1. If we fail to abolish the exploitation and oppression of animals, in addition to people, have we really gotten beyond the ideas of exploitation and oppression?
2. If animals deserve to be oppressed and exploited because of their lower level of intellectual development, then shouldn't also human children or the mentally retarded deserve to be abused (and perhaps even eaten) as well?
3. Would not it benefit the health of the human species to do without the consumption of meat and meat byproducts? (Yes, there are other sources of protein!)
4. Does not the systematic hunting of animals harm the natural balance of global ecosystems?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Amateurism is a Good Thing!
When communists say that they're for establishing a world without definite professions, many people blink. They cannot imagine such a world. In fact, such a world would be altogether antithetical to the reactionary American Dream, which is that of taking someone else's living doing what you love. And you are only supposed to love doing one or a couple particular things, and love them obsessively forever. The American Dream is hence not only a vision of exploitation, but also of a narrow-minded mentality that says "it's best to know a lot about a little". It is very specialized.
Imperialism entrenches a certain division of labor: there are those who survive by doing manual work and others who survive by doing mental work. At the present point, this divide corresponds to whole sections of the world in an overall sense. There are labor-intensive countries, where manual tasks dominate, and capital-intensive countries, where mental tasks dominate. These respectively are the Third World and the First World. The First World populations overwhelmingly enjoy an easy and non-laborious existence at the expense of the Third World populations. They (First Worlders) have lots of access to college education and desk jobs and just generally have lots of leisure time. Third Worlders on the other hand tend to barely get by and tend to overwhelmingly work with their backs tirelessly, 12 hours a day or more very often. They do not generally have access to the same levels of education, leisure time, and sedentary job options that First Worlders do, or even close. It will be an important task of communist revolutionaries to reconcile these distinctions; to abolish the oppressive international division of labor. Yes this means abolishing professions. It means giving the oppressed and exploited the opportunity to engage more fully in mental labors, achieving a balance in the nature of what kinds of work they do. And it means compelling the exploiter populations of the First World to also participate in doing useful, manual work for the planet they inhabit and the people who live therein.
So anyhow, how does one get past professions? Many people have a hard time conceiving of the relaxation of access to certain types of work as a good thing. For instance, many people believe that doctors need to be experts, and thus that only a few people should be doctors. Likewise, many people believe that art is only really art if it is done with the expertise of a professional. Hell, even just with hobbies, there are even First World college students who don't consider people who play video games on a casual basis (that is, the majority of gamers) to be "real gamers" ( ;-) ). Etc.! Legitimacy belongs only to experts in this narrow type of outlook, and things are done better if left exclusively to experts (especially in intellectual fields).
In socialist China, a very different agenda was pursued by the Maoists during and around the time of the Cultural Revolution. This approached aimed to break down what remained of the oppressive division of labor in China. Let us look at what some of the results were:
In Science: “Open-door research” was introduced: research institutes were spread to the countryside and involved peasants; technical laboratories literally opened their doors to workers; and universities set up extension labs in factories and neighborhoods. Popular primers made scientific knowledge available to the masses. The ordinary masses were brought into the field of the natural sciences.
The division of labor was also attacked in various other ways. In the field of education, textbook learning was combined with field work to give students a more rounded picture of the world. In the workplaces, professional management was replaced by various alternatives at various points (some more contrived and limited than others). The most progressive of these gave ordinary working people decision-making authority in their workplaces and required that former professional managers spend time in production. In the military, rank insignia was abolished and a campaign launched to combat officer caste mentality. China's People's Liberation Army members were also expected to help the general working population out with the tasks of production. Society was made more equitable all around in these and other ways.
Contemporary communists, that is Leading Light Communists, are not afraid of de-specialization. It brings with it not only greater equality in society and not only the freedom to engage in all sorts of fields of endeavor without being confined to a particular one, but also superior results in terms of the betterment of the human condition.
Sources of stats:
1. http://revcom.us/a/139/STRS-en.html
2. http://revcom.us/a/141/Mao_true-story-pt2-en.html
Imperialism entrenches a certain division of labor: there are those who survive by doing manual work and others who survive by doing mental work. At the present point, this divide corresponds to whole sections of the world in an overall sense. There are labor-intensive countries, where manual tasks dominate, and capital-intensive countries, where mental tasks dominate. These respectively are the Third World and the First World. The First World populations overwhelmingly enjoy an easy and non-laborious existence at the expense of the Third World populations. They (First Worlders) have lots of access to college education and desk jobs and just generally have lots of leisure time. Third Worlders on the other hand tend to barely get by and tend to overwhelmingly work with their backs tirelessly, 12 hours a day or more very often. They do not generally have access to the same levels of education, leisure time, and sedentary job options that First Worlders do, or even close. It will be an important task of communist revolutionaries to reconcile these distinctions; to abolish the oppressive international division of labor. Yes this means abolishing professions. It means giving the oppressed and exploited the opportunity to engage more fully in mental labors, achieving a balance in the nature of what kinds of work they do. And it means compelling the exploiter populations of the First World to also participate in doing useful, manual work for the planet they inhabit and the people who live therein.
So anyhow, how does one get past professions? Many people have a hard time conceiving of the relaxation of access to certain types of work as a good thing. For instance, many people believe that doctors need to be experts, and thus that only a few people should be doctors. Likewise, many people believe that art is only really art if it is done with the expertise of a professional. Hell, even just with hobbies, there are even First World college students who don't consider people who play video games on a casual basis (that is, the majority of gamers) to be "real gamers" ( ;-) ). Etc.! Legitimacy belongs only to experts in this narrow type of outlook, and things are done better if left exclusively to experts (especially in intellectual fields).
In socialist China, a very different agenda was pursued by the Maoists during and around the time of the Cultural Revolution. This approached aimed to break down what remained of the oppressive division of labor in China. Let us look at what some of the results were:
In Health Care: In 1949, China only had 12,000 Western-trained doctors for a country of some 500 million. By 1965, there were 200,000, but most of the medical care was still concentrated in the cities! This in a country that was still overwhelmingly rural! New doctors were encouraged to work at elite urban hospitals, and to focus on making a career for themselves. Meanwhile, most peasants—the vast majority of China’s population—had little or no access to modern medical care. Such an approach to health care could only help to widen inequalities in society and strengthen the influence of capitalist tendencies.
Mao and those who rallied to his line sharply criticized the direction being taken by the Health Ministry, calling for radical transformations. Under his leadership, the focus of health care shifted to the countryside, even as overall health care improved in the cities. One of the most exciting developments of the Cultural Revolution was the “barefoot doctor” movement. Young peasants and urban youth were sent to the countryside and briefly trained in basic health care and medicine geared to meet local needs and treat the most common illnesses. And doctors went to rural areas—at any given time, a third of the urban doctors were in the countryside. Life expectancy during the period of Mao’s leadership doubled from 32 years in 1949 to 65 years in 1976. The policy shift on health care spoken to here played a big role in producing that impressive result! By the time of Mao's death, some 90% of China's population had access to basic medical care. Following the termination of the "barefoot doctors" program in 1981, it took only a few short years for that percentage to plummet to just 5%. Even the World Health Organization has been forced to concede that the "barefoot doctors" program was a genuine success. This is one excellent example of how learning a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little is actually a superior course. It produced many more doctors for China, thus radically increasing access to basic medical care and improving the life expectancy of the population in a big way.
In Science: “Open-door research” was introduced: research institutes were spread to the countryside and involved peasants; technical laboratories literally opened their doors to workers; and universities set up extension labs in factories and neighborhoods. Popular primers made scientific knowledge available to the masses. The ordinary masses were brought into the field of the natural sciences.
The division of labor was also attacked in various other ways. In the field of education, textbook learning was combined with field work to give students a more rounded picture of the world. In the workplaces, professional management was replaced by various alternatives at various points (some more contrived and limited than others). The most progressive of these gave ordinary working people decision-making authority in their workplaces and required that former professional managers spend time in production. In the military, rank insignia was abolished and a campaign launched to combat officer caste mentality. China's People's Liberation Army members were also expected to help the general working population out with the tasks of production. Society was made more equitable all around in these and other ways.
Contemporary communists, that is Leading Light Communists, are not afraid of de-specialization. It brings with it not only greater equality in society and not only the freedom to engage in all sorts of fields of endeavor without being confined to a particular one, but also superior results in terms of the betterment of the human condition.
Sources of stats:
1. http://revcom.us/a/139/STRS-en.html
2. http://revcom.us/a/141/Mao_true-story-pt2-en.html
Monday, May 30, 2011
What is Maoism?
Earlier I sought to lay out some basics of Marxism and Leninism, and I have already, in many posts, begun introducing the reader to the fourth stage of the communist science, Leading Light Communism. But it occurs to me that I never completed my previously-announced task fully. I have not yet introduced the reader to the basics of classical Maoism. This post will be dedicated to that subject. I will break its distinctive aspects down.
THE TWO "ROOTS" OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. Continual Revolution. Maoists rejected the concept of the "negation of the negation", thus embracing the reality of endless contradictions. Even communist society features contradictions, just not antagonistic ones. Getting from here to a communist world means making revolution, both immediately and at every stage between here and there. It does not mean something else.
2. The Mass Line. This entails two principles that operate simultaneously in a back-and-forth relationship: leading the people in revolution and learning from the people. Communists bring to the oppressed and exploited masses of the world the scientific perspective of communism (authentic communism, that is) in order to give their progressive struggles against oppression and exploitation a radical direction. But it is also not simply a matter of bringing the masses 'our views' from without. It is also a matter of being among the masses in their struggles against oppression and exploitation, listening to their demands, and orienting our strategies to meet their needs. The important thing of the mass line is the understanding that the people are the principal revolutionary weapon in your arsenal. You must depend on the masses to make their revolution. You cannot make it for them or simply wield them as instruments. You instead must guide the masses in their struggles in an overall sense, while learning their needs and genuinely listening to their perspectives. You synthesize the resultant lessons in an ongoing way, thereby continually refining the communist science itself. This orientation, if applied correctly, yields continual advances in both communist theory and revolutionary practice. The purpose of communist revolution is to service the needs of the world's oppressed and exploited masses. (Leading Light Communists understand that this means the Third World masses, not the exploiter First World populations.)
These two principles are the most elementary to Maoism. All other aspects of Maoist theory are built on the above two foundations: the foundations of ongoing revolutionary struggle through mass mobilization for the purpose of meeting the needs of the oppressed and exploited. These two principles are concentrated in many other Maoist formulations, such as "people's war", "cultural revolution", etc.
THE MAOIST PATH TO COMMUNISM BROADLY:
Mao described the path to communism as the process of abolishing the 4 Alls: 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative economic relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all corresponding ideas. The Maoist principle of continual revolution holds that these are all actionable principles (as in not just the natural result of economic development), and the mass line concept contends that the masses must be mobilized to accomplish all these objectives for themselves.
THE THREE "BRANCHES" (i.e. SPECIFICS) OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. People's War and New Democratic Revolution. People's war is a revolutionary war led by a proletarian vanguard party that operates according to the principles of the mass line. Its objective is democratic revolution of a new sort; a revolution that establishes proletarian democracy, not capitalist democracy. Maoists have conceived of this as being concentrated in the objective of establishing a people's republic as the first objective in the struggle to get to a communist world. A people's republic is a coalition government consisting of parties corresponding to all the progressive sections of society (all the oppressed and exploited masses), led by the vanguard party of the proletariat: the most oppressed class in society. Accordingly, succeeding in people's war entails working in a nuanced way with a block of 4 progressive classes: 1) the proletariat, 2) the peasantry, 3) the various middle strata, and 4) the anti-imperialist Third World bourgeoisie. This block of classes unites around the common objective of achieving Third World development. The contradictions within this block of classes may be apparent, but they are also non-antagonistic ones that can be resolved in peaceful ways. Accordingly, the Maoist conception of the transition to socialism entails, for example, buying out the Third World anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and integrating them into the regular workforce rather than treating them in a hostile way, like by forcibly expropriating them and shipping them off to forced work camps. Traditionally, Maoists were in agreement that this path was appropriate at least for Third World nations, while some held that people's war was a universally applicable principle. Among the Chinese Maoists, Lin Biao went as far as to theorize that the world proletarian revolution should take the form of a single, worldwide people's war fought by the oppressed peoples of the Third World against the First World. Leading Light Communists embrace a strategy essentially similar to Lin Biao's. New democratic revolution opens the door to socialism by sweeping away imperialism and feudalism.
2. Collectivization of Life as the Path to Communism. Maoists do not embrace the Soviet model of socialist development, which centered on the state-ification of society and a developmental focus on heavy industry. Maoists instead embrace a balanced, all-around approach to economic development (i.e. simultaneous development of light and heavy industry, of city and countryside) achieved through the collectivization of life. Continual collectivization is understood as being compatible with the eventual abolition of the state altogether. It is the bridge between socialism and communism. The masses must come to run society for themselves directly, and this must be an actionable principle (not simply 'the natural result of economic development').
3. Cultural Revolution. The cultural life of society must be transformed through mass mobilization as well. This is particularly essential to prevent counterrevolution. A proletarian culture must flourish under socialism.
THE TWO "ROOTS" OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. Continual Revolution. Maoists rejected the concept of the "negation of the negation", thus embracing the reality of endless contradictions. Even communist society features contradictions, just not antagonistic ones. Getting from here to a communist world means making revolution, both immediately and at every stage between here and there. It does not mean something else.
2. The Mass Line. This entails two principles that operate simultaneously in a back-and-forth relationship: leading the people in revolution and learning from the people. Communists bring to the oppressed and exploited masses of the world the scientific perspective of communism (authentic communism, that is) in order to give their progressive struggles against oppression and exploitation a radical direction. But it is also not simply a matter of bringing the masses 'our views' from without. It is also a matter of being among the masses in their struggles against oppression and exploitation, listening to their demands, and orienting our strategies to meet their needs. The important thing of the mass line is the understanding that the people are the principal revolutionary weapon in your arsenal. You must depend on the masses to make their revolution. You cannot make it for them or simply wield them as instruments. You instead must guide the masses in their struggles in an overall sense, while learning their needs and genuinely listening to their perspectives. You synthesize the resultant lessons in an ongoing way, thereby continually refining the communist science itself. This orientation, if applied correctly, yields continual advances in both communist theory and revolutionary practice. The purpose of communist revolution is to service the needs of the world's oppressed and exploited masses. (Leading Light Communists understand that this means the Third World masses, not the exploiter First World populations.)
These two principles are the most elementary to Maoism. All other aspects of Maoist theory are built on the above two foundations: the foundations of ongoing revolutionary struggle through mass mobilization for the purpose of meeting the needs of the oppressed and exploited. These two principles are concentrated in many other Maoist formulations, such as "people's war", "cultural revolution", etc.
THE MAOIST PATH TO COMMUNISM BROADLY:
Mao described the path to communism as the process of abolishing the 4 Alls: 1) all class distinctions, 2) all exploitative economic relations, 3) all oppressive social relations, and 4) all corresponding ideas. The Maoist principle of continual revolution holds that these are all actionable principles (as in not just the natural result of economic development), and the mass line concept contends that the masses must be mobilized to accomplish all these objectives for themselves.
THE THREE "BRANCHES" (i.e. SPECIFICS) OF MAOIST THEORY:
1. People's War and New Democratic Revolution. People's war is a revolutionary war led by a proletarian vanguard party that operates according to the principles of the mass line. Its objective is democratic revolution of a new sort; a revolution that establishes proletarian democracy, not capitalist democracy. Maoists have conceived of this as being concentrated in the objective of establishing a people's republic as the first objective in the struggle to get to a communist world. A people's republic is a coalition government consisting of parties corresponding to all the progressive sections of society (all the oppressed and exploited masses), led by the vanguard party of the proletariat: the most oppressed class in society. Accordingly, succeeding in people's war entails working in a nuanced way with a block of 4 progressive classes: 1) the proletariat, 2) the peasantry, 3) the various middle strata, and 4) the anti-imperialist Third World bourgeoisie. This block of classes unites around the common objective of achieving Third World development. The contradictions within this block of classes may be apparent, but they are also non-antagonistic ones that can be resolved in peaceful ways. Accordingly, the Maoist conception of the transition to socialism entails, for example, buying out the Third World anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and integrating them into the regular workforce rather than treating them in a hostile way, like by forcibly expropriating them and shipping them off to forced work camps. Traditionally, Maoists were in agreement that this path was appropriate at least for Third World nations, while some held that people's war was a universally applicable principle. Among the Chinese Maoists, Lin Biao went as far as to theorize that the world proletarian revolution should take the form of a single, worldwide people's war fought by the oppressed peoples of the Third World against the First World. Leading Light Communists embrace a strategy essentially similar to Lin Biao's. New democratic revolution opens the door to socialism by sweeping away imperialism and feudalism.
2. Collectivization of Life as the Path to Communism. Maoists do not embrace the Soviet model of socialist development, which centered on the state-ification of society and a developmental focus on heavy industry. Maoists instead embrace a balanced, all-around approach to economic development (i.e. simultaneous development of light and heavy industry, of city and countryside) achieved through the collectivization of life. Continual collectivization is understood as being compatible with the eventual abolition of the state altogether. It is the bridge between socialism and communism. The masses must come to run society for themselves directly, and this must be an actionable principle (not simply 'the natural result of economic development').
3. Cultural Revolution. The cultural life of society must be transformed through mass mobilization as well. This is particularly essential to prevent counterrevolution. A proletarian culture must flourish under socialism.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)