Russell argues:
The key assumption of Mao's rural development program was that the technical transformation of agriculture could be achieved--at little or no cost to the State--by mobilizing un and underemployed labor and economically marginal natural resources which would otherwise be unutilized. Large scale labor mobilisation projects were one pillar of the Maoist program: vast labor armies would be put to work building irrigation canals and dikes, collecting organic fertilzer, killing naturla pests, etc. The second major motif in the 'leftist' strategy was rural industrialisation: small factories would be set up everywhere, financed by local peasants; the best known example being the backyard iron and stell furnaces of 1958. These local plants would produce mainly agricultural means of production, such as small tools and chemical fertilisers. IT SHOULD BE STRESSED THAT RURAL INDUSTRIALISATION WAS NOT AN END IN ITSELF, INSPIRED BY A VISION OF NARROWING THE GAP BETWEEN COUNTRY AND CITY, SO MUCH AS A MEANS OF AVOIDING THE TRANSFER OF GENERAL INVESTMENT AWAY FROM HEAVY INDUSTRY. A third category of Maoist policies included several reforms of agricultural techniques, such as closer planting and deeper plowing, which were universally popularized with little preliminary testing. All of these measures, taken together, were expected to produce fantastic increases in crop yields almost immediately. Since Mao's rural program had to accomplish something Stalin hadn't needed to, namely to create a surplus product rather than merely extract an already existing one, it was necessary to gain an even tighter control over the peasants' labor power and means of production than stalin had attempted; this, and not the ideological view of communism, was the motive behind the People's Commune."
Russell then argues that Maoist egalitarianism followed from the need to impose general austerity to carry out a crash program in heavy industry, not from a genuine communist vision.
rb