Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 08:01:01 +0000 From: Mark Jones <Jones_M-AT-netcomuk.co.uk> Subject: M-I: The relevance of Maoism Contemporary Maoism takes its place as a leading current in the international workers' movement based on its leadership of (with perhaps a few honourable exceptions) the only explicitly, militantly-uncompromising and avowedly revolutionary struggles, which are confined to Peru, the Philippines and perhaps a few other places. There is class struggle everywhere, and even (in Chiapas for instance) armed struggle (but mostly of a virtualised, Net-symbolic kind: the Zapatistas seem mostly concerned to seek dialogue while avoiding extermination; and their agenda is dictated by concerns with 'social justice' and the struggle against 'neo-liberalism', i.e. the appropriately-virtualised, shadowy form of late-imperialism). But only the Maoists and their successors are fighting openly anti-imperialist Peoples' War. Nowhere else are militarised revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties locked in a fight to the finish with the state. The uncompromising nature of Peoples' War dictates an equally-uncompromising approach to ideology, to the political contest for the hearts and minds of the international proletariat, and its social allies. Therefore the combatants in the ideological trenches (as they are depicted, and perhaps are) are equally stern in their conduct of struggle. World capitalism has, for two decades now, been in retreat. There has only been one analogous phase in the history of modern capitalism, and that is the period between 1871-1914. Then too, retreat was masked by many victories, by spectacular economic growth, by the entrenching of a truly-universal world-market, by a many-fronted advance in cultural and above all, scientific and technological fields. Nevertheless, contemporaries rightly understood the pre-First World War epoch as a Great Depression, characterised by a secular decline in prices and a cycle of intensive accumulation within an overall deflationary process: a cycle of decline of the rate of absolute surplus value and piecemeal, grimly-won advances in the rate of relative surplus-value extraction. The crisis of 1871-1914 had two dimensions: in the relations of production, that is the political-statal-social command by capital. And in the forces of production itself. This was the period in which maritime capitalism consolidated the world-market, and the global relations of production were dominated by British imperialism. The world-market used sterling as the currency of last resort and means of payments, and the rule of capital was enforced by the Royal Navy (camel caravans crossed the Gobi Desert -- the world's most landlocked trade route -- behind the Red Ensign, an indicator of British naval reach!). It was also the period in which capitalist INNER-continental development took spectacular hold, in North and South America, Central Europe, and Russia. The history of the epoch is of a growing contradiction between forces and relations of production, as burgeoning continental economies pressed more and more powerfully against the straitjacket of British world hegemony, with its extremely limited socio-historical and material basis. Within the forces of production, the epoch was characterised by the true rise of finance-monopoly capital, around the emergence of large new process industries, primarily oil and metallurgy. It was above all the epoch when steam and coal gave way to oil and steel. The multifold transition was effected by 1921, when the British imperium was displaced by US hegemony, although not on a world-scale: 1917 revealed a radical parasitism in the capitalist world-system, and the 'short 20th century' (1917-1991) was a world system organised around a bifurcation. In 1917 the masses erupted into history in a spectacular new way, bursting the barriers of the nation-state and for the first time raising the banner of World Revolution. Nevertheless, 1917 was a revolution against the trend. A proletarian revolution within a vast counter-revolutionary process, launched in 1848 and still in 1917, gathering momentum. The October Revolution was contained and recuperated to the world system, energising it, legitimising it, and unexpectedly giving world-capitalism an extended (and thoroughly undeserved) lease of life. The revolution also had its progeny, its counter-trends: a wave of national-liberation and anti-colonial struggles whose principal result was the conquest of state power in China by a Marxist-Leninist party at the head not fo a proletariat (not within China, anyway) but a peasantry. That made sense: the Chinese peasantry was self-understood as a chapter within the world-wide proletarian-led movement, and Mao had no hesitation in deferring to Stalin as head of this world movement. The anti-colonial movement had one important ally until 1949: the United States. Thus the recuperation of the 20th century's proletarian movement was completed and consummated in the struggle for world supremacy between the New World and the Old. After 1949, the US became the most bitter foe of further social and political advance by the colonial peoples. The liquidation of the British and French colonial empires was hastened along, if only because of a widespread understanding that delay produced not petty-bourgeois client-nationalism but authentic Marxist-Leninist uprisings. The zig-zag path of the 20th century proletarian international, always accompanied by betrayal, compromise, moral inversions, stagnation and corruption, also produced great political and ideological advances. These advances are actually its greatest achievements, far outweighing the conquest of state power itself. The first such advance was the creation by Lenin of a party of a new type: the Leninist party. This innovation realised Marxism within a new historical terrain, the terrain of imperialism as a world-system, which Marx had not theorised. And Leninism concretised Marxism as the theory and world-outlook of the proletariat, as the First and Second Internationals did not. The historical advance in working class self-emancipation which is Leninism, must be considered a principal result of the 20th century, of the history of attempts to overthrow the capitalist state, the exploiter society: and the dreams and wraiths by which its categories are reified in the minds of all social classes. Autonomy and self-emancipation, whose eternal watchword is probably 'Bombard the Headquarters!' became a moving principle in Maoism and represent Mao's singular contribution to the history of our movement. The Cultural Revolution is another defining event of the 20th century. It points back to the specific circumstances of People's War, of peasant-based guerrilla warfare, enfolding and drowning the urban centres of capital. But it also points forward to the reconstitution of authentic collectivities based not on the division of labour, on a working class losing its subjectivity in the embrace of the mechanised Moloch of Fordism and Taylorism, but self-conscious collectivities based on the intersubjectivity of a post-proletarian community (post-capital, therefore post-proletarian). The Cultural Revolution was therefore the first concrete prefiguring in real social practice, of the content of communism (no surprise, therefore, that indigenism has so many points of contact with Maoism, or that People's War has turned out to be the only practical way to mobilise the most oppressed, exploited, genocidally-hunted, peripheral groups, in their astonishing and zealous, unremitting wars against brutalised and inhuman capital). Maoism, through Cultural Revolution, succeeded in uniting the matter and anti-matter of the individual and the collective, as never happened in Soviet reality. This painful birthing of communist consciousness almost at once capsized into its opposite: the crass, mindless, mercenary individualism of the neo-liberalised Chinese petty-bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, it remains the case that NO REVOLUTION IS EVEN THINKABLE NOW WHICH DOES NOT INCLUDE CULTURAL REVOLUTION. That is the real significance of Maoism, which we should not lose sight of. Having said that, actually-existing Maoism is in serious need of refurbishing. The analyses and pronunciamentos of the CPP or the Communist Party of the Philippines, do not register the axis of crisis in the conjuncture of late-imperialism, and do not analyse well or at all the real content of processes within either the capitalist mode of production or the international proletariat and its social allies. Maoism is therefore encapsulated within its struggles. It has found nothing beyond intransigent denial as a critique of the existing workers' movement. And that is not enough. Mark Jones --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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