The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (161 page)

A document in which a political party sets out the programme it proposes to follow if returned to office. The document may reflect compromises between different party groupings, rather than an agreed programme of action.
WG 

 
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The turning of a situation to advantage. Specifically, use of procedural devices such as changing the order of the agenda or the voting rules, or introducing new proposals not for their merits but to split an otherwise winning coalition.

 
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(1893–1947)
Hungarian sociologist who made an important contribution to the sociology of knowledge, starting with his widely read
Ideology and Utopia
(1929). Like
Marx
before him, Mannheim wanted to relate systems of belief and ‘states of mind’ which emerged in particular historical periods to the socio-economic and political conditions which seemed to stimulate and sustain them. But he differed from Marx in that he considered
utopianism
to be a forward-looking, visionary tendency which was capable of breaking out of the constraints of the existing social order, and could thus point to the possibility of real change and transformation in the historical process. Thus Mannheim could identify a positive utopian element in
Marxism
itself, whereas Marx considered ‘utopian’ to mean unscientific and incapable of producing real change in society. Similarly Mannheim rejected Marx's conclusion that proletarian consciousness is in some respects closer to the truth than is bourgeois consciousness: for Mannheim all social classes adhere to belief systems which are rooted in their own limited experience, and this must necessarily include working-class beliefs. Mannheim considered an
ideology
to be any system of ideas firmly rooted within the confines of existing reality, and which basically expressed an acceptance of that which exists and a failure to see beyond that reality. Thus, for him the modern socialist tradition (including Marxism) must be considered highly utopian rather than narrowly ideological. Mannheim sought to develop an analysis of the link between systems of belief and the distinctive social groups which, at different times, embrace and promulgate those beliefs. He proceeded to argue that it was the task of social scientists to transcend the battleground of ideologies and utopias, and produce a more neutral and objective set of social principles which could help produce a free but also rationally planned society based on a true science of politics. This suggested a prominent role for intellectuals in society—a view which many critics of Mannheim have considered to be dangerously illiberal in its implications.
KT 

 
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(1893–1976)
Leader of the Communist Party of China from 1934 until his death in September 1976 and Marxist theorist, Mao is now remembered primarily for his two greatest mass-mobilization campaigns, the
Great Leap Forward
of 1958, and the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution
of 1965, both of which were disastrous failures. The first ended with one of the greatest famines in human history, the second deteriorated into bloody chaos. Yet it is not enough to write off ‘the thought of Mao Zedong’ as perverse or without substance. These two linked movements began from rational and intelligent attempts to create a humane and to some extent democratic alternative to Stalinism.
Mao was born in Hunan in 1893, into a family of prosperous and enterprising farmers. By the time he reached his majority, China was plunged into the chaos which succeeded the fall of the imperial system in 1912, and at the same time plunged into a desperate revaluation of Chinese society and traditions. After some vicissitudes he succeeded in entering one of China's new colleges as a mature student. There he came under the influence of the teacher Yang Changji ( see
Chinese political thought
) who had been educated in Germany and in Scotland and had created a philosophy combining elements of Western and Chinese thought. The main Western influences on Yang were
Kant
, T. H. Green , and the Scottish empiricists, and his philosophy stressed the importance for society of individual development in conditions of freedom. Through his teaching, Mao became passionately committed (like the young Marx ) to this form of individualism, and to a belief in the power of consciousness in motivating action. At this time he had read little or no Marxism, but he had been introduced to socialist ideas through the translation of Thomas Kirkupp's
History of Socialism
, which discusses the two alternative forms of socialism, the
étatist
and the communal. Mao read it ‘with wild enthusiasm’, and like most of his contemporaries agreed with Kirkupp in approving the communal alternative; indeed the characteristics of Mao's 1958 communes were largely those of the ideal socialist community which Kirkupp describes.
It was warlordism rather than capitalism which turned Mao into a revolutionary and a Marxist; and it was the possibility of uniting China through the mobilization of the masses by means of a Leninist cadre party which clearly attracted him. He worked briefly in the library of Beijing University, where the librarian Li Dazhao had just founded a Marxist group. From Li, Mao's ideas of the importance of consciousness were confirmed, and from then on his concept of leadership stressed the creation of consciousness rather than organization. This was at once the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of his thought.
In 1924 Sun Yatsen invited China's new Communist Party to join a
United Front
against the warlords, turning to the Soviet Union for the help which the West refused. Mao was more enthusiastic about this alliance than many of his fellow communists. With Soviet help Sun's successor Chiang Kaishek defeated the warlords and restored a semblance of unity to the country; but he then repudiated his communist allies in a bloody coup in 1927. Mao had already been arguing within the alliance for the importance of the peasants in the revolution (China's industrial proletariat was then minuscule). Chiang's coup, rather than Mao's eloquence, persuaded the Communist Party of China of this; driven into the hills, they had no option but to depend on the peasantry, and Mao set about creating the Jiangxi Soviet, a revolutionary rural state within the state. This was destroyed in 1934, but a new base was found in north-west China. Soon it was involved in guerrilla resistance to the invading Japanese, in a renewed United Front with Chiang's nationalists. There, Mao's ideas were further developed in the course of attempting to develop the wartime economy of this poor region. He repudiated the forced co-operatives created by his fellow leaders and turned for help to the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives, a non-communist movement which sought to bring appropriate technology to the villages. In these simple, democratic, and often dynamic institutions Mao found the concrete form of his communal socialism.
Guerrilla warfare depended upon popular support. Mao opposed all attempts by his fellow leaders to force ideologically inspired policies upon the peasants, and in opposing them developed his mass-line theory of leadership, a process of mutual education between leaders and led. The close relation in Mao's mind between Marxist knowledge and mass-line action is shown in his summary of the meaning of the mass line: ‘In the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses to the masses”. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study, turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital, and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge’ (
Selected Works
, iii. 119; in
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung
(English translation of Mao's
Little Red Book
, 128–9).
In power after 1949, however, Mao's experience was not unlike that of Lenin: sincerely, indeed passionately, devoted to the idea of communal socialism, he found himself building the
étatist
alternative. Lenin died early, but Mao lived to launch his protest against the system he had helped to create. In a series of speeches and documents he condemned Stalinism, on six grounds. (1) It was counterproductive to impoverish the peasants in order to build industry: ‘this is draining the pond to catch the fish’. (2) The high priority given to the development of heavy industry was also counterproductive: ‘if you are really serious about developing heavy industry, you will give priority to agriculture and light industry’. (3) Stalin's command economy offered no place for popular participation and popular initiative: accumulation and investment spring not from the communities' consciousness of new possibilities but from state coercion, and accumulation was therefore severely limited. (4) Stalin argued that in socialist society there were no contradictions: Mao argued that contradictions continued, including contradictions between the people and the government, and he also argued that to deny and suppress such conflict was to ‘abolish politics’, and so to abolish progress, for contradiction is the motive force of progress. (5) His fifth point arose from the fourth: that a socialist society cannot stop merely at the nationalization of the means of production and treat the first institutions thus created as if they were permanent. These institutions are only the beginning, and they are not in themselves socialist: ‘there is still a process to be gone through…there is work to do’, to create new and truly socialist relations of production. (6) The way to overcome all these faults is to decentralize decision-making as far as possible to the local communities; the job of socialist planners will then be to respond to community initiatives, not to dictate from above.
Thus Mao's mass line developed into a specific strategy of economic development and social change, expressed in the Great Leap and the communes. It would be a mistake (and one often made), however, to see these new policies as something created by one man. The economic ideas involved—the use of rural surplus to create new infrastructure and to develop local industry, in a framework of ‘integrated development’—were fashionable among Western development economists at that time. In a wider sense, Mao's ideas of the relations between centralized and local development and between agriculture and industry go back to
Bukharin
. His resistance to the fossilization of Soviet institutions echoes
Kautsky
, whom Mao read in his youth. And behind the whole complex of ideas there undoubtedly lies the affirmation of the seventeenth-century philosopher and patriot guerrilla leader Gu Yanwu (whose works Mao had read as an undergraduate) that ‘China is at her weakest when the central government is strongest, and at her strongest when her local communities are strong’.
There was one more idea behind the movement. The Chinese word ‘commune’ is a neologism invented expressly to refer to the Paris
Commune
in which Marx and Engels saw the adumbration of a socialist society which would replace the bourgeois state. Mao undoubtedly had the precedent of the Paris Commune in mind. This becomes explicit when in 1965 Mao launched his second movement, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; this time the enemy was not Stalin but his successors. Mao called them revisionists, but his hostility to them was not that they had repudiated Stalinism (he had done that himself), but that they had merely confirmed the Stalinist rulers and managers in their power by adding profit to political authority. Mao turned on his fellow leaders who favoured such reforms. He said that ‘the officials of China are a class, and one whose interests are antagonistic to those of the workers and peasants’. His protests had gone unregarded. His supporters could not publish or teach. So in 1965 he launched the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution failed, as the Great Leap had failed. In the case of the Leap Mao tried to run a movement which could only have succeeded if carried through democratically; an authoritarian party could not succeed. The Cultural Revolution failed because at the critical point Mao refused to dispense with the vanguard party, which he identified with Yang Changji's conscious élite which was to create consciousness among the masses.
JG