The Unconference on Saturday allowed me to put thoughts on paper – as I ended up doing Pair Writing in both sessions, I chose to write on two aspects of my project. First, trying to come up with part of an argument I want to make in the project. Second, what I perceive to be the main obstacle to my research, why it’s worthwhile to overcome it, how I may go about doing so…etc. For the first part of this, the analytic angle provided by Konrad in his previous post about ‘ideas to sources VS sources to ideas’ is useful. Here is what I wrote during the Unconference (with some bits omitted):
The primary motivation for Afro-Asian radicals when they approached Maoist thought was to respond to the social problems that they faced in their own environments, which meant that capturing the totality of Maoist thought or respecting its integrity is only a secondary concern. The idea that Maoist thought can be ‘exported’ by means of publishing the Little Red Book (or Quotations of Chairman Mao), which was the aim of the Chinese government to propagandise Maoist ideas, and perhaps even replace the Soviet Union as the ‘revolutionary centre of socialism,’ was overly optimistic. […] Certain aspects of Maoism were given emphasis in the context of American leftists, such as Mao’s call for solidarity between ‘all the oppressed people of the world’ which formed an impetus behind Afro-Asian solidarity. I would argue that this was taken up by leftist activists in America because of expedient reasons more than because they thought they were obediently responding to the call of Mao. The most pronounced aspect of Maoism that was appropriated in America was Mao’s call for ‘direct actions’ and ‘actively participating in the revolution’ and so many activists sprang up to serve the needs of the community by providing healthcare, for instance. The backdrop in America of the time, when radical students were in search of an ideology to channel their energies into, and to do their part in the wider scale civil rights movement that Mao’s clarity and imperative language was latched onto. Perhaps under the influence of Mao’s rhetoric, but also Brezhnev’s denunciation of Stalin in the Soviet Union, leftists were disillusioned with the perceived relapse of capitalism and the seeming halting of the socialist revolution. So Mao’s posture as the ‘true heir’ of the socialist revolution, his attempt to create a cult of personality among the socialists in the world, could act as explanations for the enthusiasm with which Maoist thoughts were taken up in the American context.
When I approached this exercise, I wanted to make it a clearly argumentative one. That means that based on my own readings on the topic, and my instincts on how ideas interact with different cultural contexts, I tried to put forth a most plausible argument. On the latter point, Marx famously said:
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
My research explores the more nuanced, perhaps even mutually influential relationship between ‘ideas’ and their surroundings. The impression that I am receiving a stronger impetus from my instincts will change when I have a better grasp of the political and cultural context in America, as well as careful reading of primary sources by the very agents who were responsible for translating Maoist thoughts into their own languages and actions. My project will also benefit from better understanding of what ‘Maoist thought’ consists of, how it developed from the tradition established by Marx and Lenin. An interesting linkage between the two is, what are the particular aspects/tenets of Maoism that, more than other ideologies, invite and attract adaptation and translation by other cultures or political groups?
As a final point, one of my intentions of the project is to map the spread of Maoist thought in some shape or form across the globe in 1960s and 70s. The first instance when I was introduced to the idea of a ‘global Maoism’ took me by surprise, because a study of the Cultural Revolution in the national context of China can easily lead to an impression that, to put it crudely, the event was the result of a deranged and megalomaniac man’s desperate cling on to power, made possible by a population that fantastically believed in a linear progress to a socialist utopia, ready to wreck any invaluable cultural artifacts and moral codes that ‘stood in their way’. Yet, a project such as mine can show the attractiveness of Maoist thought to other cultural contexts, making the point that it was not only the Chinese at the time who were swept up in a frenzy. But, if my findings also show that professed Maoists in a non-Chinese context actually shed certain tenets of Maoism in order to be effective, or that those who remained faithful to Maoism ultimately failed to attract much support, then it will raise interesting questions about what made the Chinese context particularly conducive to the happening of one of the most destructive movements in 20th century history.