Mao Zedong and “Chinese Marxism”

Mao Zedong’S Thought stands at the intersection of two histories: a global history that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, intruded with increasing forcefulness on Chinese thinking and provided a new frame of reference for thinking about the past, present, and future of Chinese society; and a Chinese history, the autonomy of which appeared as an issue as the new world impressed itself on Chinese consciousness. As “Mao Zedong Thought” ¹ took shape in the course of the Communist Revolution in the 1930s, it drew upon a foreign ideological import, Marxism, for its constituent elements. But it was the crucible of that revolution, Chinese society, with its social formations and quotidian culture, that gave it its form. At the heart of Mao’s philosophical formation lies an account of a Third World revolutionary consciousness seeking to remake itself into an autonomous subject of this new world against the immanent threat of degradation into its marginalized object. The contradictions in Mao Zedong Thought, no less than its contributions, are located in this account.