Mao & the Dunce Caps: Real Contradictions of Real Socialism

By Mike Ely

We have been discussing the experience of socialism in the twentieth century, and focusing on matters of free speech and internal repression and their impact on the socialist road. Yesterday, we posted some revealing essays by Mao (here and here) — opposing arrest for reactionary views and execution for political opposition.

In response Jonathan Rochkind writes:

This conversation certainly makes Mao sound like a wise old man, practically libertarian in his outlook. I have to say I’m somewhat suspicious whether the actual practice in China under Mao matched the implication of this conversation though — whether or not it’s what Mao intended.

Jonathan then asks a question:

What do you guys who know more think? Was China under Mao (at one period or another?) actually the libertarian tolerant place that the Mao in this conversation described/recommended?

I think the short answer is a qualified no.

Socialist China was far more complex and contradictory than some simple extension of Mao’s views. And the 1970 interview we posted is itself evidence of how controversial Mao’s views actually were and remained — even at a time when he seemed to be at the height of power (and at a time where his pictures and quotes were everywhere in society).

It is not as if Mao was two-faced (saying one thing and doing another), but rather that it was a struggle. China was often far from following Mao’s approach — because of a very real ongoing fight over the direction of society and the very real power of opposing views. Those opposing views included classic Chinese Confucianism in governance dovetailing with inherited Stalin-era assumptions about socialist methods, plus the capitalist “modernization” views that run today’s China.

Mao was not some “great dictator” ruling a “totalitarian” society etc. as is claimed in crude anti-communist descriptions. On the contrary, Mao’s Red book was published because powerful conservative forces had effectively sidelined Mao  and buried his writings  in the late 50s and early 60s.

In 1970,  Mao remarked to Edgar Snow (in a famous comment) that he felt had influenced some places around Beijing but had, in many ways, left much of Chinese society untouched. This was the kind of poetic statement Mao made to make a point — i.e. that his life had been an uphill struggle, and that he often felt like he was just starting to stir things up. [A side point: in that Edgar Snow exchange, Mao described himself as  “I am a heshang dasan.” This was widely mis-translated, including in Life magazine, as “a lonely monk walking with a leaking umbrella” (a forlorn and despairing self-image). In fact Mao  was referring to being  “wufa wutian” — a monk without topknot or sky — i.e. someone without a handle on him the gods could grab. Mao  was in fact describing himself an unrepentent and unrestrainable rebel — as a wandering monk without law or god.]

The important point here is (i believe) that Mao’s communist line was contending. It had great influence and an impact, it forced itself onto the center stage of Chinese and world politics over and over. But, in  answer to Jonathan, I don’t think believe we should think it was hegemonic. (And here we are focusing momentarily on his views on speech and debate — but it applies also to his larger views on education, agriculture, internationalist support of revolution, wage differences, socialist planning, forms of military defense, ongoing revolution, etc.)

The excitement over Maoist China (then and now) was precisely that such deeply revolutionary views were contending. Society was never simply or mainly an embodiment of communist politics, this line was contending — from the street level to the heights of power  — in a way that is truly world-historic. (And in a way that allows us to say that this was a socialist society overall, not a capitalist one.)

In regard to the struggle over ideas, here are examples of that influence of Mao’s line:

I think it is true that the Chinese Communist Party did not hold purges like the Soviet party (and that it is wrong to describe the Cultural revolution as “a purge.”) I think it is true that the Chinese communists overall held to their 1930s decision not to use execution as a means of inner party struggle. (Unlike the defeated in the Soviet Union, neither Liu Shaochi nor Deng Xiaoping were executed after their initial defeat in the Cultural Revolution, the same with their hundreds of thousands of co-thinkers, though some did die in confinement and some were reportedly beaten in in various ways). Political differences were not mainly resolved by police behind closed doors.

It also has to be said clearly that there was class struggle — including against KMT agents, local reactionaries, and party officials on the capitalist road. There was punishment for reactionary acts. (Mao is making a distinction between speech and reactionary acts like murder, assassination and rape.)

In the land reform in China, there were quite a few deaths of landlords — many many of whom had killed peasants, raped women, starved people to death, supported the white armies etc. So it not like Mao is putting forward some “libertarian tolerant place” where lion lies down with lamb. Mao was a revolutionary, leading a revolution.

He believed, as we quoted him saying:

“The suppression of counter-revolution still requires a long period of hard work. None of us may relax our efforts.”

And he was also not saying that reactionary speech and ideas should go unopposed — but that that they should be pulled into public view (allowed in that sense) — to be engaged, and drawn out, and in order that they may ultimately be defeated (in the sense that people broadly would come to understand and reject them.) He was urging the waging the class struggle over ideas in the realm of ideas (not in the realm of police criminalization).

Grappling for a Full Picture

I was recently reading an interview with someone from the small U.S. Maoist group RCP. There is an excerpt of the exchange:

Question: “What about democracy, though?”

Raymond Lotta: “….the socialist state guaranteed the rights of the masses. In China, during the Cultural Revolution, there was democracy for the masses on an unprecedented scale. Nowhere before or since did the masses not only have formal rights of free speech and press, etc., but actually use them on such a scale to examine and debate all aspects of political life. One well-known example is the widespread use of what were called “big-character posters” in the schools, factories, and other institutions where constant debate and struggle took place by posting large wall posters on every available surface. It was forbidden to tear down a big-character poster, and every institution was required to make materials—paper, paint, and brushes—freely available. The ability of the masses to hold meetings to criticize top party leaders, the freewheeling debates large and small… all of this was democracy on a scale not even imaginable in even the “most democratic” of capitalist states. The Cultural Revolution institutionalized what were called the “four bigs”—big character posters, big debates, big contending, and big blooming (of ideas). And if you think this was just cosmetic formality, the new capitalist rulers of China who came to power in 1976 understood that this was in the service of arousing and motivating the masses; they vilified and banned these practices.”

This description expresses one aspect of things in socialist China. The things listed here are true. They happened. And they were of great importance — because of their shocking novelty within the socialist experience. There certainly was a huge almost-riotous explosion of mass debate in the Cultural revolution — wall posters, criticism of powerful people, rebel views, etc.

This reflected a victory for Mao’s approach “to expose our dark side publicly and from below.” And his belief that people could learn and rule by engaging deeply with the controversies of socialist society.

But there is a tendency among communists to take the most positive experiences and present them (by implication) as the general experience. These things were true, in many places, at the hightide of the struggle, in the years of the late 60s when the cultural revolution was in its heyday. And that is important. But this is one slice of the political experience of socialist china. Where do we mention or contrast the other aspects?

One example: In the cultural revolution, rightist party officials were widely taken to mass meetings for denunciation and public humiliation. Sometimes they were forced to wear dunce caps, or have their heads shaved, or their faces painted with a big X. In one case Liu’s wife was forced to wear a slinky cocktail dress and a huge pearl-like necklace at a rally– publicly reenacting and mocking her non-revolutionary outfit worn on a foreign trip.

Mao opposed these methods (within the cultural revolution he had unleashed), but they were widely taken up — imitating the methods of peasants in land reform of cutting landlords down to size, speaking bitterness, and demonstrating how profoundly power relations had changed. Mao argued that it was one thing for peasants to do that after the guns of civil war had just stopped and the old society needed to be uprooted, but another thing for the Communist Party itself to adopt this as a method of struggle and criticism twenty years later.

And it is an example both of the contradictory experience of the cultural revolution, the limits of Mao’s control (even then), of the ways he fought to give things direction, and the fact that (on the ground) the struggle was often very different from what Mao was advocating.

Another example: In a post here on Kasama, Nuclear Fallout in Maoist China: What Does That Reveal?“, there is a discussion about radiation-caused cancers in western china during the Mao period, where it was noted that doctors saw an emerging epidemic but were preventing from blowing the whistle. The point was not just that nuclear testing damaged people (which is one issue), but that after the fact doctors were unable to raise a public alarm, unable to break through the silencing by their superiors…. and that this too says something about the norms of public debate and speech in socialist China.

Another example: I had repeated discussions over years with a publicly-known communist (who shall remain unnamed) who claimed (to my astonishment) not to know that China had prisons or that people could end up in those prison for political offenses. (Meet the stories of Kuai Dafu or Sidney Rittenberg.) This same comrade expressed shock at learning that large numbers of people had been executed in the USSR. While these gaps reveal a personal problem with  critical thinking, they also reflect the summations that people within some communist movements have been fed — summations that sometimes highlight the most positive events (which are real) without a candid contextualizing or an honest accounting of the larger picture. And this contrasts sharply, of course, with what people generally are fed — which is the cartoonish anti-communist horror stories that equate communism with fascism.)

I think we can see, just by reading between the lines of Mao’s discussion with his student-age niece that his views here are rather shocking (even alien) to her… which suggests that his suggestions are far from the norm in China (and this was a discussion during the cultural revolution). There were clearly many instances where (as the niece’s remarks suggest) a simple reactionary remark (“Down with Mao!”) led to severe consequences.

Mao consistently held very radical views — from the beginning. He consistently fought for them. But there were many reasons (which we should explore and understand) that they were not simply a norm.

And what is the point of upholding socialist china, or of upholding Mao’s views, if that doesn’t emerged from a real assessment of what Mao was struggling against, and if we don’t acknowledge the complexity and diversity of what was going on?