Posted on 09/17/2022 6:37:37 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Jones and Smith have delivered the definitive short guide to the development of wokeism, inclusive of Maoism.
Wokeism is conventionally traced back through progressivism and Marxism to the fake liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The histories of wokeism have failed to focus on Maoism, even though some observers noticed the similarity between Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the West’s cultural revolution of the late 2010s.
In 1966, China’s students rallied for “rebellion,” against “reactionary” teachers and courses, and against Mao’s “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits).
Then came the witch hunts, show trials, groveling apologies for vague crimes, over-compensatory denunciations of the other, oppressors pretending to be oppressed, mobs pretending to be righteous, and the empowered pretending to be victims.
Sound familiar?
In January 2016, David Barnhizer, a law professor at Cleveland State University, posted a paper about the linguistic and methodological parallels between Mao’s cultural revolution and on-campus political correctness.
In June 2020, Brendan O’Neill, formerly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, warned that “Britain is in the throes of a Cultural Revolution. Statues are being tumbled, past art erased, people cancelled. Wide-eyed Woke Guards, heirs to Maoist-style intolerance, are compiling lists of monuments to target and individuals to humiliate.”
In May 2021, Sir John Hayes, a Member of Parliament, criticized “an almost Maoist zeal to close minds in places which ought to be bastions of free and open debate.” He was responding to Kings College London’s apology for “harm” caused by Prince Philip’s image, which its library had published to mark his passing.
In June 2021, Xi Van Fleet, an immigrant from China, told the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia, that it was practicing an “American version of the Cultural Revolution . . . The only difference is [China’s Maoists] used class instead of race.”
Noting similarities is not the same as proving influence. China was mysterious to Westerners even before Mao consolidated his rule over the mainland in the 1940s. Mao called himself Marxist, but self-consciously conflated Confucianism, legalism, and Daoism—despite their contradictions. He broke with the Soviet Union, adopted “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and attempted autarky. He exported revolution, but not outside Asia.
How on earth did Maoism influence Western liberalism?
The answer does not come from mainstream political science—to its shame. David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith are professors of war and strategy. This explains the title of their latest book: “The Strategy of Maoism in the West.”
Jones and Smith note that radical leftists are obsessed with strategy, given their imperative to change society.
An analysis of politics as a strategy usefully manifests ends, ways, and means.
Jones and Smith sometimes over-reach, however, such as when they speculate that Carl von Clausewitz influenced Mao. They quote Clausewitz’s observation that war outcomes are rarely permanent, as if this inspired Mao’s musings on “contradictions” begetting temporary “unities.” Clearly, Mao is paraphrasing Hegel’s ideational dialectic, while Clausewitz is just being observational. Clausewitz, too, utilized Hegel’s dialectic, but not in this case. Jones and Smith should have noted that Clausewitz and Mao shared a common influence, without speculating that Clausewitz influenced Mao.
Jones and Smith are sure-footed in their political analysis. They define the radical Left as a “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.” This is the sort of clarity that Western conservative parties lost with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Thanks to precise concepts, pithy analysis, and confident writing, their book is a fast, enlightening read, at less than 200 pages (despite rich citations).
I advise readers to start at chapter 5, which begins with Mao “at the outset of his political journey in 1926.” Mao formulated a binary world of friends and enemies, to stimulate conflict, in pursuit of change.
This leads Jones and Smith to the second defining characteristic of Maoism: endless conflict. In “On Practice” (1937), Mao writes: “If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end.” Mao unwittingly confirms a caricature of communism in general: revolution is in the party’s self-interest, not society’s.
I advise readers to jump from chapter 5 to chapter 3, which describes Mao’s development of European Marxism, from control of people’s actions to control of their thinking. Mao’s “rectification” campaigns go back to the 1920s, his “consciousness raising” to the 1930s.
Jones and Smith sum up his tract “On Practice” (1937) as “a critique of empiricism, suggesting that it is a mistake simply to accept the appearance of things as true because it fails to account for the dialectical and historical nature of knowledge.”
Mao’s “On Coalition Government” (1945) prescribes the washing of cultural pollutants out of the common mind, just as we would wash dirty faces. Since cultural pollutants include resistance to change, change must be compelled.
This sounds like the post-structuralist assault on reality and autonomy. Thus, I advise readers to jump from chapter 3 to chapter 1, where Jones and Smith identify French philosophers of the 1960s as the critical enablers of Maoism in the West. Terrorists and revolutionaries, such as the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof gang, and Black Panthers, embraced Mao’s guerilla strategy. However, the guerilla strategy was always elusive. Meanwhile, the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser were growing disillusioned with Soviet communism, given Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. They turned from Marxist political revolution to Maoist cultural revolution.
This decade ends with the clearest case of French philosophers influencing American revolutionaries. In 1970, George Genet visited the Black Panthers, who subsequently shifted from misogyny and homophobia to what we know now as intersectionality. A co-founder (Huey Newton) issued a paper on “The woman’s liberation and gay liberation movements,” which he described as equal victims and “valuable allies.”
Chapter 2 moves on to the 1970s and 1980s, when the radical Left developed post-structuralism (a.k.a. the denial of objectivity), colonialism studies (a.k.a. the demonization of whites), human rights (at the expense of liberties), and social justice (at the expense of meritocracy)....
Viva los wokenistas!!!!!
The Marxist version of the art of Zen.
Repeat the mantras until bliss engulfs everything.
Or just put the muzzle of the barrel of an AK-47 at the base of the skull of the candidate for “re-education”.
Very good at curbing dissent.
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Thanks, great article, long, a lot to absorb.
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