CSC International Research Webinar Series
Date: Tuesday 23 August 2022
Time: 9.30 – 10.30am AEST
Location: Online
About this event
Reinterpreting the Chinese revolution: Mao’s party-substitutionist revolution in theory and practice
I propose a wholesale reinterpretation of the Chinese revolution and the social system it installed. I reject the orthodox theoretical framework and historical narrative that’s been assumed by most China scholars, regardless of their political persuasions, namely that Mao’s revolution installed socialism and Deng “restored capitalism.” In my experience, the conceptual prison of Maoist theory has posed insuperable barriers to understanding modern China. First, it misrepresents the nature of Mao’s party-substitutionist “new class” revolution that, far from installing socialism, installed a nationalist, anti-democratic, anti-socialist Stalinist totalitarian police state. Mao was first a nationalist, secondly a socialist. But his socialism drew not from the working class self-emancipation “socialism from below” ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin, but from the pre-Marxian “socialism-from-above” ideas of utopian socialists, anarchists and agrarian populists like Proudhon, Bakunin and Herzen who imagined that they alone possessed “correct ideas,” the correct vision and strategy to build a socialist society, so should rule as beneficent “savior-dictators.” Mao theorized and led the first successful substitutionist revolution. But from China to Korea, Vietnam and beyond, they all installed new class societies. Second, it can’t explain the contradictions of the system Mao installed because if Maoist China was socialist then all its horrors are inexplicable in relation to Mao’s thought. Third, it can’t explain, if the Dengists were intent on “restoring capitalism,” why did they sabotaged their own market reforms to prevent the full restoration of capitalism and maintain the dominance of the state-owned economy? To understand these contradictions, we need a different theory, which I offer for your consideration. I’ll show how Mao forged his “substitute proletariat” out of petit bourgeois intellectuals, how he married Confucianism and Stalinism to mold a “virtuous” communist mandarinate, and how this “new class” developed its own interests which were nationalist, bureaucratic, anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, and anti-socialist.
About the speakers
Richard Smith
Richard wrote his UCLA History Dept. PhD thesis on the contradictions of market reform in China. He held postdoctoral appointments at the East-West Center in Honolulu and Rutgers University but did not pursue an academic career. He is the author of Green Capitalism: The God that Failed (2016) and China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse (2020) and is currently completing his next book,The Triumph and Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (2023). His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Real-World Economics Review, The Ecologist, Journal of Ecological Economics, Spectre, Tempest, and other media. Richard is a founding member of systemchangenotclimatechange.org and has written ecosocialist pamphlets for the DSA Ecosocialist Working Group. Most of his writings can be downloaded at richardanthonysmith.org.
David Goodman (Chair)
David S G Goodman is Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, where he is also Professor of Chinese Politics. He has worked in universities in Australia, China and the UK since 1971. Most recently he established the Department of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, where he also later served as Vice President for Academic Affairs. In Australia he previously worked at both the University of Technology Sydney; where he established the International Studies Program and later became DVC International; and the University of Sydney where he was part of the team that originally established the China Studies Centre. Prof Goodman is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Image credit : Respectfully wish Chairman Mao eternal life from chinaposters.net