In 1921, Mao attended the First Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Shanghai, and in 1923 he was elected to the party’s Central Committee. He spent the 1920s organizing labour strikes, studying, and developing his ideas. It became clear to him that in China, it would have to be a rural and not an urban proletariat who would carry out the revolution.
Crucible of communism
The CPC shared the ideological outlook of Marxist-Leninism with the Kuonmintang (KMT) – China’s nationalist and anti-monarchist party founded by Sun Yat-Sen, with links to Soviet Russia – and both had the overall aim of national unification. However, the Communists’ popular movement of peasants and workers was too radical for the KMT, who turned on their CPC allies in 1927, crushing them and suppressing their organizations in the cities. This violent conflict was the crucible from which the doctrine of “Maoism” emerged as a guerrilla-style rural Marxian revolutionary strategy.
"Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed."
Mao Zedong
In 1934 and 1935, Mao – now the chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic, a small republic declared in the mountainous region of Jiangxi, southeast China – cemented his position as foremost among Chinese communists during “The Long March”. The first of a series of marches, this 9,600-km (6,000-mile) ordeal, lasting over a year, was ostensibly undertaken to repel Japanese invaders, but it also served as a military retreat by the Communists’ Red Army to evade the Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kaishek. They crossed 18 mountain ranges and 24 major rivers, and only one-tenth of the original force of 80,000 soldiers and workers who set out from Jiangxi in October 1934 survived the march to reach Shanghai a year later. Mao’s supremacy was sealed, and he became leader of the CPC in November 1935. Following Japan’s defeat by the Allies in World War II, the resumption of civil war in China, and the eventual surrender of Nationalist forces, the communist People’s Republic of China was finally established in 1949, with Mao at the helm.
Mao’s cult of personality was relentlessly reinforced by mass demonstrations of crowds carrying posters of their leader and copies of his Little Red Book of quotations.
The Great Helmsman
In 1938, in his concluding remarks to the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the CPC, Mao expounded on his theory of revolution. He maintained that in a China that was still semi-feudal, the truly revolutionary class was the peasantry, and only military struggle could achieve revolution; demonstrations, protests, and strikes would never be enough. With the peasant-proletariat armed and powerful, Mao – now known as “The Great Helmsman” – did bring about many changes for the good. Among other measures, he banned arranged marriages and promoted the status of women, doubled school attendance, raised literacy, and created universal housing. However, Mao’s admiration for Stalin and his infatuation with Marxian language and theories of revolution disguised the many thousands of brutal killings that he and his forces committed on the road to power. There were to be many millions more – some from the violent repression of those deemed opponents of China, and some from neglect. In the space of three decades, Mao forced the country to almost complete self-sufficiency, but at an unspeakable cost in human life, comforts, freedoms, and sanity.
"Without an army for the people, there is nothing for the people."
Mao Zedong
The Five Year Plan launched in 1953 achieved spectacular increases in output, and was followed by the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958. By forcing the Chinese economy to attempt to catch up with the West through mass-labour projects in agriculture, industry, and infrastructure, Mao brought about one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known. Between 1958 and 1962, at least 45 million Chinese people – mostly peasants – were tortured, overworked, starved, or beaten to death, a fatality rate only slightly smaller than the entire death toll of World War II.
The atrocities of this period were carefully catalogued in the now-reopened Communist Party archives. These records show that the “truly revolutionary class” – Mao’s chosen people in the great struggle for social justice – were in fact treated as faceless, expendable objects by Mao and the Party. In contrast to Marx’s conviction that socialism would be an inevitable development from the material and cultural achievements of capitalism, Mao correlated the poverty he saw in China with a moral purity that he believed would lead to a socialist Utopia. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution was introduced with the aim of cleansing China of “bourgeois” influences. Millions were “re-educated” through forced labour, and thousands executed.
Mao in modern China
The politics that for Mao grew “out of the barrel of a gun” turned out to be the totalitarian politics of terror, brutality, fantasy, and deceit. On his death, the CPC declared that his ideas would remain “a guide to action for a long time to come”. However, as society evolves and awareness grows of his horrific crimes, Mao’s influence on Chinese thought may finally be cast off.
Tractors made in China not only increased output but symbolized Mao’s policy of “maintaining independence and relying on our own efforts”.
MAO ZEDONG
The son of a prosperous peasant, Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan, in Hunan province, central China, in 1893. Mao described his father as a stern disciplinarian who beat his children on any pretext, while his devout Buddhist mother would try to pacify him.
After training as a teacher, Mao travelled to Beijing where he worked in the university library. He studied Marxism and went on to become a founder member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. After years of civil and national wars, the Communists were victorious and, under Mao’s leadership, founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Mao set out to ruthlessly modernize China with his “Great Leap Forward” mass labour programme, and later the Cultural Revolution. Both initiatives failed, resulting in millions of deaths. Mao died on 9 September 1976.
Key works
1937 On Guerrilla Warfare
1964 Little Red Book or Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
See also: Karl Marx • Sun Yat-Sen • Vladimir Lenin • Joseph Stalin • Leon Trotsky • Che Guevara • Ho Chi Minh
INTRODUCTION
Huge industrial and social changes took place in the years that followed the end of World War II. The scale and industrialization of warfare, the decline of the great colonial powers, and the ideological battles between communism and free-market capitalism all had a profound effect on political thought. A world recovering from human tragedy on such a scale urgently needed to be reinterpreted, and new prescriptions for human development and organization were required.
Across western Europe, a new political consensus emerged, and mixed economies of private and public businesses were developed. At the same time, new demands for civil and human rights emerged across the world in the immediate post-war period, and independence movements gathered support in Europe’s colonies.
War and the state
There were many questions for political thinkers that plainly stemmed from the experience of global conflict. World War II had seen an unprecedented expansion of military capacity, with a dramatic impact on the industrial base of the major powers. This new environment provided the platform for a collision of ideas between East and West, and the Korean and Vietnam wars, alongside countless smaller dramas, were in many ways proxies for conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.
The nuclear bombs that had brought World War II to an end also signalled an era of technological developments in warfare that threatened humanity on a terrifying scale. These developments led many writers to reconsider the ethics of warfare. Theorists such as Michael Walzer explored the moral ramifications of battle, developing the ideas put forward by Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.
Other writers, such as Noam Chomsky and Smedley D. Butler, explored the configurations of power at play behind the new military-industrial complex. In recent years, the emergence of global
terrorism, and the subsequent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, have thrown these debates into sharp relief.
The period immediately after the war also raised serious questions about the appropriate role of the state. In the post-war period, European democracies established the foundations of the welfare state, and across Eastern Europe communism took hold. In response, political thinkers began to consider the implications of these developments, particularly in relation to individual liberty. New understandings of freedom and justice were developed by writers such as Friedrich Hayek, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick, and the position of individuals in relation to the state began to be reconsidered.
Feminism and civil rights
From the 1960s onwards, a new, overtly political strand of feminism emerged, inspired by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, who questioned the position of women in politics and society. Around the same time, the battle for civil rights gathered pace – with the decline of colonialism in Africa and the popular movement against racial discrimination in the United States – driven by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and inspirational activists including Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Once more, questions of power, and particularly civil and political rights, formed the main preoccupation of political thinkers.
Global concerns
During the 1970s, concern for the environment grew into a political force, boosted by the ideas about “deep ecology” of Arne Naess and coalescing into the green movement. As issues such as climate change and the end of cheap oil increasingly enter the mainstream, green political thinkers look set to become increasingly influential.
In the Islamic world, politicians and thinkers have struggled to agree on the place of Islam in politics. From Maududi’s vision of an Islamic state to Shirin Ebadi’s consideration of the role of women in Islam, and through the rise of al-Qaeda to the hope offered by the “Arab Spring”, this is a dynamic and contested political arena.
The challenges of a globalized world – with industries, cultures, and communication technologies that transcend national boundaries – bring with them fresh sets of political problems. In particular, the financial crisis that erupted in 2007 has led political thinkers to reconsider their positions, seeking new solutions to the new problems.
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Neoliberalism
FOCUS
Free-market economics
BEFORE
1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocates a naturally ordered society without authority, arguing that capital is analogous to authority.
1922 Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises criticizes centrally planned economies.
1936 John Maynard Keynes argues that the key to escaping economic depression is government spending.
AFTER
1962 US economist Milton Friedman argues that competitive capitalism is essential for political freedom.
1975 British politician Margaret Thatcher hails Hayek as her inspiration.
Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek wrote his warning against unlimited government in an appendix called “Why I am not a Conservative” in his 1960 work, The Constitution of Liberty. In 1975, newly elected British Conservative party leader Margaret Thatcher threw this book on a table at a meeting with her fellow Conservatives declaring, “This is what we believe”.
Thatcher was not the only conservative politician to admire Hayek’s ideas, and he has emerged as something of a hero to many politicians on the right. For this reason, it may seem strange that he should have so firmly insisted that he was not a conservative. Indeed, such is the apparent ambiguity of his position that many commentators prefer the term “neoliberal” to describe Hayek and others who, like Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan, championed the idea of unfettered free markets.
Hayek versus Keynes
The principle of free markets is at the heart of Hayek’s insistence that “the chief evil is unlimited government”. Hayek first came to public prominence in the 1930s, when he challenged British economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas for dealing with the Great Depression. Keynes argued that the only way to get out of the downward spiral of unemployment and sluggish spending was with large-scale government intervention and public works. Hayek insisted that this would simply bring inflation, and that periodic “busts” were an inevitable – indeed necessary – part of the business cycle.
Keynes’s arguments won over policy-makers at the time, but Hayek continued to develop his ideas. He argued that central planning is doomed to failure because the planners can never have all the information required to account for the changing needs of every individual. It is simply a delusion to imagine that planners might have the omniscience to cater for so many disparate needs.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers."
Friedrich Hayek
The gap in the planning is data, and this is where free markets come in. Individuals have a knowledge of resources and the need for them that a central planner can never hope to have. Hayek contended that the free market reveals this knowledge perfectly and continually. It does so through the operation of prices, which vary to signal the balance between supply and demand. If prices rise, you know that goods must be in short supply; if they fall, goods must be oversupplied. The market also gives people an incentive to respond to this knowledge, boosting production of goods in short supply to take advantage of the extra profits on offer. Hayek viewed this price mechanism not as a deliberate human invention, but as an example of order in human society that emerges spontaneously, like language.
According to Hayek, a free market spontaneously matches the availability of resources to the need for them through supply and demand. The knowledge to make these adjustments deliberately is way beyond the possibility of any individual.
Loss of freedom
Over time, Hayek began to feel that the gap between the planned economy and the free market was not simply a matter of bad economics but a fundamental issue of political freedom. Planning economies means controlling people’s lives. And so, in 1944, as World War II raged on, he wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom to warn the people of his adopted country, Britain, away from the dangers of socialism.
"Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest, it is the control of the means for all our ends."
Friedrich Hayek
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argues that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism, and makes us all serfs. He believed that there was no fundamental difference in outcome between socialist central control of the economy and the fascism of the Nazis, however different the intentions behind the policies. For Hayek, to put any economic master plan into action, even one intended to benefit everyone, so many key policy issues must be delegated to unelected technocrats that such a programme will be inherently undemocratic. Moreover, a comprehensive economic plan leaves no room for individual choice in any aspect of life.
Government needs limits
It is in The Constitution of Liberty that Hayek’s arguments about the link between free markets and political freedom are most fully developed. Despite his assertion that free markets must be the prime mechanism to give order to society, he is by no means against government. Government’s central role, Hayek asserts, should be to maintain the “rule of law”, with as little intervention in people’s lives as possible. It is a “civil association” that simply provides a framework within which individuals can follow their own projects.
The foundations of law are common rules of conduct that predate government and arise spontaneously. “A judge,” he writes, “is in this sense an institution of a spontaneous order.” This is where Hayek’s claim that he is not a conservative comes in. He argues that conservatives are frightened of democracy, and blame the evils of the times on its rise, because they are wary of change. But Hayek has no problem with democracy or change – the problem is a government that is
not properly kept under control and limited. He asserts that “nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power” – and that, he implies, includes “the people”. Yet, “the powers which modern democracy possesses,” he concedes, “would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite.”
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have."
Gerald Ford
Hayek is critical of laws intended to remedy a particular fault and believes that government use of coercion in society should be kept to a minimum. He is even more critical of the notion of “social justice”. The market, he says, is a game in which “there is no point in calling the outcome just or unjust”. He concludes from this that “social justice is an empty phrase with no determinable content”. For Hayek, any attempt to redistribute wealth – for instance, by raising taxes to pay for the provision of social welfare – is a threat to freedom. All that is needed is a basic safety net to provide “protection against acts of desperation by the needy”.
The Politics Book Page 31