re-mao's economic strategy

[MLuftmensch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Michael Luftmensch)]

re-mao's economic strategy

Having made their stands at Red Flag Canal, Chris and Gina seem
disinclined to move. Gina has declared for the ideal of humanity
set free from alienated labour, and Chris has laid down the Law
(of Value).

Gina writes:

>The whole point is to do away with commodity production
>altogether, and return to "natural" production for use, in the future
>communist society.

*

Chirs writes:

>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.

*

Yet when Gina writes about returning to the future,  Chris insists that
she is hitting the nail on its head.

During the Cultural Revolution, going back to the future was associated
with Yenan, the stronghold of  the Chinese communist movement in the thirties
and forties. Self reliance was the economic strategy Mao
pursued in waging a war of  national liberation in the countryside.

A man called Wei En Lin - most welcomely! - writes of the Chinese evaluation
of Mao himself:

>Mao is taken seriously, but not as a communist,
>more as a nationalist liberator.  To the average Chinese his
>historical legacy is not much different from Bolivar's in Latin
>America, or Ataturk's in the Republic of Turkey.  Students who
>are well educated in history and culture speak of communism as
>something which "used to exist."

*

I don't see how the maoist economic strategy can
be divorced from its historic and geographic roots -
midcentury national liberation and agrarian
reform in China - and turned into a timeless model which
is universally applicable.

This leads me to ask the following two questions:

1. Did maoism meet its limits when the Red Army encircled the
trading cities of the coast?

2. Does not centre/periphery polarization have some bearing on the Law
of Value?

Michael Luftmensch



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