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.