[Marxism] Mao Tse-Tung Mickey Mousesong(was: somethingor other about porn)

[S. Artesian]

I kind of expected that the last part of my post would generate a response, 
and not the first part about land-tenure and the characterization of 
pre-revolutionary China.  For the record, Mao's philosophical mush is 
complemented by the Maoist mushy social analysis of China, and the economic 
development of China pre-revolution.

My point in that second part of the earlier post is that the idealist 
nonsense and ideological gibberish is in fact Maoist and that the 
pseudo-theorizing serves a very concrete purpose of dis-connecting Marxism 
from its link to and focus on the primacy of the proletariat; justifying 
cross-class alliances [the "popular front" as you identify it] etc.

Certainly that ideology, and the success of the Chinese revolution, and its 
weakness, and its enduring inability to "modernize" China, and its inability 
to change the organization of agriculture has everything to do with the 
correlation of material forces-- and those material forces are first and 
foremost the relations of class power-- where the bourgeois order in China 
is too weak to even survive the rigors of its own birth and, at the same 
time, the working class has suffered serious losses and defeats.


If China could not, based on the terms of its internal development and its 
position in the international order, support the expansion of bourgeois 
property, and if the proletariat had been isolated and defeated, then that 
void was filled by a property system eliminating a weak bourgeoisie, 
dispossessing the not very powerful landlords,  expelling the international 
private capital-- in short a system that was the extension of  the rollback, 
contraction, consolidation, Thermidor, whatever you want to call of the 
Russian Revolution.

I certainly agree with the importance of demystification, but 
demystification begins with demystification of the "popular front"  "blocs 
of 3,4,5 many classes,"  and the pseudo-Marxism that substitutes simple and 
vulgar anti-intellectualism for real social analysis.


Now Marvin says that the Chinese revolution accomplished the tasks of the 
national democratic revolution.  While this sort of bastardization of 
Trotsky's analysis of the permanent revolution is quite popular with some, 
it doesn't stand up to rigorous Marxist analysis.  What, first and foremost, 
constitutes the first and foremost task of the national democratic 
revolution?  Well, IMO, it is the emancipation of agricultural production 
from the limits of small scale "subsistence +" agriculture, the emancipation 
of the population from the tethers of agricultural production, so that 
agricultural productivity is of a degree and depth to support the movement, 
and exploitation, of surplus labor into industrial production.   Look at 
China's agricultural productivity, its proportion of the population 
employed, and under-employed in agriculture, and tell me what part of that 
task has been accomplished.  It was NOT accomplished in China.  It was NOT 
accomplished even in the USSR, where at the time of the collapse, up to 1/3 
of the work force was engaged in agricultural production.

The industrialization of the economy was NOT accomplished by the Chinese 
revolution.  While industrial production certainly expanded under the CCP 
after the revolution, China could not in any way shape or form be considered 
an industrial country prior to 1983,  and certainly the specific weight of 
industrial production in the economy was less than that of some other 
emerging economies.  Would we call China an industrial country today?  I 
know I'm in the minority here, but proportionally, based on population 
size-- I wouldn't.

I find it pretty funny that Marvin in one breath talks about China's "very 
gradual introduction" of capitalist norms that might undermine the authority 
of the CCP and at the same time refers to the difference between the 
durations of the Russian and Chinese revolutions as insignifcant in 
historical terms.  Well, the introduction of capitalist norms, and 
capitalist economic relations, has hardly been gradual or insignificant.  It 
has made incredible inroads in a briefer than brief, on the historical 
clock, time.


There's more than philosophical, ideological, theoretical differences at 
work here.   Expropriation of a weak, fragmented, bourgeoisie; expulsion of 
isolated enclaves of international capital; introduction of the property 
form and relations that mark the retreat of the workers revolution after 
1928; forms that are extended after the greatest slaughter of workers, ever 
means that all the "tasks" historically unfulfilled by the bourgeoise, will 
remain unfulfilled.  Trotsky's analysis , IMO, clearly inherits the 
momentum, the logical impulse of Marx's in that Trotsky clearly recognizes 
that those historical tasks would befall the proletariat, but could not be 
resolved without the completion of the revolution in the advanced 
countries-- that the resolution of "national democratic tasks" required the 
application of a social property form that engaged, injected, advanced 
technologies free from the reproduction of capitalist value relations.  The 
revolutions of Russia, and China became the vehicles for introducing 
technologies not free of the value relations.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Cod" <tcod at hotmail.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Mao Tse-Tung Mickey Mousesong(was: somethingor other 
about porn)



surely it had to do with material forces and not Mao's misapplication or 
misunderstanding of abstruse philosphical doctrines.