Few people in history have been as influential as Karl Marx. His ideas would shape a century, but the man himself would not live to see it, because it was only a few decades after his death that movements and parties that were explicitly Marxist in their beliefs were beginning to properly dominate left-wing politics across Europe. Soon, revolution would follow, and with it, millions of deaths.
Marx had originally conceived of the proletarian revolution as the inevitable consequence of the disequilibrium of capitalism, but half a century after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, communist intellectuals and would-be revolutionaries were growing frustrated with waiting – and none more so than the Russian Bolsheviks and their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924), who the world would come to know as Lenin. Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was still a largely agrarian society and very far from satisfying the industrialised “late-capitalism” conditions for revolution as set out by Marx, so the Bolsheviks bestowed upon themselves the role of “vanguard” of the Russian revolutionary proletariat. The doctrine which is known as Leninism prescribes how the revolution was to be led by a small, educated elite who could force industrialisation on Russia and rule until the proletariat had matured into a collective capable of taking over.
The Soviet Union immediately developed into an authoritarian state, a necessary circumstance given the lack of revolutionary disposition among ordinary Russians who had to be forced onto the road to Utopia, but one which Lenin and his successor Josef Stalin (1878-1953) also justified as required to build and defend “socialism in one country,” as necessitated by the failure of world revolution to materialise in the way it had been predicted by Marx.
But of course, in the years to come many other countries did fall to communist revolution, and most important among these was China. China itself had seen significant change in the early part of the 20th century, when the weak Qing Dynasty, who had ruled for two and a half centuries, was overthrown and the Republic of China was born in 1912. Over the next decades, the ruling Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, who had initially been allies, enjoyed increasingly fraught relations and eventually fell into a civil war. The Nationalists were a brutal enemy and in 1934 the Communists were forced into a retreat from their base in the central Kiangsi province to take refuge in northern China. The 5,000 mile, 12-month journey would become known as “The Long March” and, despite the hardship and battles along the way, which resulted in the deaths of as many as 70,000 out of the 100,000 communists who fled, its legend created a platform for the charismatic communist leader, Mao Zedong (1893-1976) to increase his influence. With the advent of WW2, the Communists and the Nationalists briefly joined forced to fight the Japanese, but when the war ended, their conflict resumed. Now a recognised political party which had enforced its power bases during the fight against the Japanese, in 1949, the Communists won, the Nationalist leaders fled to what became Taiwan, and Mao took power in the People’s Republic of China.
Mao immediately stated a comprehensive programme of reform, modelled on the Soviet Union and aimed at industrialising China’s weak, largely agrarian economy, and he enjoyed some early success with significant improvements in literacy and healthcare, accompanied by brutal repression of his political enemies. In 1958, the 2nd Five-Year Plan, known as The Great Leap Forward, introduced a new programme to organise agriculture into communes worked collectively by farmers and overseen by local officials. The aim was to increase agricultural production to feed industrial workers and the cities, but fraught by bad decisions and poor working conditions, lacking in incentives for hard work, and understaffed from the assignment of rural workers to China’s nascent industry, primarily a hugely ambitious steel production programme, the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe. In 1959, crops failed, but just like Stalin had done when his collectivisation programme ended in the Holodomor famine, Mao continued to move grains to the cities and maintained his agricultural export programme, rather than admit to the failure of his plan. His stubborn commitment to The Great Leap forward, upon which much of his political power hinged, would all but destroy agricultural production in China for three years, and when it was finally abandoned in 1962, as many as 45 million people had starved to death in what is the worst famine in human history.
In the aftermath of the famine, private farming saw a resurgence and Mao’s power was temporarily weakened, but by 1966 he was back, and to reinforce his power he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1964 Mao had written his Little Red Book, officially titled Quotations from Mao Zedong, a pocket-sized book with a red cover, designed for every Chinese to always carry with them to inspire and guide through the wisdom of Chairman Mao, who had increasingly become a deity-like figure in China. Mao now mobilised a mass movement, known as the Red Guard and consisting primarily of young people whose lives had been shaped under communist rule, to seek out and eliminate those who were suspected of opposing him. Mao was convinced that it was not enough to collectivise the economy, but that bourgeois thought and culture were still widespread and would have to be eradicated for a new communist society to be successful.
The Red Guard was tasked with the destruction of traditional Chinese society (the “four olds”: ideas, habits, customs, and culture – basically, Chinese civilisation pre the 1960s), and most of China’s cultural artefacts – books, art, architecture – was lost forever and largely replaced by the personality cult around Mao. Over 10,000 people were killed in Red August in 1966 and the terror continued, indoctrinating children to turn on their parents and targeting authority figures like teachers, who were subjected to public humiliation and torture in violent “struggle sessions,” and killed in their thousands. When the Red Guards eventually ran out of victims, they turned on each other and civil war-like strife between various factions broke out, lasting until the military finally put a stop to it in 1968. This marked the end of the worst of the Culture Revolution, but it would continue to be pursued until Mao’s death in 1976 and is estimated to have cost the lives of more than 1.5 million people and maimed and crippled millions more.
After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), a former high-ranking official whose (relatively) right-wing views had led to him being purged during the cultural revolution, successfully positioned himself as the next Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and when in power, initiated a series of reforms which broke with Mao’s dogmatism and would eventually open China up for foreign investment and turn the economy towards free markets.
But even though Mao’s ideas were largely abandoned in China after his death, they were highly influential on many other communist revolutionaries. Mao’s main philosophical contribution was a development of the material dialectic through his theory of contradictions. A dialectical view of history has been central to progressive thought, from G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical framework which conceives of progress as an inevitable journey from darkness to enlightenment which is driven by the resolution to contradicting ideas, to Karl Marx’s adaption of it to put the contrast in material conditions of the classes at the centre of the dialectic process. (Read more about the dialectic and its role in progressive thought here.)
According to Mao, under capitalism, the principal contradiction (that is, the contradiction “whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions”) is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Mao defined this conflict as an antagonistic contradiction, by which he meant that it could not be resolved by peaceful means, as opposed, for example, to the contradiction between the proletariat and the peasantry, which is non-antagonistic and was to be resolved through collectivisation and mechanisation (it is interesting to note that within leftist movements supposedly non-antagonistic contradictions have repeatedly been at the root of fierce infighting, often ending in violence, and, indeed, the history of communists’ conflict with peasantry is soaked in blood).The bourgeoisie is the dominant aspect of the principal capitalist contradiction, but the revolution shifts the power, makes the proletariat the dominant force, and ushers in socialism – but this doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie has been eradicated or doesn’t still poses a threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The revolution is a continuing process, and the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s answer to the problem that even after the CCP had taken power, many bourgeoise elements remained in Chinese society.
The revolutionary left rejects the idea that the antagonistic contradictions in capitalist society can be resolved through democratic elections, a sentiment that is especially prevalent in third world revolutionary circles, where the struggle against what is seen as bourgeoisie imperialism is assumed to be winnable only through violent uprising. Mao adapted Leninism to fit an agrarian society, putting emphasis on the peasantry as the revolutionary base and it is this, as well as his approach to contradictions and their resolution, which is central to the ideological framework for these communist guerrilla groups who operate in largely agrarian societies and identify as Leninist/Maoist, rather than as orthodox Marxists. It is often associated with the leader of the Peruvian guerrilla group The Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán (1934-2021), also known by his nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo, who held it to be a “third and higher stage of Marxism” and was highly inspired by Mao’s views on imperialism as a key element of the bourgeoisie system.
Today, as far as the developed world goes, Maoism can be considered a fairly exotic and largely uninfluential variety of hard left ideology; and in China, though he is still revered as an important historical figure, politics has long since moved on from his doctrine. But across the developing world, even four decades after his death, Mao still enjoys a significant following. His gruesome legacy shaped China and it is very possible that somewhere, most likely in Africa or South America, there will come a time when his ideas will again win real influence and bring about more of the type of human suffering that has accompanied communism every time it has been tried.