Word: mao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mao's main contributions to Marxist theory was to stress the role of the peasants, rather than the industrial workers exalted by Marx. Another was the doctrine of perpetual revolution, which reached chaotic extremes during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. Party bureaucrats and intellectuals were banished to factories and into the countryside to "learn from the people" by working with their hands, and teenage Red Guards rampaged through China assaulting supposed "bourgeois rightists." One was Deng, who was paraded through Peking with a dunce cap on his head and mocked as a "capitalist roader...
...money is the decadent capitalist idea which has gradually prevailed in our party and society." Even if that point of view should eventually win out, a return to full-fledged Maoism seems most unlikely. The sufferings of party officials and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, the economic stagnation under Mao and the rapid growth achieved during the first stage of Deng's policy all argue against it, even to Chen and other conservatives. On the whole they approve of Deng's rural reforms...
...fired 700 people [out of a total of 2,140], we could make the same number of engines with better quality because we would have money," he says. But he quit in despair because party officials would not let him make that and other changes he considered essential. Mao's tradition of "the iron rice bowl"--that is, lifetime employment--dies hard...
That something has failed, and failed badly, is no longer seriously disputed, even by many Marxist experts. Before Deng, the failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace...
...animating spirit of Deng's reforms has been to liberate the productive energies of the individual, a daring concept not just for a Marxist but for a Chinese (the concept of individualism has a negative connotation in Chinese society). He began, appropriately, with agriculture, which had been collectivized by Mao to a degree extreme even for the Communist world. The land was worked by communes that grew what the state directed and turned over all food produced to the state for distribution. Pay was based on a system of "work points" that bore little relation to production: a peasant would...