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Works of Maoism #17
Fundamentals of Political Economy
Can a socialist planned economy work, and work in a way that leads away from the exploitation, inequality, and greed of capitalism? The defenders of capitalism say no. But Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism, a pathbreaking book about the Maoist experience from 1949 to 1976, in which one quarter of humanity transformed an economy, a society, and themselves through socialist revolution…A visionary work written by Maoist forces during the Cultural Revolution that the present rulers of China have suppressed…A valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion and debate about the nature, purposes, and feasibility of a planned socialist economy…A book for all who dream of and struggle for a new world.
“In an era shocked by the collapse of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, it is encouraging to be reminded of socialism’s success in China’s revolutionary phase and this study sets out, luckily and confidently, the theory which successful practice expressed. It throws light not only back on how China developed before the great reversal there, but may conceivably also throw light forward.”
NEVILLE MAXWELL
Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
“This is a volume of historical importance published by Mao’s supporters during the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. The text advances many crucial as well as controversial themes about the task of socialist construction and the dangers of capitalist restoration in post-revolutionary societies. This is an ‘inside’ source focusing on ideological debates of theoretical significance. One certainly need not agree with particular views in this volume-for instance, the applicability of the law of value to socialist society-to appreciate its systematic treatment of the issues. A must for students of political economy and Chinese studies.”
CYRUS BINA
Political Economist and Research Fellow
CMES, Harvard University
“In an era shocked by the collapse of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, it is encouraging to be reminded of socialism’s success in China’s revolutionary phase and this study sets out, luckily and confidently, the theory which successful practice expressed. It throws light not only back on how China developed before the great reversal there, but may conceivably also throw light forward.”
NEVILLE MAXWELL
Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
“This is a volume of historical importance published by Mao’s supporters during the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. The text advances many crucial as well as controversial themes about the task of socialist construction and the dangers of capitalist restoration in post-revolutionary societies. This is an ‘inside’ source focusing on ideological debates of theoretical significance. One certainly need not agree with particular views in this volume-for instance, the applicability of the law of value to socialist society-to appreciate its systematic treatment of the issues. A must for students of political economy and Chinese studies.”
CYRUS BINA
Political Economist and Research Fellow
CMES, Harvard University
346 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 20, 2023
A classic. This is a wide-ranging but accessible primer to policial economy written during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution intended to educate the masses in the fight against revisionism and the abandonment of Marxism in places like the Soviet Union and revisionist elements of the Chinese Communist Party. Conveniently includes review problems appropriate for group discussion, and references to relevent works.
April 7, 2014
A whole different world is possible. I love the title of the first chapter: "Study Some Political Economy". Lotta's preface and afterword is valuable, with insights and specifics on things such as how the Chinese socialist economic system was designed to be much less centralized than the Soviet model, and the importance of that. Socialism in China achieved great things. It was ultimately defeated. But we can and MUST do it again, and even better!
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April 19, 2020Chuang, the great anti-CPC communist group in China, by far the greatest providers of class struggle analysis and reporting from there, give us this gem on the topic of this book:
"Prototypical of this problem is the example of the Shanghai Textbook. Originally published as the Fundamentals of Political Economy in Shanghai in 1974, during the peak of state influence during the “long” Cultural Revolution, the book was meant as a summary of Party ideology at the time. Ostensibly describing “socialist political economy” as theorized and practiced in China, the textbook was translated and published, with accompanying essays, by American Maoists under the name Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Socialism: The Shanghai Textbook. The textbook, alongside other collections of state propaganda and reports from foreigners’ tours of model factories, has been taken as a common reference point for both supporters and detractors.
The problem, for either political persuasion, is that the data laid out in the Textbook is purely mythological. The text’s theoretical poverty aside, no system such as that described by the book ever existed. By the same token, the practices observed by touring model factories were often limited to those factories. Though some features were obliquely shared between reality and these Potemkin villages, all the fundamental characteristics were different. The Textbook is better understood as a sort of religious text rather than a description of the socialist era’s economy. Tours of model enterprises became a kind of pilgrimage, reinforcing the holy status of such texts for Western radicals. Scholars basing their studies on policy pronouncements are then engaged in a sort of glyphomancy, pulling apart the minute details of leaders’ speeches and rearranging them to fit whatever narrative one wants to tell."
Perhaps because they're heavily involved in Chinese leftist politics and not US ones, they don't specify that said American Maoists were the RCP, an infamous personality cult around its chairman, Bob Avakian, with a truly embarrassing history.
As for the book itself, it is digitally available and if you want, with a critical mind, look at the most blatant Stalinist propaganda to fool the fools that want to be fooled, here you go. If you want actual Marxist critique of political economy, however, this is just about the most hilariously blatant and extreme falsification of Marx and Lenin possible.
"Prototypical of this problem is the example of the Shanghai Textbook. Originally published as the Fundamentals of Political Economy in Shanghai in 1974, during the peak of state influence during the “long” Cultural Revolution, the book was meant as a summary of Party ideology at the time. Ostensibly describing “socialist political economy” as theorized and practiced in China, the textbook was translated and published, with accompanying essays, by American Maoists under the name Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Socialism: The Shanghai Textbook. The textbook, alongside other collections of state propaganda and reports from foreigners’ tours of model factories, has been taken as a common reference point for both supporters and detractors.
The problem, for either political persuasion, is that the data laid out in the Textbook is purely mythological. The text’s theoretical poverty aside, no system such as that described by the book ever existed. By the same token, the practices observed by touring model factories were often limited to those factories. Though some features were obliquely shared between reality and these Potemkin villages, all the fundamental characteristics were different. The Textbook is better understood as a sort of religious text rather than a description of the socialist era’s economy. Tours of model enterprises became a kind of pilgrimage, reinforcing the holy status of such texts for Western radicals. Scholars basing their studies on policy pronouncements are then engaged in a sort of glyphomancy, pulling apart the minute details of leaders’ speeches and rearranging them to fit whatever narrative one wants to tell."
Perhaps because they're heavily involved in Chinese leftist politics and not US ones, they don't specify that said American Maoists were the RCP, an infamous personality cult around its chairman, Bob Avakian, with a truly embarrassing history.
As for the book itself, it is digitally available and if you want, with a critical mind, look at the most blatant Stalinist propaganda to fool the fools that want to be fooled, here you go. If you want actual Marxist critique of political economy, however, this is just about the most hilariously blatant and extreme falsification of Marx and Lenin possible.
May 19, 2024
The outcome of Mao's "margarine communism" (to use the term Stalin referred to the Maoists by), the Shanghai textbook serves as little more than an attack on the teachings of Lenin and Stalin regarding the socialist economy, especially the lessons laid out by Stalin in his famous work Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.
Fraught with attempts to justify "new democracy" since, by the time this book was written in 1976, it had come under attack from actual communists, gross distortions of the question of commodity production and exchange under socialism, and support for Titoite methods in agriculture since Mao was, in principle, cut from the same cloth as Tito (for example, according to the authors, the problem with Khrushchev wasn't that he sold the machine tractor stations - that was actually good according to the authors - but rather that individual peasants weren't also allowed to own tractors!), a fact Stalin was well aware of when he criticised the Maoists.
Beyond the actual content of the textbook which often functions as a means to repeat what Mao had already said over and over, the preface and afterword by the Maoist economist Raymond Lotta also serves to give deeper significance to the textbook while, in practice, only working to further betray Maoism's break with Marxism, practically admitting Mao's rejection of the Marxist conception of classes and that Mao's system of economics bear little difference to Tito's.
From start to finish a wholely un-Marxist textbook way outdone by the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on economics, A. Leontiev's beginner's course book written in the 1930s.
Fraught with attempts to justify "new democracy" since, by the time this book was written in 1976, it had come under attack from actual communists, gross distortions of the question of commodity production and exchange under socialism, and support for Titoite methods in agriculture since Mao was, in principle, cut from the same cloth as Tito (for example, according to the authors, the problem with Khrushchev wasn't that he sold the machine tractor stations - that was actually good according to the authors - but rather that individual peasants weren't also allowed to own tractors!), a fact Stalin was well aware of when he criticised the Maoists.
Beyond the actual content of the textbook which often functions as a means to repeat what Mao had already said over and over, the preface and afterword by the Maoist economist Raymond Lotta also serves to give deeper significance to the textbook while, in practice, only working to further betray Maoism's break with Marxism, practically admitting Mao's rejection of the Marxist conception of classes and that Mao's system of economics bear little difference to Tito's.
From start to finish a wholely un-Marxist textbook way outdone by the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin on economics, A. Leontiev's beginner's course book written in the 1930s.
July 26, 2007
Occasionally some propositions made in earnest can be so far off the wall that we find them quite entertaining rather than bizarre. The Shanghai Textbook is one such work. The author does a decent job explicating some ideas of Marxian economics. Having never read the economic writings of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, his only sources for 20th century economics (except some bureaucrat in one article mentioned in passing), I cannot comment on the author's treatment of them. However, one has to wonder what sort of terrifying conditions lead the author to write that all natural barriers to production can be overcome by human will based upon one relative exception in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, written at the height of the cultural revolution in no less than Shanghai, this piece of Maoist propaganda is, simply put, comical. Except when he sticks strictly to Marx, the author committs virtually every fallacy in a first year economics course imaginable on every page. Needless to say the style is highly politicized and reads like a Pravda article during the Stalin days. The treatment of the Sino-Soviet split and the maelstrom into Capitalism by Khruschev is somewhat informative, if nothing else but to hear the hardline Stalinists defending the disaster that was mid-20th century Bolshevism. Nevertheless, the utter lack of economic sophistication makes this book hillarious and I highly recommend it to anybody out for some good laughs.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews