(A point to keep in mind: There was a reason the Chinese spoke of "Marxism-Leninism" but "Mao Ze Dong THOUGHT.")
One definition of dogmatism (and I think this is what Mao meant whenever he used the term) is the attempt to translate theory directly into practice. Such an attempt changes theory ("scientific theory" if you will) into religion: a set of unchanging doctrines to be "applied." Mao held that M-L was a theory or set of theories good for the entire epoch of imperialism/monopoly capitalism. He thought it unlikely that, during that epoch, the fundamental theory would develop further. (He also noted parenthetically that in a thousand years both Marx & Lenin would look pretty silly.) One can argue that in a dozen different ways for several thousand pages, but that debate is not relevant to my immediate concerns. For the sake of discussion I am simply taken Mao's understanding of M-L theory as a given.
In _this sense_ and in this sense only Mao believed that "there is no development of theory through practice." The practice of the Chinese Revolution was unlikely to falsify or even develop at any fundamental level the theory of commodity fetishism. If you go to a cookbook to learn how to bake bread you do _not_ want a treatise on quantum mechanics, or on the conservation of energy or on the structure of organic molecules. (And while those fairly fundamental theories may well need correction some day, it is on the whole pretty unproductive to waste time trying to disprove them now.)
BUT if you turn that M-L (a fundamental theory of the capitalist epoch)into a direct formula for practice, then "the revolution" goes down the same tracks in every locality at every time. What goes for Russia in 1905 goes for France in 1923 goes for China in 1930.
Mao begged to disagree. For one thing, he found that the (valid -- permanently valid for the capitalist epoch) marxian analysis of class when turned into immediate practice did not help very much in understanding and relating to the peasant movement in Hunan. (Peasants are petty producers -- and if you stick rigorously to m-l theory at the highest level of abstraction, they suffer from all the political ills characteristic of petty bourgeoisie as discussed in the works of Marx & Engels & Lenin and other marxist theorists.) And hence the first building block of the Chinese Revolution: The Peasantry, and the alliance between Proletariat (barely existing in China) and Peasantry.
That fundamental theory didn't _directly_ translate into a response to the Japanese invasion either. For that one needed to unite all that could be united. And we arrive at the distinctive feature of "Mao Thought" -- the United Front, a Front that even included the "National Bourgeosie" (some fairly big capitalists, and definitely enemies of the revolution. Volumes i-4 of the _Selected Works_ of Mao are a record, among other things, of the unfolding of this United Front strategy through the Japanese War and (with great modifications) through the Civil Wars that followed.
This is Mao Thought. There are elements in it, I think, which _do_ enrich Marxist theory, but only by radical abstraction, which most "Maoists" in the u.s. seem not to have been capable of. And in particular, in becoming "Maoists" most currents in the "New Communist Movement" of the '70s tried to transplant the "Doctrine" of the United Front to the United States. And it simply does not work. The United Front was a theory for a predominantly peasant nation faced with foreign invasion. The attempt to treat "Maoism" as a fundamental theory of revolution led, through this core 'doctrine' of the United Front, to the absorption by many of the New Communist groups of the'70s of the banalities ofbourgeios sociology as the basis for their analysis of classes in the U.S. A United Front is a United Front of _Classes_, and to have such a United Front one must first of all have a plurality of classes to unite.
In other words, the very first step U.S. Maoists took in adopting Maoism was to reject the core of Mao's thought, the particularity of class relations in each nation. In the United States there are only two classes that count: Proletariat and Capitalist. United Front analysis shatters the working class into a variety of quite mythical classes, leads to endless microscopic analysis trying to distribute this or that sector of the working class into this or that invented class category, creates fractions of the Capitalist Class proper with whom communists are to from "united fronts." This is metaphysics or academic sociology, not marxist thinking. (The invention by some LBO posters of a mythical class of "coordinators" should qualify them for membership in the RCP.)
Of course, in China itself, "Mao Thought" did, in the '60s, in part morph into "Maoism," in the form of the "Theory of the Three Worlds" and of "The International United Front Against Social Imperialism" (I may have forgotten the exact terminology here.) That emerged from the China-Soviet split -- and it sent the u.s. "new communist movment" into a tailspin from the get-go. That theory was a really metaphysical attempt to smash the wine of post-Vietnam War period into the bottles of the 1930s (with the SU playng the role Germany had played earlier). Some communist group in the u.s. (PWOC???) even put out a paper entitled, "Eventually, Why Not Now?" the point of which was that eventually there would be united front of China with the U.S. ruling class against the new fascists from moscow, so why don't we form that united front right now.
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I had written his far when I checked my e-mail again and read intervention of Yoshie, Doug's response, and her response to that. Yoshie has put it nicely. I will only add that Doug's focus on those aspects of capitalism which change between the early editions and the evening news is merely the flip side of the dogmatism that consults _Capital_ to determine what to have for breakfast. Both dogmatisms are incompatible with serious political thought.
Carrol
Chiang Ching wrote:
>
> > The term "Maoist" rather dissolves what seems to me central to what we
> > can learn from the Chinese CP 1930 to 1960 or so, the separation between
> > "ism" (fundamental theory of the capitalist era) and "thought" (the
> > theory and practice of a particular revolutionary movement in a
> > particular time and place).
> >
> > To put not entirely flippantly, the first thing we must learn from Mao
> > is not to be Maoists.
> >
> > Carrol
> >
>
> So, if I follow you correctly what you are saying is that there is no
> development of theory through practice?
>
> That seems hardly Marxist to me since Marxism is based on a scientific
> approach to the world. Without development of theory by through its
> application, you end up with dead dogma.