A positive view of Mao's legacy?

[presidentjlh]

I have a very good friend who grew up in China in the 60s and early 70s. I had read Warren Carrol’s “Rise and Fall of the Cummunist Revolution” and thought it was very good. I gave it to my friend, a non-catholic BTW, to read and tell me what he thought. He thought it was the best book on describing communism he had read since coming to America in 1982.
To say the least, Warren Caroll does not think highly of Mao.
As bad as we think communism was, it was worse. So many people think of it as simply an economic system “that didn’t work”. That is revisionist history by the left and intelligensia to sooth their consciences of decades and decades of supporting such a terrible scourge on humanity.

Indeed. Ronald Reagan was right to have called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”

Communism is the perfect theory on paper, but in reality, it is by far the worst practice.

 

[Shin]

Capitalism is simply the natural way of people owning and choosing how to buy and sell what they own without force. Each individual makes decisions and bears the responsibility for those decisions, and freely decides how best to make use of what he has.

It is not a system at all in the end, it is the natural way of doing things. Every child understands it. One person owns one thing, another owns another and they decide between each other how to exchange it without interference by busybodies.

This results in lack of waste and invention, entrepreneurship, innovation… people owning their own businesses and taking responsibility for what they truly have responsibility for rather than relying on a mafia of so-called government officials.

Captalism is ultimately simply natural freedom. And so naturally it does well.

Communism and Socialism are imposed systems, artificial creations, based fundamentally and simply on some people with guns telling you to give them all you own, so they can decide what’s best supposedly according to made up rubrics, supposedly to distribute it to ‘the people’. A convenient excuse that does not justify theft, and is an unnatural construction placed over human society. It gives the people in charge of distribution the power, and corrupt people gravitate to it who do not work – and they create class warfare to perpetuate it – in other words an unnatural hate and envy between people with more material goods and those with less.

It is in other words, based in the sin of envy and perpetuated by it and other sins, such as laziness, self-righteousness and pride where people think they know better than others how to use material goods, and so forth.

It is no wonder that it never works and always causes waste, corruption, devaluation of human rights and destruction of the work ethic.

Its errors are what Our Lady of Fatima warned about coming out of Russia and perverting human society.

 

[Black_Rose]

Capitalism is simply the natural way of people owning and choosing how to buy and sell what they own without force. Each individual makes decisions and bears the responsibility for those decisions, and freely decides how best to make use of what he has.

It is not a system at all in the end, it is the natural way of doing things. Every child understands it. One person owns one thing, another owns another and they decide between each other how to exchange it without interference by busybodies.

This results in lack of waste and invention, entrepreneurship, innovation… people owning their own businesses and taking responsibility for what they truly have responsibility for rather than relying on a mafia of so-called government officials.

Captalism is ultimately simply natural freedom. And so naturally it does well.

Communism and Socialism are imposed systems, artificial creations, based fundamentally and simply on some people with guns telling you to give them all you own, so they can decide what’s best supposedly according to made up rubrics, supposedly to distribute it to ‘the people’. A convenient excuse that does not justify theft, and is an unnatural construction placed over human society. It gives the people in charge of distribution the power, and corrupt people gravitate to it who do not work – and they create class warfare to perpetuate it – in other words an unnatural hate and envy between people with more material goods and those with less.

It is in other words, based in the sin of envy and perpetuated by it and other sins, such as laziness, self-righteousness and pride where people think they know better than others how to use material goods, and so forth.

It is no wonder that it never works and always causes waste, corruption, devaluation of human rights and destruction of the work ethic.

Its errors are what Our Lady of Fatima warned about coming out of Russia and perverting human society.

No, capitalism is not the natural state of affairs for all of humanity, nor is pure communism. To the contrary, capitalism was spread throughout the world via military force. For instance, the Cold War was fought to stop the spread of communism and facilitate its demise. Secondly, trade and western military supremacy forced the Asians to modernize and enter world trade.

(Too lazy to recite historical facts and construct an elegant thesis, much like a Henry CK Liu article.)

 

[Black_Rose]

Chinese history provides examples contrary to your assertion that capitalism is universal, unless you want to use a very broad definition where the ability to own any personal property (such as a car) is considered “capitalism”.

Again, I do not have the time to fact-check numerous interesting and relevant concrete facts, construct a complex thesis, elegantly write it, and proofread it. I suppose the next best option is to copy and paste from one who has already done that in the interest of expediency.

Feudalism in China has concurrent aspects of what modern political science would label as fascist, socialist and democratic. As a socio-political system, feudalism is inherently authoritarian and totalitarian. However, since feudal cultural ideals have always been meticulously nurtured by Confucianism to be congruent with the political regime, social control, while pervasive, is seldom consciously felt as oppressive by the contented public. Or more accurately, social oppression, both vertical, such as sovereign to subject, and horizontal, such as gender prejudice, is considered civilized self-restraint and natural for lack of a socially acceptable alternative vision. Concepts such as equality, individuality, privacy, personal freedom and democracy, are deemed antisocial, and only longed for by the mentally deranged, such as radical Taoists.

This would be true in large measure up to modern times when radical Taoists would be replaced by other radical political and cultural dissidents. A distinction needs to be made between genuine indigenous dissent and dissent from those merely playing opportunistically for foreign imperialist favor. Dissidents who hide under foreign imperialist patronage and protection, conveniently enjoying bogus martyr status without the inconvenience of martyrs’ fates, will pay for such free rides with loss of credibility. Economic self-interest, the foundation of market fundamentalism, is viewed in Chinese culture as a character flaw. Until modern times, merchants were ranked in social status below prostitutes in feudal society.

The imperial system in China took the form of a centralized federalism of autonomous local lords in which the authority of the sovereign was symbiotically bound to, but clearly separated from, the authority of the local lords. Unless the local lords abused their local authority, the emperor’s authority over them, while all inclusive in theory, would not extend beyond national matters in practice, particularly if the sovereign’s rule was to remain moral within its ritual bounds. This tradition continues to the modern time. This condition is easily understood by Americans, whose federal government is relatively progressive on certain issues of national standards with regard to community standards in backward sections of the union.

Confucianism (Ru Jia), through the code of rites (li), seeks to govern the behavior and obligation of each person, each social class and each socio-political unit in society through self-constraint. Its purpose is to facilitate the smooth functioning and the perpetuation of the feudal system. Therefore, the power of the sovereign, though politically absolute, is not free from the constraints of behavior deemed proper by Confucian values for a moral sovereign, just as the authority of the local lords is similarly constrained.

henryckliu.com/page115.html

Traditional Chinese culture considers merchants who buy and sell for profit,
bankers who lend other people’s money as a livelihood and speculators who profit
from the needs of others in adversity, little better than social parasites.
With its elite class in continuous decline for much of the past two centuries,
Chinese culture naturally would suffer eclipse in modern time from which it
would yet recover.
In modern time, rare traces of traditional ideals would be found only in remote
Chinese villages, untouched by the destructive influence of Western imperialism,
where pride of workmanship would still show in peasant handicraft, and the quest
for social harmony had not been compromised by disjointed individual
initiatives.

In these village societies, it would remain inconceivable that the betterment of
the individual could be achieved independent of the betterment of the whole
village, let alone at the expense of it. What would be bad for the village as a
whole could not possibly be good for the individual villager.
The revival of this focused pursuit of symbiotic union of personal fulfillment
and collective ideal would be considered by many serious thinkers as a
fundamental prerequisite for the renaissance of Chinese culture in modern time,
as it is prevalent in Tang time.

Many historians would credit this social cohesion of Tang culture, in a society
of spiritual piety, ordered hierarchy, ethnic diversity, cultural assimilation,
political cohesion, if not continuous stability, and social mobility, to the
effectiveness of Confucian emphasis on self-restraint and the calming effect of
Buddhist acceptance of fate. They would cherish the Confucian notion of natural
hierarchy, balanced with the Buddhist view of all things being fundamentally
equal in essence, that have permitted the pursuit of perfection to flourish at
all social levels rather than being concentrated at the top.

lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2001-November/035090.html

 

[Darkbloom]

Liu attempts to exculpate Mao from incompetence and malice by attributing the suffering from the Great Leap Forward to exogenous factors such as the inclement weather and economic sanctions.

Actively working against evil, which the embargo against Mao did, can not rightly be construed as culpability for the harm of that evil. That burden is born by the perpetrator of that evil.

 

[Darkbloom]

I find the uni-dimensional caricature of a cold-blooded power-hungry tyrannical dictator too simplistic.

The simplest answer to the problem 2 + 2 is 4. It is also true.

Some people are caricatured, and some people are so dominated by on trait that to not portray them as “uni-dimensional” would be dishonest. Mao falls into the latter category.

 

[Black_Rose]

The simplest answer to the problem 2 + 2 is 4. It is also true.

Some people are caricatured, and some people are so dominated by on trait that to not portray them as “uni-dimensional” would be dishonest. Mao falls into the latter category.

No, Mao’s actions were motivated by his concern to construct a democratic dictatorship led the by proletariat against the reactionary classes. Mao’s primary motivation was not bloodshed since it was only the means of his plans, not the end. To the contrary, eradication of the Jews and gypsies were the ends of Adolf Hitler’s final solution:

Our state is a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance. What is this dictatorship for? Its first function is to suppress the reactionary classes and elements and those exploiters in our country who resist the socialist revolution, to suppress those who try to wreck our socialist construction, or in other words, to resolve the internal contradictions between ourselves and the enemy. For instance, to arrest, try and sentence certain counterrevolutionaries, and to deprive landlords and bureaucrat-capitalists of their right to vote and their freedom of speech for a specified period of time - all this comes within the scope of our dictatorship. To maintain public order and safeguard the interests of the people, it is likewise necessary to exercise dictatorship over embezzlers, swindlers, arsonists, murderers, criminal gangs and other scoundrels who seriously disrupt public order. The second function of this dictatorship is to protect our country from subversion and possible aggression by external enemies. In that event, it is the task of this dictatorship to resolve the external contradiction between the enemy and us. The aim of this dictatorship is to protect all our people so that they can devote themselves to peaceful labour and build China into a socialist country with a modern industry, agriculture, science and culture.

marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch03.htm

Mao’s actions were motivated by exigency since he was under pressure from geopolitical powers who wish to see him fail. Like Lincoln, he had to take high stakes positions, such as the Great Leap Forward, in order to quickly modernize China. Unfortunately, implementation flaws, bad luck, and antagonistic policies from the US, not conceptual error and malice resulted in the GLF gamble failing. Therefore, Chairman Mao Zedong is not directly accountable for those who perished during the debacle of the GLF and therefore it is an unfair exaggeration to claim he was the butcher of 70 million people, but he was definitely the butcher of millions (not tens of millions) of reactionaries which he conducted under duress of the geopolitical environment. Mao may have a negative legacy, but it is often exaggerated by neoliberals.

Henry CK Liu’s portrait of Mao is not 100% accurate, but it does contain some under-appreciated truths about Mao that are ignored by most people who only wish to tarnish his legacy.

 

[Darkbloom]

I do not know if Mao is in hell for his lack of faith and deeds, but Mao did express respect for human life and he does not fit the stereotype of an egomaniacal dictator but maybe an unpragmatic utopian. As I remember parts of *Quotations from Chairman Mao, *he had great respect for the Chinese peasant as they were the proletariat in Maoism much like factory workers in European Marxism. No one doubts the Great Leap Forward was disaster and millions perished, but the focus is on Mao’s responsibility for those deaths and his intentions. Liu attempts to exculpate Mao from incompetence and malice by attributing the suffering from the Great Leap Forward to exogenous factors such as the inclement weather and economic sanctions. (Another hypothesis is that Mao had benevolent intentions stemming his desire to improve the peasants welfare, promote capital formation, and free China from imperialistic influences on a path towards national self-determination; but he was merely incompetent or his plans were not implemented properly.) The Red Guards tried to suppress political opponents by subjected those with supposed capitalist sympathies subjecting them to “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution. Confucianist texts, Buddhist monasteries, and crucifixes were also unfortunate victims of the Red Guards’ fervor. However, the suppression violent political opponents is not a unique sin of the radical left since Augusto Pinochet, Jorge Rafael Videla, and Roberto D’Aubuisson used these tactics to suppress their political rivals.

I posted this because it was an unconventional article, but since I do not have through understanding of Chinese history beyond my exposure of Liu’s writings, I cannot be an articulate apologist for Mao. Despite being perspicacious and informative in his other articles, he is an ideological Maoist who often defends the Chinese Communist Party. I recently found by searching on google that he had an acrimonious confrontation on a mailing list with J Bradford de Long about Mao and the Great Leap Forward more than a decade ago.

mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-June/010587.html
mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-June/010568.html

Yes, he is not the pinnacle of objectivity, but that accusation is equally applicable to everyone since our perception of reality is refracted by our ideological and political spectacles. I do not see Mao as imperfect, but it is a reasonable thesis that Mao’s legacy has been unjustly tainted, distorted, and misunderstood in the ideological battleground of the Cold War. Unlike Liu, I am willing to accept that Mao was incompetent, but I find the uni-dimensional caricature of a cold-blooded power-hungry tyrannical dictator too simplistic.

No, Mao’s actions were motivated by his concern to construct a democratic dictatorship led the by proletariat against the reactionary classes. Mao’s primary motivation was not bloodshed since it was only the means of his plans, not the end. To the contrary, eradication of the Jews and gypsies were the ends of Adolf Hitler’s final solution:

marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch03.htm

Mao’s actions were motivated by exigency since he was under pressure from imperialistic powers who wish to see him fail. Like Lincoln, he had to take high stakes positions, such as the Great Leap Forward, in order to quickly modernize China. Unfortunately, implementation flaws, bad luck, and antagonistic policies from the US, not conceptual error resulted in the gamble failing. Chairman Mao Zedong is not directly accountable for those who perished during the debacle of the GLF and therefore it is an unfair exaggeration to claim he was the butcher of 70 million people, but he was definitely the butcher of millions (not tens of millions) of reactionaries which he conducted under duress of the geopolitical environment. Mao may have a negative legacy, but it is often exaggerated by neoliberals.

Henry CK Liu’s portrait of Mao is not 100% accurate, but it does contain some under-appreciated truths about Mao that are ignored by most people who only wish to tarnish his legacy.

Evil actions can not be excused by good intent.

Furthermore, it hardly seems self evident that Mao’s goals were good, so even the quality of intent can be called into question. What cannot be called into question was Mao was responsible for untold millions of murders.

 

[CPA2]

How do you put as positive spin on Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that killed 30 to 40 million people?

 

[Darkbloom]

How do you put as positive spin on Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” that killed 30 to 40 million people?

By linking to the Asian Times apparently.

 

[catharina]

By linking to the Asian Times apparently.

Or more precisely, maybe by linking to a certain writer covered by the Asian Times.

 

[estesbob]

No, Henry CK Liu’s portrait of Mao is not 100% accurate, but it does contain some under-appreciated truths about Mao that are ignored by most people who only wish to tarnish his legacy.

“Other than that how was the play, Mrs Lincoln”

 

[catharina]

“Other than that how was the play, Mrs Lincoln”

Love it.
You are so wonderfully funny, estesBOB.

 

[estesbob]

Love it.
You are so wonderfully funny, estesBOB.

 

[rpp]

I guess if you kill enough people, you can be considered as having a positive legacy. Since Hitler did not kill as many as Mao did, his legacy is not so positive.

Admittedly I did not read much of this thread. So I did not see how a mass murderer who killed more people than any other in the history of the world could be considered to have a positive legacy. I am sure his behavior and actions are not consistent with anything Christ taught. However, I think Nero would have been impressed by Mao.