes on Dialectics, 35 C.L.R. James takes up Hegel’s philosophy to distinguish between three levels of cognition: First, basic sensory perception. Second, “Knowledge,” which organizes sense data into mental categories (for example, our experience of the color green, the texture of rough bark, and the sound of wind in leaves, all become “tree”). Knowledge categories are essential for our daily activity, but they can also prevent us from adequately grasping continual changes in the phenomena they describe. A further transformation must therefore take place: Knowledge categories must blossom with internal dialectical oppositions, and yield new categories through a series of negations. Hegel refers to this third level of cognition as “Reason.” For James, dialectical Reason allows revolutionaries to continually transform their categories in a manner adequate to social reality, as the latter is continually reshaped through social practice.

  In contrast to this view, Mao makes no distinction between what Hegel would call “Knowledge” and “Reason.” The first level of cognition is apparent in On Practice: “In the process of practice, man at first sees only the phenomenal side, the separate aspects, the external relations of things…. This is called the perceptual stage of cognition, namely, the stage of sense perceptions and impressions.” Then, Mao explains,

  As social practice continues, things that give rise to man’s sense perceptions and impressions in the course of his practice are repeated many times; then a sudden change (leap) takes place in the brain in the process of cognition, and concepts are formed. Concepts are no longer the phenomena, the separate aspects and the external relations of things; they grasp the essence, the totality and the internal relations of things.

  In this passage, Mao essentially says one can grasp the essence of changing phenomena by steadily stacking empirical perceptions on top of each other, until a conceptual leap takes place by unexplained means.36 He thus sees in thought only the gradual accumulation of empirical data, generating new categories that can then be tested in practice. At this level of sophistication, there is little to distinguish Mao’s notion of cognition from simple empirical observation and induction. At the same time, he overlooks how collective social practice renders received categories contradictory, and how categories themselves may be transformed through these internal contradictions. One expression of this blind spot is Mao’s tendency to critique Stalinism by layering caveats and exceptions atop it, rather than examining its internal contradictions and negating it entirely.

  A third feature of Mao’s philosophy is the original contribution he makes to the notion of “contradiction” itself. In On Contradiction, Mao establishes a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” contradictions. “There are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing,” he argues, “and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.” Mao takes Chinese society as an example: the contradiction between Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism is the primary contradiction at the moment, displacing the contradiction between the CCP and the KMT and allowing for the Second United Front, but when Japan is defeat
ed the order will change again.

  Mao further distinguishes between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions: “Some contradictions are characterized by open antagonism, others are not. In accordance with the concrete development of things, some contradictions which were originally non-antagonistic develop into antagonistic ones, while others which were originally antagonistic develop into non-antagonistic ones.” At the same time, he downplays the idea that antagonistic contradictions lead to “negation” (a process wherein something is destroyed, even as elements of it are preserved at a higher level in a new phenomenon).37 Instead, Mao emphasizes that the “principal” and “non-principal” sides of a contradiction switch places:

  The principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes accordingly. In a given process or at a given stage in the development of a contradiction, A is the principal aspect and B is the non-principal aspect; at another stage or in another process the roles are reversed—a change determined by the extent of the increase or decrease in the force of each aspect in its struggle against the other in the course of the development of a thing.

  In his original contributions, Mao conceives of social reality as a web of contradictions with varying levels of influence over one another. Each contradiction, in turn, is composed of discrete elements, which may become more or less antagonistic over time, and may alternate as the dominant term within an overall unity. This conception has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Mao’s primary/secondary and antagonistic/non-antagonistic distinctions provided a set of descriptive categories to interpret the complex political relationships in Chinese society. Was the relationship between the party and the national bourgeoisie antagonistic or non-antagonistic under New Democracy? Was the conflict between global imperialism and oppressed nations the primary contradiction in the world today, or the contradiction between capitalism and socialism? Mao’s concepts helped him grapple with politico-military problems, and they attest to his skills as a strategic thinker. In particular, the primary/secondary distinction offers a useful schema to ground the notion of contradiction in complex systems with varying centers of power and influence.

  On the other hand, Mao’s contributions downplay the active, processual character of dialectical processes, and the degree to which objects of analysis are transformed through them. While Marx never explicitly elaborated his version of dialectics, he generally conceives of contradictions as ongoing, interactive relationships, in which opposed poles presuppose and constitute one another in a process of self-movement. This process may lead to a negation that radically transforms the content of the poles and the relationship itself.38 Mao’s dialectic, by contrast, is a formal opposition between two separate elements whose content remains constant, and which oscillate back and forth in response to outside stimuli, in a manner similar to a toggle switch. For Martin Glaberman,39 this interpretation lends itself to a view of contradictions as simple conflicts, which can be easily manipulated by outside forces. Mao expresses this tendency when he views the socialist state as a sovereign power, capable of managing and “resolving” contradictions in Chinese society by fiat, rather than an institution itself embroiled in contradictory class relations and constituted by them.

  No philosophy can be said to lead, necessarily and directly, to a specific political line. By definition, philosophies are abstract sets of ideas, which may be interpreted in a variety of ways as they are brought to bear in practice. Depending on their formulations, however, philosophies may incline those who take them up toward some interpretations of reality and practice, and away from others. Historically the reductive materialism, empiricism, and positivism that Maoism shares with Stalin’s “diamat” have led revolutionaries in negative directions. In many cases, revolutionaries employing these philosophies have come to view individual consciousness as a direct imprint of the objective laws of class society, which may be discovered and manipulated by specialists with external knowledge, while the creative thought and activity of proletarians is overlooked or rejected as “false consciousness.” The result is a tendency toward manipulation and authoritarianism, seen so often in the Marxist-Leninist tradition.40

  Revolutionaries today need not replicate the same applications of Mao’s philosophy. However, they must evaluate Mao’s writings in a critical manner and compare them with other conceptions, in order to arrive at a full appraisal of Maoist philosophical categories. Many currents in Marxist philosophy place consciousness and creative activity at the center of their understandings of dialectical change. Mao, by contrast, recapitulates the underlying assumptions of Stalinist orthodoxy. For him, the dialectic is a universal law inscribed in physical matter and society, independent of individual will, which may be manipulated by sovereign powers possessing scientific truth.

  10. Guerilla Warfare

  Mao’s final theoretical innovation at Yenan focused on military strategy. In pieces such as Basic Tactics, Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan, and On Protracted War, Mao elaborated a complete military framework for the Chinese Revolution, spanning overall strategy for the war with Japan, battle doctrine, and small unit organization and tactics.41 Many of Mao’s arguments are condensed in his famous On Guerilla Warfare. His work fused concepts from Western military theorists such Carl von Clausewitz with those of classical Chinese military theorists such as Sun Tzu and Liu Ji. It also coincided with the growth and consolidation of the CCP’s military forces, including the Eighth Route Army in the north, the New Fourth Army in the south, and guerilla base areas behind Japanese lines.

  In his military works, Mao argues against factions of the party calling for negotiation with Japanese imperialism, and insists the war is winnable. Certainly, he concedes, Japan currently enjoys military superiority. But at the same time, “deficiency in her man-power and material resources” prevents Japan from fully securing the territory it conquers, while Japan’s internal class tensions and growing international opposition will weaken it in the long run. By contrast, China currently suffers from a “small fighting capacity,” but it also possesses a huge population, great economic potential, international support, and a vast territory that can be traded for time.42 Therefore “the strength or superiority on either side is not absolute,” and given effective strategy and tactics “the factors unfavorable to the enemy and favorable to us will both develop as the war drags on.”43 In order to give Japan’s weaknesses and China’s strengths time to manifest in practice, Mao argues, the war must become protracted in nature.

  Mao conceives of protracted war in three stages: strategic defensive, strategic stalemate, and strategic offensive. In the first stage, Chinese forces will be forced into a series of retreats, and the Japanese military will score major victories, seizing cities and territory. Yet as the relative strength of the two sides changes, the conflict will reach a point of equilibrium, and eventually Chinese forces will be able to retake the initiative and drive out the imperialists. Mao emphasizes the strategic stalemate stage as a crucial “pivot of change” in this sequence, a moment in which individual engagements have the ability to reshape the overall trajectory of the war. “Whether China will become an independent country or sink into a colony is not determined by the retention or loss of the great cities in the first stage,” he argues, “but by the degree to which the whole nation exerts itself in the second.”44

  Mao emphasizes the centrality of guerilla tactics and organization to protracted war. In order to shift the balance of forces, the Japanese must be weakened by rapid opportunistic attacks, carried out by mobile forces in their rear areas. These forces must coordinate their activities with the Red Army but can operate with a degree of autonomy and may be formed on the initiative of villagers themselves.45 In several pieces, Mao details the tactics, arms, organizational structure guerilla units should employ, and how they should coordinate with the CCP’s military command.46 He instructs guerilla combatants to