Thread: Maoism
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Old 04-30-2012, 02:31 PM   #53
Alan
 
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I apologize for taking this long to respond, I don't know why I didn't do so sooner.
You can see that the intentions of the movement were very beautiful and idealistic:

"Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend."

First of all, my main contention with this would be a philosophical one. The biggest break between Maoism and European Marxism has to do with the concept of contradiction. In the West, Marxism is very Hegelian, so a contradiction naturally arises from any point of affirmation, and it will have to deal with this contradiction to overcome it, or rather sublate it. In Maoism, being influenced by Taoism, the contradiction also naturally arises from the affirmation, but there is no synthesis, there is no sublation, only further division, the famous 'one becomes two' over and over again.

So to Maoists, the hundred flowers blooming are a hundred different communisms, because once communism wins over the people, it can only divide itself even further.

So I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I definitely like the idea and it resonates a bit with Deleuzean rhizomatics - although Badiou, having been a Maoist, definitely would say that Deleuze still doesn't champion the 'many' as he claimed he did.


From a political perspective, though, we can see a huge problem emerging, but even by reading the wikipedia entry we understand it so I don't need to say much about it:
What if it was just a ploy? What if it was just a plan to make dissenters feel confident that they could criticize the state so that the state could find them and then repress them? Isn't that sort of what happened? And by 'sort of' I mean 'EXACTLY' what happened?

Well, the answer that I give to that might feel like handwaving the issue, but with what I explained in the audio I believe it makes sense. The answer is that whether this was planned all along as a means to consolidate power, or it was a genuine and honest idea, that does not matter. What matters is that the people themselves saw it as a new stage of greater freedom of speech and higher level of criticism and discussion, and that's what they were determined to get.
Sadly it didn't happen, in the same way the anarchist communes in Spain also didn't last against Franco's fascist military machine. But for a little over a month, people made sure to lay the foundations of a new society with genuine freedom of speech, assembly, and information. The defeat wasn't because of an internal problem that made the movement unsustainable, or an inconsistency in the structures set in place. The defeat was an external issue, the power of the Communist Party, even as led by Mao, and it was the Communist Party and not the people who decided to backpedal from the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Because the Communist Party had already consolidated their military power, in direct contrast to the early Mao who preached that the People's War meant that the military cannot be distinct from the masses themselves, it was easy to crush such a movement.

So we see that the failure of this movement is the same failure of pretty much every other revolutionary event: the creative affirmation of the multitude gets crushed by the conservative might of the State.

The lesson here, then, is not that Maoism, as exemplified by the Hundred Flowers Movement, failed because it was too extremist. It failed because it didn't go far enough.
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