Brandon Lightly on the Mass Line and New Democracy, Part 1

In this episode of VarnVlog, we are joined by Brandon Lightly to discuss the complex and often misunderstood history of Maoism. We dive deep into the theoretical underpinnings of the "mass line" and "new democracy," exploring how these concepts served as an internal critique of Marxism and a departure from Soviet-style bureaucracy.

Key Topics Covered:

Defining the Mass Line: Is it just populism, or a sophisticated leadership feedback loop?

The Historical Origins: From the Hunan Report to the Long March and the second United Front.

Theoretical Innovations: Mao’s 1961 critique of Joseph Stalin and the rejection of the "Great Man" theory of history.

Fragmentation: Why there are so many different Maoist tendencies (MLM, MIM, Third Worldism).

Praxis: The rectification movement and the relationship between urban intellectuals and the rural peasantry.

Journal Articles

Dirlik, A. (1970). The ideological foundations of the Chinese Revolution. Journal of Contemporary History, 5(3), 39–54.
Dittmer, L. (1977). Line struggle: Notes on its organizational context and theoretical development. Modern China, 3(3), 303–312.
Fogel, J. A. (1980). Ai Siqi, establishment intellectual by Joshua A. Fogel. Modern China, 6(1), 23–47.
Hammond, E. R. (1978). Marxism and the mass line [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Korolev, A. (2017). De-ideologized mass line, regime responsiveness, and state-society relations. China Review, 17(2), 7–36.
Lyman, S. V. (1970). The Chinese Communist Party in the United Front, 1937–1945 [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.
Mazur, M. G. (1995). The United Front of the 1940s: A social and cultural perspective. Modern China, 21(4), 431–456.
Selden, M. (1971). The Yenan Way in revolutionary China. The China Quarterly, (45), 263–294.
Steiner, H. A. (1951). Current mass line tactics in Communist China. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 277(1), 422–436.
Teiwes, F. C. (1978). The origins of rectification: Inner-party purgation in the 1930s. The China Quarterly, (74), 181–201.
Tokuda, N. (1971). The mass line during the Yenan period. The China Quarterly, (47), 1–18.
Townsend, J. R. (1967). Political participation in Communist China. University of California Press.
Womack, B. (1980). The phase of de-Maoization in China. China Report, 16(1), 7–21.
Womack, B. (1991). Mao Zedong and the sinification of Marxism. The China Quarterly, (126), 1–15.
Young, G. (1980). On New Democracy and the transition to socialism. Modern China, 6(1), 3–22.

Books & Primary Sources

Coble, P. M. (2023). The collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek lost China’s civil war. Cambridge University Press.
Elbaum, M. (2018). Revolution in the air: Sixties radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. Verso Books.
Hirata, K. (2024). Making Mao’s steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the transnational origins of Chinese socialism. Cambridge University Press.
Karl, R. E. (2010). Mao Zedong and China in the twentieth-century world: A concise history. Duke University Press.
Li, H. (2024). Fighting on the cultural front: U.S.-China relations in the Cold War. Columbia University Press.
Lin, C. (2019). Mass line. In C. Sorace, I. Franceschini, & N. Loubere (Eds.), Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political concepts from Mao to Xi (p. 122). ANU Press.
Lovell, J. (2019). Maoism: A global history. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Lowe, D. M. (1966). The function of "China" in Marx, Lenin, and Mao. University of California Press.
Mao, Z. (1940). On New Democracy. Marxists Internet Archive.
Mao, Z. (1977). A critique of Soviet economics. Monthly Review Press.
Moufawad-Paul, J. (2016). Continuity and rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist terrain. Zero Books.
Schram, S. R. (Ed.). (2005). Mao’s road to power: Revolutionary writings 1912–1949: Vol. VII. New Democracy, 1939–1941. M.E. Sharpe.
Zheng, Q. (Ed.). (2020). An ideological history of the Communist Party of China (Vol. 2) (L. Sun & S. Bryant, Trans.). Royal Collins Publishing Group.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Unlock The Mind Atlas
Hear The Mind Atlas now on Spotify original score by mystery composer , narrated by Campo

Transcript

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varnblogging. Today we're rejoined by Brandon Lightly. And we're gonna talk about Maoism.

SPEAKER_02 1:00

The most fun and complicated thing to talk about, I think any Marxist in the West could ever do.

C. Derick Varn 1:07

Marxist anywhere. I mean, like, like, unless you're living in China and then just like, okay, Maoism is whatever the Polit Buder Bureau of the PRC says it is, the CPC, you know, consensus line. Maoism is a contested and complicated history, and I'm going to just put it out here and say, even though we're only dealing with two elements of it, it's an internal critique of Marxism.

Why Maoism Is So Contested

C. Derick Varn 1:36

So much so that I think it's debatable, and I know this is this is you know, people are gonna go nuts, how Marxist it is in its assumptions. Like, I saw people lose their shit when Black Redguard, our DSA's foreign Christopher, said that Maoism was, you know, like anarchism for Marxist, and I'm like, well, the reason why he's not that isn't as insane as it sounds like is that Maoist actually tended to agree with platformist and and zapatistas, like like not modern zapatistas, I mean zapatistas in the Mexican Revolution, and a few other groups that the peasantry was the most revolutionary class because of the task at hand, and that the proletariat would catch up later, although they are still Marxists in the sense that think ultimately the proletariat's probably the more important class, although Mao's writings on this actually contradict themselves. So I'm like, not even gonna get into that, and this is not even getting into the fragmentation of Maoism after the 60s, um, because Maoism starts to fragment pretty pretty thoroughly, both because of the divisions it causes within the and within the official formally common-turned, common form-aligned communist parties, uh, which all split basically immediately over this stuff, more than even Trotskyism. I mean, yeah, you Trotskyists got kicked out, but the Mao, the Maoist caused these parties to split, but to and I think also more importantly, even Maoists amongst themselves differ dramatically on what they believe. So if you're a dungist or a dung jiist, which are not the same thing, despite the fact that they're often presented the same, or if you're a classical Mao Zedong thoughtist, or if you're Marxist internationalist, are there any MIM people left? There are third worldists left. I don't know if there are MIM people all that left. I mean, there are MLM people, which is which to I'm just gonna do a quick breakdown just so people know yeah, this is actually good with Maoism, yeah, because there's so many. Yeah, there I mean Trotskyists are interesting because the tendencies are named after who founded them. So you have like Marciism, Cliffitism, Grant, Grant slash Woodsism, which is the basically the most the one that survived the most apparently, etc. etc. And I could go into the differences, but usually they're about two things how you handle imperialism, how you handle the West, and what how what you think makes the Soviet Union questionable. Those were the divisions and Trotskyism. In Maoism, it's weirder because they're not necessarily,

Mapping Maoist Tendencies And Splits

C. Derick Varn 4:58

with the exception of Shining Path Galonzoist, named after leaders of tendencies that split, they're named after completely different theoretical assumptions. So you have Mao Zedong thought, which is classical Maoism, but it asserts that classical Maoism is correct for China and countries that are at the same development level as China, but not most countries, not even most countries in the developing world. Then you have Marxist-Leninist Maoism, who asserts that yes, it is appropriate for everybody, regardless of where they're at. Then you have the various forms of third worldism, Marxist internationalist movement or the Marxist internationalist Maoism. I've actually seen it called both. I don't know which is correct, which led to various forms of third worldism, which have various degrees of the first world proletariat as an enemy, and how much of an enemy varies by individual, actually, pretty greatly, and what they think that the first world proletariat should do varies pretty greatly amidst different theorists, but that's another tendency. One that seems to be based off of literally a misunderstanding of a translation of the three world speech, but which is often attributed to Lin Biao, but may not be Lin Biao's ideas. I've actually like I've read now more and more about this, and I'm like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

It does seem like there is almost in the same way that like proletariat nations kind of like independently popped up in multiple areas. It does seem like third worldism in some respects popped up in multiple different areas with completely different justifications and like frameworks for understanding what they were. I mean, I know in the European context, like European third worldism developed as an as a like metaphor for the estate system again, and that's just like not at all what third worldism, as we're talking about today, is even like kind of related to, but that that language is seeped into it in some ways, and and people might be going, why are you discussing this?

C. Derick Varn 7:14

Because you're only discussing the mass line and new democracy. Well, what some of these movements actually, even though they're Maoist, reject new democracy in particular. The only thing that I think we can say all Maoists share is the mass line, and what they mean by that is going to be different. It is thrown around a lot without a lot of people understanding what it is. Like when I first heard the mass line, it was I remember reading Norman Finkelstein talking about why he gave up being a Maoist.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

I never realized Norman Fingelstein was a Maoist. That's interesting.

C. Derick Varn 7:53

Yeah, back in the day, like long time ago. Like before he was famous, it's like in the 70s. Oh, okay. Um, and he talked about the mass line and he made it sound like it was just like populism. And a lot of people, a lot of left populism comes out of Eurocommunism and Mal Spondex because I think it's a misunderstanding of the mass line. But okay, you might go, Varn, whatever. What does this have to do? Well, we kind of have to get into to this. I mean, one of the things that we need to talk about about the mass line was in 1961, Mao criticized Joseph Stalin for two things. One is killing too many communists. I know, surprising. Mr. You know, the most large tradition of Marxist-Leninists actually agreed with Khrushchev on this point before you guys go. They hated the secret speech. They didn't, they thought that Khrushchev threw out the baby with the bath water, but Mao actually agreed with Khrushchev that the purges killed too many communists and too many innocent people in general, and that the Soviet Union had crushed the peasantry way, way, way too much. That the anti-Kulag campaigns were unnecessary. He says this explicitly in 1961 in a speech called A Critique of Soviet Economics, which you can find printed in full from Monthly Review Press. It was printed in 1977 in English. And he he also did this after the anti-rightist campaigns, which I don't want to get into the Hundred Flowers campaign and the anti-rightist campaign, which some people see was a bait and switch. I want to get into all that today. I don't know that it was or it wasn't. Then in the 16 articles in 1966, Mao eulogized mass action and the end of mass politics in the Soviet Union and called for it to return, which is basically what kiss off both the collective period and the great proletarian cultural revolution. And this leads to uh reinterpretations of the mass line in 1966. But you know, we're kind of starting at the middle end, so let's go back to the beginning. I'm gonna start with what the mass line is, and you read a bunch of articles, I read a bunch of articles, and I did just I went back and read all my history of the Chinese Communist Party to make sure I knew what the hell I was talking about in terms of what this meant in China. Now we can talk about what this has meant outside of China in these various other Maoist tendencies, but we need to talk about it specifically as a kind of result of the limitations of the specific United Front with the Kuomendong that happened in the 1920s and 30s, yeah, and then uh how Mao concretized this during the Civil War, yeah, um, after the long march.

Mass Line Origins In United Front

C. Derick Varn 11:13

And go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Yeah, I think that's a good place to start actually because we've been talking about the United Fronts and the Popular Fronts. This is the first United Front is a popular front and or a national front in all respects, yeah, but it was called the United Front just because of translational uh work. It was they they wanted to literally be more united, and the word popular front was more of like a revolutionary term. I think like Lyman Slake, uh Lyman Van Sleyke writes about this, but yeah, uh that's why it's called the United Front. That's why the that's why China called it the United Front, even though it is a popular front, right?

C. Derick Varn 11:49

Also, Popular Front wasn't acceptable in Marxist language, it was part, it was considered a revolutionary term, but a bourgeois revolutionary term until 1937. And the first United Front predates that, so they couldn't call it a popular front, even though that's effectively close to what it was. And it turns out terribly for the Chinese communists because they get massacred by the wide of the common gong, which starts off the Civil War, just like really, you know, like slimming down 10 years of history very quickly. But so I'm gonna talk about what the mass line is because I don't think it's not just populism. There is a there's a three-step process here. We'll talk about its philosophical foundations and then we'll go back and talk about its history. So, like the mass line is an operational cycle. Now, the masses include depending on the time period of which you are talking about in Chinese development, the popular classes, which is often code for the non-reactionary petite bourgeois, left nationalists, which isn't really a class, but they're often included in this, the peasantry, and the agrarian and industrial proletariat. When we get to new democracy, we will include the non-comprador national bourgeoisie highly, highly controversially. But this is who the mass line is, and the peasantry is in the forefront, but Mao says this is because of specific historical conditions of China where feudalism is even less thrown off than it was in Germany, which was also something that we were debating about because they hadn't really got rid of the younger class and all that either in Germany at the time of the beginnings of Marxism.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

This is actually, I feel like this is where I fell down the rabbit hole pretty far, specifically in regards to. I mean, we've talked about how like Maoism might is like an internal critique of Marxism, but it's also a critique that's been there since the beginning. I'm not like really a late Marx, early Marx kind of person, but I will say it does seem like late in Marx's life, he did have a bit of a change of heart when it came to Russia and the peasant commune system, the like Or Shina, I believe.

C. Derick Varn 14:30

Yeah, the Orshina, and this is this is known from the drafts. I'm gonna say this because actually the letter that was sent is much more pared down. From the drafts of the VLS Ashulik letters, which everybody makes a lot of hay with, but he does seem to argue that if you have the development of the core countries, that the peasantry, if they had a collective system of organization, could basically leapfrog over that development. So that development had to happen.

SPEAKER_04 15:01

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 15:02

But but you don't have to necessarily, according to Marx, go through uh industrial development, which again, neither Lenin nor Plakanoff really even knew about this.

SPEAKER_02 15:16

Yeah, I I believe like uh Lauren Goldner in their book like Revolutionary uh Revolutionary Feet Theoretical Underdevelopment. I have a lot of like it's a it's a fine book. I think people should read it, but it's it it it is ultra, it's ultra. Yeah, but they do Lauren points out that like Engels in certain ways did actually suppress some of this like later Marx work, even though like their drafts and stuff, because he was just mad that Marx decided to get a special interest on Russia instead of finishing Capital.

C. Derick Varn 15:43

Yeah, people think it's because he wanted to suppress what Marx was saying. It's like, no, he's not trying to do that.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

I mean, yeah, I don't think it was suppression, I think it was just again, these are letters. This is uh the Sule Oh my gosh, Sasulich, Sassulich, yeah. Uh the that letter, like it's a few letters, there are a lot of Marx letters.

C. Derick Varn 16:03

Also, Sasulich is an interesting character because she's also important in the in the history of Bakunin. But anyway, just as fun little notes of revolutionary historical people that end up having like a weird get referenced a lot, and you're like, who the fuck is this person? Like I don't know anything about her, but I sure know that everybody was writing her fucking letters.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, everybody was fucking talking to her.

C. Derick Varn 16:27

Um, anyway, so and and this is actually part of like there is a justification that came actually after the fact. It does it. The other thing that I learned from reading Mal's biography that Mao was very conversant in Marx and and Lenin and Stalin, but he read it backwards. So he was first conversant, according to his biographer. I gotta find the specific biographer that I'm thinking about, is a Russian guy who went through the archives. It's not the one that most Americans read, which I think it's probably some like anti-Mooist piece of shit book.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

But uh yeah, it's like Mao, the great killer or whatever.

C. Derick Varn 17:12

Yeah, but what's the book? It's like by Alexi something.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

Alexander Ponsov.

C. Derick Varn 17:28

Uh yes, it's Alexander Ponsov's book. And Ponsov points out that Mao is first introduced to Klopotkin, then encounters Shindushu, who is sort of like the Plakanoff slash Trotsky of China, although he wasn't he also gets called a Trotskyist. It's unclear that he was actually a Trotskyist to me, at least early on. And then uh and Shindhu Shu is one of the finders of the Chinese, one of the two founders of the Chinese Communist Party. The other guy is the I keep on forgetting his name, but he's the proletarian nation simultaneous Selene guy. And and then Mao goes through Stalin, Lenin, and Marx kind of backwards, and he's reading them as he's developing theory and goes from being one of the most influential fighting figures in the in the CPC to being the leader of the CPC, effectively. Now, I will say we tend to read Mao as like a unitary leaner, and he was not. Like, even when we talk about the mass line, it's actually debatable who first came up with it. Mao's the person who refined it, but it's attributed to both Lee Li Shan and Joan Lai. And no one, I mean, literally, I can't find anything, even translations of Chinese text that can settle the matter of who came up with it first. It seems to have been something that they discussed as early as the 1920s, but doesn't get codified until the 1940s. But so let's talk about what it is. All right, the mass line is not an event, it is not populism, it is not everyone gets a vote. It is a leadership feedback loop. It goes upon a fairly strict three-step process. The party has its cadres, it sends its cadres out to collect all the scattered and unsystemic ideas, grievances, and local knowledge of the general population, as per what Lennon said to do. When Lennon talks about this in terms of understanding the classes and understanding hegemony, we always think about this because Gramsci's the one writing about it, he writes about it in terms of like figuring out cultural hegemony as a means of ideology. But this is the origins of the first step of the mass

Mass Line Defined As A Cycle

C. Derick Varn 19:58

line. You go out, you talk to the people, the people being the popular classes, and just to remind people of who that is, according to Mao, that's the peasantry, the industrial proletariat, the agrarian proletariat, the petite bourgeoisie under a certain amount. And like that was this was like strictly limited and codified. Who it isn't is landlords and the comprador bourgeoisie. And landlords are a bigger deal in China because of their state of development. And the comprador bourgeoisie is a concept that comes in from the national from national fronts and national liberation movements that is not inherent to Marxism. The comprador is a word from Portuguese, and it referred to business leaders who were indigenous, local to the area, but not necessarily indigenous because not like Chinese, China, Chinese people, the Han aren't necessarily indigenous to every area of China they're at either. And who would cooperate with the foreign capitalist powers, particularly the Portuguese, which is where Comprador comes from, and so people will throw this around after the new left happens because all this stuff gets intermixed. You'll even sometimes see Trotsky as talk about comprador bourgeoisie. And I'm like, Yeah, that's cool and all, and it is helpful. Although the love of the national bourgeoisie is weird, particularly if you take some of the MLMs and like talk talking about national bourgeoisie in the developed world as being good, because I'm like, that's some of the most reactionary elements that you have.

SPEAKER_04 21:34

Yeah, that is.

C. Derick Varn 21:35

Um, but Mao did not say that people in America should do this, so let's just give him the credit where it's at. He's talking about trying to overthrow feudalism and set up and set up a control form of basically capital development super quickly and bypassing the need for capitalism through this mass line. So you have the gathering from the masses, then the party goes through and systemically studies everything that they get, but they check it through the lens of Marxist Leninism, going through you know the various codified forms of Marxism that they've come up with as modified by the Chinese party at this point. Initially, it was it was not modified by the Chinese party, initially it was by according to the common turn, and this is to turn them into systemic and concentrated ideas, which is the vanguard element of it, and then you return to the masses where you take these policies to the people, explaining and popularizing them, relying on the fact that you got the information from them from the people themselves, and then you try to put them into action.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

It seems to me a lot of people see the mass line as step. One and that's it. Is go to the people and hear their complaints, and then the party should do that. Yeah. That's overwhelmingly, at least, been my understanding, like been my experience with people talking about the mass line on left spaces.

C. Derick Varn 23:04

Yeah, because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn 23:09

I mean, in some ways, like this is gonna sound crazy because we're eventually gonna talk about ultra-left and left communist responses to all these lines. But like this notion of party is remarkably similar to Borderga's, except Borderga doesn't give a shit about the peasants or the petit bourgeoisie. Like, that's what he thinks the party should do with the working class, and that's why he also thinks that like we shouldn't fight factions and have faction bands, because if you were if your party had gotten the systemic line right, you wouldn't need it anyway. Um that that the existence of factions shows the incompleteness of the party's ability to understand what they need to do, and that basically organically this would resolve itself. This is where the organic centralism stuff comes. It's weird, uh but like I'm I'm trying to explain it in the most charitable way possible. Uh, we'll come back to that because it's gonna be important when we talk about left communist responses to all this, yeah. But this isn't that different from that. Like the the idea is the party is using theory to take what the masses want uh and give it to them, but in a way that promotes the agenda of socialism without merely being tailist. Now we're to come back to this because one of the most common disparagements of the mass line is that it's tailist and class collaborationist, and to some degree it is, but a lot of people point out that's not the major problem with it. Like a lot of articles that you gave me were talking, like, well, actually, the part this middle processing parts where a whole lot of stuff can go really strange, yeah, yeah. But what are the philosophical foundations for it? Because one of the things that makes Marxism unique, as set stated by Alvin Golder, is we are the only people that really take our governing philosophy so seriously that we govern by it.

SPEAKER_02 25:04

Truly, yes, yes.

C. Derick Varn 25:07

Like we're it, like liberals don't actually govern by liberal theory.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Like no, it's gotten so bad within liberal circles that people will call just governing by liberal theory socialism at this point.

C. Derick Varn 25:21

Yes, exactly. She's just like, okay. Thank you, populist.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Yeah. For those of you who are good work, everybody.

C. Derick Varn 25:31

I hate populism more than probably anything else.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Pre-order, pre-order Varne's book, by the

Mass Line As Epistemology

SPEAKER_02 25:38

way.

C. Derick Varn 25:39

Yeah. Yeah. A book where I talk about with General Tut why I hate populism for six pages. Um, I also give some positive stuff that people can do, but anyway, but mostly it's why I hate it. Tut adds all the sophisticated psychoanalytical stuff to it. I'm more just like, this is the stats, people. So I know this is gonna sound weird, but the mass line is two things. It is both an operational principle and it's an epistemological gambit, and that latter part's interesting to think about. So, what's the epistemological gambit? Because this is not true for the popular front and the united front, the popular front and the united front aren't using this tactic as a way to get ideas processed in the party, that's not what they're doing, like they have other stuff. So, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this as a baseline more is because everyone agrees the United Front and the Popular Front are strategies and tactics. This is a strategy, a tactic, an operational principle, and a philosophical principle, and it is unique to Maoism in terms of Marxism. But what undergirds it is not one of the things I want to say as we talk about this, I do think most of the elements of the mass line have some basis, and like minor writings by Marx or Ingalls or Lenin. What I do not think is that they're put together that way by any of those people. So I say this because old Maoists used to admit that this was a philosophical innovation. New Maoists will kind of somehow claim that this is just like standard, obvious like Marxism and Marxist Leninism. And I I I beg to differ, it is not.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

And in doing so as well, these Maoists will also tend to almost dumb down what the mass line is in order to make it less innovative, less new, like less of an innovation, so that they can fit within the like regular Marxist circles, right? Which I think is probably a mistake.

C. Derick Varn 27:57

Yeah. Actually, I actually kind of admire the mass line, even though I would not include all the classes that they include in it, but as a way of like both giving people what they want, but trying to keep it along a socialist line instead of just like random ad hoc policies like fucking populists do. Totally look at this for me.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

I mean, this is the problem of reformism is you just fall into the reformist trap and lose your maximalist vision, right? And this is at least an attempt to answer uh or address that contradiction.

C. Derick Varn 28:31

Right. And it's actually it's a process as opposed to whatever the transitional program was. Yes, yes, and Trotsky is though. For the people who don't know what that is, that was their answer to the min-max problem. So this is an answer. It's like, no, we still have a minimum program, we still have a maximum program, but we're we are processing this to pull this through that those two things, both the maximum and the men, the minimum program, are constantly shifting with material conditions and class needs. That's the idea. And I don't think this would be controversial in Marxism, except that early Maoism puts the peasantry in charge, so that's where things get different. However, as the communization theorists will point out, maybe Maoist had a point because the peasantry actually did have revolutions at the industrial proletariat in the in the developed world, didn't, and that wasn't just in Asia. Um right, so the philosophical foundations one is the theory of versus praxis distinction from Marx a la a la Moses Hess a la Aristotle, well, excuse me, from Marx a la Moses Hess, a la Hegel, a la Aristotle, let me get the lineage correct. Although in the Maoist tradition, and I sometimes sound like I'm being like condescending here, but since a lot of the people that Mao was working with were very smart but otherwise illiterate peasants who knew Taoism more than they knew like European philosophy, Mao will express this stuff at least when it is translated into English in ways that seem remarkably simplistic and almost like Taoist folk magic, which is sometimes what I accuse vulgar Maoism of being. It's just taking like very like very simple statements made by Mao to the peasantry and to be like,

[Ad] Unlock The Mind Atlas

C. Derick Varn 31:08

This is it, like we have the contradiction and we live in contradiction, and I'm like, that's not what Marxism is or what dialectic is, but whatever, man. But I do think part of that, if you read like different Mao texts, depending on what like who he's talking to, you will get a vast difference in sophistication, and that's for Mao himself. Unlike Soviet texts, which often always read like stereo instructions, actually appreciate that Mao's theoretical texts are actually aimed at different levels of people.

SPEAKER_02 31:45

It's something that Mao had mastered that a lot of people still fail to master today, myself included.

C. Derick Varn 31:51

Yeah, yeah. I like I I once had a conversation

(Cont.) Mass Line As Epistemology

C. Derick Varn 31:55

with Daniel. I've had many conversations with Daniel Tiny's talking about expressing stuff to the masses, and I'm like, I you know, I'm not against using complicated language with with relatively uneducated people as long as they are willing to ask me what it means and spend time to explain it. But sometimes I'm like, we don't need to speak to everybody like we're fucking professors. Um it really is not helpful, but anyway, so you have the theory versus practice thing, and the idea is like the theory needs to come from the praxis itself. But where do you find the praxis? Well, in the struggles of the popular classes, particularly the peasantry and the boot and the proletariat. So we need to look and study the actual social practices, label labor practices, class struggles, scientific experiments, etc., going on within the proletariat within a certain nation. And this is a thing the Maoism. Maoism, more than other forms of communism, is nationally bound. Yes, nationalism is part of all forms of communism, sort of a whole different debate.

SPEAKER_02 32:57

But we're not gonna mention Otto Bauer this episode.

C. Derick Varn 33:00

We're not gonna mention him, we're not gonna go into Otto Bauer, we're not gonna go into Rosa Luxemburg, uh, or Anton Panicook, or Bordega, but anyway, or the fact that Mal but that Marx seems to be all over the place himself on the national question, yeah. But anyway, the other thing that it does is despite the fact that Maoists are often seen as being more cult of personality driven than even most normal Marxist Leninist, aka Stalin promoters, this actually does reject the great man theory of history, even though it is still you still have a great you still have the cults of personality that malice parties are given to. Which is that the people and the people alone are actually the motivating force of history. I mean, Mao says that explicitly. I think the quote from Mao translated into English, and I'm not gonna try to say anything in fucking Mandarin. So the people and the people alone are the motive force in the making of world history. Um, so this is a collectivist notion, and I have actually pointed out that for all my problems of what China did during the Ciner-Soviet split, some of which I find kind of hard to forgive, they actually did take some elements of Marxism a little bit more seriously than the Soviets. And I know that in and of itself is gonna kind of surprise some people. The other thing was that Maoism is anti-bureaucratic, and part of the reason Maoists thought things got so violent in the Soviet Union were internal struggles against bureaucracy, which had to be dealt with through things like the use of China and the Red Terror, and and and and and they thought that this led to the killing of way too many comrades and way too many innocent people. And while people can talk about Mao's death tolls, what you won't find in even in the Cultural Revolution, um, it's not that they didn't do executions, they did, but executions were harder to do, they had a stricter grounds, and a lot of the killings were actually suicides, they weren't they were they were honor suicides, they were not or they happened in street battles, they were not, you know, taking people out back and shooting them in the head in mass, yeah, which did happen in the Soviet Union, no matter how you cut it. So this was a way to dialectically deal with the two problems that they saw in a bureaucracy, which is commandism, which is leaders giving orders without an understanding of local reality or class needs, and talism, which is leaders simply following the masses' ideas without providing any guidance, leading to an incoherent basket of policies that don't make any fucking sense and don't lead to socialism. That was what they were aiming to do. This is actually like a dialectical synthesis of the talism commandism problem. Does it work? We'll come back to that because it changes meaning a lot throughout the history of China, and this is where things are gonna get complicated.

SPEAKER_02 36:18

Okay, go ahead. Yeah, I will say the the question of like, does it work? We're gonna come back to that, of course, but like at least during the second United Front period, Mary Mazer has a quote that says to individuals at the time, the United Front and the and then the mass line process because the Communist Party was leading this certain front, uh, meant both concrete discussion and action on political issues, which affected per their personal lives. What primarily attracted people outside the two major parties to the United Front was the practical way it addressed pressing political issues and opposed the Japanese. And so, like, this isn't just like an abstract concept. This was being on the ground, Chinese communists were like working locally, were like networking with other parties, with bourgeois parties and with liberal parties, and then they were intervening with them, co-opting them to a certain extent, but the people who were a part of them were feeling heard and feeling like things were actually being addressed compared to like the GMD or the KMT, whatever you want to call them.

C. Derick Varn 37:15

Yeah, the GMD, KMT, the Guamendong, Kamandong, depending on how you transliterate that.

SPEAKER_02 37:22

Yes, yeah, depending on who you're reading and who you're translating.

C. Derick Varn 37:25

I remember talking to one of my Chinese students about Shankai shek, and they looked at me for like a half an hour and then said it to me in their regional dialect and then a Mandarin, and I was like, that's what I mean. Yes, and they're like, What? I'm like, this is how we say this in English. I am deeply apologetic for the fact that I am butchering your language. But I have, yeah, and they're like, Oh, you mean blah blah blah. I can't even remember what they said because I can't get the tones right. But it was not like they just looked at me like I was crazy when I said Shang Kai-shek and Sun Yat sen. They you they got Sanyat-sen quicker than Shankhai shek, and I don't know what the difference in pronunciation is, it makes that easier to trans to translate over, but anyway, it was it was this weird time where I thought I was bonding with my Chinese students at one point, and they were looking at me like I was nuts, and then they realized what I was talking about. Like, oh, you do know something, you just have no idea how to pronounce it.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

I'm like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like I already struggle enough with French, I'm not gonna even try to pronounce Chinese words today.

C. Derick Varn 38:24

Yeah, this is the other thing, is like all the languages involved in Maoism, except for Spanish and Portuguese, are languages I don't speak. So, well, uh, that's not true. I kind of speak Korean, but like, but Juice's not Maoist at all. So, like, at all.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

It was we just we we're gonna put them up there. That's gonna be the last thing that we talk about.

C. Derick Varn 38:49

I don't even want to deal with Juice.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

Juice, like I know. They're they're just the weird guy who like comes along for some trips and stuff, and we're just like, yeah, we're gonna point at him.

C. Derick Varn 38:59

I call it Confucio Anti-Confucio Marxist Leninism, which confuses people, but I'm like, it's both extremely Confucian and extremely anti-Confucian simultaneously, which is uh partly about the scholar role and the former intellectual in the class coalition, which by the way is in the Juice class coalition. That's what the paintbrush is. Which people like I'm like, these symbols actually represent shit, people like the the the hamstick is the peasantry and the proletariat, the united dictatorship of the peasantry of the proletariat, which becomes the dictatorship of the proletariat once you collectivize the farms and make all the peasantry into agrarian proletariat in theory, although it doesn't really work out that way. Um just really pissed a lot of people off once you got rid of Bukharin, but whatever. I'm not here to idolize Bukharin either, but he was actually pretty good at keeping the peasants involved. Um, anyway, back to this. So I just want to talk about the distinctions from both populism and general democracy. One, the mass line is not a vote, it is not about majority rule. The party retains the final authority to decide what mass ideas are correct based on revolutionary theory. And while this is a democracy within the party, in theory, anyway, you gotta be in the party to be part of that democracy. It is an idea of transforming the masses by also meeting them where they're at simultaneously. It is not just populism and whatever the masses say is good. This is from the idea in Marx that the advanced sections of the proletariat are the most likely to join up and merge with the socialists. This actually is kind of a more advanced like working out of the merger thesis, except that it involves more classes than the merger thesis does. The merger thesis involves socialists from whatever class that they're in, and that was usually the petite bourgeois uh professionals uh at the time, and the the proletariat, and the hope is the advanced sections of the proletariat will be leading the way with the socialist theorists supporting them, and then the masses of proletarian coming along as this becomes successful. That was the idea in Kotsky and probably Marx. I mean, I don't think Kotsky pulled that out of his ass.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

Um I mean, Kotsky famously said everything that he wrote was just synthesizing Marx and Engels.

C. Derick Varn 41:39

Yeah, which I think is kind of true. Although yeah, I'm not 100% bought in on that, but there's a lot of LaSallean concepts that come into Leninism through Kotsky. Um, so because of the synthesis, one of which is democratic centralism does not come, even though Marx was a centralist and a Democrat, Democratic centralism comes from the LaSallean side of the Marxist-LaSallean coalition that formed the SP Day, not from the Marxist side. The Eisenhockers were not democratic centralists, which is interesting. Anyway, so the party remains a vanguard in that it believes that it can understand the long-term interests of the people better than themselves because of their theoretical socialist apparatus, but that it listens to the people and how to do this and takes particular situations seriously. Because the other thing that they critique the Soviet Union for was not listening to local conditions. So there's that. Now, let's get into the history of this because the mass line is interesting, it's actually been revitalized under Xi, which is something we could talk about.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

Yeah, he's he's really re-he's revitalized the United Front work as well, uh, which is not the United Front work is not a United Front, it's it's different, but it's also part of the mass line process. That was kind of until through like dung. I think through dung was like fairly like it wasn't really doing much, and then X kind of like revitalized that through the four principles and everything.

C. Derick Varn 43:19

Yeah, after Dung, you had like, for example, you had formal freedom of speech in the in in communist China until Dung. I know people are often surprised that if like Dung actually is one of the people who suppressed, like made certain speech acts more illegal than others.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

A very liberal reform, I would say. That's a joke. That's that's a joke.

C. Derick Varn 43:38

I need to kill the education of rural girls, but anyway, see Mobo Gao and Dong Fin for discussions of that. And by the way, actually read some Chinese scholars from China on this. Don't just read whatever. I mean, I am gonna create a corresponding study guide for this, it's gonna include all kinds of sources, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

If you have access to like English, like English translated like Chinese scholars, or you speak anything, or you have access to a friend who's a Chinese speaker, yeah. Like do that.

C. Derick Varn 44:19

The amount of all right, so let's talk about the Mass Lines history because this is fascinating, weird shit. So in the 1920s, the first United Front goes tits up. I don't really know how to explain it. The the right of the common dong uh suppresses the left of the common dong and then massacres the the the CPC, which also leads to Chindu Shu being discredited because he becomes a fall guy for that, because he was the person enforcing the Common Terms line and the party, which creates a space for Mal to come up because the other founder of the CPC dies um before this happens. I kind of remember that guy's name. We'll look it up in a second, because he's a proletarian nations guy other than Mussolini, and he's he's actually kind of weirdly fascinating, but he doesn't live very long, so let me actually look it up.

Early CCP History And The Long March

SPEAKER_00 45:16

And if when people say the founders of the Chinese Communist Party is mal, they're just wrong. Just straight up wrong.

C. Derick Varn 45:27

Who's the founder? Li and Chen. Lee Das Li Dashao, I think is how you might say that. I don't know. I get I'm not good at pinion transliteration, so but Li Dashao and Shin Dushu is the other one. We've already talked about Shindu Shu. Anyway. And you know, there's the current standing committee of which anybody seems to only know Xi Jinping. They don't know the other ones, like Chow Li J or Wang Ning or Tai Chi or Ding Shu Shang or Li Ji or Li Ji. Like, I'm just going through the standing committee as it exists and butchering all their names. Sorry, Chinese speakers. Now you know what the French speakers feel like when they listen to me. But anyway, I do think it's interesting how we don't focus on any of those divisions or what it's hard to know. I mean, honestly, if you don't if you're not in the party and read Mandarin, you kind of don't know this stuff. And the other thing I will say is because of the mass line, even though it is democratically centralist and has a strong central government, local conditions and provincial authorities actually much stronger in China than it was in the Soviet Union. So there are massive differences between the autonomous prefectures in the various provinces, than there than there were than the same conditions in the Soviet Union.

SPEAKER_02 47:24

Yeah. Which is a flexibility that you just don't have, other experiments.

C. Derick Varn 47:32

One of the things I think about the mass line is it is unique to Maoism, but Maoists aren't the only people who use it. Marxist Leninism Ho Chi Minh thought uses a mass line justification, even though they are pretty damn anti-Mooist. They haven't forgotten Cambodia. The Gueverist, not Maoist, but did also use mass line logic. Again, though, what the you tend to see this in places that are not super industrially developed. Because what makes the mass line different from the merger thesis? The inclusion of the peasantry and some forms of the petite bourgeoisie, and even sometimes, like I said in Juice, which doesn't follow mass line, but there are some other countries that do where the the ex-Confucian intellectual are considered a valid class because they've been thrown out of feudal order and brought in as part of the leadership. And this is what makes Asian Marxism so different in a lot of ways, and Soviet Marxism, and they're both different than quote unquote Western Marxism. And before you get all on to me by Western Marxism people, I just mean Marxism not in the Soviet Union and not in Asia.

SPEAKER_02 48:55

Like it the existence of an actual like intellectual class, like in Alexia, not even that, but just one that was a ruling class at one point in a history that could be slightly remembered, just changes things dramatically. Where I mean Lennon talks about like the intellectuals being the shit of society and or the shit of culture, not the producers of culture. But right, this is just like not the case in a society where the intellectuals are an actual class.

C. Derick Varn 49:29

Although what I always talk about, this when we talk about Lennon, because Lenin's talk about the intellectual class is the intellectual servants of the czar. That's who he means. He does not mean white-collar workers.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

Uh he means actually that's a good distinction, actually.

C. Derick Varn 49:43

Yeah, yeah. He means uh like because people get this all confused, like, because they'll read like Lennon and they think he's talking about the PMC. No, he's not, he's talking about the minor courtiers who have the ability to be scholars because they are supported by the czar. Whereas in the Confucian tradition, these people were the aristocracy, they weren't just servants of it.

SPEAKER_02 50:07

Exactly.

C. Derick Varn 50:08

And that's got an interesting problem. And one of the things about Maoism that's of great debate is how much uh legalism and Taoism and Confucianism, even though Mao is okay, so during the Hu Jin Tao period, and and you there's less of this in the Xi Jinping period, but you still see it, you'll hear people argue about how Confucianism was necessary to build the collective culture to make communism uniquely furish in China and almost make communism a national character argument. I just want to point out Mao would have shot you for that because a cultural revolution was about breaking the backs of the Confucian Alexia and the urban elites. That's what it was aimed at, which was not a bourgeois problem. And it whether or not it worked is up for debate, but um uh let's see.

SPEAKER_02 51:11

It does seem like the the power of Confucianism has ebbed and waned in recent administrations. I don't quite know how to describe the leadership structure, but I'm gonna call them administrations, yeah, the different governments.

C. Derick Varn 51:23

The Politburo of the different you know administrative secretariats. The one thing that's happened under J is positions that were that were distinct even under Mao, like for people who don't know, usually it's the party secretary who has the most power in an actually existing socialist country, but there are presidents and shit. Like the president of the Soviet Union wasn't the people that you think of as the leaders of the Politburo, like and people always forget that. I'm like, no, they're they have presidents, they weren't that important, but they had them and they did do some things. And for example, like in in like the premier versus the president was a distinction prior to Xi in Chinese government, and under Xi, they've been consolidated, so but like Zhou and Lai had a lot of damn power under Mao, it was often you know Mao's enforcer, but also his counterweight. But anyway, I'm back to this. So and the Hunan report, which is the report on the investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan, which is like one of the first Maoist documents, it's all Maui. Uh you have the beginnings of the process that leads to the mass line, which was actually going out and looking at at the conditions at the time. And if you wonder where he might have got this idea from, think about the conditions of the working class in England written by Ingalls, and think about the directive given by Lenin. So this is not foreign to Marxism, you know, to go out and like, what are they actually doing? How is the how is the working class and the peasant crest actually living? And in the Hunan report is where Mao argues that because of their particular situation in China, the poor peasants were going to be a more revolutionary force than the urban proletariat because the urban proletariat was underdeveloped. There is still a classical Marxist argument, kind of here a little bit in early Mao. I want to be very clear on that. We can argue if it stays there, but you know, for people who are who listen to me, I'm not a Maoist, but I'm actually kind of I actually will kind of intellectually defend um like some of the Maoist moves and why they developed the way they did. I just I'm always like, okay, but we don't have a peasantry anymore, so I don't see what the point about this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 53:55

Yes, that is that was a big thing.

C. Derick Varn 53:59

So and this broke with particularly the 1930s Stalin line about the peasantry. Now there was still there was still a consideration of the petite bourgeoisie and the landholders, and like there's even lines like you had so many hectares led to like you being a different class of people, like they got very specific. I don't want to sound like all the peasants were okay, but you did not have massacres of peasantry uh of uh like large land large land holding peasants unless they were also massive landlords.

SPEAKER_02 54:31

Yes, that was the distinction for sure.

C. Derick Varn 54:35

So you didn't go through de-cologization and have like a mini civil war trying to break the backs of your peasantry, and the other thing that Mao did is even though they had collective agriculture, collective agriculture was done on local conditions and not imposed from the top, which I do think is why collectivization did not, even though it often failed during the Great Leap Forward, it was not unpopular. You didn't have peasants like sabotaging the mission the way you did in the Soviet Union, because local conditions were considered a lot more, and I could go into the to the the what this means about the interpretations of democratic centralism and central organization, but basically, even though the CPC is still centralist and believes in central organization, it is much looser in its organizational style than the Soviets were, and take of that what you will, but it seems to have worked out kind of to their advantage, yeah. All right, so during the Hunan early period, you have this, then you have the Zhangji Soviet. I think I'm saying that right. Uh, I'm just gonna spell it in English for people. I have no idea how you say this, Mandarin. Just J-I-N, J-I-A-N-J-G-X-I Soviet, which is a little later, and the party begins practicing workers' inquires uh inquiry and investigative meanings to understand land ownership, peasant grievances, what level of landlord is the problem, how to survive KMT encirclement, providing tangible benefits to local supporters so they didn't defect to the KMT. This is where this really starts getting headway because they're really concerned about defectors, because unlike in the Soviet case, I mean, yes, they suppressed the SRs and the other Narodniki and they fought the rights, but basically this was settled by civil wars, and the peasantry more or less sided with the Soviets until they didn't. Whereas in China, but particularly leading up to World War II, you're dealing with multiple facts, there's way more factions, so it's not just like the rights versus the West, and like there's a few blacks somewhere that no one cares about, unless you're one of those blacks, and by blacks we mean anarchist in China. You have the warlords, you have the the the Kuomendong, you have the Japanese invaders, you have the foreign powers that are still trying to hold on to parts of the pro uh of the coastal provinces. So you have a much more complicated civil war, which is not to say the Russian Civil War wasn't complicated, but it did ultimately end up with like two sides, basically. Um with like, you know, like we talk about the red Mensheviks and the white Mensheviks, which are the Mensheviks that went into exile but didn't really oppose the Soviets versus the white Mensheviks who sided with the reactionaries, etc. etc. So the sorting isn't as clean in China, so keeping people loyal was more important.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

This is also, I mean, it's so complicated, and I feel like people don't often like point this out is that like there was a real possibility that Chen Kai-shek would have allied with the Japanese invaders with like some kind of anti-communist agreement, and that was like a major reason that the KMT, like the second United Front formed, was to prevent that from happening in the first place because it was just becoming such a real possibility that the Japanese and the KMT might form an anti-communist coalition.

C. Derick Varn 58:41

Yeah, that bad. It was that bad. So then you have the Yunnan period, which is the institutionalization of the party, but that, my friends, is the long march because at first the CPC is way outnumbered by the KMT and gets their ass kicked multiple times, so they go out to the mountains and start institutionalizing themselves. And in 1943, during this period, you have a couple of resolutions. Uh one is like the combat liberalism speech that everyone loves but doesn't understand. Like most of Maoism. But then you have the 1943 resolution, which where Mao talks about the resolution on the methods of leadership, and you get the slogan of the mass line, which is from the masses to the masses, and he talks about two specific deviations. So normally we talk about right and left deviationism from the Marxist center, but Mao actually talks about specific deviations, which is commandism and tailism. Tailism is an old thing where you have incoherent policies, some of which are reactionary because the people like them. Populism, yeah, aka populism, aka policy mongering, aka, you know, and tailism takes both reactionary and progressive. I you know, initially it meant also bringing up reactionary or anti-communist or anti or like socially conservative stuff into the movement. Mal, for example, was much more careful than Galonzo on like meeting with peasants and dealing with their sexism, but not like freaking them out. So I know that people don't like gradualism, but Mal was very much gradualism on the progressive role of women in the party. He's very pro-women, but he was very gradual about it because he didn't want like what sometimes happened to leadership who went to peasants in Peru during the Shining Path period and tried to preach gender equality to rural people, and they got themselves fucking killed, and then the party reprised and killed the peasantry in response, which led to reprisals and made the shining path kind of fucking unpopular. Mal didn't do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Um again, this is a good example of the flexibility because there were small towns where there were actually like members of the Chinese Party, like Communist Party who were women who were in leadership positions, and then there were other towns like right next to them where that's not the case at all. Like, right, that's not happening right here, that's not happening there.

C. Derick Varn 1:01:17

Yeah, we'll get the idea is like we'll get them there, but we're not starting there. We're gonna let these various areas come up as they need to come up. Yeah, the idea is we're gonna get them all to the same place, but we're not going to force them to pretend like they're at the same level culturally or developmentally right now. And you can tell I'm actually impressed by this in the history of China because this is an issue in other places in the communist world. I mean, you want to see where this gets wild. Read the second international debates about whether or not women should vote. It is not as obvious as people think. We only talk about the pro-women voting side of that debate, but it was not all pro at all. So, anyway, then you had the rectification movement, which was an attempt to rectify the thinking of the urban intellectuals who had joined the party, but forcing them to adopt the lifestyles and perspective of the rural peasantry by co-living with them. This is gonna come up again because this is where the rustification policies come from. And I know I am unpopular for saying this, but one of the things I admire about Maoism is forcing intellectuals and peasantry to live together and share skills, and everyone else talks about it like it's a tragedy, even other Marxists, even some people in China talk about it, but you will notice that it's usually from the perspective of the urban intellectuals, yeah. Um so anyway. So this happens in the Yunnan period. This is a precursor to what's gonna happen in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This is in the mass line. All right. Do you disagree with anything I've said so far? And we're about to get into the proper Maoist era, so I don't think so.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:08

I think we've I think the only point of disagreement would have been if you disagreed with the intellectuals going to live with the rural people. I think that's really important.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:17

I'm I'm as an intellectual who has lived in fucking bum fuck ass places important, yeah. That's why when everyone's like, Why don't you live in New York? And I'm like, Because I need to know how most people live.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:30

I need to not, I need to not lose my mind.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:33

I mean, I don't have a problem with New York, but like, you know what would drop me to my you put me in LA, I would go insane immediately.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:39

What I probably was spread out, so you have to drive everywhere.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:44

Yeah, what if New York, but no Fordist infrastructure, no manufacturing history, even though it's gone in New York too, and the dominance of the even lamer forms of finance and technological capital, they're even more rent-seeking, but make up most of the economy. Yeah, that's gonna make me super fucking happy. Yeah, and then people who got rich off of land speculation, you know, like and for for those of you who who will ever hear me talk about things, I'm gonna be very careful about this. But even as a teacher, when I've taught the rich land speculation wealth, those people are fucking awful. Like, not every one of them, obviously, but as a rule, when you encounter people who don't want to work but are super fucking privileged, either aristocrats or people who got lucky with land speculation, and it's because they don't know how to work, even by a bourgeois center.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:42

Yep, they don't even have the bourgeois like worker mentality, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:04:46

Like, they're not even like they don't have the corporate mentality, it's anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:51

They don't have the grind set, even right, it's bad.

C. Derick Varn 1:04:56

So, and the rectification movement was that so that the urban intellectuals would skill this part of it's often missed, would skill the peasantry with ideas, but they'd also have to learn how to live with the peasants, learn their lifestyles, and actually know it by doing it, not just theoretically going about it. This was their critique of a lot of the esp day and even the Bolsheviks.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:19

They didn't go out and do they didn't live with the people they were representing and the SRs were the one who had the go-to-people campaign. And granted, it didn't work because their entire thing was don't actually do any of the rural work, just tell the rural people what they're supposed to believe. But I mean, the Cuban literacy program did a similar thing as well, where teachers were sent out from Havana, lived in these towns, and then it wasn't just I'm going to teach you how to read, it's you're going to teach me how to fish because you're a fisherman. And that from there it was it was a skills trade.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:48

By the way, in Latin America, the places that didn't have problems with vaccines during COVID were places where the nurses that actually and doctors had actually done something similar and lived with the peasantry as parts of the community and not as a separate class. And so there's a lot more trust in them. Where that did not happen, you had the same results that you had in the United States.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:09

We're seeing a further breakdown in the United States because it's being like that stratification is becoming more and more apparent.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:14

Right. Which, by the way, was one of the few positive functions of traditional Christianity in the United States, is that it actually encouraged class class knowledge and some institutional responsiveness to each other that has been undone by everybody, but like the largest Catholic parishes because of the extent of social animation. I'm not saying that religion's good, but it actually did serve that function in the US and it's gone now. Which, by the way, you guys are getting pure reactionary religion now because these religious people don't go to church, so they're not.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:51

Yeah, it's just it's vibes-based, it's vibes-based reactionary thought.

C. Derick Varn 1:06:58

Which is remarkably easy to defeat in practice, but remarkably hard to get rid of because you can't just get rid of the institutions and promote it.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:06

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 1:07:09

So let's talk about the Maoist era, which is a period of what we might call high Maoism, or when Mao is most influential between 1949 and 1976. And you have basically three periods of this. The Great Leap Forward, which this was an attempt to use my mass energy to bypass traditional economic laws, both communist and otherwise. Uh, the mass line was used to justify rapid collectivization and things like backyard furnaces and community factories that were built, like you know, just locally. But it was really open to oligarchical capture within the party. Um, Mao knew this. I mean, Mao was also, I mean, some more cynical people would say Mao was often good at playing the popularness off of these new oligarchs to make sure that he stayed in power. That's cynical.

Great Leap Forward And Cultural Revolution

C. Derick Varn 1:08:08

That's a cynical interpretation. I think it's I think the reality is probably somewhere in the middle, to be quite honest with you, that Mao probably really didn't believe this, but it did also happen to keep him in power, so whatever. Um, but anyway, so you had the Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to do this on like voluntaristic will. This is where the romantic communism you hear about in the 70s comes from. That if you just will it, they will come. I hate to tell you, but dungism need what you know, and I have lots of problems with dungism, and and I think the death toll of the Grape Leap Forward is over is overstated, but I don't go as far as Dong Ping Han and pretend like it's not serious because I'm like sometimes people like, well, oh, people were getting sick and dying of malmatrician, but that's not starvation, and I'm like, Yes, it is, as a definition of starvation. Yes, yeah, but anyway, uh, I will say, however, that even during the Great Leap Forward, lifespans were increasing from the warring states slash warlord period, which was real damn bad. I mean, if you like the 19th century for China, you talk about century of humiliation, and people are like, Oh, the American century of humiliation. You have rebellions that kill like 20 times more people than us than the US Civil War did, both in terms of absolute proportions of society and in and in terms of proportional numbers. Then you can talk about a century of humiliation because that China had that multiple times, yeah, in the 19th century. That you know, it was bad. So, yeah, the opium wars, the boxer rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, the war war period, like like I think average lifespan was like 45.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:04

I mean, it's just bad. Just the fact that the Taiping Rebellion killed more people than like I think the United States has ever lost, like total, like all wars together. We haven't hit it.

C. Derick Varn 1:10:16

No, no, like it's something like 20 US civil wars, which is our bloodiest per capita war, yeah, because civil wars are like and basically you have things that we call rebellions that were like full-scale civil wars, if we're completely honest. So the Great League Forward may have been bad, but it was better than what came before it, and this is something that's like like one. I'm not here to say that, like, oh, communist China, nothing ever bad happened. A lot of bad happened. I want to be very clear on that. But when people talk about this and they don't talk about what was happening in China before it, I think they're being dishonest because I'm like, like the death scales are astronomical during the opium wars and the Taiping Rebellion, it's like crazy.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:05

Yeah, it's simply bad faith to pretend that like the the Great Leap Forward was some kind of aberration or something that wasn't even normal in certain circumstances.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:16

One of the problems with China is that it's always produced more population than food, and that's actually still true, it's just got better ways to handle it now. China is not food secure, it's relatively and not energy secure. That's why they still do shit like store food, which we don't do.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:33

So, anyway, and they also have the largest energy storage right now.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:37

Yeah, because yeah, but we just blew through ours.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:39

Yeah, well, yeah, nobody has any energy storage at this point except China.

C. Derick Varn 1:11:43

Um, but anyway, then you have the four periods like the period in the 60s, which is like the 100 Flowers campaign near the anti-rightist campaign. I'm not gonna go into that. That's that's a particular that's an interesting period of Chinese history where I think there probably is some real criticism of Mao that needs to be done. And then you have the Cultural Revolution, which, by the way, I have the historically unpopular belief that looking at the class sections and the ethnic tensions that emerged out of the out of the anti-riotist campaigns and out of the great leap forward, and even out of the hundred flowers campaigns, I think the uh the the cultural revolution as bloody as it got avoided the civil war. That's my personal opinion. There are a few other people who agree with me. The the people who do the great proletarian revolution cultural revolution podcast agree with me, but in general, a lot of people think I'm crazy for saying that, and they're like, Oh, the cultural revolution is ultra-leftist. And I'm like, Well, by ultra-leftist, you mean actually tried to live by communist means and figure out ways of doing labor tokens and doing what was spelled out in critique of the Goethe program. I mean uh Gotha program, I always make it Goethe pronouns wrong. Then sure, but like I think that they were actually trying. Now, I do think they failed, but one of the things that you know, someone like Michael Sandel talks about about cooperative spirit in China, he's worried about what happens when the last of the cultural revolutionslash long march people are gone because he thinks that the the interclass solidarity might go away. Oh wow, and he sees signs of that in the young. He talks about this in his book on meritocracy, and like, and that's probably why G is taking such an interest in returning to Mass Line stuff, yeah. But anyway, so then you have the Cultural Revolution, which is he used the Mass Line to bypass his own government and party, which he thought had become bureaucratic and elitist, and even capitalist rotor. And when people try to tell you that capitalist rotor was invented in the West, they are lying. It is a Chinese accusation. Just sorry about that. I know that I've seen that asserted in a couple of books recently that people took seriously. You can know nothing about Chinese history in the 60s and 70s and believe that. The reason why it was used in the West was the popularity of Maoism that was poorly understood. I mean, like, I will say that like West French Maoism and American Maoism, and even to some degrees Latin American Maoism. Uh the Latin American Maoists, they at least a lot of times did go to China and learn some shit, but like everybody else was like kind of going off a ring and a prayer and a couple of books. That's what they had. Like you know, they have like you know, the little red book, and that's what you got.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:42

Anyway.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:44

So you have the Maoist area, you have the send down of the youths, which were sent to the countryside to learn from the masses, based off of the the rectification movement, the rustification movement came from the rectification movement. Sometimes it was a punishment, other times it was just a way to get people to learn from the masses. And J comes from this. We don't have many long marchers left. I don't think we might not have any long marchers left. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:13

Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't think so.

C. Derick Varn 1:15:16

But we still have the send down people left, and that once they go, I don't know what we got because I do think that's an interesting thing about China. And let's go. Let's talk about this. And then we have the reform era, which is 78 to 20 to 2012, or as I like to point out, it's really 82, with the establishment of the new constitution and Dung becoming unquestionably in power. Dung did not come to power by himself in 76 after the removal of the Gang of Four. There are this there's a centrist coalition that that was really kind of didn't really do anything. They're called the they're often called the nothingness faction in retrospect. That Dong is able to actually use the left of of the CPC to oppose and to establish some more reforms. So basically, you had these milk toast centrist, I don't know, Chinese quasi-Khrush-Breznovites. They weren't Khrushchev Brezhnevites because they weren't coming from that tradition, but that's like their equivalent.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

I think Ezra Vogel's Dong Xiaoping like biography goes into this a little bit.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:35

Yeah, he does it does, and uh also some of the Chinese critiques like the Left in China book by um goes into this too. So so sometimes you'll see you'll like check an American source and it'll say like Dong Xiaoping came to power in 1976. Not really. He really consolidates power by 1982. That's when the new PRC constitution is established, that's when they declare the establishment of socialism and the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat, kind of sort of not really. Also, they declare the establishment of socialism kind of sort of not really, and I say kind of sort of not really because they also talk about the need for more socialist reforms to establish true socialism, which will enable us to establish communism, and sometimes it sounds like they're talking about it in millennial terms and we'll hit it like in a thousand years.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:26

The a thousand year socialist project.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:29

Yeah, well, Mao sometimes sounded like that too, even in the late 70s. I mean, like it's not just like Hu Jin Tao and Zheng Xi Min and those guys. I mean, it's like and and Jing Xiaoping, it's pretty much like it goes back to Mao.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:43

I do I do understand that to a certain like uh on one hand, socialism needs to be a real project, but it also needs to be an aspirational project. Like, I understand that, but it's difficult to put that into language and writing and constitutional forms.

C. Derick Varn 1:17:56

Yeah. So you have the bureaucratization period, which is 1978 to 2012. I'm gonna actually say the dung reforms were also they hit China really hard. The life expectancy freezes until the 2000s, so Chinese life expectancy goes go just stops, it doesn't go down, but it it plateaus during the 80s. So people like, oh, so great their 80s, if you were certain people. You also had stuff like, I mean, during this time period, you had the end of socialized medicine, which even though as barefoot doctors you had it, even Amartus Sen says that the barefoot doctors, even though they were like doing stuff like inventing elements of traditional quotation Chinese medicine, they did actually have a positive effect in an increase on life expectancy, you know, even if their treatments didn't have a lot of science backing them up. So make of that what you will. That ends things like free education

Reform Era And The Costs Of Marketization

C. Derick Varn 1:18:55

for rural girls goes away. Um, like when people talk about Dung introducing like neoliberalism, like, no, he goes further than the neoliberals do, he introduces massive market reforms and undoes a lot of traditional socialist programs in China to get a bunch of capital investment into China, which is important for what happened now.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:22

Basically, yeah, I mean these are these are things taken away that aren't like that are just starting to be reintroduced, yeah, like in the last two years.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:31

One of the things I've actually talked about is like like the new Red New Deal, which was just like we're gonna do some social welfareism in China in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022. This is this is still relatively new. Now there were things like land reform during the during the Zhang Ji Min period and Huin Tao, where like peasants could buy their apartments, and so there's all this like wealth tied into former peasants and proletarian workers who now own their own their house, and like believe it or not, you have more rights of homeownership in China than you do in the West. Like you can refuse to like move your house and a road be built around it.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:19

Yeah, there's some amazing, like amazing drone footage of like these winding roads because a couple of people in these small like rural communities didn't want to sell their house, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:20:28

And there's like, believe it or not, there's not eminent domain, so like China's weird, but when I say weird, it's just because it's had a different path of development from us, and for all the like state has infinite power thing, they'reas where they don't claim it. Yeah, so anyway, so now in the other thing that happens during the early Maoist era and then is really brought back during the Dungish era, it's just focus on new democracy. Then Zheng Ji Min expands New Democracy even more to what's called the three represents, which means the professional middle class and entrepreneurs are now part of the mass line class formation.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:23

Just bring bring it all, bring all the bourgeois and just uh which is where the millionaires and the party stuff come from. I do feel like this is where I feel like this is where some more substantive critiques can come in. It almost like I just from reading how the mass line works from the United Front to New Democracy, it seems that there was there was an attempt at a path that then was through like austerity measures and stuff, was almost pulled back a certain way, not all the way. Like again, China's on a different developmental trajectory than we are in some ways, but there is still it's starting to appear that like China's market mechanisms are functioning in a way similar to they have a business cycle, yeah. There's a business cycle, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:18

This is so weird to me that people argue with me the most about China's capitalistness when they clearly have a business cycle. And I'm like, even if you don't think the Chinese state is capitalist, and I'm willing to argue that it's not, it is subject now to the capital markets in the same way every other nation is. BRICS hasn't undone that they're just you know, they're the most productive. I mean, like they're better at capitalism than the capitalists are, but like but nonetheless, like it doesn't change you know this fact. It also, I mean, we also have to deal with like class struggle in China is both real and both through the state and against it simultaneously, yeah, because of the increased inclusion of everybody into the mass line. So, okay, so you have Ji Jinping, who's considered a centrist, comes to power, but he like kind of cuts off from this new Neo Maoist thing that's happening, look at Bo Shi Lai and those scandals. And so in 2013, he he entered he introduces the so the first thing Xi Jinping does is the mass line practice education campaign, which is to quote Xi Jinping, look in the mirror, straighten their tire, take a bath and seek remedies to local problems, because there was stuff like the Foxconn suicides and you know Hugin Tao's promise of delivering, like even like like European levels of social democratic welfare was not delivered upon. Z is still is somewhat critical of doing that, actually. And we could talk about why and what we make of that. Some people think you know, I know some people in both the left and the right of like

Xi Jinping And The Digital Mass Line

C. Derick Varn 1:24:23

social democracy who actually think this is a problem, but nonetheless, like he is interested in in the mass line campaign. He returned to self-criticism sessions, but without like you know, the lethality of Mao. I mean, because we could talk about like when Maoism gets Maoism in the Cultural Revolution. One of the reasons why the def count was so high is the self-criticism campaigns often led to people committing honor suicide. Yeah, and in other places, like in the Red Army faction, it led to people killing each other, almost barracks communism, uh, catechism of a revolutionary, nowist communism in Russia style, like Nikki, like I can never say this guy's name, like Nibdev and those guys in the 19th century.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:09

I mean, there was a real yeah, there was a real chance at one point that uh Dung uh won, he was doing some self-criticism, like that Dung was gonna die. Uh, even though Dung and like Mao were very close.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:21

Yeah. Dung got justificated for his deviations from Mao, but he's not, he's not. And remember what I said, Mao criticized Stalin for killing too many comrades. You'll actually notice that a lot of Mao's opposition did not die. I mean, I do think there's some shitty stuff that happened. Like, I think what happened to Liu Xiaoqi is like unnecessary and cruel, which was like denying him his diabetes medication and letting him die in jail. But I don't think that was I I mean, like, just personally, I don't think that was necessary. I also think that like the weird tension between Mao and Limbiao is like hard to like it. The argument is was it an accident or did Mao have him blown up? History seems to s to indicate that maybe Mao blew him up. Yeah. But in general, party members didn't get executed, and mass mass deaths tend to be more accidental, or are suicide-based and mass execution based. I mean, I'm not saying there weren't mass executions in China.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:28

I will say, yeah, there was there's there's a reading of the Cultural Revolution, is just like when there's a massive up like change, like this upswell of society, there's a terror. I mean, we saw it with the French Revolution, we saw it after the American Revolution.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:41

Yeah, we saw it in the Yez of China. I mean, are I mean, arguably, like even if you are like an author getties like Sheila Pittspatrick, like Stalin is not why the Yizov China is so bad, which I actually agree. Like, Stalin's not the only reason why it was bad. Stalin didn't do much about it, though. He just institutionalized it, and it did lead to things like people getting killed uh for reasons that had nothing to do with what they were actually concerned with, because people started turning people over for like petty vengeance, anger at bureaucracy, getting back at your girlfriend, etc. etc. etc.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:19

The numbers aren't necessarily the same, but even a post-civil war and post-the fall of Reconstruction, like that's we that's objectively just a counter-revolutionary terror, but there are terrors that happen after these things. And I do think the cultural revolution, like my defense of the cultural revolution, is that it seems that they prevented what could have been more.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:38

Yeah, it could have been a far worse terror, if not an outright civil war.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:42

Yes, yes.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:43

In a civil war in modern China, it would have been one of the bloodiest affairs of modern history. So, okay, but you had the return of what what democratic life meetings and self-criticism sessions, although they weren't they weren't nearly as dramatic as they were during the Cultural Revolution, or in some of them like more insane, malice, culty things outside of China. And you also hear about the digital mass line because they use social media and apps like they monitor it and they monitor it for like state control reasons, but they also monitor it to figure out what people want. Yeah. Um, again, I'm not here to be pro or anti-China, but you guys might hear that I'm actually fairly impressed by Chinese communist history. In the Sino-Soviet split, I confound people because I internally agree with them with the Maoist on a lot of stuff. However, what they did on the international stage after 1968, I don't I side with the Soviets.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:55

So like it's like it's like the critiques were right, but then then becoming buddies with Nixon.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:02

Yeah, and doing the Khmer Rouge to mess with the Vietnamese to get back at to get back at the Soviet Union. That that's supporting Pinache just to give the middle finger to both the social democrats and the USSR.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:18

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:19

Yeah, that's not something that and also I mean you can go forward. Backing the United States in the war on terror.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:28

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:29

Which they did. I know, I know. People like, oh, but they have to. You can still see it like their lukewarmness to do a damn thing about Israel because Israel is a major technological trading partner, even though, you know, I mean, you can see it a little bit with Iran as well, where they're where a lot of the push has been, all right, let's go to the table.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:48

Like a lot of I've seen a lot of leftist be like, why isn't China intervening in the like American aggression? And they have, they've just intervened on the side of the US, essentially.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:58

That was a very like because even though they want to counter block to the status quo and they don't like they don't seem to like Trump very much, they don't want it too soon. And they don't want to do what the United States did and like become a currency hegemon and make it too expensive to produce anything in their own country since they're still subject to the global market.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:21

Exactly. Um they they they've seen what happens, right? Granted, everybody there were economists at Bretton Woods who were gonna who said this was exactly what was gonna happen, but US wanted dollar hegemonia, so yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:35

I well can say that that's what we wanted Bancor. Now, Bancor would have been in favor of the British Empire, but it also would have encouraged world peace. So I don't know how like like it may have been cynical for the British to encourage, but also would have created an international currency to that so that national currencies don't do what they do.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:58

Yep.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:59

And I know I'm gonna have some people like, well, currency is not real money, and then I have other people be like, Oh, Marxism's wrong because currency is all that matters, depending on your interpretation of MG theory. Neither one of us are the believers in either one of those things. Currency is partial money, but I actually will say if you want to understand the global economy, you you actually start you study commodities and commodity development, not currency flows. Although currency flows are important.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:25

I'm just currency flows are downstream of commodity development, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:31:29

And you want to understand like like you why this is important. Well, if you price US growth in any commodity, I've tried it with gold, but you can do it with oil, you can do it in almost anything. Any commodity has a relatively stable price. American growth after 2019 just doesn't exist, it's all nominal. Now people say, Oh, that's you know, that that uh all nominal growth is all that matters. I'm not sure that that's true, but we'll find out.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:58

We're we're in the find out stage at this point.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:01

So we are an hour and a half in, and we've covered the basics and basic history of mass line thought. I hope this corrects some people. It is pretty clear how this develops out of the popular front and the united front or the national front. It's also clear that it it actually, I think, innovates in some useful ways on traditional Marxism, but I also am gonna criticize it for being way too expansive on what classes it includes in the mass line. And I do think this goes back to new democracy, so let's actually talk about new democracy.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:40

We made it, we're an hour and a half in. We did it.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:42

Yeah, well, you know, this is gonna be a long episode because I have to we have to explain. I think, unlike the popular United Fronts, where we're covering more material, but it's also a simpler concept, it's like less specific, it's both less specific and more specific. It's weird in the United States

Sino Soviet Split And Global Realpolitik

C. Derick Varn 1:32:58

because neither the popular or united front from above actually work because we don't have parliamentary coalitions. So when we talk about the popular front, what we actually mean in the United States is liquidationism into the Democrats, and we talk about the United Front, we mean the United Front from below and working with non-communist unions. That's all we mean in the United States, but everywhere else you this stuff kind of works, okay? So New Democracy. Right? New Democracy comes from section five of On New Democracy. It's kind of funny that it comes that late in

New Democracy And Four Class Bloc

C. Derick Varn 1:33:37

the text entitled About It. But let me explain it. And this is still used today. This is where some of the not you guys know there are other political parties that are allowed in the in in China to this day as part of both the United Front and New Democracy. They don't have any ruling power, but they do have advice and consent and participate in the administration of various cabinet functions and this and the other. It actually does matter.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:05

Yeah, this is this is the deliberative aspect of the deliberative democracy that is China in a lot of right, a lot of senses.

C. Derick Varn 1:34:11

Now, yeah, I mean, okay, so I'm just gonna read the quote from this. This is from 1940, and I also consider this like Mao's dialectical incorporation of the Chindushu, like quasi-classical Marxist, almost placonist Leninism with Lee's national proletarian thought, because this is part of what like Mao doesn't pick up now for proletarianism. I don't know, maybe fascism scared him off of that. I have no idea if he even knew about Mussolini using those terms, but anyway. China, this is from the this this is from January 1940. China may now adopt a system of people's congresses from the National People's Congress down to provincial county, district, and township people's congresses, which is like the Soviets, by the way. This is kind of what this is, with all levels electing their representatives to the government bodies. What makes it different from the Soviets is it's not just the working class Soviets or workers-only councils with representatives. But if there is to be proper representation for each revolutionary class according to the status in the state, a proper expression of the people's will on the people, that's a phrase that I find interesting because Marx fucking hated that phrase. Yeah, I'm just like, who are the people? We are not one. Anyway, I may have entitled a book about that. Um a proper direction for revolutionary struggles and a proper manifestation of the spirit of new democracy, then a system of really universal and equal suffrage, irrespective of sex, creed, property, or education, must be introduced. Such is the system of democratic centralism. Now, Maoist put interest put a lot of emphasis on the central, but they do believe in the democracy part. I really do believe they do. Now you might go, well, they're not a democracy. I'm like, well, they kinda are, they're kind of not.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:28

I I'm this is this is my this is my the hill that I'm gonna die on, is that I think democracy is kind of a useless term at a certain point, especially the way that we use it in the English speaking world, because in every sense, Iran is a democracy just as much as the United States is a democracy, just as much as China's a democracy. It's just they're different types, and that's what we're actually talking about.

C. Derick Varn 1:36:48

No, Iran is a Republican government that just happens to have a religious vanguard as the people deciding what to know it goes. Whereas we have two bourgeois parties that do that. Sometimes, yeah, and they're not that different, all right. Only a government based on democratic centralism can fully express the rule of all revolutionary people and fight the enemies of the revolution most effectively. Although one day I'm gonna do a series on all the things that democratic centralism has meant because I've sometimes for it and sometimes against it, depending on how you define it, and we don't consistently define it even as Marxist. I think it's actually led to some like glaring errors, but I also will say that basically if you believe that votes are binding in your organization, and you believe that the organization, central government, binds the organization if it's voted on fairly and legally, then you're kind of a democratic centralist in the small d small c synth.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:49

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:37:50

So while I have critiques of certain elements of quote democratic centralism as it's been historically practiced, by that I mean stuff like we're gonna do open votes and slate voting and all that shit. As far as like the sit like the basic idea that your your votes are binding, I believe it. Like I don't leave an organization just because the organization votes in a way that I don't like, unless I feel like it absolutely violates the spirit of what I believe in, and then I leave the org.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:17

Totally, yeah, exactly.

C. Derick Varn 1:38:21

And I have often left orgs, so but you know, for example, like with the DSA, I've lost every damn vote that I've voted on in that damn thing. But I do more or less think that the org's resources should go where the democratic will is. I also think, however, that the democratic will is often limited to the popular perception in an organization, and that an organization, even the DSA, is actually a very small representative of a class, much less the masses, whatever the fuck that is. At least the Chinese defined it. So there you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:59

No, we call a vote of 3,000 people a mass movement now.

C. Derick Varn 1:39:02

Yeah, yeah. Vote of 3,000 people in an organization of a hundred and a hundred K in a cut.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:12

That was me doing air quotes. A hundred thousand.

C. Derick Varn 1:39:14

Yeah, a hundred and five. It really is a hundred and five thousand now, but it's like like the new I got told the New York Branch doesn't even have regular meetings, so because it's too big. And I'm like, well, they should break up into smaller units and they won't do it. I'm like, okay. Only the government based on democratic centralism can fully express the will of all the revolutionary people and fight the enemies of the revolution most effectively. I always hear this stuff and I'm like, this is good rhetoric, but like prove it though. Yeah, um, there are must and I do agree that this is true. Actually, I agree with this statement, except that almost every word of it is not defined. And I know it's gonna find people are gonna be like, What do you mean? I'm like, Well, how do you define democratic centralism? Only a government based on democratic centralism can fully express the will of all the revolutionary people will only a democratic government can express the will of the people involved in the government, no shit. And well, debatably, because there's oligarchical capture, but we can deal with that, and but we're gonna talk about that in mass democracy and in new democracy because that gets brought up a lot and fight the enemies of the revolution most effectively, except when they're inside the party, and Mao has to do something about that. But there must be a spirit of refusal to be privately owned by a few in the government and the army. Because one of the things that another thing that makes Mao, there's a lot of things that makes Maoism different. We haven't talked to a lot of like I've defended the mass line. Primary secondary contradictions unique to Maoism, and that actually makes imperialism more important than capitalism and not an automatic development of capitalism um or later development of capitalism. I am of the imperialism existed before capitalism, but it has like all prior forms that exist in capitalism a different meaning and rationale under capital. So talking about pre-capitalist imperialism as if it's the same thing as post-capitalist imperialism is highly distorting and misleading. But it is older than I mean, it's probably as old as there's been states, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:22

But anyway, I mean, I would argue this, like this this is gonna be my argument.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:28

It might be a little bit of a well the other the other thing that makes Maoism unique that you also see from the Soviets, but that Mao that Lenin warned against is the standing army. Mao believes in a standing army, but then he actually had to form a counter-army of the Red Guards to fight the standing army. Whereas Lenin says the goal, now he doesn't say we can do this yet, but the goal is that military should eventually not exist, and in an interim when the when the people are found, it should be done by universal militia, and that's also probably how you should do the police.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:01

Yeah, oh yeah. This this has been this has been a hot take since about 2020 for me is uh how to do police abolition, and it's everybody becomes yeah. You and I are on the sortition, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:42:12

Is you you sortition the military into a local to police force, and you have little universal conscription into everything, and it's got a limit of four years. Absolute limit of four years. I don't want actually fear standing police more than I'm fear standing armies. Um but you know, and people are like, Well, you still have police. I'm like, Yeah, I mean, we still have people with guns, so I just don't want a a cottery of people that just have like carp blanc execution who don't come from the community, and and and yeah, I don't I don't want a pseudo-occupying class, that is, which is what police have been. Other forms of law enforcement, such as sheriffs, actually come from a different origin, but the constable it, which is where the cops come from, people like, oh, it comes from slam holes. No, it's older than that, it comes from the occupation of Ireland. When the military got pulled out of Ireland, they created a constable and then they brought it home. That's what happened. There were sheriffs who were basically tax enforcers, and you know, they were basically local tax enforcers and thus also their own form of policing. But they would hang a lot of people. I'm not gonna say that they didn't, but they were not, they were actually sort of quasi-democratically appointed after a certain point, and also they have a different origin than the police do, which is why we have both in the United States somewhat confusingly. But anyway.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:47

Oh, I was really quickly going to say that the imperialism question, this might be a hot take from me, but I think it actually comes from the the agreement, the KMT CCP agreement, where or the CPC agreement, where the Communist Party agreed to work to realize some of Sanyat-sen's principles of nationalism, democracy, social welfare, and then to reorganize the Soviet area a little bit. I think that united front work may have actually moved into the new democracy framework a little bit.

C. Derick Varn 1:44:16

Yeah, I just realized that we've been going through two hours. So we're not going to complete new democracy in this thing. So I'm going to go ahead and invite you back on very soon for recording. I won't release it that so we can fully cover it. I just want to mention new democracy is important to the NAS line because New Democracy is a block of four classes, the proletariat, which is supposed to be the leading force, the the peasantry, which is the main force of the revolutionary in energy, but not the leading force in new democracy. So this is the distinction that even though the peasantry is the most revolutionary class, it's not supposed to be in charge, although it might be equal to the proletarian Maoism, and that's where things get a little bit iffy, which also makes using Maoist and fully developed in the developed world kind of weird. Because I'm like, okay, what protracted fucking people's war? That's another thing to

Standing Armies And Police Abolition Tangent

C. Derick Varn 1:45:13

think for the Maoists. Are you gonna do when there's no fucking peasantry that isn't just a normal class war? Yeah, but anyway, then you have the petite bourgeoisie, which includes students. I don't know why, because they're not really petite bourgeoisie, but just usually we just don't know where to put them. Intellectuals who are professionals who could sell their skills on the market. Now that's different from the PMC because the PMC today is largely salaried, which means they're actually been worker fied in beginning proletarianization, so that's different, and small business owners, and then the national bourgeoisie who were capitalists who were patriotic and opposed to fawn imperialists and comprador bastards, but were still bourgeoisie, and this includes the big bourgeoisie. This is the most controversial element of new democracy, and this gets expanded after dung to even more people. This is why this is why some people have said that Maoism degenerates into national Bolshevism because it's class cooperationist, including with the bourgeoisie. Now you can argue that this is happening, and Mao did that this is happening in areas where you are overthrowing a feudal overlord and you're trying to direct capital development as a shortcut while maintaining the communists in leadership. Just this is the same argument of like Bukharin in the in the NEP, actually. So it's not, I mean, Mao didn't like Bukharin, but Dung does, and I don't think it's completely because Dung's some kind of renegade. So this is new because it's not it's not parliamentarily capitalism, which is too weak to function, it's not mass democracy, and it's also we're not gonna have a separate period of capitalist development where they get to be in charge of the state, we're gonna maintain this block and then phase capitalist out somehow that we never really talk about.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:19

Like 2050, I think now, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:47:21

Yeah, yeah, just push back over and over and over and over again. The other thing is we talked about democratic centralism being super important to this, so they believe in universal suffrage for the revolutionary classes, so the compraved bourgeoisie are the only people who don't get the vote. They believe in centralized execution of the people's will, which must be followed by everyone. But back to the mass line, this is adapted for local conditions in every case, and then opposition to Western representative democracy as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which just exists to manufacture for the rich, whereas we have the rich in our coalition, but we control them, damn it, because they're good patriots. This leads to state ownership and private ownership and a hybrid economy, and state ownership for the CPC is very different than state ownership in the Soviet Union, particularly post-dung. And this is where things get real complicated and where we might have some real criticism. But we're gonna end that there because otherwise we'll be here forever. So, like a six more hours, hit the bell, and we're gonna. I'm gonna recall this like the mass line and the beginnings of new democracy, and then we'll do new democracy as its own episode, and we'll return to the mass line and part four of our ever going series, and then I think we'll probably start talking about populism, new populism, left populism, and then the left communist response. But uh, you guys may have noticed that me and Brandon, I'm not a Maoist, I don't know if Brandon's a Maoist or not. I'm not a Maoist, but we're more sympathetic to this than people would be ex would expect us to be because it's still around.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:17

It is an experiment that's ongoing, which is I think important.

C. Derick Varn 1:49:21

When everyone else is like, the Soviet Union worked, and I'm like, but it doesn't exist anymore, so

What Comes Next And Wrap Up

C. Derick Varn 1:49:25

it didn't fucking work. And you can come up with like this is why, and this is why, and this is why all day, and that's interesting and useful to do, even. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do it, but at some reasons I'm like, that's cope, though, because like it like the if anything can resist Leninism, and I'm like, Well, I mean, it won, but also it lost.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:44

Yeah, not anything.

C. Derick Varn 1:49:46

Like, um, I hate to tell you, but the Russian Federation, extite what certain liberals and conservatives in America would try to convince you, is sure as fuck not the Soviet Union. No, um, there is some continuity, but that continuity is more in abeyance of everything that isn't continuous. So, yeah, so we'll come back and talk about new democracy in more detail. Just one of the people that had the basic outline of it. But I just realized that if I go now and we start a new democracy and go into all the critiques and all the articles that were read, we'll be here for five fucking hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:21

So that's true.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:23

We're gonna end now and see you soon.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:29

See ya.