The English title is a softening. On the Russian title page this book is a Kritika — a critique — and Progress turned that into the mild, descriptive The Philosophical Views of Mao Tse-tung, with the polemic demoted to a subtitle. Nothing else about the volume is mild. Two named authors, M. Altaisky and V. Georgiyev, in five chapters and about 62,000 words, set out to prove that Mao Tse-tung never held a dialectical-materialist position at all, that the Marxist vocabulary in his writings is an "extraneous element" imported from outside, and — this is the sharp end — that his two celebrated philosophical essays were not written when they say they were.
Establish the date first, because for once it is not the usual story. Most Progress translations trail their Russian originals by years. This one does not. The last events the text can see are the 24th Congress of the CPSU, held in Moscow in the spring of 1971, which is quoted from Brezhnev's Central Committee report and its closing resolution; and a footnote to joint Chinese newspaper articles on the centenary of the Paris Commune and the fiftieth anniversary of the CPC, "celebrated in March and June 1971." The Russian text therefore closed in the middle of 1971 and Bryan Bean's translation came out the same year. That is a fast commission, and the speed tells you what it was for. This is Soviet philosophy hurried into English while the ideological quarrel with Peking was at its loudest and before Nixon's visit changed the terms of it.
It also matters that this book comes first. The larger collective volume in this series, A Critique of Mao Tse-tung's Theoretical Conceptions, edited by Konstantinov and Sladkovsky, appeared in 1972 and carried the same central philological finding. A V. G. Georgiyev is among its nine named contributors, credited with the philosophy sections. Whatever the exact relation between the two men, the argument that Western readers met in the 1972 collective book was published here, under two names, a year earlier and in considerably more detail. On the evidence, this is where it originates.
The finding is worth stating plainly, because it is the most valuable thing in the volume and it is correct. In 1937 Mao delivered lectures on philosophy at Yenan. Part of them appeared in the Shanghai journal Min-chu in 1940 under the title "Dialectical Materialism"; a fuller text, without the author's name, was issued by the Ta-chung shu-tien firm in Talien at some point between 1945 and 1949. Altaisky and Georgiyev reproduce that pamphlet's table of contents and then report what comparison shows: "A detailed analysis of the text revealed that it was based entirely on two Soviet works" — the textbook Dialectical Materialism (Moscow 1933, general editor M. Mitin) and the article of the same name in volume 22 of the first edition of the Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopedia. The verdict follows: "Mao Tse-tung's pamphlet is really no more than a recapitulation of these two works. Whole passages have been 'lifted' wholesale, with little or no change." Elsewhere they specify that in it Mao "repeats, practically word for word, whole passages from Mitin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism."
This holds up. Western scholarship arrived independently at the same conclusion two decades later; Nick Knight's edition of the 1937 lecture notes, Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism (1990), documents the dependence on Soviet textbook material in detail. And the authors are scrupulous enough to quote Mao's own disclaimer from the pamphlet: "This course of lectures of mine cannot be considered good either, since I myself have only just begun studying the dialectic and am not capable of writing a good book. . . ." They are also fair enough to record that what Mao took was accurate — "Mao Tse-tung is merely retelling in Chinese the correct theses contained in Soviet works" — before arguing that he vulgarised it. That is how textual criticism should be done.
On the dating of "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" they are more careful than the 1972 volume, which simply asserted the essays were written in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here the claim is hedged — "the hypothesis is now being advanced with ever greater insistence from many quarters that these works belong to a later period and have simply been back-dated" — and then supported by four numbered facts. The essays appear on no reading list issued during the rectification campaign of 1941–45, although they were supposedly written precisely to correct the deviations that campaign attacked. The Yenan newspaper Jiefang jih-pao does not mention them. They are absent from the Selected Works published in 1945 and 1947. And in 1951, when Chen Po-ta and Hu Chiao-mu wrote book-length celebrations of Mao as a theoretician for the Party's thirtieth anniversary, neither "makes any mention of 'the great philosophical works of Mao Tse-tung'." The authors' own summary — "We are dealing with what must have originally been some extremely raw and immature material for lectures delivered by Mao Tse-tung at Yenan" — is close to where the scholarship has settled. The 1937 lecture material is real; the Selected Works texts of 1951–52 are substantially reworked versions of it, and the difference between them is not trivial. An argument from silence is not proof, and these four silences do not establish that nothing was written in 1937. They do establish that whatever was written was not thought worth reprinting for fourteen years, which is the point that actually damages the cult.
Now the difficulty, and it arrives through the footnotes.
The yardstick against which Mao's borrowings are measured is a Soviet textbook of 1933 produced under the direction of Mark Mitin. Mitin was not a neutral instrument. He was the man who, with Stalin's personal backing, had just finished destroying Soviet philosophy as an independent discipline in the campaign of 1930–31 against Abram Deborin and the "Menshevising idealists" — a campaign that ended academic philosophical debate in the Soviet Union for a generation. Deborin himself survived. Jan Sten, who had tutored Stalin in Hegel, was shot in 1937. Mitin prospered, and the textbook that resulted is here presented, without qualification, as the standard of Marxist correctness that Mao failed to meet.
The authors know about the campaign. Deborin's name appears in this book exactly once, and in a revealing way. Discussing Mao's attacks on "Deborin's idealism" among Chinese Communists, they write that "the politico-philosophical errors of the Deborin group could not possibly have any bearing on China, since the CPC cadres were, for objective reasons, far removed from philosophical debates in the USSR," and conclude that Mao invoked Deborin as an alibi for liquidating internationalists. That is probably true. But the sentence assumes as settled what it never states: that there were errors, that they were Deborin's, and that the matter was closed. What the "philosophical debates in the USSR" of 1930–31 actually consisted of, and who won them and how, is not described anywhere in this book about the political abuse of philosophy.
There is a smaller symptom of the same discomfort, and it sits at the exact pivot of the argument. The measuring text is given three different identities in three places: the "text-book Dialectical Materialism (Moscow 1933, general editor M. Mitin)"; "Mitin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism, published in the USSR in 1933"; and a footnote reading "Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Part I ('Dialectical Materialism'), Moscow, 1935." A book that convicts Mao of imprecision might have been more precise about the volume it convicts him against — particularly given that Dialectical and Historical Materialism is also, and far more famously, the title of Stalin's own 1938 essay, the philosophical chapter of the Short Course, which for a generation of communists from Prague to Peking simply was Marxism. Stalin's essay is not cited, discussed or mentioned anywhere in this volume.
Stalin's name appears about a dozen times in 62,000 words. Every instance is of the same kind: Mao read The Foundations of Leninism; Mao's quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin were derived from Stalin's works; Mao is "fond of quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin"; Lin Piao says Mao is higher than Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin; Mao privately called Stalin a metaphysician. Stalin figures as a source Mao mined and a name Mao exploited. He never once figures as a person who did anything in the Soviet Union. There is nothing here about 1936–38.
That absence does specific damage in the Conclusion. The authors' final charge against Maoism is the doctrine of intensifying class struggle: "Lenin pointed out that the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is waged at the stage when socialism has not yet been built... the Maoists assert that the class struggle continues after the triumph of socialism, in socialist society"; "the Maoists maintain that the class struggle becomes more and more fiercer as society advances from capitalism to communism." The correction offered is sound Leninism. It is also, word for word, the repudiation of Stalin's thesis of 1937 — that the nearer socialism comes the fiercer the resistance of the defeated classes — which was the theoretical licence for the Terror. A reader in London or Milan is left to suppose Mao invented it.
So: is voluntarism a charge the accusers' own tradition can survive?
Take the charge seriously first, because it is not empty. The authors list Mao's postulates crisply — "production relations and not the productive forces play the major role in the socialist mode of production; politics and not economics are the ruling factor in socialist society; moral impulses and not material interest are the main factor in building socialism; men and not weapons decide the outcome of a war" — and read them as "an attempt to subject the objective laws of socialist construction to the subjective activities of the leadership." The distinction they draw is the right one: the Maoists mean by subjective activity "not... the purposeful activity of the masses, based on knowledge of the laws of social development, but... their activity to implement the designs of their leaders." They pursue Mao's image of the Chinese people as a blank sheet — "the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it" — to the correct conclusion: "It is mistrust of the masses, mockery of the masses." Their handling of the Great Leap and the people's communes as an attempt "to improve artificially the relations of production" is accurate and was, in 1971, still an uncomfortable thing for anyone on the left to hear said out loud.
Their method is better than the 1972 volume's, too, and this deserves crediting. Where the Konstantinov book sourced its gravest charges to other Soviet publications, this one works from Chinese material: the Talien pamphlet, a Peking philosophy manual of 1961, the Academy of Sciences review Hsin-chian She for 1965, Hungchih, Jiefangjun pao, Red Guard compilations of Mao's closed speeches. When they date the campaign for the "theory of subjective activity" to 1958–59 and observe that the philosophical case for will over conditions was constructed exactly as the Great Leap was failing, they are doing real historical work, and they say so as a principle: Maoist distortions can be found "by finding out when, in what circumstances, and for what reason, they choose to stress a particular proposition."
Apply that principle to this book and it answers the question. The volume's own best witness is a Chinese philosopher, Yang Hsien-chen, introduced in a footnote as a man who "criticised Mao Tse-tung's voluntarist views, declaring them to be subjective idealism and neoMachism," and who for it was subjected to a persecution campaign from 1959 to 1962 and declared a revisionist in 1964. Soviet philosophers had done the same thing thirty years earlier and been dealt with more finally. The authors cite Yang's fate as evidence against Mao without a flicker of recognition, and it is the same flicker missing from the Deborin paragraph, the Mitin footnote and the closing pages on class struggle.
The reply had already been written, and it answers this book two years before it was published. In Intercontinental Press vol. 7 no. 36, 3 November 1969, under the heading "Trotskyism in Peking? A Moscow 'Theoretician' Exposes Maoism," M. R. Whitney went through an Izvestia article by Fyodor Burlatsky that had been circulated in English by the Soviet embassy in London. The overlap with Altaisky and Georgiyev's Conclusion is not general but textual: Burlatsky's "military-bureaucratic dictatorship" and his gloss that the Maoist slogan of purging the party of capitalist-roaders "in reality means destroying the opponents of the personal dictatorship of Mao and Maoism" recur here almost word for word, as does the same quotation from Lin Piao on final victory in one country, followed by the same conclusion — that this was "the thesis with which the Trotskyites attacked Leninism" and pushed the Soviet Union "along the slippery path of adventures and provocations." Whitney made two observations about that formulary. First, on Burlatsky's use of the "notorious thesis of the 'continuous' sharpening of the class struggle": "He does not mention that the author of this thesis was Stalin, and that it has never been officially repudiated by his own government." Second, on the charge sheet itself: "There is an obvious contradiction between labeling the Maoists 'nationalists' and labeling them 'Trotskyists,' and Burlatsky can't have it both ways. Which are they?" Altaisky and Georgiyev cannot either. Their Mao is a "hidebound chauvinist suffering from megalomania" whose deviations are those of "petty-bourgeois illusions about socialism, the 'guerrilla habit', populism and neo-Trotskyism" — nationalist and internationalist adventurer at once, in the same sentence.
The book also states that "the leaders of the Trotskyite Fourth International have been increasingly active champions and 'volunteer' propagandists of 'the thoughts of Mao'." This is checkable and it is false. In the July 1971 issues of Intercontinental Press — the months in which this text closed — Joseph Hansen was writing of "The Dupes of Maoism" that "the ultraleft language of 'Mao Tsetung Thought' bolstered this false interpretation," and that "Like Stalin, Mao represents a bureaucratic caste... Its chief characteristic is that it places its own narrow, nationalistic interests above the interests of the world revolution" (vol. 9 no. 29, 26 July 1971). A year earlier, at the University of Rome launch of Livio Maitan's book on the Cultural Revolution, the criticism from the floor was that the Maoists had "indulged in full-fledged obscurantism, making a dogma and cult of Mao's thought" (Intercontinental Press vol. 8 no. 11, 23 March 1970). As for the underlying claim that Trotskyism and Maoism converge on the peasantry, the text is available: in The Third International After Lenin (1928), chapter III, on the Chinese revolution, Trotsky's argument is precisely that "the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian." One may think him wrong. One cannot have him agreeing with Mao.
What, then, should a reader take from this volume? Chapter I, on the composition and dating of Mao's philosophical writings, which is the best short piece of textual detective work Soviet sinology sent abroad in these years and was vindicated by later Western scholarship. The section "Antagonism in Lieu of Contradiction" in Chapter IV, where the reading of On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People — that Mao replaced antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions with contradictions between ourselves and the enemy and among the people, and put the working class and the national bourgeoisie inside the second — is accurate, and the objection that this is a right-opportunist move rather than an ultra-left one is a fair one, however awkwardly it sits beside the rest of the indictment. And the Chinese-language sourcing throughout, which is genuine expertise and not available in English from many other places in 1971.
The rest is a demonstration of its own thesis. Altaisky and Georgiyev show, competently and from the documents, that a leader's early notes were back-dated, retouched and turned into scripture; that his followers made the practice of millions into obedience to one man's design; and that the philosophy which justified this was a popularisation of Soviet textbooks with the qualifications removed. Every element of that description had a Soviet original, and the textbook they measure Mao against was itself the product of a purge. They can see the mechanism perfectly. They cannot see where they are standing.