>How can anyone who has ever read the preface to _Quotations from Chairman
>Mao_ deny that Maoist thought is characterized by a lack of critical
>capacity? How can anyone deny that Maoist thought is characterized by
>mindless brainwashed utterances?
>
>Or is the idea to deny that there was ever such a person as Lin Biao,
>closest comrade-in-arms and designated successor to Mao Zedong?
This statement is really a tautology: "Maoist thought" is that which is mindless and brainwashed utterances.
"Maoism", particularly as exported to the west as symbolic theatre, may well have been mindless and brainwashed by definition. It "talked Chinese" to non-Chinese people.
The phenomenon of Lin Biao and the Cultural Revolution is more complex. Certainly IMO a leftist, idealist error but for reasons more complicated than that they were all mindless or brainwashed.
I have just checked the text, in Mao Tsetung and Lin Piao, Post Revolutionary Writings, ed K. Fan, Anchor Books 1972.
The original Quotations were compiled in 1964 for the People's Liberation Army to systematise the practise of copying down and memorizing certain maxims during the study of Mao's writings.
The Foreword was for the second edition in December 1966 to promote the quotations throughout the population. Bearing in mind the unified nature of the PLA, this act implies also a sort of tranformation of China economically into one great commune, which eventually proved to be disastrous.
Even so, perhaps Brad DeLong could pin-point exactly which bits of the Foreward are so mindless. Not all are; for example "In organizing study, different units should select passages for study that are relevant to the actual situation, the tasks, the current thinking of the masses and the state of their work."
Lin Biao had ulterior motives, no doubt, in writing
"Comrade Mao Tse-Tung has, with genius, creatively and in an all-round way, inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism, advancing it to a completely new stage."
KHRUSHCHEV
Compare this statement by Khrushchev in 1949 to the Ukrainian Communist Party:
"All our successes we owe to the great Bolshevik Party and to the experienced guidance of our beloved leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin. Millions of workers in all countries of the world see how the Soviet Union is carrying out the great socialist ideas, the ideas of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin."
And on March 13th 1939 at the 18th Congress of the CPSU(B) he opened
"Comrades, we have heard at our Eighteenth Party Congress a report of struggle for communism, the struggle of our workers, peasants and intellectuals, of all the working people of our Soviet land, led by our Party and its Stalinist Central Committee, directed by the genius of our great guide and leader, Comrade Stalin." (Storm of applause, breaking into an ovation. All rise.)
And in conclusion -
"Long live the towering genius of all humanity, the teacher and guide who is leading us victoriously to communism, our beloved Comrade Stalin!" (Ovation. All rise. Loud cheers of 'Long live our great Stalin!')
Chris Burford
London