Mao and Marxism

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy I

Abstract

Comparative political theory, a research agenda that aims to explore connections between different traditions of political thinking, has thus far ignored one of the most consequential acts of political-theoretic comparison in the modern world: the Chinese Communist Party’s, and particularly Mao Zedong’s, appropriation of the work of a 19th century German author as a framework for making sense of their own political situation. While scholars tend to treat Maoism as a natural stage in the history of socialist thought, following Lenin and Marx himself, it remains to be explained why Mao found this intellectual tradition to offer the best language to use for articulating his thought.
In this paper, I focus particularly on Mao’s writings from the 30s, that is, dating from the time of the alliance with the Kuomintang against the Japanese invasion and occupation of China. This is the period in which Mao’s influence as a political organizer, party leader, and military strategist grew to its peak. In these texts, he takes up the question of (literal) warfare against Japanese colonialism, (metaphorical) class warfare against Chinese capitalists, the difference between these two notions of combat, and why he understands the Red Army to be a much more effective fighting machine than the Kuomintang’s National Army.
My paper’s argument is that Mao turns to Marx’s work as a way of conceptualizing the problem of violence, agency, organization and political authority. In short, Mao contends that winning the war against Japanese imperialism requires winning the battle of democracy, that is to say, mobilizing the entire Chinese people against the invasion—and that, he argues, can only be done by giving the people a concrete vision of their economic freedom. This, in turn, points us towards an explanation of what made Mao so compelling not only within his own national context but within the global south more broadly: his attempt to theorize organization and national liberation as a specifically economic political project.

Author

• Alexander Diones, UCLA