"'MAOISM' AND 'TRADITION'"
by Claudio Mutti
(Translated from French)
The Taoist Origins of the Theory of Contradictions
Mao Zedong said: “By the general nature of contradiction, we understand that it exists in all processes and runs through them from beginning to end: movement, things, processes and thought, everything is a contradiction” [1].
Mao admits, with Marx, that contradiction is the universal engine of all development. But Mao's thought differs from that of Marx in that, drawing on the Taoist tradition, he describes the complementary nature of opposites: “Without 'upwards' there would be no 'downwards'; without 'down' there would be no 'up' either"[2].
Taoism teaches that 'yin' and 'yang' are “opposite principles and, at the same time, complementary and inseparable, as they have different values: they are the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine, the active and the passive, the sky (in a broad sense) and the Earth, the light and the dark, the creative and the inert, and so on” [3]. 'Yin' and 'yang' are “two categories that are symbolically linked to light and shadow: in all things, the light side is yang and the dark side is yin; but, as they are never one without the other, they appear much more as complementary than as opposites” [4].
It is this principle of complementarity, present in all Far Eastern traditions, that we find again in the Maoist theory of contradiction, where the interdependence of adversaries is maintained: “It is like this with all opposites: by virtue of certain conditions, at the same time that oppose, are interconnected, impregnate, interpenetrate and depend on each other; this is what is called identity” [5]. Taoism holds that “existence and non-existence, the difficult and the easy, the long and the short, the high and the low allow each other to know each other” [6], and so on. In Taoism, this permanent succession of opposites produces changes that "sometimes complement each other and sometimes follow one another" [7].
We believe that such a Maoist interpretation of dialectical contradictions is linked to Far Eastern traditions and implies a claim to Taoism using Marxist-Leninist terminology.
The solar character of the new Maoist order
To "deepen the great proletarian cultural revolution" in China, it was said: "The growth of all things depends on the Sun and the revolution depends on Mao's thought."
This sentence expresses the idea that the Head is identified with the Sun. Previously, the Emperor of China rotated the "Temple of Light" following the positions of the Sun - which to the observer seemed to come from the South - stopping twelve times, symbolically indicating the twelve seasons corresponding to the twelve months; “The 'twelve suns' were thus successively identified, which are the twelve 'dityas of the Hindu tradition, and also the 'twelve fruits of the Tree of Life' in apocalyptic symbolism” [8]. Mao continues to use this symbolism of emperors that continues to be heard in the songs of the Chinese revolution:
The East is red, the sun is rising.
China spawned a Mao Zedong.
The Communist Party is like the sun.
It makes everything that illuminates shine.
Wherever the Communist Party is.
To make the revolution, we need Mao.
Mao Tse Tung's thought is like the Sun shining from the East.
We need the Great Helmsman to sail on the high seas.
We respect and love Chairman Mao, our educator, our guide.
It is the Sun in our hearts, the Red Sun in the hearts of the revolutionary people.
Long live Chairman Mao!
The rays of the Golden Mountain of Beijing illuminate the planet.
This golden sun is Chairman Mao.
This solar character constantly attributed to Mao Zedong makes us think that Maoism is the contemporary incarnation of the great Chinese imperial tradition.
Volunteering
Maoism reinterprets the interacting forces in history in its own way. Mao reaffirms the importance of ideas in historical processes: “the correct ideas, characteristic of the advanced class, will become a material force to transform society and the world” [9].
While Marxism considers that material forces are the ones that determine everything, Mao's thinking starts from the fact that man is the beginning of everything: “it is only necessary that men exist to accomplish anything... Revolution can change the world” [10]. Thus, four principles are affirmed: man is superior to matter, politics is superior to other activities, doctrine is superior to politics, living ideas are superior to written ideas. It is a voluntarist idealism that excludes any kind of secular or Marxist determinism. Maoism puts man in his place: man is the subject of history and not the object of a predetermined end.
This voluntarist idealism is the basis of the cultural revolution: "The cultural revolution aims to revolutionize human thought" [11]. Man is the center of everything, not the economy: it is not enough to transform this last reality, it is necessary to transform man. Corneliu Codreanu also proposed “reforming man”: “This country is heading straight for ruin for lack of men, not programs. That's what we got. We must not create programs, but men, new men” [12]. But the analogy between the doctrines of Codreanu and Mao becomes much more evident when we compare the importance that Maoism attaches to the peasantry within the new order it wishes to create.
the peasant
The importance that Maoism attributes to the peasant, in addition to the antithesis between the countryside and the city, is fundamental to the Maoist conception of the state. These two pillars inspired all European "ruralist" theories advocated by Oswald Spengler, Walther Darre, Karl Dyrssen, Ferenc Szàlasi, etc. Where fidelity to the "Bauerntum" [peasant] is seen as the principle on which the strength of blood and the "Volk" are based. Mao and Lin Biao's conception of the peasant is expressed in the opposition between the bourgeois, the "new nomad", the "infertile man" - the protagonist par excellence of "Zivilization", the terminal and twilight phase of a cycle - against the undemocratic figure of the peasant, "the ever-living source of blood that makes universal history in the cities" [13].
In the new Maoist order we find again the heretical Bolshevik prophecies of creating a regime based on the peasant-soldier, or also the ideas of a Germany which, had it returned to its socialist and peasant traditions, could have united with Russia against the mercantilist west [14].
Lin Biao wrote: “The War of Resistance against Japan was, in its essence, a revolutionary peasant war led by our Party… Relying on the peasants, creating rural support bases, using the countryside to surround the cities and finally take over las: I have here the victorious path that the Chinese revolution has trodden” [15].
Lin Biao defends this theory of creating revolutionary bases in rural areas to later take cities as a principle that must be universally practiced: “Looking at the world as a whole, North America and Western Europe can be called 'cities of the world and Asia, Africa and Latin America, its 'rural areas'. After World War II, for various reasons, the proletarian revolutionary movement in the capitalist countries of North America and Western Europe was temporarily retarded, while the popular revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America developed with all its vigor. Therefore, the world revolution of our day also presents, in a sense, a situation in which cities are surrounded by countryside” [16].
Ferenc Szàlasi, leader of the Arrow Cross Party, at the time called for an uprising by agricultural nations against the industrial economies of the European and North American plutocracies.
It is from this "aristocratic perspective and existential struggle against the city bourgeoisie"[17] that we can see the opposition between the society founded on the loyalty to the land of the ancestors that faces cosmopolitan civilization, the world based on blood opposed to democratic miscegenation. Bourgeois intellectuals are scandalized by such horrors: "It is possible that this delusional veneration for the shape of the head is a new kind of racism that has not yet taken root in other Asian peoples" [18]. “China is building a new wall much higher and more impregnable than the previous one: it consists of separating the Chinese from all the foreigners around them, of isolating the Chinese. Nobody can make friends with the Chinese, be they Europeans, Africans or Asians” [19].
The war
“War tempers people and advances history” [20]. This sentence by Lin Biao perfectly sums up the Spartan ethics of Maoist China. Such statements scandalize pacifist consciences who perceive in them a certain echo of the exaltation of the war that once resonated in Marinetti's manifesto: “war - the only hygiene in the world”.
Bourgeois journalists tremble at the Maoist vision of war: “Among the symbols of the revolutionary Red Guard, along with the hammer and sickle, there is also a new and blasphemous element that is not part of Marxism: the rifle. Rifles say much more about Mao than any exegesis of his writings. Karl Marx wanted peace, Mao Zedong wanted war; Karl Marx preached peace as the ultimate end of class struggle, Mao Zedong proclaims that people's war will be eternal...”[21].
Revolutionary heroism is dealt with in a chapter of the “Little Red Book”: in this chapter the virtues of war, courage, sacrifice and fighting spirit are exalted: “An army always advances determined to win and never wants to submit to the enemy . Even in the face of adverse conditions, keep fighting to the last man” [22]. “We must continually develop our fighting style: have courage in battle, not be afraid of the enemy or afraid of fatigue; the struggle continues, we must persevere in the struggle to return to it after short intervals of time” [23].
“Thousands upon thousands of martyrs heroically sacrificed their lives for the people. Let's get up and follow this bloody red road! "[24]. Maoism exalts heroic values and opposes pacifism a warlike conception of life based on spirituality, values and ethics that are proper to it. This conception does not make room for the existence of individualism, but preaches an impersonal activity. that, free of any subjectivity, gives importance to the heroic sacrifice which is, by definition, a de-individualized form of anonymity.
Against commercial companies that only promote "civic virtues" and that "identify material values with values in themselves and where the ideal of life is a safe and comfortable life of work, production, sport, cinema and sensuality" [25], Maoism proposes as an alternative a type of society in which the warrior and the hero are the protagonists.
But we must not believe that because Maoism proposes a military morality superior to bourgeois morality, it does not warn against militarism: "The Party sends the weapon, and we will never allow the weapon to send the Party" [26]. The military component is, above all, warrior and exists in the sphere of means, not ends: in the new Maoist order, the warrior principle is subordinate to the political principle, just as in the Platonic state the volitional element and the caste warrior are subordinated to the intellectual element and to the elite composed of sages and initiates.
The art
“Our art and our literature, whether at a higher or elementary level, serve the great masses of people and, in the first place, the workers, peasants and soldiers; they are created for them and are used “by them” [27].
Four years later, Stalinism formulated its theory of art in similar terms: “It is up to literature to help the state to adequately educate young people, respond to their problems, teach new generations to be courageous, to believe in their cause, to show each a way to overcome obstacles and barriers…” [28].
This truth given by art is similar to the political conception defended by Plato: “Platonic totalitarianism (...) arises from the awareness that the old ruling class is dead and that a new one has not yet been born. Viewing things from this perspective, Platonic totalitarianism historically coincides in many points with modern totalitarianism, as it seeks to replace the old political elites that were born from the liberal revolutions” [29].
Against baffling bourgeois theories about art, Mao asserts that "there is, in reality, no art for art's sake, no art that is above the classes, no art that develops outside politics or is independent of it" [30]; art in China must be folk art. Like Plato, Mao defines "liberated" art as that which refers to the imperishable models of traditional Chinese poetry. Mao Zedong was also a poet, as well as the ancient emperors Han, Leang, Tang and Wei, whom he met and copied by performing poetic exercises according to traditional formulas, which endowed his poetics with elegance, strength and aristocratic spirit [31].
The medicine
Maoism also represents a traditional medical alternative to the Western pseudoscience that now predominates in the modern world. Acupuncture has been practiced in China since ancient times, and the capitalist West is forced to admit that such a thing contradicts the idea of "progress": “After the opium war in 1840, where the country's general decline and the growing enslavement of the Ching emperors to imperialist aggressors was a fact, acupuncture was eventually relegated to the sidelines. The situation was further aggravated under the reactionary Kuomintang government, which completely discriminated against this form of traditional therapy” [32].
Mao Zedong's new order meant, in the scientific field, a rediscovery of traditional medicine. “Since the founding of the new China, the Party and the State have tried by various means to recover traditional therapies, which is why several research centers have opened in Beijing and other major cities in order to institutionalize acupuncture in almost all hospitals. ” [33]. Acupuncture, like all forms of traditional Chinese medicine, stems from the doctrine that disease is caused by the fact that the balance that maintains the ideal tension between yang (male, active) and yin has been lost. (The feminine, the passive). Chinese medicine aims to get at the cause, unlike secular medicine, which is dedicated to treating the effects and which can be described simply as symptomatic.
But there is another point of view that must be taken into account: Chinese medicine, like all traditional sciences, has many symbolic elements that allow its application in the context of Taoist philosophy as a really cognitive form that serves as a basis for personal fulfillment. The Chinese doctor tries to restore the relative balance of health in the face of illness, for which he gives the patient the symbolic key to realizing Tchenn-jen, the real Man, which is the starting point of any process of knowledge that leads to higher states of being and that culminates in the identity with the Tao, that is, in the condition of Cheun-jen or transcendent Man” [34].
It is precisely in defending this alternative against the pseudoscience of the modern world that Maoism resorts to traditional science and creates favorable conditions for a return to an initiatory principle that is inscribed in the arts and professions. In the case of medicine, the acupuncture claimed by the Maoist revolution lays the foundation for the traditional saying: "Heal yourself."
SOURCES:
1) Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction”.
2) Idem.
3) Julius Evola, “Introduction to the Tao Te Ching”.
4) René Guénon, “La Grande Triade”.
5) Mao Zedong, op. cit.
6) Lao Tzu, “Tao Te Ching”.
7) Julius Evola, op. cit.
8) René Guénon, op. cit.
9) Mao Zedong, “Where do correct ideas come from?".
10) Mao Zedong, “Speech of September 16, 1949”.
11) Decisions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, August 1966.
12) Corneliu Z. Codreanu, “The Iron Guard”.
13) Oswald Spengler, “The Decline of the West”.
14) This is the thesis supported by Karl Dyrssen, who in his book “Die Botschaft des Ostens”, written in 1933, approved the peasant revolt in the name of “Prussian socialism”, which was to completely liberate Germany from bourgeois capitalism. In general terms, this is the thesis of all National Bolsheviks, not only in Germany, but in many other European countries.
15) Lin Piao, “Life and Victory of the People's War”.
16) Op. Cit.
17) Giorgio Freda, “Two Letters Against the Tide”. Regarding the role of the peasantry in the new Chinese order, the author writes: “Can we deny that the formula - or better, the slogan - of Lin Piao, articulated in the struggle of 'the campaign against the city ', suggests the similar requirement indicated by Spengler, and that certain reliefs of the current Chinese' landscape 'indicate (by its regime of historical conditionality and other various reasons) lines analogous to those, which could be expressed in Europe, for example, Prussianism? ".
18) Salvatore Pellegrino, “Epoca”, Nº 834.
19) Lamberti Sorrentino, “Tempo Ilustrato”, Nº 45.
20) Lin Piao, op. cit.
21) Lamberti Sorrentino, op. cit.
22) Mao Zedong, “On the Coalition Government”.
23) Mao Zedong, “The Current Situation and Our Enemies”.
24) Mao Zedong, “On the Coalition Government”.
25) Julius Evola, “Men in the midst of the ruins”.
26) Mao Zedong, “The Problems of War and Strategy”.
27) Mao Zedong, "Intervention at the Yenan Conference on Problems of Literature and Art".
28) Pravda, August 2, 1946.
29) Adriano Romualdi, “Plato”.
30) Mao Zedong, op. cit.
31) Many of the poems written by Mao are born out of the experience of combat, and in them is revealed a worldview that is not secular, but, if we can put it that way, traditional; like the poem "The Immortals", where about two revolutionary heroes it is said that they are not dead, but that they have conquered immortality and are in Heaven, among the gods.
32) Commentary in a book on acupuncture from Peking University, 1972.
33) Idem.
34) Tullio Masera.
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Popularly known for his Eurasianism and Syncretic Studies, Claudio Mutti is an Italian writer, essayist, and editor of the Geopolitical Studies "Eurasia Magazine". A philologist by training, he's also a scholar of Finno-Ugric languages .