The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left

219 Pages·2022·1.128 MB·English

by  David M. Jones, M. L.R. Smith

© David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Contents
Preface vi
Introduction to The Strategy of Maoism in the West 1
1 Maoism and modern western political thought: a genealogy 21
2 China’s greatest export: Maoism, orientalism and
post-colonial discourse theory 60
3 Maoism and the mind: the struggle for control over the
interior realm 94
4 The strategy of rage: Maoism and the politics of passion 118
5 Creating the land of hatred: the strategic utility of Maoist
inspired social discord 145
6 Signposts towards the Maoist end of history 171
Conclusion: 西方文化大革命 (Xīfāng wénhuà dàgémìng) –
the West’s Cultural Revolution 204
Index 208
v
Preface
Most works of sustained inquiry represent a long journey from initial concept
to materialization in print. This is especially so with this volume because it
encapsulates our reflections upon, and engagement with, the ideas of Maoism,
strategy and China over many years.
The impetus to start work on this particular project arose from an article
that we wrote for the think-tank, Cieo, in July 2020 entitled ‘The West’s
Maoist Moment’. We would like to thank Joanna Williams, the founder of
Cieo, for being receptive to our ideas and for her tireless work in promoting
a true diversity of viewpoints, and challenging the often stifling intellectual
orthodoxies, in the public and policy realms. Likewise, we are grateful for
the continued support of our friends and peers, Bruce Hoffman, Andrew Tan,
Bruce Newsome and Nicholas Khoo, who offered constructive comments on
the ideas that appear in the book. The English Speaking Union of Victoria,
Australia, provided a grant to aid writing and research for which we are very
appreciative. Grateful thanks, too, are extended to Harry Fabian, our commis-
sioning editor, and all the team at Edward Elgar Publishing, who have steered
this book to completion with great professionalism.
As always, we want to acknowledge those in our lives – Lola, Jo, Adela,
Emily, Cecily and Flora – who provided much welcome relief from the pres-
sures of writing and the stifling conformities that now afflict contemporary
academe.
Finally by way of a prefatory note, as this study draws extensively on the
writings of Mao and makes reference to other writings in Chinese, we need to
offer a brief clarification about how Chinese names and expressions are pre-
sented in the text. A number of source materials refer to Mao according to the
Wade–Giles system of romanization (for example, Mao Tse-tung) as opposed
to the Hanyu Pinyin system (Mao Zedong), which is the officially recognized
system of transliteration of Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China. Outside
Taiwan, the Hanyu Pinyin system has largely displaced Wade–Giles in most
contemporary scholarship. Therefore, unless cited directly from quotation, or
unless expressed as a formal title of a publication (for example, the Peking
Review), this book will, as far as possible, seek to standardize expression in
Hanyu Pinyin.
vi
Introduction to The Strategy of Maoism in
the West
In February 2017, the then Dean of Bristol Cathedral, the Very Reverend
David Hoyle, announced that he was ‘prepared to have a conversation’ about
removing the Cathedral’s largest stained-glass window because of its links
to the prominent seventeenth-century Bristol philanthropist, slave trader and
deputy governor of the Royal African Company, Edward Colston. After
violent demonstrations against racism in a number of British cities in June
2020 and the toppling of statues such as Colston’s, the Dean’s preparedness
seemed extraordinarily prescient.1
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations in the wake of the killing
of George Floyd by a police officer in the city of Minneapolis in the United
States (US) on 25 May 2020 supercharged, amongst other things, the campaign
against the legacy of Edward Colston. The Bristol experience is one instal-
ment in a movement originating in the US but with European connections to
remove the stigma of slavery, colonialism and racism by taking down statues,
renaming buildings on campuses and in public spaces, and ‘decolonizing’ the
secondary and tertiary curriculums.
The BLM movement, a loose, de-centralized collection of chapters and
affiliates, finds institutional racism everywhere: in the structure of schools,
universities, the media and business, and across the public and private sectors
of the capitalist system.2 In the United Kingdom, BLM supporters consider
Winston Churchill a racist,3 demand that Oriel College, Oxford demolish its
statue of the imperialist Cecil Rhodes,4 and favours the removal of the statue of
Thomas Guy from the hospital he founded in London in 1720 with profits from
investments in the South Sea Company, a company that also invested in the
slave trade.5 Across the Atlantic, BLM subjects institutions and public statues
to similar exhortations and assaults.6 The prevailing ethical orthodoxy holds,
in the words of Reverend Hoyle, that ‘opposition to slavery is dead simple.
Slavery is wicked and evil’.7
In one sense such sentiments are correct. The remnants of slavery and colo-
nialism are ubiquitous. Slavery has been systemically embedded in the deep
structure of world history, etched into the human experience since the dawn of
civilization.8 For that very reason, however, slavery has not always appeared
‘wicked and evil’. From Babylon, Egypt and Rome, to the Conquistadores
1
2 The strategy of Maoism in the West
in South America, the Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia and eighteenth and
nineteenth-century North America, slavery was the basis of economic devel-
opment and political order.9 Slave labour is still prevalent today. In China,
laogai (labour reform prison camps) enable Chinese state linked companies to
undercut the prices of their competitors, a facet of modernity that the designer
clothes wearing, mobile phone carrying BLM protestors often conveniently
overlook.10 As some historians still appreciate, conquest, slavery and oppres-
sion mark the troubled origins of most empires in the non-western as well as
the western world.11
This notwithstanding, the passionate fervour that informs contemporary
anti-racist rhetoric, and that of environmental groups such as Extinction
Rebellion, and the LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer,
intersex and other) movements that share its goals and feed off its righteous
indignation, constitutes a calculated iconoclastic assault on the West’s history
and culture. Iconoclasm was a religious impulse that has entrenched histor-
ical roots. At least since the Book of Exodus, monotheist faiths consistently
rejected and destroyed heretical images.12 Indeed, it was the iconoclasm that
drove the seventeenth-century English Puritan movement that occasioned
Edward Colston’s donation of the stained-glass window to Bristol Cathedral.13
The opportunity arose precisely because the millenarian enthusiasts of the
English Civil War (1642‒49) had smashed the original medieval window.
In its later twentieth-century European manifestations, iconoclasm assumed
an ideological and racist idiom, as well as a religious one. The Nazi conquest
of Poland required the systematic destruction of historic sites associated with
a racially inferior Jewish and Slavic culture.14 In the twenty-first century, it
played a seminal role in Islamic State’s explicit policy outlined in its operating
manual The Management of Savagery (2004) (by Abu Bakr Naji) in Syria and
Iraq. In its pursuit of an Islamist utopia, Islamic State rejected any idolatrous
(shirk) reverence for the past, particularly relics of the pre-Islamic era of
jahiliyya (state of ignorance).15 Islamic State revealed what this entailed after
it captured the ancient Roman city of Palmyra, in March 2015. The fact that the
city featured on a list of United Nations approved World Heritage sites served
as the incentive to destroy the artefacts of the pre-Islamic, Greco-Roman
inspired, Palmyrene era.16
The international community denounced Islamic State’s cultural destruction
as barbaric, even though Palmyra was a city, like almost all others of the
period, built by slave labour.17 Islamic State’s addiction to violence is perhaps
more intense than the BLM movement’s, but the strategy of destroying the past
to build a purified tomorrow differs only in its ultimate utopian goal. Editing
the past to meet the standards upheld either by Islamic State or the Third
Reich represents an ideological attempt to kill history, and the motivation of
Introduction 3
BLM and its affiliates in movements for transgender reform and Extinction
Rebellion are really no different.
MAOISM AND CULTURAL WARFARE
The motive to wage war on the past, and to destroy the images and icons of the
present in order to create tomorrow’s new society, does not arise in a vacuum.
Like all historical developments the motive is a product of contingent social
forces. Specifically, the motive towards cultural desecration and the felt need
to destroy an inconvenient past is the result of pre-existing ideological yearn-
ings. An ideology is a system of ideas that often informs the basis of both
theory and policy that aims to move society towards a particular goal or end-
point. It is the neglected ideological wellsprings that have inspired the growth
of cultural warfare in the West that forms the central theme of this book.
The philosophical creed in question is one that originates on the political left
of the ideological spectrum, and primarily within the tradition of the radical
left. In this volume, the term ‘radical left’ refers to a broad movement that is
dedicated to advancing policies of social egalitarianism, but has no interest
in the preservation of, and ultimately no commitment to working within, the
structures of existing political society. Unlike the constitutional or social dem-
ocrat left, the radical left does not accept the integrity and legitimacy of the
current capitalist democratic order. It is prepared to engage with the structures
of that order only for the purposes of probing its weaknesses and exploiting its
fault lines with a view to ultimately displacing it in its entirety.
Political thinking on the radical left has, of course, a long lineage extending
from the French Estates General of 1789 where nobility sat on the King’s right
and the third estate on his left, through the development of Marxist theory in
the nineteenth century to the emergence of the New Left, which rose to prom-
inence in the 1960s.18 The preoccupation with challenging and overturning the
capitalist order has engendered an acute interest in matters of strategy: namely,
how to use the means at one’s disposal to achieve stated goals. How to advance
towards the new social order has seen radical left theorists devote meticulous
attention to the analysis of existing social structures and the appropriate
methods to bring about the conditions for revolution. Vladimir Lenin’s tract
What is To Be Done? is perhaps the classic exemplar of communist strategic
thinking in this regard.19 The granular approach that theorists of the left fre-
quently devote to matters of strategic analysis often accounts for the recondite
nature of communist writings on the subject.
Thus, returning to central question at hand, the ideological origins of, and
rationale for, the current penchant for image-breaking arising from BLM
inspired protests within western societies reflects the neglected impact of
Maoism – or ‘global Maoism’20 – on western New Left thinking from the late
4 The strategy of Maoism in the West
1960s.21 Commentators have sometimes referenced the similarities between
the statue protests in the West and the period of the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution in China.22 Few, however, have considered the direct and indirect
intellectual and cultural connections between Mao Zedong’s revolutionary
thinking and radical contemporary movements in both Europe and North
America.
The neglected genealogy of the Cultural Revolution that propels the radical
social justice movement, fuels the eagerness of state funded universities to
‘decolonize’ the curriculum, and animates transnational non-governmental
organizations to promote de-industrialization to save the planet, needs recall-
ing. Culture war was, after all, one of the People’s Republic’s earliest exports
to the West. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has, for years,
explicitly viewed it as its ‘magic weapon’.23 Why, then, this book asks, did
a twentieth-century Chinese revolutionary ideology become so adaptable and
spectacularly successful in the West?
The key text that influenced the conduct of the putative Islamic State, The
Management of Savagery, acknowledged the importance of Maoism – in
a suitably Islamist guise – to its version of permanent revolution. The Islamist
version of Maoism speaks of the necessity for ‘cultural annihilation’ rather
than cultural transformation.24 Mao’s advice on cultural warfare also very
much informed the precursors of the Black Lives Matter movement, namely,
the student counter-cultural revolutionaries of 1968 who followed Mao’s Little
Red Book (1964) in their denunciation of the ‘sugar coated bullets’ of the
bourgeoisie and the paper tiger of US imperialism.25
In the aftermath of the catastrophic failure of Mao’s programme of forced
industrialization, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ between 1958 and 1962,26 Mao
sought to silence criticism of his capricious leadership of the CCP through the
institution of a ‘great proletarian cultural revolution’ (wen hua da geming).
Launched in the spring of 1966 to revitalize the revolutionary spirit and refash-
ion the state structure, the Cultural Revolution required a profound renovation
of society that would touch the ‘people to their very souls’.27 In the course of
the new revolutionary struggle the masses would spiritually transform them-
selves and recast their social world.
Like its 1960s western counter-cultural imitators, and its more recent evoca-
tion in the BLM movement, it was university and middle school students who
first responded to the Maoist call to rebel against established authority. The
chaos that subsequently engulfed China began at Beijing University in May
1966 when a junior philosophy lecturer, Nie Yuanzi, displayed a big charac-
ter poster on campus declaring ‘Ignite the Cultural Revolution!’ The poster
asserted its ‘boundless love for the Party and Chairman Mao’ and expressed
‘inveterate hatred for the sinister anti-Party anti-socialist gang’. It denounced
Introduction 5
the university for its ‘indifference and deadness’ and called for: ‘All revolu-
tionary intellectuals, now is the time to go into battle’.28
Encouraged by a June 1966 party decree postponing university entrance
exams, student activists mounted political and physical attacks on their ‘reac-
tionary’ teachers and the courses they taught. Rallying under slogans such as
‘It is justified to rebel’29 and ‘Destruction before construction’, these young
activists marched through cities and towns across the country following the
Maoist injunction to destroy ‘ghosts and monsters’.30 Maoist inspired student
‘Red Guards’ targeted the ‘Four Olds’ – old ideas, old culture, old customs and
old habits – that corrupted and undermined the revolutionary project.31
During the summer and autumn of 1966, millions of Red Guards armed with
mass produced copies of the Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong (also known
as the Little Red Book), campaigned to destroy all symbols of the feudal past
and bourgeois influences in the present.32 Museums and homes were ransacked
and old books, records, monuments and works of art destroyed. The students
trashed everything from ancient Confucian texts to modern recordings of
Beethoven. They gave new revolutionary names to street signs and buildings.
The revolution quickly moved from destroying culture to destroying people.
The Red Guards arrested and paraded ‘bad elements’ or those with ‘black’
class backgrounds through the streets.33 Forced to wear dunces caps, these ‘cow
demons’34 were often physically as well as psychologically abused at ferocious
‘struggle sessions’ before they confessed their thought crimes at public rallies.
Red Guards turned on anyone who had received a western education and on
any intellectual who could be charged with ‘feudal’ or ‘reactionary’ thought.
Academics and teachers bore the brunt of the violence. The lucky ones got
away with self-criticism and a humiliating process of self-rectification. Those
less fortunate, such as the Chinese playwright, Lao She, died at the hands of
the mob, after their houses were pillaged and their books burned.35
In The Search for Modern China, Jonathan Spence wrote that entrenched
within this frenzied activism was a political agenda of ‘purist egalitarianism’.36
It involved much more than the confiscation of private property. It required the
total transformation of the self to achieve mass revolutionary consciousness.
The resulting anarchy was only resolved, ultimately, with the death of Mao and
his replacement by the more pragmatic Deng Xiaoping.
KILLING HISTORY: MAO AND CULTURAL
REVOLUTION IN THE WEST
Given its disastrous impact on China’s economic and political development
between 1949 and 1976, Maoism might have gone the way of other Third
World ideologies: Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s Third Way, the Non-Aligned
Movement, South American dependencia or pan-Arabism. Indeed, Frank
6 The strategy of Maoism in the West
Dikötter’s seminal study of the Cultural Revolution assumed that the sub-
sequent reaction to the experiment had ‘buried Maoism’.37 Far from it. Out
of a curious historical conjunction, where chance acts upon choice, Mao’s
version of socialism with Chinese characteristics and its commitment to
cultural revolution fortuitously coincided with the mixture of affluence, nar-
cissism, boredom and fascination with the East that inspired the West’s student
revolutionary movement of the late 1960s.
Protesting against America’s imperialist war in Vietnam, Mao’s Cultural
Revolution appealed to the increasingly radical student movements that swept
western university campuses in 1968. Mimicking their Chinese contempo-
raries, European students similarly denounced their ‘reactionary’ lecturers,
organized campus sit-ins to raise consciousness, and banned speakers they
found bourgeois, capitalist or otherwise offensive. Mao’s Little Red Book and
a poster of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara became essential radical accoutrements.38
Maoism proved initially attractive because it offered revolution à la mode.
Dressed in fashionable Mao jackets, students found in the simplistic aphorisms
of Mao’s sīxiǎng (thought reform) a taste and style that fascinated their jaded
palates, otherwise bored by the abstruse dialectics of European Marxists such
as György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas and Louis Althusser.39
Some took their Maoism beyond a fashion statement. Mao’s thinking on
guerrilla warfare informed the violent tactics of the Red Brigades and La
Lotta Continua in Italy, the Baader Meinhof gang in West Germany, and the
Angry Brigade in Britain.40 Meanwhile, in the US, the Black Panther Party
called for radicals to ‘off the pig’ (kill the police) and for solidarity against
‘the [white] man’.41 They received encouragement from a new generation of
Mao-inspired academic enthusiasts such as Angela Davis, protégé of Frankfurt
School theorist Herbert Marcuse, whose copy of One Dimensional Man, the
other ‘little read book’ of the age, could also be found on any self-respecting
radical student’s bookshelf.42 One of the Panthers’ early leaders, Eldridge
Cleaver, considered Mao ‘the baddest ass motherfucker on the planet’.43 The
Afro hairstyle, the clenched fist salute and the cult of violence that Panthers
such as Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown and Bobby Seale embraced also made
them radically chic adornments at celebrity Upper West Side parties, held by
the likes of Leonard Bernstein in Tom Wolfe’s memorable 1970 satire ‘That
party at Lenny’s’.44
However, unlike the current radical protest movement that aimed to
overthrow capitalism, its repressive institutions and systemic racism, the
counter-culture protests of the 1960s had a limited impact on the conduct of
the West’s domestic politics. Democratic governments in the US and Europe,
whether of a conservative or social democrat hue, considered urban guerrillas
with their penchant for revolutionary violence from Rome to Oakland a crimi-
Introduction 7
nal threat and a challenge to political stability. Members of the Black Panthers,
Red Brigades and Red Army Faction ended up in gaol or dead.
Yet the memory lingered on, especially in the universities. Mao’s cultural,
as opposed to an economic and structuralist, approach to revolution coincided
with the anti-capitalist endeavours of Frankfurt School critical theorists. It also
fuelled a generation of French thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault,
Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard who treated all knowledge as power and
found in Maoism the means to deconstruct prevailing power relations and
allow the otherwise silenced ‘subaltern’ voice to speak.45
The various strands of European Maoism, especially the more intellectually
robust French variety, proved particularly eye-catching not only on European
campuses but also in the US. The French Maoist groups with their links to
Jean-Paul Sartre, Foucault and the Tel Quel group played a central role in trans-
forming Maoism into a core ingredient in an evolving late twentieth-century
critical theory.46 Privileging culture and the politics of everyday life over
economics, Maoism, together with the Frankfurt School of Marxism, framed
a deconstructive assault on the West.
Maoism also influenced Edward Said, who encountered its fading French
revolutionary embers in Paris in 1978. It inspired his subsequent deconstruc-
tion of the European view of the Asian ‘other’ and facilitated his unmasking of
the western practice of orientalism.47 Following Said, post-colonial discourse
theory facilitated the deconstruction of the university humanities and social
science curricula and opened the door to their prospective decolonization.
Maoism, of course, also had an international impact within and beyond
Europe on the evolution of urban and rural guerrilla warfare strategies, espe-
cially in what Mao viewed as the non-aligned world.48 Che Guevara, as well
as a variety of African, Southeast Asian and South American revolutionaries,
went to China in the 1950s and 1960s. Shining Path, the Black Panthers,
the Baader Meinhof gang, and more recently Islamic State, all drew upon
Maoist understandings in their conduct of guerrilla insurgency, believing that
clarifying acts of violence were central to the management of their long war
strategies.
During the Cold War a number of studies traced the transmission of revolu-
tionary Maoist technique to a global audience.49 However, they rarely account
for the reasons why it proved attractive and enduring in a specifically West
European and North American intellectual context. This book, by contrast,
explores the channels of ideological influence by which the Maoist ‘long
march through the institutions’ (the phrase coined by radical student leader
Rudi Dutschke) spread through the West’s cultural apparatus, and manifests
itself today in critical race theory, cancel culture, iconoclasm and curriculum
decolonization.