Communist Thought - Tumblr Posts

Violence, Power and the Chairman

Zedong, Mao “The War History of the Koumintang” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. 2011       Praetorian Press LLC.

                Zedong takes the examples of Sun Yat-Sen as well as Chiang Kai-Shek.  In China, he argues, political power is achieved through possessing an army.  Failed political parties have not had armies and so have been unable to achieve their goals.  This is the state of affairs in China of Mao’s era, he argues, because there have been multiple violent elements led by bourgeois elites struggling to maintain personal power.  For the Maoist communist, non-violence is not an option, since the goals of the communist being morally imperative- namely the driving out of Japanese imperialism and the communist revolution as per Marx- the communist must accumulate power to achieve the goals of the proletariat-party.                 What Zedong posits is that violence is the core of power in China.  Mao sees the advancement of technology as the means to the communist revolution, and the gun as the expression of technological development that will make this possible in China.                 While Zedong states that war is not wanted or desirable, it is pursued as a moral imperative for the Chinese communist.  The process of violence and warfare is a function of the disparate warlords of China struggling for power.  The people must rise up with one voice in order to wage the war in China that will both bring an end to the cycle of bourgeois warfare and usher in the communist revolution that Marx prescribed.