My report on the Report.

I finished the Report recently. I'm into it. I'd like to post question to you lot: what does Mao mean by the distinction between economic and political? My hunch is that this touches on Tzuchien's question about where capital (and, perhaps, Capital?) is in all this. I'm not entirely sure how to proceed.

These are among the things that Mao listed under "hitting the landlords politically":
"Checking the accounts. Imposing fines. Levying contributions."

Each is about as economic as the things listed under "hitting the landlords economically".

Judging from this, from "hitting the landlords politically",

"Once the peasants have their organization, the first thing they do is (...) to pull down landlord authority and build up peasant authority in rural society. This is a most serious and vital struggle. It is the pivotal struggle in the second period, the period of revolutionary action. Without victory in this struggle, no victory is possible in the economic struggle to reduce rent and interest, to secure land and other means of production, and so on."

It seems to me that the distinction is in large part one of degree, a matter of the scope and consolidation/maintainability of gains. It's also striking that the political struggle is the precondition for the economic struggle. Read in one way, it can be taken to say that the economic is political (against any objectivist marxism). Taken in another way, it does pose a certain type of struggle as having priority over another. My sense is that the political vs economic is an old debate within marxism, and one I'd like to know more about. It may be in part due to my own sort of syndicalist proclivities that I want to call Mao's 'political' at least in part 'economic', but I do simply wonder at the use and nature of the distinction.

One way I thought to try and sort through this is via Schmitt. He's been on my mind, as I'm trying to read get to know his work better. (All quotes are from The Concept Of The Political, 1996 edition.) He writes that "[t]he political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping." (29) In this sense, then, political might be read, minimally, as 'antagonistic'. The economic, then, growing out of the political, would be another instantiation of antagonism. I don't think Mao means (or means only) what Schmitt means, though. I'm not sure.

Also, "a class in the Marxian sense ceases to be someting purely economic and becomes a political factor" when it forges a friend/enemy grouping. (37) This seems at odds with Mao - for Schmitt the progression goes economic grouping then political grouping. But for Mao the political grouping emerges out of economic groupings (rich, middle, poor peasants, with internal divisions in the poor as well). So, the economic grouping become a political grouping and takes (or, perhaps better, in the taking) of political action, which in turn lays the ground for economic action.

Schmitt continues "the real battle is then" - that is, after the forging of a friend/enemy grouping - "no longer fought according to economic laws but has - next to the fighting methods in the narrowest technical sense - its political necessities and orientations, coalitions and compromises, and so on." (37) What it would mean to fight according to economic laws is a bit beyond me (the economic is, to my mind, also political and this includes so-called economic laws).

Perhaps one way to resolve the economic/political distinction would be to say that the political is the decision or the event, only in realtime: that is, it's not instantaneous. The organizing of the peasant associations takes time to get to the point of forging the grouping, and also that forging has a duration. The economic then might be activity after the event/decision is passed. I'm not sure, and again I suspect I'm just reading Schmitt into Mao and that this doesn't explain how Mao meant the terms.

That's what I've got so far. I enjoyed this piece a lot. Let's read more. I'd be particularly keen to read any other investigations of this sort, and anything that may exist on the methodology of investigation. I know Badiou talks about Lazarus making investigations of this sort, but none of those are in English as far as I know (and would be off topic anyway).

a first attempt at reading

It occurs to me that Mao’s piece might be otherwise characterized, contra Althusser’s essay, “how not to read Capital.” Not in the sense that Mao provides a criticism of poor interpretations, but rather that he shows how we might not need to read Capital at all –not the book and certainly (and this is the point) not the phenomenon. Mao simply makes no reference to capital. This is certainly Marxism gone awry.

In its stead, Mao provides an analysis of the inherent capacity to struggle on the part of society. In the “report,” emphasis is not placed on properly “scientific” fields of structural concerns, but rather on the actual subjective fields of struggle, against the landlords, the gentry, against traditional norms and religious belief. Clearly, the struggle against these subjectively rooted forms of alienation require no reference to capital (both the book and the phenomenon).

What made the greatest impact on me is the major theme of the struggle against tradition that Mao outlines as one of the central guiding intuitions of making sense of the peasant’s struggle. The nationalist/anti-imperialist struggle, the “major” political movement of the day, on the part of Sun Yet-Sen and the KMT appears as entirely distant from the actual concerns of the peasants. Mao witnesses some peasants paying lip-service to these questions of “China” and the “Three People’s doctrine,” but they end up being almost a caricature of themselves since even those who think in terms of the nationalist struggle are not actually subjectively engaged in it. What is overwhelmingly present is the strides they have made, the changes that are “closer” to them.

Can there be a communism without the central attention to capital?

If we were to maintain the communist orthodoxy and claim that Mao’s “Report” is a particular aspect of the larger social-political picture, what we would have to maintain is that it is ultimately capital (as Althusser liked to say) “in the last instance” that provides objective mode of causal force. The view is that Mao is simply responding to the “structural effects” of an underlying phenomenon. But, surely this subverts the central basis of Marx’s praxis, in “The German Ideology” the central point was to argue against such claims to false objectivity for what should be of utmost importance to the communist is the actually-lived conditions of the struggle. As such, maybe Mao remains in fidelity to the spirit of Marx but not to the letter.

What emerges to the foreground as capital recedes to the back?

I can’t say for sure, but it seems like Mao ends up paying more attention to those social conditions which manifest themselves, bring themselves to bear in the struggle: patriarchy, the landlord system, legal action.

This heterodoxy indeed reflects some of my own dissatisfaction with Marx himself –to the point where it seems like the analysis of capital appears to be superficial at best. When do we ever encounter capital? We certainly encounter bosses, we certainly encounter cultural forms which alienate –but is the reference to capital necessary?

More on this shortly.

Mark's reaction to the "Report"

Well, I must say that I like this quite a lot, and I think I agree with it pretty much wholesale. One limitation of it is that it is somewhat anecdotal, meaning that it's difficult to ascertain whether Mao's conclusions are empirically correct. Parts are indeed apriori/theoretical. His statement of the relation of landlords' domination to the domination of tribe, cult and patriarchy seems to me underevidenced, for example. I buy the argument that among the poorest women may have more authority through their labour value, but what does this mean in terms of the revolution - how are women to be further liberated?

It seems to me though that Mao is here already developing a Maoist viewpoint which diverges from previous Marxism in seeing the peasantry as revolutionary agents, if requiring a bit of propaganda from conscious types like himself. I think he correctly identifies the power of ideology to arm peasants with the vocabulary to make revolution.

some prelim. notes on the "Report"

The date is March 1927 -which is before the Long March, before Mao is head of the CCP and ... as far as I can gather, Mao wrote this before the Autumm Harvest Uprising in HuNan -which was a disaster and led to Mao's initial decline in the party. The peasant "laboratory" -i suppose we might call it that - however provided the central insight into the future of communism in China.

also note: April '27 was when KMT's purge of the communists began.