Back in 1968 I had read some Mao, no Lenin, no Clausewitz. A friend in the history department got a draft of his dissertation (which was on Lenin & Clausewitz) rejected, & dropped by my office late in the evening. (Several of us worked nights n our campus offices.) He was in deep despair, thinking of giving up history and taking a job with a chemical company (he had a B.S. in chemistry.) I said let me look it over and I traipsed over to an all night donut shop and started reading through it. (I'm better helping others than I am in writing my own publishable documents.) Anyhow the next day I gave him a possible outline for recasting his work -- going completely by what I had read in Mao for my understanding of Lenin and Clausewitz. He didn't follow my outline, but it was good enough to return his courage to him and it wasn't long before he had his ph.d. in Russian history. But anyhow, this much congruence between three diffeent writers, all living in radically different contexts, is the kind of congruence one finds where something like real theory is operative.
So Michael is on to something, in respect to WAR. But my focus in the post he responded to was not war but social revolution, and there certainly is not a transportable THEORY of social revolution in Mao's works (or Lenin's or Gramsci"s). There can't be. It is not the sort of process amenable to theory ("in the deep sense") but only to thoughtfulness (e.g. Mao-Thought in China) within a given context.
So in a broader sense Jerry and I are right, Michael is wrong. But there is a narrower context, of actual military contflict between organized forces, in which Michael has an important point to make. (Guerillas are an organized force, just a different kind of organization from wht they worked with in the Pentagon.) And as he says, that military theory divides into two, between organized armies on the one hand, between guerilla forces and the state on the other hand.
But another but. The "Maoists" of the west were wrong, not juvenile (a really absurd epithet), and in the context being wrong was inevitable, not a character or even an intellectual weakness. Jesus! We were coming from nowhere and climbing in the ring with the strongest and most ruthless empire the world had ever known. Those young people who went back day after day to order coffee and get beat up (was it at a Walgreen or a Woolworth lunch counter) were I supposed pretty damned "juvenile," but if they hadn't been lbo-talk wouldn't exist today. ("Let me sit on a throne at the side of the road / And sneer at the chumps going by.") We -- all of us who fought (and mostly lost) the battles of the 1960s -- didn't quite have the leisure of an Arnold, Eliot, Bloom, Henwood-Doss to 'maturely' weigh all the1000 possible perspectives on the world; we needed something, QUICKLY, that made some sense of what we were doing. Some of us found it in Mao. Some in Stalin. Some in Gorz. Some in Trotsky. Some in ______ (whoever), and adapted it as well as we could to our immediate tasks. Even a prize bit of idiocy (which I saw as idiocy at the time) does not deserve the pseudo-mature sneers that some in this thread have indulged in. I had advanced the slogan, "Raise the political cost of the War," and some fatheads (my emotional response, not a mature judgment) took that to mean smash windows at State Farm (costing them a few more pennies to repair). Ugh. But I prefer them to Wojtek or Doss or Henwood here. They were doing the best they could with the available theoretical and material resources to strike a blow at those wise and mature men who were slughtering two or three million in Vietnam.
"Mao Thought" was/is profoundly wrong as a theory of social revolution in the West, but those caught up in the process, while wrong were neither stupid nor juvenile to try to make it work for them.
Jerry Monaco wrote:
On 5/29/08, Michael Pollak wrote:
On Wed, 28 May 2008, Doug Henwood wrote: Could you please explain what you find valuable in "MaoTHOUGHT"? It's long struck me as juvenile, but I'd appreciate hearing an argument to the contrary.
MP] Well as a theory of how to win a guerrilla war, it's pretty good. Michael
JM] To be pedantic again, I would like to ask in what sense is Maoist thought on guerrilla war "a theory" except in a very colloquial way where the word "theory" just means "something thoughtful I think might be true or might work"?
CBC] My initial point (probably not expressed clearly enough) was precisely that what some in the west took as a Theory was regarded by the Chinese themselves as Thought (Jerry's thoughtfulness within the particular conditions they found themselves in). JM] Why isn't such thought "a program"? This is what the left used to call it. The Maoist tradition thinking through the stages of guerrilla war is advice on strategy and tactics and a long-term political program.
CBC] This is good. Perhaps in English "Program" would be a useful translation for thought in "Mao-thought." Probably of all the groups in the '60s the Panthers made the best beginning in 'translating' that Program to the conditions they faced in the black ghettoes. (The 101 errors and crimes they committed are nothing to the point here.) One of their initial actions was demanding a stop sign at a crossing near a school where several children had been hit. "Serve the People" doesn't really translate from 1930s China to 1960s Oakland, but the Panthers came close to doing so.) And it was so unavoidably _ad hoc_: I suspect Newton and Seale were a bit surprised to suddenly wake up one day and realize that without even quite knowing it they were Revolutoinaries. A reactionary local artist in Bloomington did a wonderful caricature of me, copies of it being placed in the men's room of every bar in town, with the caption (from memory) "A year ago I couldn't even spell 'revolutionary' and now I am one." Something like that. And he was on to something, not just in reference to me but in reference to everyone involved in those years between the Montgomery bus strike and the final defeat of ERA. Had we waited for the exactly right (and 'mature') program to come along we would have stayed home and listened to the hi-fi.
JM] A doctor who advises you to take aspirin to relieve your headache does not usually have "a theory of headaches" he has a prescription for (hopefully) relieving your pain. It is similar with strategy and tactics for guerrilla war... it is an observed pattern that leads to a prescription, and not a theory in the deep sense.
And shag, may I ask, what is wrong, exactly, with making such distinctions? Jerry
CBC] This thread has thrown out so many variations (and in rather long and somewhat rambling posts) that I suspect everyone is misunderstanding everyone to some extent. I'm not sure shag objected to the distinctions but had her focus on something else.
Carrol
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