REVIEW OF MAO TSETUNG's “ON THE CORRECT HANDLING OF CONTRADICTIONS AMONG THE PEOPLE”.
Pedro Lara de Arruda
As Mark Seldom presents, this speech of Mao on what he considered to be the proper way of handling contradictions among the people come in “a moment when the party leading body, the Eight Congress, had just declared that class contradiction in Chinese society had been resolved”. A position he – Mao – was radically against and, according to him, presented a threat to the revolutionary process China was passing through for it was an attempt to solidify the emerging contradiction between the people and the party bureaucracy/elite.
Historically, this speech, which was addressed to the Eleventh Session (enlarged) of the Supreme State Conference on February 27, 1957, marks the unique event in which a revolutionary leader evaluated the extended bureaucratization being held by the revolutionary party and tried to revert one such trend without properly abiding the central role of the party but, instead, pushing it to intensify some early policies predicted to be taken as soon as the first stage of revolution was achieved. Accordingly, the first step would comprehend the seizure of the country and the defeat of opposition groups and imperialist threats, what was already reached at the time he pronounced this speech. Originally the Maoist revolutionary process accounted for a second moment in which the Party would aim the issue of the class contradictions among the national society, therefore, that's precisely the reason why Mao stands for in this text. Despite this fulfillment of the original revolutionary plan, there's, as already mentioned, the issue of the extended bureaucratization of the country as an emerging threat to the ideal of an equal society, therefore Mao also raised the issue of resisting one such trend.
His speech is basically divided into two main areas, the first one concerning the economic contradictions among Chinese society and the second one referring to contradictions due to deviant and dissident thoughts and the revolutionary ideology of the Communist Party. Of great interest is the fact that this is possibly the text in which Mao devotes more attention to the Marxist and Leninist interpretation of the dialectical process, which he will use as reference to access the contradictions he diagnoses. Taking this particular text into the bigger frame of Mao's traditional uses of Marxism there's a clear distinction between the superficial and mistaken use he usually makes of Marx in his rhetorical use of Marxism and the mature understanding of the dialectical process that he express in this text. In the section of the book dedicated to the economic contradictions, and particularly in its 5th paragraph, there's a rich evaluation of the general role of contradiction in Marx dialectical approach which clearly contrasts to the rather dichotomous interpretation with which Mao usually vests the concept of dialectics. Here its one of the few occasions in which Mao really accounts for a dialectical process consisting of endless oppositions leading to a constant renew of ideas through means of synthesis given by the encounter of thesis and antitheses, instead of a simple presentation of antithesis seeing to be taken as manual to be strictly followed. Through this analysis Mao acknowledges the dinamicity and unpredictability feature of the revolutionary outcomes, as well as the importance of struggling forces in the sett up of genuinely new synthesis.
One could point out that the reason for Mao to give up his traditional misuse of Marxist theories and resort to a deep and theoretically rich approach at this particular moment was maybe an outcome of his personal understanding of how the superficial and rhetoric use of Marxism only were pushing the Chinese revolution away from the Marxist expected outcomes. One such view, however, can not be taken without critiques coming from those that point some Marxist misuses remaining in this very speech of Mao, beside the huge gap between his theoretical perception of the reality and the very practical measures he prescribes in this very speech and in further speeches and policies.
As for the theoretical mismatches with the same Marxist theory he resorts to highlight the importance and the role of contradiction on the dialectic process, Mao clearly contradicts the basic Marxist argument that class struggles, whether domestic or not, are an irreconcilable antagonism. Using the argument of China's particularities he points that there are two sort of contradictions: The antagonistic one opposing the Chinese nationalists under the flag of the Communist Party and divergent nationalists and imperial forces, which he folds into the category of “enemies”; and the non-antagonistic one opposing the Chinese people itself. Among this second type of contradiction he accounts for the class oppositions and quotes the clearly seen cases of peasants, working classes, the intelligentsia and the party bureaucracy. Thus, he points that such non-antagonistic oppositions could be handled peacefully by the “concrete conditions of China”, what is a direct opposition to the Marxist approach of the irreconcilable aspect of class struggles leading to revolutions and not Party lead revisionism in the society.
Another minor theoretical mismatch with Marxism, which I'm not even sure it worth mention, is the way Mao portraits the 'unity of opposites' as a “fundamental law of the universe” according to Marxism, when, in fact, Marx didn't point to any immanent reality behind structures but, instead, referred to the instrumental value of dialectics while dealing with realities, independently of the fact of those realities being reachable or not. In short, Marx didn't say that things work according to the dialectic mechanism, but simply that we understand and interpret things through that way, therefore the social theory should be conscious of that and structure itself similarly. However, this mismatch is of minor effects to the issue raised by Mao, and even the deeper meanings behind this presentation of the dialectics ethos may not really fit Mao's perception since it come in the context of a speech in which parallel issues like the semiotic aspect of dialectics may have being (over)simplified for the sake of parsimony in the presentation of the role of contradiction.
Another failure of this speech is given by the silence of Mao on what concern emancipatory movements in China. It's clear that he portraits the anti-communist and imperial forces as antagonistic forces and that the class struggles are seen as non-antagonistic forces, however, nothing is said about situations like Tibet, in which a dwell for independence was played not in opposition to China or to the communist China, but simply as a parallel dynamic happening at the same moment as the Chinese revolution. Such kind of contradictions are theoretically neglected by him and, once again, the facts show that Mao's theoretic silence served to mask arbitrary policies which, in this mentioned case, were directed toward Tibetan people. Despite the fact that critiques of the untold are usually not fair, the fact is that movements like the Tibetan nationalism were too much relevant not to be mentioned, therefore this silence should be seen as a choice and not an unpredictable oblivion. Of a similar nature would be the critiques to his oblivion of other struggles and contradictions among the Chinese society at that moment, specially concerning the role of women.
Regarding the previously mentioned gaps between his theoretical resort to Marxist consistent dialectics and the policies he prescribes in this text, one can says that the extended role he pays to planing policies goes against the widespread bureaucratization process he criticizes and also against the dynamic and unpredictable aspect of the dialectical process. In light of the cyclical characteristic of dialectics and of the social division created on base of the Party bureaucracy the reasonable prescription would be the empowerment of peoples grassroot capacity to respond to new realities, and not an attempt to plan and predict the outcome of dialectic interaction between contradictory forces in the society. Specially not if one such planing is to be conducted by the Party, what would obviously lead to an enlargement of the bureaucracy. The way he presents necessity to plan, it only serves to justify bureaucracy growth and, at the same time, can hardly help on the management of situations since he himself recognize them to be exposed to the dynamicity and unpredictable struggles of forces in the dialectic processes. In short, instead of a central planing, his critique of bureaucracy and his dialectical approach would be better suited by simply empowering the poles clearly identifiable with the people instead of advancing scenarios for the outcome in the struggle between people aligned forces and elitist forces.
In this special aspect it's interesting to note also how the paradox of Mao's people oriented policies are based in the oblivion of meaningful socialist and anarchist contributions and experiences which emerged in the early 20th Century in opposition to the Soviet experience. Its shockingly how Mao endorses a people's oriented Marxism but ends up always circumscribing the revolutionary stages to the Party decisions and to the Party mechanisms. Not to quote anarchist experiences like those occurred in Spain and in Ukraine, Mao dismisses important libertarian-socialist views like those of Anthon Panekoek, who charged the Russian revolution to be a bureaucratic counter-revolution and stressed the Marxist thesis of the “workers emancipation through means of workers action”. By dismissing those experiences he neglected theoretical developments in the socialist struggle like the self-management and counsilism which could possibly fit better his dynamic dialectic than any strict planing. Another dismissal which handicapped Mao from finding an administrative possibility which escapes the bureaucratizing process and at the same time proves flexible enough would be the Anarcho-Federalist ideas launched one century ago by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Accordingly, the federalist arrangement, better than the nationalist party centered device, would be, at the same time, flexible enough to the dynamicity of the dialectical historical process, and too close to the people to be distorted into a mechanism for elitist control and social stratification.
A clear exemplification of this incoherence between his theoretical claims and the policies proposed in this text come in the reference he makes to the issue of the intellectual - “The Question of the Intellectuals”. One first point to be mentioned here concerns the very typification of a distinct role to the intellectual, an option which unfolds the possibility of reified knowledge and therefore opens up the possibility for further social stratifications based on this reified knowledge. Despite the classical Marxist support for one such approach, it must be mentioned that at his time there was already a critique of this scientific reification implicit in the consent of a different role for ideas coming from specific groups in the society – like universities – and those coming from ordinary citizens and workers. Accordingly, the whole idea of science would be a bourgeoisie attempt to monopolize the social though and the only way to built a society equally committed to the several sects among it would be the granting of equality for ideas independently of where they come from. In the Chinese case, however, it can be said that the imprecision with which Mao dealt with the issue didn't come to represent a serious problem for still today there's not a real identifiable intelligentsia exerting some sort of intellectual elitism over the society as a whole. Instead it can be said that the bureaucracy championed any other attempt to create a social elite and still has the monopoly of being the only elite in China. There's no scientific elitism, the same way there's no religious or artistic elitism, but only the bureaucratic elitism.
Despite this more controversy issue of the role of intelligentsia in the society, the fact is that Mao acknowledged the importance of a free though as a coherent aspect with the same dialectical process inspiring his analysis. However, when it comes to the objective police prescription of how to instrumentalize one such goal and also preserve the gigantic role he keeps for the Party, he simply recovers his traditional cynical rhetoric and pretend to assure freedom of though at the same moment that he impose restrictions that basically define his own Party oriented though as the limits of freedom itself. If he aligns to the rich dialectical description of this text while acknowledging the necessity of free though, he further blunders all this merits while defining freedom into strict limits of his own thoughts and, therefore, turns the social though meant to be the element of dinamicity in the dialectical process into a rather restrict aspect which quilts Maoism in the intolerance and makes it miss the point of being a dynamic process to become a static thesis or antithesis (as one prefers to call) faded to obsolescence in a real revolutionary historical process.
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