I read some of Mao’s works and informed me on MLM(the Gonzalo line not MZT) and my question Is why do ML’s don’t like MLM? and why PPW Is not universal like MLM’s claim? My opinion Is that PPW even viewed as just the three phases Mao speaks about adapted to one material condition Is not enough to say it Is universal because the theory that those three phases are universal also needs to form from material reality and so Is just idealist but it still doesn’t convince me and It might come from me not being educated enough on the matter so let me understand.
MLM is a utopian socialist ideology that uses abuses Marxian aesthetics.
Historical materialism is not a prescriptive ideology in the sense of giving you a list of tenets of what “thou shalt do” in order to be implemented from the top-down by decree for moralistic reasons. It is descriptive theory that describes how the relations of production objectively develop as an inevitable consequence of the development of the forces of production.
All major early Marxists from Marx to Engels to Lenin to Bukharin to Hilferding agreed that the communist party actually had limited role to play in the socialization of production, because the socialization of production is something that occurs naturally as a result of the development of the forces of production, and any forcible attempt to alter them would make no theoretical sense, and in fact Lenin even said it would be “economic suicide.”
The role of the party, as described in the Manifesto, is two-fold: (1) to encourage the development of the forces of production, which will automatically on its own increase the socialization of production, and then (2) to expropriate already socialized enterprises, i.e. enterprises that have already arisen to a national scale of their own accord. The latter step does not “create” the economic foundations, it just changes the legal structure around something that came into existence deterministically on its own.
However, MLMs are utopian socialists. In their rhetoric, they imply that we should abandon historical materialism and just treat Marxism as a list of moral tenets to follow where we should, by decree, from the top down, implement everything Marx predicted of future society by fiat today, as if they are moralistic prescriptions of how society should be, such as, completely outlawing all non-public enterprises even in sectors of the economy which are so underdeveloped that it is still dominates by small producers (something Lenin, again, outright said would be economic suicide!). Anyone who disagrees they accuse of being a “revisionist,” which is ironic because they wish to completely abandon Marx’s socioeconomic theory and accuse everyone else of being a “revisionist.”
Of course, they want to maintain Marxian aesthetics, so they will not literally say, “we are abandoning historical materialism.” They instead square this circle in a very weird way, that is rather comparable to how Christians treat the Old Testament. If you ask Christians why they don’t follow the law of the Old Testament, they claim that, for some arbitrary reason, it doesn’t apply anymore, and so they believe all the laws of the Old Testament were true laws to be followed back then, but that, for some arbitrary reason (like Jesus’s sacrifice), we can now abandon them all today.
MLMs use this same kind of explanation. They say that, yes, MLs are completely right about historical materialism, but that only applied to semi-feudal “developing” countries. In countries that are more “developed” and no longer semi-feudal, it no longer applies, and so therefore they are not contradicting Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc, because they full agree with everything Marx, Engels, and Lenin said in those “developing” semi-feudal countries. But we can ignore all that now because most of the world is now “developed” capitalist countries.
It is very vague and arbitrary, because there is no material explanation as to why suddenly historical materialism should be thrown out the window because countries are no longer semi-feudal. Nothing in Marx’s or Lenin’s analysis for the role of the communist party hinges on the country being semi-feudal or capitalist. As Lenin said, the small producers have to disappear naturally as a result of economic development, and so in the meantime, we have to learn to “live alongside them,” and it would be “economic suicide” to try and disperse them.
Why? Again, because the dispersal of the small producers has to come naturally as a result of the development of the forces of production. The reason a sector of the economy may be dominated by small producers is because, objectively and materially, in the real, physical world, the means to manage that sector of the economy in a centralized way does not yet physically exist due to its underdevelopment. If you try to centralize it by fiat, you will be trying to centralize a part of the economy which has no physical mechanism to be be centralized. That would introduce an economic contradiction, not resolve one.
This is, again, what basically all early Marxists agreed upon. What about a modern country like China being no longer semi-feudal makes this argument no longer apply? MLMs cannot explain why it no longer applies other than vaguely gesturing to modern countries being “developed” and thus it no longer applies, and so they insist we should switch to a more moralistic prescriptive analysis instead, with no coherent reason as to why.
They then, again, declare everyone who disagrees with them as an immoral evil “revisionist” and become hostile toward them to an absurd degree, and end up fighting against other communists more than they even fight against capitalism. MLMs even claim Cuba is a capitalist imperialist country and the Shining Path has attacked communists inspired by Cuban foco theory. They do way more harm than good as they basically destroyed the image of communists in Peru by killing other leftists who were very popular among the masses.
thanks for the detailed response
What is the full quote of Lenin about “economic suicide”? I can’t find it easily.
Fwiw this description is nothing like the maoists I’ve worked with. They practice HM, they are not dogmatic and are very bottom-up.
What is the full quote of Lenin about “economic suicide”? I can’t find it easily.
Comes from “The Tax in Kind”: “What is to be done? One way is to try to prohibit entirely, to put the lock on all development of private, non-state exchange, i.e., trade, i.e., capitalism, which is inevitable with millions of small producers. But such a policy would be foolish and suicidal for the party that tried to apply it. It would be foolish because it is economically impossible. It would be suicidal because the party that tried to apply it would meet with inevitable disaster. Let us admit it: some Communists have sinned ‘in thought, word and deed’ by adopting just such a policy. We shall try to rectify these mistakes, and this must be done without fail, otherwise things will come to a very sorry state.”
He says something similar in “Left-wing Communism”: “The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists — that is something we accomplished with comparative ease; it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them.”
Of course, who says it doesn’t particularly matter since it’s not gospel, what matters are the reasons it is said, the substance behind it, which is that socialism is built upon socialized production, which is laid autonomously by the development of the forces of production, not by state decree. People often use “capitalist” to refer to anyone who engages in any sort of finance, but often in these older texts “capitalist” specifically meant the “big bourgeoisie” that already operated very large, highly socialized enterprises that could be expropriated for the nation, while other terms like petty bourgeoisie and small commodity producer is used for everyone else.
How you deal with the “capitalists” (big bourgeoisie) is “comparatively easy” because you can just expropriate their already national-scale enterprises as the basis for your national-scale enterprises. But how you deal with the small producer is much more complicated, because obviously a small producer can acquire capitalistic, and not socialistic, interests, but also there is no material basis to expropriate them, so you have to somehow square that circle, and it is something that was never fully worked out and is something socialist countries today are still trying to work out.
Although, it wasn’t unexpected. In Hilferding’s Finance Capital in the last chapter he talks about this, how a socialist revolution that builds a socialist state but still possesses a large portion of its economy dominated by small enterprise will find itself in a long-term struggle to maintain the dominance of the socialist system while having to contain the contradictions from the vestigial capitalist elements, which could last for a long, long, long time.
I’d highly recommend Bukharin’s “Anarchy and Scientific Communism” where he discusses how what separates anarchism from Marxism is that Marxists don’t want to build a brand new society “out of a void” but want to expropriate the foundations already created by finance capital.
Fwiw this description is nothing like the maoists I’ve worked with. They practice HM, they are not dogmatic and are very bottom-up.
It’s a framework for a scientific theory of socioeconomic development, it’s not really a “practice,” unless you just mean a “practice” as in using it in your analysis. If so, if you’ve really talked to tons of Maoists who genuinely have a historical materialist analysis, then how did they justify to you that MLs are “revisionist” just for upholding the orthodox Marxist view of socioeconomic development? What argument did they use to justify their claim that not making all private enterprise illegal is a form of “revisionism”?
Starting to think that “The Tax in Kind” is an underrated work among Marxists.
Great response and highly informative!
I’m not sure I understand the theoretical point you’re making, but people declaring themselves MLM have made a lot of questionable organizing decisions in the west since the 1960s. Their groups have a tendency to overly elevate the importance of single leaders, struggle to persist through seemingly insignificant disagreements and frequently splinter into smaller factions who all hate each other. IMO the theoretical differences between ML and MLM are largely scientific questions and should not preclude MLs and MLMs working together any time soon—though it frequently does.
Where am I not clear?
Not trying to be rude but you wrote an incredibly difficult to follow run-on sentence with way too many conjunctions. Your idea might be completely correct, I just can’t follow your point.
Ik I should have been more straightforward basically the question is why PPW is or isn’t universal from a ML analysis
ML parties generally emphasize mass political organizing, trade unions, and preparation for revolutionary crisis rather than immediate protracted people’s war. I think most ML would argue that people’s war was the correct strategy for Mao’s china but that not every situation necessarily calls for guerrilla warfare on the path to socialism–concrete analysis of concrete conditions and all that.
This doesn’t touch on PPW, but as an ML, my issue with MLM is that the Maoist position on Actually Existing Socialism is insufficient and largely idealist, in that they essentially reject any AES state
Their most developed critiques are of China, but when that’s somewhat outdated, and their critiques of any other socialists county are either lazy grafts of their China critique (re: Vietnam), or just half baked nonsense
