Luftmensch on maoism

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I welcome Michael getting further into the politics of Maoism.

Two points as briefly as possible at present.

1) the mass line at its best, is in information systems theory a
policy of selective amplification. At its best it is a robust and
flexible method of linking a centralised marxist party with oppressed
people. It is interactive and dialectical in a way that
Stalin's conveyor belts were not.

Useful in waging guerilla campaigns (in the right terrain) it
became much more problematical once the party had achieved power,
and intersected with the problem of what information systems
were available to the socialist state. As far as I can see the
factions in the Chinese leadership fought out their battles in
the 60's in terms of which village was to be visited and to be
held up as the exemplum of the mass line.

They were receptive to "public opinion" expressed also in indirect ways.
The spontaneous mass mourning at the death of Zhou Enlai, who very
significantly died just before Mao, was treated by all sides in the
Chinese leadership as a signal of hostility towards Chiang Ching and Co.



2) Economics. Mao wrote on economics a reflective book which has not
been discussed on this l'st. When I referred to "maoist economics" I
meant loosely the primacy of effort. In fact their are some
similarities with the Stakhanovite movement in the SU of the 30's.

The key challenge to IMO clear and valuable proponents of the
economics of the Cultural Revolution, like Gina, is this.
Capitalist commodity production, even more dominant on a global scale
than when the Manifesto was written in 1848, is revolutionary in
repeatedly reducing the labour content of use values. It has a motor
driving continual increases in productivity.

What I called
maoist economics does not economise on labour power. It praises its
expenditure to the point of exhaustion. That is an economic policy
that cannot be sustained for more than a few years, and can be
criticised on these grounds alone, quite independently of whether
you say it was a privileged class, or stratum imposing this on
people, or whether you accept that people themselves wanted for a time
to "go all out".


Hope these comments take the argument a step forward.

Chris



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