On Tue, 5 May 2009 20:49:29 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
>
> On May 5, 2009, at 7:51 PM, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> > On the other hand, I feel that I am, by in large, in sympathy
> with
> > the spirit of Doug's comment, which I suspect is a critique of
> the
> > authoritarian nature of the state apparatus that Mao contributed
> > considerably to, but that authoritarian structure was linked to a
> > very radical project of social transformation, one that
> continually
> > outstripped the material ability of the society to transform.
>
> Yes, that's what I was really talking about. It wasn't just the
> material ability of the society to transform - there evidently
> wasn't
> a whole lot of mass support for the agenda. The ease with which
> Mao's
> successors transformed China into a quasi-capitalist state - though
>
> obviously not one in the Anglo-Saxon sense - is evidence that his
> revolution had very shallow roots.
Mao, unintentionally made it much easier for his successors to impose quasi-capitalist reforms. One of aims of the Cultural Revolution was to weaken and undermine the bureaucracy which Mao perceived to be inherently conservative and prone to revisionism. Indeed, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party itself became one of Mao's prime targets. Therefore, later on when Deng inititated his economic reforms, the bureaucracy was in much less of a position to resist the turn to the market than it might have been otherwise.
Jim F.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
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>
>
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