Maoism

Maoism, political doctrine based on the thought and activities of the Chinese revolutionary leader and statesman Mao Zedong. Maoism as such was never defined, and the term never used by its practitioners in China or elsewhere, who preferred to employ the expression “the thought of Mao Zedong”, describing it as an adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese circumstances.

The political activities of Mao spanned over half a century from the founding of the Chinese Communist party in 1920, to the Long March towards north-west China to escape attack from the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek (1935), from the struggle against the Japanese invaders (1937-1945) and the victory of the Communist revolution (1949), to the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and its demise. Though the theoretical foundations of Maoism were laid in the late 1930s with the publication of On Contradiction and On Practice, it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that Maoism came to be considered as a political theory in its own right. The immediate cause of this was the dispute with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which started in 1960. In challenging Soviet leadership in the international Communist movement, Mao and his supporters were inevitably driven to produce new revolutionary principles which were often sharply in contrast to those of Soviet Communism. The most important of these was the idea that the “principal contradiction” in the world was not that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat but between, on the one hand, the underdeveloped countries, metaphorically called the “countryside” and, on the other, the capitalist states or “cities” of the world. The pattern of the Chinese revolution, conducted predominantly by peasant armies surrounding the urban redoubts where Chiang Kai-shek's forces had retreated, was thus recast as an international strategy. Another central characteristic of Maoism was an overstated and often euphoric reliance on the power of the masses (“the subjective forces”) to prevail—if properly guided by the “correct” political line—over obstacles of an economic and ideological nature. It was assumed that economic transformations could be achieved by the sheer power of the human will and that traditional mentalities could be rapidly and ceaselessly recast. Maoism's emphasis on equality, typified by the ubiquitous blue working clothes worn by men and women alike, the messianic fervour of its supporters, the constant sessions of criticism and self-criticism during which “old ideas” were rejected, produced a form of collective repression by peer-groups different in kind from the practice of Soviet Communism. This led to a far too swift and damaging collectivization of peasant farms (1955-1957), to the catastrophic Great Leap Forward of industry which included the development of labour-intensive industries in rural areas, and, above all, to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which virtually paralysed China between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s.

The basic premise of the Cultural Revolution was that, to avoid the entrenchment of a bureaucratic party elite, it was necessary to mobilize the masses, and in the first instance young students (the Red Guards), to rebel against the centralized and authoritarian nature of the system. In fact, Mao was mobilizing the masses to eliminate his numerous opponents in the party leadership. Soon the Cultural Revolution degenerated into an apparently unstoppable movement, often violent and intolerant, which gave primacy to the ideologically “correct line” over expertise. As the cult of Mao's personality developed, a collection of his sayings bound in a little red book became the sacred text of a largely anarchic movement which was not brought under control until 1971 and which was repudiated after Mao's death.

In the 1960s Maoism became briefly influential among student activists in Western Europe and North America who were captivated by its apparent antiauthoritarianism and voluntarism. It had also some import in developing countries where guerrilla warfare, successfully practised by Mao in the 1930s, was seen as providing a strategy for revolutionaries unable to defeat well-equipped armies by conventional means. On the whole, however, Maoism as a source of revolutionary inspiration did not outlast its creator.