First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 9, October 27, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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An editorial in the Guardian’s October 1 issue – entitled “Mao Reclaimed” – provides a useful insight into the ideological and theoretical roots of the occasional inconsistencies in that newspaper’s coverage of international affairs.
Overall, the Guardian offers a positive anti-imperialist perspective. The “independent radical newsweekly” regularly features extensive and partisan international coverage, especially concerning national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Many see the Guardian as the most extensive source of international news for activists in the U. S. solidarity and anti-intervention movements.
At the same time, the Guardian’s international reporting frequently exhibits three pronounced and inter-related short-comings. First, the newspaper advances no integral strategic conception of how the struggles against imperialism in specific countries combine and interface with one another as part of a common global, revolutionary process. Second, the Guardian consistently underplays the relative weight of the socialist countries in the worldwide battle against imperialism while simultaneously promoting numerous misconceptions about internal life in the socialist community. Third, the newspaper invariably vacillates on those controversies where adopting a consistent anti-imperialist stance requires forthright rejection of narrow nationalist or anti-Soviet prejudice – examples being the Guardian’s initial criticism of Vietnam’s role in ousting Pol Pot in 1979, its hasty condemnation of the Soviet Union immediately after the downing of KAL 007 (both positions since reversed), and the newsweekly’s still-murky standpoint regarding the battles between revolution and counter-revolution in Afghanistan and Poland.
To an extent, these shortcomings simply reflect common prejudices on the U.S. left – prejudices which, we might add, are slowly but steadily being shed as the progressive movement matures. But the Guardian is unfortunately a laggard, not a leader, in .this process. As its October 1 editorial makes explicit, the reason is the newspaper’s continuing allegiance to certain fundamental tenets of Maoism. Although the Guardian has moved away from the most blatant class collaborationist politics advanced by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the 1970s and ’80s, it has never seriously confronted the theoretical constructs of Maoism itself. As a result, the Guardian’s international coverage still rests on extremely shaky ideological underpinnings, specifically on Mao ZeDong’s unscientific views concerning the nature of socialism and his skewed conception of internationalism. (For a discussion of the repudiation of Mao’s views by the Chinese Communist Party and the dilemma this has created for the international Maoist trend, see the “Looking Left” column in Frontline’s October 13 issue, “Marxism in China Today.”)
Recognizing that Mao ZeDong’s theoretical “breakthroughs” have become widely discredited in recent years, the “Mao. Reclaimed” article takes a defensive posture and argues that “Chairman Mao deserves better than the low-key commemorations that marked the 10th anniversary of his death.” The Guardian agrees that the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” – which Mao initiated and led – was a “colossal error,” but argues that this was due to “criminal extremes” rather than the basic theoretical premise behind it. This premise – Mao’s notion about “continuing the class struggle under socialism” – is still upheld as a major contribution to Marxist theory. Further, Mao’s view is equated with defense of the role of the “subjective factor” in socialist construction and with the recognition that “building socialism is not only a matter of material output and profit, but must also involve changing the way people think.”
But such an equation is completely wrong. It is both factually incorrect and simply foolish to imply that the socialist countries which utterly reject Mao’s theories – from the Soviet Union to the Eastern European countries to Cuba to Vietnam – think socialism is only “material output” and don’t believe in mobilizing the masses and “changing the way people think.” These countries have made far greater strides forward in transforming cultural, ideological and political life than anything accomplished under the leadership of Mao’s line, precisely because they hold to the materialist perspective that, once the proletariat holds power, social and ideological struggle must proceed in tandem with and based upon expansion of society’s productive forces. Mao’s theories led to disaster in China because they contradict this thesis – which lay at the core of Marx and Lenin’s view of socialism – in favor of an abstract and idealized “class struggle” which has no foundation in socialist society’s actual class structure.
The Guardian completely misses this point. The result is not only misplaced longing for future Maoist Cultural Revolutions “without excesses” but – far more serious – a consistent pattern of underestimating the material, political and human strength of existing socialism. And with such a distorted picture, it is not possible for the Guardian to accurately gauge or write about the contemporary world balance of forces between imperialism and socialism or the contribution to defeating imperialism being made by that section of the international proletariat which already holds state power.
At least as much of a problem is the Guardian’s treatment of Mao’s line and practice regarding internationalism. The extent of the Guardian’s comment on this central topic is a sentence giving Mao ZeDong credit for “his stress on national self-reliance and independence.” No criticism whatsoever is made of the fact that, for Mao, these concepts were only in part directed against imperialism; they simultaneously embodied opposition to solidarity with the socialist camp or with national liberation movements that allied closely with the socialist countries. This narrow nationalist viewpoint lies at the heart of the class collaborationist foreign policy China has pursued since the late 1960s, and is the most glaring illustration of the degree to which every variant of Maoism deviates from a working class perspective. Yet the Guardian – though distancing itself from particular consequences of Mao’s outlook – embraces its ideological essence as a revolutionary virtue. No wonder the Guardian’s pages cannot offer a comprehensive and accurate assessment of the vital inter-relationship of the socialist countries, the national liberation movements and the workers movements in the advanced capitalist countries as they mutually reinforce each other in the common struggle against imperialism.
For the Guardian to cling so stubbornly to Maoism’s backward theories is not only unfortunate, it is in many ways ironic. After all, the “turning against Mao” which the Guardian presently bemoans began in large measure in 1975-76 when international Maoism collaborated with U.S. imperialism and South African racism during the final stages of Angola’s fight for national liberation. And in the bitter political controversy that ensued, the Guardian itself played a decisive role in exposing the errors of the Chinese party and building support for the revolutionaries of the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
Today’s widespread repudiation of Mao represents, at bottom, the necessary extension of that initial political break with class collaboration to a comprehensive theoretical and ideological critique. And until the Guardian comes to grips with this fact, its contribution to the anti-imperialist struggle will remain limited.