File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9803, message 221


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



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