Was Mao a Marxist? - Mao studies and the construction of Mao's political identity

Nedanstående innehåll är skapat av Mimers Brunns besökare. Kommentera arbete

“The force at the core leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party. The theoretical basis guiding our thinking is Marxism-Leninism.” (Mao Tse-Tung, 1966; 1)

So reads the first line in Mao’s “little red book” with an extract from Mao’s landmark speech at the First Session of the First National People´s Congress of the People´s Republic of China in September of 1954, and what better place to launch this exploration of Mao’s contested and dubious relationship to Marxism (Marxism-Leninism), than with Mao’s own words.

Much has been written about “Mao’s Marxism”, in particular during the vibrant academic debate of the cold war period, where western “Mao scholars” found it particularly relevant to isolate the “essence” of Mao’s political identity and explore if this “essence” could be traced to any coherent understanding of a Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Though it is commonly assumed that Mao believed himself to be a Marxist thinker (Starr, 1977a), Mao scholars have demonstrated little interest in this detail, extending their concerns much further than simply elaborating on Mao’s self-image as a Marxist. Instead, their interests have reflected a need to (re)produce and represent their own objective narrative of what constituted Mao’s and Marx’s political thought, and it is this matter which this paper aims to explore.

Drawing upon the insightful works of Nick Knight (1984) and John Bryan Starr (1986b), in examining and criticising the empiricist approaches embedded in the discipline of Mao studies, this essay will elaborate on these critiques calling into question the methodological and ontological assumptions rooted within the Mao scholars’ approaches’. By outlining how the Mao scholars have come to (re)produce and reflect normative and restraining structures within their work, this paper hopes to shed some light on how alternative theoretical approaches to this matter, can prove fruitful in the understanding of Mao’s complex and torturous relationship to Marxism.

The ‘major debates’ in Mao Studies

The academic debate of Mao’s political thought spun off in the early 60’s and had a prevalent concern with the splitting understanding of the nature of Mao’s relationship to Marxism. During the following decades, a number of diverse scholars dedicated their time and minds, to refute each other’s claims that Mao was or was not a follower of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. (Schwartz, 1960b; Wittfogel, 1960a; Schram, 1963; Meisner, 1971a,: Pfeffer, 1976; Walder, 1977)

Prevalent in the early debate was the heated exchange between Mao scholars Benjamin Schwartz (1960b) and Karl Wittfogel (1960a). At the risk of oversimplifying their arguments, Schwartz’s position held that Mao had developed a brand new “ism” (“Maoism”) fundamentally differing from Marx’s political thought, due to its heavy reliance on ‘China’s cultural and historical conditions’ (Schwartz, 1960b; 35-42). This view was strongly contested by Wittfogel, who defended that Mao’s political thought in fact reflected a deep understanding of the fundamental essence of Marxism and dispensed the “Maoists” as he named Schwartz, as having “an inadequate understanding of the doctrinal and political Marxist-Leninist background” (Wittfogel, 1960a; 14).

Following the tenor of this early debate, a new generation of Mao scholars in the late 70’s triggered a turbulent dispute by defending “Mao’s Marxism” and criticising the predominant view that Mao’s was not a Marxist, due to his weighty reliance on ‘voluntarism’ and a Chinese cultural identity. This new critical generation of scholars, pioneered by Richard Pfeffer (1976) and followed by Andrew Walder (1977), claimed that ‘the China field’, (as represented by Schwartz, Schram and Meisner), had erred by adopting a caricatured or dogmatised understanding of Marxism, misrepresenting Marx’s political thought and hence misinterpreting Mao’s relationship to Marxism altogether. By re-examining the works of Marx, and invalidating ‘the China fields’ readings as arbitrary and insufficient, Pfeffer and Walder defended a more flexible understanding of Marxism, fully compatible with Mao’s political identity. This re-interpretation was not satisfactory to the opponents in ‘the China field’ and by reasserting their position a voluminous and lingering debate came to follow, eventually fading out of prominence with little, if anything, being settled.

Knight’s criticism of the ‘major debates’

With his insightful assessment of these debates, Nick Knight in his noteworthy essay ‘The Marxism of Mao Zedong: empiricism and the discourse in the field of Mao studies’, argues that the key lacunae underpinning this discourse within Mao studies, has been the Mao scholars’ inability to “mobilise a wide range of theoretical assumptions“(Knight, 1984: 7), or more precisely, their failure to muster these assumptions explicitly and jointly.

At the heart of Knight’s argument lies a critique of the field of Mao studies that has remained surprisingly blind to it’s lacking ‘empiricist epistemology’ . The Mao scholars, according to Knight, have relentlessly pursued an empiricist epistemology through their ambitions to unveil the ‘essence’ of Mao’s relationship to Marxism, but have neglected the contesting understandings of what constitutes their topic of investigation. The key flaw therefore is ‘the failure to address decisions about Marxism itself and the problem of formulating a bench-mark of which to evaluate the orthodoxy of Mao’s Marxism’ (Knight, 1984, 7) as a result, this has lead to a fruitless discourse without hope of a resolution, since the Mao scholars are simply talking about different concepts altogether.
Discussing the problems in the relationship between the scholar and the text, Knight maintains that the Mao scholars have to consider the conflicts within the texts they are referring to (Starr, 1986; 2) - are they to look at all Mao’s writings as containing a coherent ‘supratemporal’ thought or just to analyze specific writings from specific periods? The scholars must also consider how these texts are to be read. Drawing upon the work of Althusser and Eco, Knight criticises the assumption that there is a ‘neutral realm’ in the text in which conflicting interpretations can be measured and compared (Starr, 1986; 2), calling into question the empiricist assumption that Mao’s texts contain any concealed ‘essence’. Subsequently this leads us on to Knights final point, that the scholars’ theoretical background and the contemporary intellectual currents of thought inevitably play an influential role in shaping the scholars’ work and opinions (Knight, 1984; 8). In other words, Knight argues, Mao scholars’ works can be neither apolitical nor freed from an arbitrary selection of facts


The ontology, narratives and identity

In assessing Knight’s critique of the ‘empiricist epistemologies’, dominating the discipline of Mao studies we may note that whilst insightful, the essay has failed to touch upon perhaps the most penetrating assumptions of them all, the Mao scholars’ assumptions of identity. According to common psychological wisdom, identity refers to a characteristic of the individual - we "possess," "acquire," and "have a sense of" (Gover, 1996; 1). In the discourses of Mao’s Marxism, this assumption of identity has been substantially prevalent. Through repeatedly posing the question ‘Was Mao a Marxist?’ Mao scholars have remained blind to the normative and ontological assumptions sustaining the question itself. The problem with the question’s ontology is that it presupposes an essential definability of human subjects as possessing a coherent identity and dismisses the challenging view that identity can also be perceived as inconsistent, co-constructed, and mobile.

The challenging view, called in to question here, is that identities themselves are constructed and narrative ideas, constantly changing and renegotiating themselves in relation to their context (Gover, 1996; Somers, 1994; Wendt, 1992). To exemplify the relevance of this matter, we can suppose that the field of Mao studies was to ‘solve’ all the previously stressed empiricist challenges; succeeding to mobilising a series of benchmark definitions addressing the nature of Marxism, and the ‘correct’ understanding of Mao’s and Marx’s political writings. The problem of the ontology of identity would still remain pivotal in this hypothetical scenario, since the central point of this problem lies in the fact that whilst Mao may be considered a Marxist (and even have considered himself Marxist) his identity as a Marxist would always be re-constructing itself within it’s social context and never remain uniform. In this contesting view, identity is not asocial nor can it be contained, but should rather be viewed as a continual process.

Adding to the considerations of exploring Mao’s identity as a Marxist (Marxist-Leninist) or non-Marxist (Maoist), it should be noted that competing socio-cultural factors, such as race, gender, economic conditions, power, temporal setting, sexuality, geography and physical characteristics (to name only a few), all play prominent roles in the way Mao scholars in general, Mao himself and even you the reader come to (re)produce and negotiate the conception of Mao’s political identity, arbitrarily exploring and valuing certain factors whilst ‘silencing’ and ignoring others.

The process forming the understanding of subjects’ identity is also a significant matter to be explored. Since this paper holds that identities neither are pre-social nor are exclusively rooted in material structures, but are highly constructed and negotiated through the process of symbolic discourse, it comes to be relevant to explore how the concept of narratives has functioned in the discourse of Mao studies. As explained by Margaret Somers in her essay ‘The Narrative Construction of Identity: a relational and network approach’ (1994) the understanding of narratives within social science has changed substantially in recent years and scholars have increasingly started to question the role of narratives in constructing and reflecting political structures. As Somers points out:

‘Narratives have changed over time. Whilst the old concept was a representational form, the new form of social epistemological and social ontological hold that it is through narratives that we know, understand and make sense of our social world. And it is through narratives and narrativety that we constitute our social identities…
…we come to being, regardless of who we are (however ephemeral, multiple and changing) by being located or locating ourselves (usually unconsciously) in social narratives rarely of our own making.’ (Somers, 1994; 606)

The Mao scholars’ rhetorical attempts to identify Mao’s identity, through appeals such as ‘Mao is’ (Pfeffer, 1976; 455); ‘Mao was’ (Meisner, 1972), ‘Mao was a true’ (Schwartz, 1976; 471) and so forth, only exemplify the factual, ontological proximity between Mao scholars of different ideological camps. In their common attempt to identify if Mao was (or was not) a Marxist, these Mao scholars have constructed dominating narratives of Mao’s identity, which at there core are socially constructed and hence shifting. Therefore, we can see how (Mao’s) identity as a concept, does not exist outside of the realm of social and narrative constructions, but is an inherent part of them. Mao’s identity, does therefore not exist as an unbroken concept, but is a construction of different narratives.

In conclusion we have established that the major debates within Mao studies have in vain attempted to consolidate the polarized views of Mao’s Marxism, but more importantly, that they have shared and (re)produced a restraining perception of the methodological and ontological approaches’ concerning Identity.

Although Knights criticisms of the major debates within Mao studies is perceptive, with its focus on the empiricist epistemology underpinning the discipline, his critique has failed to extend its analysis to incorporate a broader view of identity. Central to Knights critique is the Mao scholars focus on Marxism and their preoccupation with unveiling the ‘essence’ of Mao’s political thought, aspiring to derive some coherent essence from the political writings of Marx. However, in focusing primarily on the epistemological concerns regarding empiricism, Knight has much like the rest of the field of Mao studies, remained insensible to the ontological disputes concerning the concept(s) of identity.

Therefore, the focal concern with this paper has been to extend the critique of ‘the major debates’ to consider a challenging approach to identity. This approach can be summarised as viewing identity as relative and a socio-cultural process, where narratives or discourses play a weighty role in its constructions. Important with this realisation, is that the Mao scholars themselves and their perception of Mao’s Marxism, is shaped by and supporting of these narratives. The narratives of Mao’s identity need therefore to be approached with a greater theoretical and ontological awareness which in turn will produce an enhanced and multifaceted understanding of Mao’s relationship to Marxism.
If the question of Mao’s relationship to Marxism is to be explored the conventional approach with the dichotomy of Marxist (Marxist-Leninist) verses non-Marxist (Maoist), must be discarded for the employment of a method of fragmented and non-linear comprehension, appreciating the role of narratives and ontology in the formation of Mao’s relationship to Marxism



BIBLIOGRAPHY

BRESLIN, Shaun (1998) ‘Mao’, Harlow: Longman Publishing

GOVER, Mark (1996). ‘The Narrative Emergence of Identity’, Paper presented at the Fifth International Conference on Narrative. Lexington, Kentucky, Oct.

KNIGHT, Nick (1986) ‘The Marxism of Mao Zedong: Empiricism and the Discourse in the Field of Mao Studies’ The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs No.16. Jul.

MAO Tse-Tung, (1966) ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’ Peking: Foreign Languages Press

MEISNER, Maurice (1971a) ‘Leninism and Maoism: Some Populist Perspectives on Marxism-Leninism in China’ The China Quarterly, No. 45. Mar.

MEISNER, Maurice (1977b) ‘Mao and Marx in the Scholastic Tradition’ Modern China vol.3. No.4.Oct.

PFEFFER, Richard (1976) ‘Mao and Marx in the Marxist-Leninist tradition: A Critique of “The China Fiel...