ABSTRACT
… IT MAY be argued that an intensive militarization of public life (in China) is not in principle incompatible with the maintenance of party control, especially if the party is determined to pursue a policy of economic austerity and social egalitarianism. Such a choice could even be defended on rational grounds quite extraneous to Mao’s own highly idiosyncratic version of “war communism.” It can be held that in a large, poor, and overpopulated country with China’s special problems, a combination of military discipline and ideological rigor is an effective means (perhaps the only effective means) of wringing an economic surplus from an unwilling population. If this be granted for argument’s sake, one still has to account for the transformation of a doctrine which originally expressed the spontaneous protest of the proletariat of early capitalism. The utopian literature of modern communism, as it arose after the French Revolution, was egalitarian enough, but the aims it defined had little in common with the revolutionary nationalism of the Maoist regime. Communism in those days—broadly speaking the half-century ending with the 1848 upheaval and the Manifesto—defined the terms in which an elite of French and British workingmen and their intellectual leaders envisaged the distant future. That future was seen under the aspect of a stateless and classless order which would inherit the economic wealth created by the industrial revolution. It never occurred to the early pioneers of this faith, or to the authors of the Manifesto, that communism might become the “ideology” (in the precise sense of “false consciousness”) of a movement seeking to substitute itself for what Marx called the “bourgeois revolution.” Yet this is what has been happening in China since 1949, following the precedent set in the U.S.S.R. since 1917.
