OBSERVATIONS ON MAO's SPEECH: “ON THE 10 MAJOR RELATIONSHIPS”

OBSERVATIONS ON MAO's SPEECH: “ON THE 10 MAJOR RELATIONSHIPS”¹

Note: This text is part of a series of analysis which I developed during my involvement with the history of Maoism, and many of the opinions espressed here have changed considerably. Anyway I decided to post this one here stating the view I once had, even if its only to contrast with my current perceptions, which are expressed on more mature texts such as "Seeking logics behind ' seeking truth from facts' ".

The following analysis presents some of my personal impressions over Mao's speech at an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, on April 25, 1956, in which he addressed what he considered to be the 10 major “problems concerning socialist construction and socialist transformation” in China. Before properly exposing those views, however, its necessary to highlight some main points regarding: the scope of my comments; the context in which he addressed one such speech and; above all, the reason of why I'll try to offer my understandings of this specific speech as a complement to my last essay on another of Mao's most famous works (The New Democracy).

About my comments; they should be read as opinions coming from someone who has never read most of Mao's theoretical works before. Despite a big interest and a fair involvement with other Marxist and Historical Materialist approaches, the fact is that Mao's works are new to me. And however this amateur interpretation of mine can neglect the precise role that this particular texts I've being analyzing so far may have played in the core of his formulations, there's still, I believe, a great space for my interpretations as long as the isolated content of those punctual works of him do reveal some characteristics of his utopic project (here utopia is not used with any other meaning than that of a plan to be implemented).

In short, the fact that I'm analyzing particular essays without referring them to the totality of Mao's works or the political relevance they come to get along the Maoist revolutionary and post-revolutionary levels does not mean that the points I highlight were not meant by him. Skipping the hermeneutic debate over rather isolated analysis can or not account for the “real” and “sublime” meaning of the author, the analysis I offer than should be taken into account, at least, when excavating some epistemological aspects of his speech. After all, there's a fair consensus even among habermasians that epistemology, different from meanings, goals and institutions, tend to remain whatever being the contextual reality affecting the source of the speech – the speaker. Therefore, my biggest effort will be in the sense of evaluating some clear epistemological aspects made transparent through this particular speech, as to offer my personal opinion on whether one such epistemology can possibly instrumentalize the fulfillment of the sublime goals of justice, equality, freedom... in sum, the ceasing of what Marx called the oppression of human-beings by human-beings (here I took the liberty of contextualizing Marxist gender biased original words – oppression of man by man – into a more egalitarian language).

As already mentioned, the text to be analyzed here is, in fact, a political speech addressed to some high level members of the Communist Party after the first 7 years of rule it exerted over unified China. Keeping this particular context in mind is necessary to understand the reasons leading the speech to be so passionate and, as we will develop our argument latter, biased, empty of logical content and, therefore, arbitrary. It's clear for any reader that the text sounds more like a preaching, on which its speaker highlights some consensual options under classic paradoxes of social relations but there's no rational exposure of how precisely to proceed in the supported ways, or any sort of deep scrutinizing of the basic forces behind the paradoxes being addressed. The text is a rather over-simplified analysis of obvious issues by even most obvious solutions, most of them relying on emptiness or on the individual morality of the actors in position. And if one such methodological exposure of ideas goes radically against the logical principles which stand for the very unfairness of the society Mao fought against (or claimed to do so), it's precisely the political performed presentation it was meant to be that may give it a little more credibility and claim for a less radical critique over it. After all, speeches aimed for political support under official state-centered institutions are somehow bounded to the emptiness and lack of self-critique. The state-centered political game is a rather cynical game of hiding subjective desires under collective lies, and however I myself don't agree and try my best not to legitimize this tradition, we must still remind this aspect once evaluating the referred speech of Mao, possibly as a way to separate the general critiques of a state-centered official political system from the particular weakness of the particular Maoist approach to the official state-centered politics.

In that sense, our effort will be to look for links between this text and the text I've previously analyzed (On New Democracy), as a way to reduce the already mentioned counter-effects and mis-perceptions of a punctual analysis, as well as to distinguish those elements of emptiness used for the political performance of 1956 and those logical gaps that shall be attributed to epistemological failures and to a Maoist refuse to address some points in rational discursive way (preferring to set them by means of pure and arbitrary force).

As already mentioned, most of the problems he addresses are not so particular as he claims, and in fact are present irritants in almost any sort of estate-centered social rule, existing in capitalists, socialists and even in some pre-modern kind of societies. The 10 points he refers are, respectively: The relation between high industry and soft-industry/agriculture; The relations between industries in the cost and industries in the interior (which we could access by the broader category of problems regarding production and geographical positions); The relation between economic construction and defense construction (which is present for every state under the shadow of war); The relation between states, units of production and the producers (which is there fore the State planed developed as well as for the enterprises management dilemmas in a global-market oriented society); The relations between central and local authorities (which exist in ever society more complex than the family, and even in some non-patriarchal families); The relation between Han nationalities and other nationalities (which can be seen as the only really element of uniqueness, but, still, can have one such status questioned if we take other examples of late national movements among a plural society); The relation between party and non-party (which is just a different approach for the division between status quo and revisionists); The relation between revolution and 'counter-revolution' (a particularity of the last mentioned opposition in which the revisionist becomes the status quo but keeps the 'revolutionary' speech in order to gain political support and to monopolize political spaces); The relationship between right and wrong; The relationship between China and other countries.

In fact, out of those 10 paradoxic problems we can reasonably argue that the only real unique one is the one concerning the relationship between Han people and other minority people in China. All the other problems he raise are problems faced by state-centralized rules over a nation. Its important to highlight how Mao stresses this particularity of China as a tool for strengthening his leadership position. From the text “On New Democracy” to the present one its clear and recurrent the way he always claim for a uniqueness in the Chinese case, as if any other social position could fit the Chinese necessities and, therefore, every reasonable management of those problems depended only and exclusively on accepting the Maoist orientation, regardless of all sorts of arbitrariness, abuses and analytical gaps of it. It's a very basic cognitive mechanism that of claiming the monopoly of social control (and in his case, the monopoly of wisdom and morality itself) by featuring the current problems at a level of particularity which denies space for any other source of knowledge not emerging from the specific characterization presented by oneself. In short, its the simple case of the husband who harms the wife but rejects any outsider to judge him by simply stating that the general familiar relations logics does not apply to his own. Well, of course, every family has its particularities, the same way every society and every civilizations has it's own logics, but as long as rationality has a role to play on our judgment it may not be the voice of the oppressor – violent husband or authoritative ruler – to set up the history, but, instead, the voice of the victims that Walter Benjamin so brightly refered in his tradition of the oppresseds. And if we dare opposing the dictatorial voice that ruled China for 27 years and made a proud statement that, in his opinion, he JUST repeated some 30% of the Stalinist mistakes, than we may see that those same 30% of mistakes are still enough to characterize a genocide (however smaller than the Soviet one it may have been), are still too much crime wars against Chinese own people, and are still too much a aberration of oppression by human-beings by human-beings.

More than featuring his own position as the only able to attend Chinese necessities, the fantasy of such uniqueness in the Chinese reality served as a way to reify enemies and create some sort of negative identity, some counter-resistency identity. The old and classic principles of the very state he criticizes so much, those of using external enemies as a tool to foster a solidarist self-perception among societies to be than folded into state rule. This very strategy, present in almost the TOTALITY of the state unification processes in the world (and largely in Europe), was particularly accentuated by Mao since he used it to foster a Chinese nationalism centered on his personal rule. That way he over-emphasized the particularities of Chinese uniqueness as a way to make a solid portrait of what is not Chinese being the enemy, a necessary distinction in the process of exposing people to a common fear so that they could automatically grant all the prerogatives of power, morality and rationality to the state. That is the strongest base supporting some recurrent and rational-weak (or absent) associations he makes insistently in this speech, such as, for example: The anti-nationalistic aspect of those who don't accept the Party's official position; the anti-peasantry aspect of those who don't endorse the Party's view, etc.

In a link to the text “On New Democracy” we can highlight how this featuring of uniqueness is manipulated to foster a binary enmity line according to which all who don't strictly follow the Party's orientation are automatically positioned in the pole accused to be against nationalism, against peasantries and even against morality. In this sense, the emptiness of basis to positively describe what is the so called anti-revolutionary in the text of 1956 is a rather methodological continuity to his intransigence regarding revolutionaries who he condemned of being infiltered agents or stupid naives in the previous text “On New Democracy”. In fact, what is lost by simply accepting his binary judgment is the fact that several different social views over the revolution, most of them much more critical than his own, are simply melted and discredited with views really willing to restore the status quo ante.

And it's precisely for denying a discursive space for other social views that Mao's speech fail so much on really differentiating his “revolutionary” China from other sorts of dictatorships and even from most traditional capitalists modus operandi. In his egocentric way of settling his own positions as the “good” side of his binary division of reality, Mao even tries to be humanist, and express some desire of not repeating absurds like those committed by Stalin. However, he fails on doing that precisely for his epistemological choice of institutions as the starting point in the relationships to be settled with people. When he talks about center-units relations, for instance, he may sound like humanist when he stresses the importance that unities also exert some influence over the center. What he misses, however, is the notion that the very way those influences are to be exerted are firstly determined by the center (which here represents the institutional aspect). In short, the fact that he makes many references to the people does not hide the fact that it is the institutional settlements which shape how people should access institutions, and not the opposite. What Mao brings is a rather Althusserian Marxism according to which people must be benefited from institutional logics, instead of a more humanist perception of the dual role of people, on benefiting and also shaping the institutions from which they shall benefit of.

A clear example of this Althusserian anti-humanist logic of Mao comes from the example already mentioned of the relation between center and unities. In the text we're analyzing Mao makes a clear statement of the priority of the center over the unities since the space given to the unities should face it's limit's in the central capacity to preserving itself in light of the expansion of the units role. Still in that point of the text, Mao makes a rather poor dialectical (which for me sounded more like a dichotomical) understanding of central and unities, but ends up centering the unreachable limit as being the deterioration of the center, and not the complete sublimation of the unities to the central logic. On pointing the unreachable limit in the central authority (institutional role) rather than on the unities freedom (human care), Mao don't differ much of, let's say, the liberal logic according to which the unreachable limit is the economical mechanism which provides care for the individuals (the market), rather than the people 's particular care. And here, it's important to make clear that, however his political staging forced Mao to lexicographically deny any pre-eminence of center over unities, it's a childish effort to deny that it was precisely what he did on settling the limits for this 'dialectic' relation in the deterioration of the center and not in the deterioration of the unity.

The very fact that he only presents the role of the units under the view of the center, without, lets say, a vision of the center under the units view, also strength our argument that Maoism was in fact an anti-Humanism Marxism. Making this even clearer there's a paragraph in which he compares his rule with the Stalinist one, which he considers to be very inhuman (but doesn't dare to really oppose), and he offers a very proud testimony that he may not have committed much more than 30% of the Stalinist mistakes. Therefore we should ask: Is humanism a numeric issue? Is it a quantitative analysis which differs humanists from non-humanists? Shall Mao be considered a humanist and Stalin a anti-humanist for the difference on their death rates? I particularly consider humanism to be much more than numbers, and altogether with Hegel and Marx stick to the position that humanism shall be kept for those who start their social investigations through locating the meeting points of individuals and structures and, most of all, who raise revolutionary forces aiming nothing but the best. If history is about repetition and mistakes, as pointed by Hegel, we should better aim at the most sublime perfection to have the least regrettable mistakes, instead of Maoist like “realistic” utopias whose closeness to the undesired reality is so close that the 'Hegelian' mistakes may sometimes show their-selfs into barbaric levels more violent and regrettable than those behind the previous thesis (stage). A humanist synthesis depends on a real antithesis and not a simple a make up of the contested thesis. At this point, I suggest finishing this essay by looking at the following excerpt in which Mao poses himself against the death penalty for the economic losses of wasting someone's working strength:

Third, from now on there should be fewer arrests and executions in the suppression of counter-revolutionaries in society at large. They are the mortal and immediate enemies of the people and are deeply hated by them, and therefore a small number should be executed. But most of them should be handed over to the agricultural co-operatives and made to work under supervision and be reformed through labour. All the same, we cannot announce that there will be no more executions, and we must not abolish the death penalty.

… After all, from the deep of our human beings, does it slightly resembles like a humanist view? Is it really reasonable to excuse so many abuses Maoism committed for achieving a social reality in which, again, humans come to the extreme of being measured by their working-price? Wasn't it a too expensive price payed for such a short, if any, social evolution?

In a personal statement that is rather an confession than a proper conclusion to this essay, I must end it up by stressing the huge disparity between Mao's arbitrary decisions based on missing arguments and the traditional Marxists and Historical Materialists. He's social visions are rather poor, methodological contradictories and therefore his seizure of Chine may not be accounted for the efficacy of his speech, as a logical scenario, but, instead, to other reasons, like the fragile situation of China when it was captured by Mao, his personal Charismatic characteristics and the widespread misuse and misinterpretations which distorted one of the most Humanistic theories of society (Marxism) into fuel for some of the most barbaric adventures of modern times.

1By Pedro Lara de Arruda.