A brief overview

Any ideology that is imported from one country to another (and especially from an under-developed country with a cultural tradition as different from the West as China) must first of all find roots within the host country. Otherwise it is doomed to perish and remain an esoteric philosophy confined to the inner circle of the 'converted' with little influence on general social struggles.

In the process of finding roots the imported ideology very often becomes transformed or mutated in order to fulfill or affect certain needs. It can gain no success unless it touches one of those dormant nerves. The struggle becomes the struggle to taper the original ideology to the real needs of the host society, awakening that part of the 'cultural heritage', which can make it acceptable. In this attempt to adapt to different social conditions Maoism had to adapt the general aspects of Chinese Maoism to conditions prevailing in the West.

The Maoist formula to achieve this had three essential components, which can be outlined as follows:

(a) By posing as a new populist strategy for class revolution and one which was radical by comparison with the strategies of the traditional 'revisionist' Communist parties or the Social Democrats.

(b) By combining a belief in Chinese peasant communism with a folksy ecological critique of modern technology, which ironically at times has utilized sophisticated technical developments to buttress a pervasive medievalism. We need look no further than at Chris Harper's baneful anarchist alternative drawings of a 'utopian' future where "revolution is the festival of the oppressed" coagulates in a dreary English Kropotkinite routine of meadows, communalized gothic cathedrals and tithe barn workshops. More generally the coming together of "small is beautiful" ecological anarchism and the fallout from Maoist peasant fantasies overlap on the terrain of the state when President Carter can authorize a one billion dollar research program on solar energy. A recent review Overthrow edited by Paul Krassner and ex-hippy friends having lost the millennial feelings of the late 1960s can ridiculously proclaim that "the only revolution is solar" - a technolatry disregarding the social relations of production which is utterly essential when outlining the hopes of a green future.

(c) By providing a pseudo-scientific body of ideas that were religious and ritualistic in character.

Maoism was not a revolutionary breakthrough but all three aspects were to attract thousands of young 'intellectual' ideologists from that sector of society immediately above the working class performing a functionary role (or more nearly preparing to do so) in some aspect or other preserving the capitalist social order. Maoism also had an appeal to some workers with a great penchant for immediate destruction of the commodity economy who often wrecked havoc on stodgy legalistic demonstrations while shouting out ludicrous slogans bearing no relation to their practical destructive activity, at the same time as they were blind to a similar raison d'etre behind football hooliganism / council estate vandalism etc.

At the height of their power in China the Maoist faction of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) were able to give their blessings, some money and provide (or so the Western Maoists believed) proof of the vitality of Maoist organization.

With the defeat, in the late 1970s, of "the Gang of Four" and the Maoist faction within the Chinese ruling class, the Western Maoists were to lose much of their appeal and audience. This, together with the Pol Pot horror stories meant 'classical' Maoism was shattered. Although classical Maoism is dead, shadows of Maoist ideology constantly re-appear in more subtle forms. However there is more to it than that. In many respects Maoism dead is more unnerving than when it was a shouting but living corpse having influenced (and changed the face of) the powerful lobby of the Western liberal tradition with its long historical line of paid up intellectuals. So let us take at look at some of these more recent characteristics.....

The development of Third World national liberation movements in the aftermath of the bloodbath of the Second (inter imperialist) World War seemed to provide an answer to the question of the Eurocentric and American orientation of world history. Anxious liberals eagerly supported these movements as a way out of the pernicious circle. In reality they were acting as the faithful chien-de garde of a European nationalism, which was in the process of being exported to the rest of the world. After 1945, Nationalism within Europe was stale, corrupt and discredited and had developed the evil legacy of Imperialism.

Commitment to Third World liberation struggles was able to restore a racism 'free' of the guilt of fascism and European Imperialism. The inequalities within the anti-imperialist rhetoric corresponded to different stages of development. For the First World condition of their reproduction of nationalism was full support for a nascent Third World bourgeoisie in their battle against Imperialism, combined with a shamefaced denigration of belonging to a First World country. The Maoist Le Dantec had insisted upon giving assistance to national liberation movements as a "categorical imperative". Within the rules of this anti-imperialist game, it was possible to proudly say, "I am Chilean" but not "I am French or I am German" but with the former ultimately supporting the latter in paradoxical ways.

It did indeed seem like a return to the founding principles of bourgeois nationalism –admittedly on another continent and with the face-lift of state capitalism. Such a romantic longing was never again to find a better echo until the recent emergence of petty nationalist and regionalist movements. Not until the middle 1970s was nationalism in the metropoles to become a respectable cause again for the reforming bourgeoisie and then it was thrown onto indigenous small nationalities such as the Basques in Spain, the Bretons in France and in the UK, the Irish (never absent - the exception which proves the rule), the Scots and Welsh (c/f. Tom Nairn's The Breakup of the UK) followed by a host of mini-regional sentiments, e.g. in the USA the record companies beaming down on the 'unique' flavour of Cajun culture in the Deep South. However in the immediate post war period, the nationalist lacunae and the apparently dead sentiments of nineteenth century romantic nationalism were unexpectedly exported onto a Third World context. Individuals like Edgar Snow were among the first path-finders while others were to traipse over these paths again and again, even right up to the recent charter flight romantic journalists who attended Chou-En Lai's 14 course dinners talking of Yunnan caves and greater deeds. Or, if not that, there's Basil Davidson's Black Star, a worshipful appraisal of Nhkruma's rise and fall, concluding with a picture of Nhkruma alone, unloved, isolated and misunderstood, in the Ghanaian twilight. Apropos of Black Star - if one still has any patience left - read the utter rubbish in Basil Davidson's Eye of the Storm with the black slave still carrying the white progressive journalists knapsack through the yellow green plants which twist in the inter-imperialist wind, the lunar imagery going journalistically into war, into the moral force of good sense and a host of other euphemisms for covering up the cracks in the Portuguese colonial system and the 'freedom' movements. At best a back handed respect for the poor.

In many respects these were the 'Napoleonic' accolades finding a new and unexpected lease of life under the guise of 'socialism'. It was also a 'socialism' which was in the process of development and not yet institutionalised. Therefore it might be able to escape the path, which, in Russia, had led to the undeniable stories of peasant and worker hardships and political assassinations and purges. Many liberals had already torn up their Communist party cards and with the 1956 invasion of Hungary many more were to do so. Those who remained liberals were now able to shift their new status of 'orphans' onto Third World liberation struggles.

Mao, although never criticising Stalinism, had embarked on a different policy in relationship to the peasants and instead of forcing the peasants into the towns and factories, Mao had attempted to bring the factories into the countryside. The scanty information which existed and the bland and blind enthusiasm with which pro-Maoists in the West presented this policy (cynically denying all stories of famine and the thousands of deaths which it produced after 1958) gave Mao's image amongst these liberals, a more 'humanitarian' appeal. It also seemed to avoid the costly stages of the development of European capitalism, the dark satanic mills and the town ghetto, in a kind of William Morris cum Kropotkinite pre-Raphaelite time warp, in fact a forerunner displaced onto another country – China - of their latter day ecological demands to be realized as a utopia of rational consumerism within the paradigms of capitalism.

Another difference between Russia and China in this period was that China had emerged from a civil war in which the forces of Chang Kai-shek had already killed many of Mao's would-be-rivals. The Chinese Communist party was then able to take almost absolute control and to integrate intellectuals, previous civil servants, etc. Stalin had been unable to do this in Russia and had to send out his own hatchet men to carry out this task. Mao could now 'use' his fallen comrades and rivals in death and thus increase his 'heroic' image.

In any case, for the Western liberals, there had been real achievements in China since 1949.

(1) The party had avoided enslavement to Russian and Comecon imperialism.

(2) They had increased life expectancy from 30 in 1949 to around 50-60 in the late 1960s and had alleviated the terrible and real conditions of a great section of society - the dead and starved bodies on the gutters every morning appeared to have been cleared up.

(3) A type of full rural employment was being given to the peasants where before this had not existed.

These three factors on their own were credited to Maoist organisation and the latent (or evident) technocratic nature of these Westerners was impressed. The second Five Year Plan, englobing the Great Leap Forward, appeared to embody the very heart of a technocratic plan; it was inspiring to see 900 million people being organised on a scale never before imagined. If the Western liberals heard the stories of hardships and misery that ensued, they blanked them. Many of them were able to criticise Stalin for imprisoning intellectuals but completely ignored the plight of hundreds of thousands of peasants, a stance typical of Western liberalism with its snooty superiority towards wage labour work with low ideological content.

After the splits in the fully integrated state-capitalist countries following the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Sino-Soviet rift in 1958-9 small pro-Chinoise groups began to appear. At first maintaining an open debate on what they termed "Soviet Revisionism", by 1963 this debate had given way to denunciation and attack. In France those party factions partisan to Moscow and those partisan to Peking kept up an open discussion until 1963. Certain French Communist party heavies (Bergeron for example) defended the Chinese position on "Soviet Revisionism". However, in 1963, the so-called Letter of the 25 Points appeared cutting this debate off completely. In Belgium, the first pro-Chinese Communist party was set up by Grippa while in France the pro-Chinoise revue edited by Jacques Verges, Sine, Stakloff etc. appeared. From here those tiny groups were to mushroom all across Europe and the USA and Grippa had even forwarded the idea of a "new international" based on them (the 5th International). One might as well have called for the creation of the 12th International, which is exactly what the Motherfuckers amusingly did in New York five years later though not exclusively over the corpse of Maoism.

Much of the notoriety of the Western Maoist groups came as a result of their involvement in the events following May 1968 in Europe though during that glorious year they hardly had any impact, denouncing one of the greatest events in world history, as a "petite bourgeois social democratic plot"!!!!

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The upward economic cycle following the Second World War was based on the success of Keynesian demand management and cheap raw material and lasted from 1945-1950, declining for two years only to be followed by an upward cycle again until 1955. Such a propitious situation was to create the second largest baby boom this century.

These post-war babies were to face the labour market towards the end of the downward cycle of 1960-67, when work was getting scarcer and resources for education and training schemes etc. were beginning to be phased out. Over-population is different in all periods of history and the problems of the surplus population in the mid-1960s were no exception. The effect was different on different social layers but the general strategy, which had been employed to deal with it, was similar, consisting of keeping this surplus population out of the labour market through unemployment benefits, higher education and other training schemes.

One of the layers most affected was that of university trained personnel. The university, in transition from being the exclusive training ground of managers, the repository of bourgeois science, had also taken on the unflattering secondary role of the repository of surplus labour. While it was necessary to train a new generation of managers, it was also necessary to take this group, at least temporarily, out of the labour market. This led to overcrowding and saturation within the universities and colleges of further education for which they had not been designed. These would-be managers were caught between the promise of a bourgeois future and the harsh realities of surplus labour.

Such a situation was to exacerbate the tensions within the ruling class. More than anything it was to create a massive disaffection with the liberal faction, whose leaders were all in their 50s and whose thinking had been formed in the post-war boom. Not unsurprisingly the younger liberals began to criticise these leaders, especially in the form of the smug pro-Moscow Communist parties as well as the Second International leaders. In the USA there was massive disaffection within the 'grass-roots' organizations of the Democratic party.

Maoism, as an ideology, provided a way out of this smugness. By presenting Maoism as a radical, often violent, alternative to the collaborationist reformism of their parents, the pro-Maoists touched the nerve centre of a real demand. By masquerading in a pseudo-religious cloak while maintaining a materialistic core they made the ideology appealing.

The university explosions from the1964 Berkeley sit-in in America to the wave of occupations in the late 1960s threw up leaders who used these assaults to reform the universities and were singling themselves out in the eyes of company personnel managers or already had their sights set on political or 'sensitive' professional careers. At its worst in Japan the hyped up aggressive drive of power mad militants on occasions was turned into the hard sell type executive working for Toyota.

For would be technocrats who didn't have the finesse or know-how to be successful leaders, the only alternative was radical change within the system. They could use, or attempt to use, the workers as a lever while they set off on a utopian technocratic voyage into the realm of warped and fictitious dialectics (in essence the negation of dialectics). Appearing to be radical on the one hand they were laying the foundations for their future careers on the other. The anti-fascist student leaders in Portugal and Spain were later to find 'good jobs' in the new 'democracies' set up after the collapse of these regimes. Ex Maoists were awarded with ministerial jobs in the post 1974 government in Portugal paralleling the fate of militant fellow travellers like the populist anarchists of LUAR whose boss, Palma Ignacio became Minister of Labour in Portugal in 1977.

The Maoists in the period following the Cultural Revolution were to see China through rose-tinted spectacles where the official proclamations were seen as 'gospel' truth. Far away hills are green and far away myths are only like the truth if repeated often enough. The confused way in which the Maoists in the West were to present the events in China 1967-68 made mockery of what really happened, a profound proletarian revolution, which not even the Maoist faction had been able to control. That this struggle was defeated, both by its own ignorance of history and by Maoist trickery, was never mentioned. The Maoists were to present the years 1965-68 as one ongoing movement and part of one struggle, the struggle for Maoist hegemony. They tried to hush-up the distinction between the struggles of the Chinese proletariat against the ruling class and the manner in which one faction of this class - the Maoists – were to manipulate these struggles and finally crush them by throwing the army against the workers. They claimed, in chants and slogans, the necessity of Maoist organization as the starter motor of proletarian revolution without ever letting on that this struggle had also been against Maoism. This unkind lie – a cynically structured ambiguity - which had been the cause of untold misery and so much forced labour was accepted as the truth and proclaimed all over the West. It caused thousands to take Maoism seriously, to accept their concept of the "masses" literally as though it were some magical trans-class concept. Mao's writings On Contradictions (1937) - although probably re-written by the time of the first published version for Western consumers in 1951 - reflected Mao's difficulties on controlling the factional groups and interests within the embryonic Chinese Communist party and it is an appeal to the broadest base possible. It is an appeal for an alliance, ("Things opposed to each other can complement each other") of various classes in order to overthrow the main enemy - the Japanese imperialists and comprador bourgeoisie.

This call for demagogic class collaboration had by June 1968 in France become a call for a "Popular Front" against the principle danger of the usual fascism in the stereotyped Maoist mind. "A Popular Front is not made up of progressive students even with the sincerest desire to align themselves to the working class nor of workers acting in a disorganised fashion, without a scientific Marxist Leninist plan. It is formed within the struggle at the base. But to conduct this struggle to victory it requires a solid Marxist Leninist party which conserves its own autonomy, allying and working with others." Or, (the struggle) "requires the leading role of the Party, armed with Mao thought and organised in a revolutionary party"; there are many such examples.

Maoist populism in the West was merely the importation from Third World countries of the concept of the "Popular Front" and "Anti-Imperialism" in which they already had the answers brought to fruition by a variety of carpetbagger practices. Diverse tactics were used, like packing meetings, taking decisions on direct action alone (hoping that others would follow) creating parallel organisations which would then unite with other organisations in a 'front' thus giving them more elbow room to manoeuvre the 'front'. Unconsciously or not, the cover of Les Maos en France got it right, the Andy Warhol-like reproduction of the same meets its apotheosis in Maoism.

The Maoists would stop at nothing to give themselves a better more popular image. In 1969, the Unione dei Comunisti Italiani Marxisti-Leninisti (UCI-ML) had a forced march of several hundred children of southern immigrants through the streets of Turin and brought them close to the Fiat headquarters. The children were escorted by the paramilitary corps of this organisation and the kids, all dressed in red, all waving Mao's Little Red Book, provided a spectacle of force and organisation which is not all that strange in a country like Italy; Mussolini had used the same tactics, (kids dressed in black) in the late 1920s.

This same organisation was able to produce thousands of leaflets without ever explaining where the money came from. Rumours that the UCI-ML financed its operations with funds which were taken from Northern industrialists who were promised that no wildcat strikes would be stirred up in their factories were never denied. Mafia like tactics was the other side of radical 'populism'. (See the development and decline of Student Movements in Europe: Gianni Statera, OUP, New York 1975).

The populism of the Maoists was always limited in any case. In Italy or France or in Portugal where this populism was most attempted as a means to create 'the party' it has had little success, although it has been noisy and turbulent. Aldo Brandirali, general secretary of the UCI-ML, produced thousands of posters with the heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and guess who? Yes! Aldo Brandirali. In Portugal posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Arnaldo Matos (general secretary of the MRPP - Movement for the Reorganisation of the Party of the Proletariat) have also been produced. These enfants terrible of the bourgeoisie, not having the sexiness of an Eva Peron, without the cunning of a Mao, without the heroism of a Samora Machel, who, in the end, have very little to offer other than narcissism and paranoia didn't get anywhere. Is it surprising?

In any case the substitutionism was blatant. Talking in the name of the people, writing in the name of the masses, meant that these 'people / masses' had nothing to do but to sit back and allow the Maoists to do everything for them - except maybe to come out occasionally to show that they existed. At Renault in France, the Maoists could beat up foremen whom they disliked and later put out leaflets to the effect that "the workers at Renault have taken out their justice on the lackeys of capital", and the workers would later to their surprise, be given a run down on the ins and outs of the affaire.

Maoist foxiness, Maoist folkiness

The endorsement and the belief in Chinese peasant communism and the policy of full rural employment via the rural communes were to strike a particularly sensitive nerve in the West. It was to reinforce a desire to retreat to the imagery of former modes of production, create an ecological global view of class relations in which the new society was the mirror image of what was judged to have been "the good old days". It was one in which the savage developments of modern capitalism was rejected only in favour of the romanticized misery of underdevelopment. It is one of the sources of the modern ecology movement; though it must be stressed only one as equally much came from anarchist sympathies guided considerably by Murray Bookchin's revolutionary insights on the depredations of nature inside America.

As was mentioned above one of the reactions to historical crisis is the desire to fly back to the past, to a point before the appearance of the crisis. In this way the crisis is apparently resolved, although in reality it is merely ignored. The torque of the contradiction is merely shifted backwards in time and the solutions are false ones, with their heads in the sands. Western Maoism fitted into the flight to utopia and romantic responses on the part of a tired consumerism gone completely plastic. The growth of the Hippie movement in the USA and the UK in its ideological mouthing was precisely such a romantic flight, though its real undertow - the refusal of work, petty thieving cum occasional real life game subversion (e.g. the detourning of Disneyland by a bunch of freaks in 1970) was a giant's step in the direction of the contemporary social revolution. Maoism tended to tail end this movement and by 1972 -74 the clandestine Weathermen were just about all that remained of its more 'radical' (read militaristic) section. By mixing small-scale production in China with small-scale production in the US (artisan production, boutiques, small farming of macrobiotic goods, small-scale production and distribution of illegal products like marijuana etc) it was able to establish a base and a global worldview, indeed at times an armed global viewpoint. On the whole they consisted of pauperised intellectuals fleeing from the labour market, which was hostile to them, unable to make it in the overcrowded colleges, contemptuous of the production line that threatened to close in on them. They found solace in the cultural imagery based on clean and healthy lives, which were represented in the photos taken out of China Pictorial. Their posters of smiling healthy peasants mirrored in their minds the efforts of these peasants as they heroically tilled their fields with primitive instruments, similar in many aspects with the hard lives of the early American settlers.

The difference of course was to be found in the refrigerators, which they kept, the six-pack beer cans from which they drank their beer and the supermarket down the road. Their imagery was only valid at the expense of another section of society producing these goods for them, though finally the employed proletariat has only itself to blame for the continuation of capitalism. Proletarian auto-critique - the refusal to be a proletarian - must become one of the central features of authentic revolt. The refusal of work is central to it.

In the US folksiness came out in an attempt to set up rural communes in the backwaters of Death Valley or Vermont where land was cheap or could be occupied, recreating the frontier images which they watched on the old Hollywood re-runs on TV, with the sense of the 'love of the Earth' of the early settlers intermingled with posters of heroic Vietcong soldiers and Chinese village life. A book like Life in a Chinese Village was to be found on many of the bookshelves in these rural communes and its success was partly due to this transplantation of one socio-economic reality into another. It seemed easier to accept the ideology than the economic reality of such a scene, even if it forced certain participants of this forced life-style into nervous breakdown. They could only believe that the Chinese peasants had chosen such a heroic life-style rather than see the need of the Maoists to forcibly herd millions of peasants and workers into collectivized farms. The White Panther Party (a Maoist party set up to provide backing to the Black Panther party), based on a rural commune near Ann Arbor, started off the day with a dose of self-criticism, a la the Vietcong, over their rice crispies and cornflakes. In any event their whole Maoist image was to collapse and this party was to change its name to the Rainbow Peoples party putting out a one year plan in 1972 becoming an ecological pressure group which, though better fell well short of a total critique of growing ultra capitalization beginning to really invade every aspect of our conscious and subconscious lives.

In some magical way the support of Maoist ideology was seen as a revolt against "modern technology and its ills", even though many of them were to become frustrated by the ability of 'modern technology' (especially the electronics industry) to survive them, and even by pass them, (the massive injection of capital into ecology or grants for solar energy etc.) Many of the ex-Maos in the US are today active in the anti-Nuke movement, which even now on the technological level carries in its rucksack (never mind all its other pathetic failings like belief in parliamentarism) a simplistic dismissal of all nuclear energy without considering the possibilities of harmless nuclear fusion (admittedly a big 'if') if the experiments prove successful.

At the time of their disillusionment with Maoist militantism Maoists may have agreed with the Beatles, "Carrying pictures of Chairman Mao ain't gonna get you anywhere anyhow" and probably even endorsed the Beatles conclusion that revolution was a waste of time (Let it Be) as they retired into small-time, full-time business interests. And it is doubtful if the Chinese peasant fleeing feudalism ever met up with the American hippy fleeing capitalism as they went down that same road in opposite directions.