ABSTRACT
Mao Zedong’s theory of peasant revolt is best encapsulated in his 1927 essay entitled “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan.” The first goal of a revolutionary peasant movement, after enlisting and organizing the peasant into an organization, is to attack the prestige and soft power of the landowning class. The rural areas need a mighty revolutionary upsurge, for it alone can rouse the people in their millions to become a powerful force. In Mao and Mazumdar’s theory of what a more just and equal agrarian society might look like and how it might be achieved, they refute a key classical Marxist argument about capitalist development. In creating a theory that calls for the upending of existing agrarian social relations, Mao and Mazumdar call our attention to one of the fundamental contradictions of modernity—that older social hierarchies can easily serve newer modes of production.
