With the death of Chairman Mao Tsetung, the international revolutionary movement has lost its most experienced leader and one of its greatest theoreticians. Mao Tsetung is in the front rank with Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Mao Tsetung's life was that of a practical revolutionary. From an early age, he devoted his energies to the task of liberating the Chinese people from their age-old oppression.

When still in his teens, Mao Tse-tung fought in the revolutionary armies against the Ching dynasty. A foundation member of the Communist Party of China, Chairman Mao was active in all fields of revolutionary works. He worked in the workers' movement, the peasant movement and the youth movement. Prior to the Kuomintang's betrayal of the national movement in 1927, Mao Tsetung worked in its propaganda department and trained peasant cadres. Following the defeat of the Autumn Harvest uprising, Chairman Mao led his forces up the Chingkanshan Mountains to form the first revolutionary base area in China. It was there that he first formulated his basic theory of the Chinese revolution.

During the epic Long March made under his leadership, Mao Tsetung was elected Chairman of the Political Bureau of the CCP. From that time on, he inspired the Chinese to one victory after another. Under his leadership, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people have defeated the Japanese, the Kuomintang and US imperialism and have built a new socialist China.

Warning About Soviet Path

When the Kruschev clique seized power in the Soviet Union, Chairman Mao aroused revolutionary people the world over to the threat these revisionists posed to the struggle for socialism.

But Mao Tsetung was not only a man of revolutionary action. He also had deep learning which embraced diverse fields such as economics, politics, philosophy, art and culture and military affairs. All aspects of Marxism were enriched by his thinking: the theory of the party, state and revolution; the development of a people's army and people's war, the theory of building socialism and philosophy.

In this article I will only deal with some of his most important developments of Marxism.

Underlying all of Mao Tsetung's creative developments of Marxism-Leninism was his penetrating grasp of Marxist philosophy, in particular his insistence on the primacy of practice and development through contradiction. In consequence, his thinking was distinguished by a rigid adherence to principle combined with an unprecedented flexibility and anti-dogmatism. Many of his writings flay those who reason from abstract concepts rather than an investigation of the facts. His constant advice was: "Seek truth from the facts".

Mao's "On Practice"

According to the Marxist theory of knowledge, expounded by Mao in "On Practice", all knowledge arises from social practice, particularly material production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. Knowledge develops in two interconnected stages (a) the perceptual [unclear: stage] - here only external and superficial aspects of a thing are grasped; (b) the logical stage - here concepts, judgements, inferences and theories are formulated; the essence of things is grasped, along with their internal contradictions, their laws and internal relations with other things. The logical stage develops out of the perceptual stage. Once formulated, theories must be reapplied to the practice of changing nature and society - this is dictated by the fact that such theories are formulated to solve practical problems and that their truth can only be determined by that application. There is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is always concrete. The cycle of knowledge is practice, theory, practice.

With this as his basis, Mao Tsetung always insisted that the problems of the Chinese revolution could only be solved by the concrete investigation of Chinese realities. In "Oppose Book Worship". Mao declared: "A Communist Party's correct and unswerving tactics of struggle can in no circumstances be created by a few people sitting in an office; they emerge in the course of mass struggle, that is, through actual experience. Therefore, we must at all times study social conditions and make practical investigations." "It is necessary to study conditions conscientiously and to proceed from objective reality and not from subjective wishes." (Reform Our Study).

In his "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature". Mao Tsetung stated pointedly: "In discussing a problem, we should start from reality and not from definitions..... Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions....and we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts." Unfortunately, many so-called "Marxists" ignore this and confuse Marxism with scholasticism.

This profound belief in the primacy of practice led Mao Tsetung to many of his original contributions to Marxism-Leninism. The mass line practiced by the Chinese Communist Party in its leadership is concrete manifestation of the Marxist theory of knowledge.

According to Mao Tsetung, "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, and test the correctness of these ideas in such 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." (Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership).

Mao's Own Application

Mao practiced this himself throughout his life. For example, one of his important discoveries was the people's commune as the best form of production unit for the transition from socialism to communism in the rural areas. The people's commune combines industry, agriculture, animal husbandry and other aspects of economy, as well as the local organs of state power and militia. But the first people's commune was developed spontaneously by China's peasants in order to improve irrigation. When Mao heard about its formation, he travelled to it and investigated it for some days. His investigations convinced him that the people's commune was of general significance for all rural China.

Chinese citizens gathering in Peking's vast T'ien An Men Square & bowing their heads in homage to Mao Tse-tung.

Mao Tsetung's most important contribution to Marxist philosophy is embodied in his work "On Contradiction" In the Marxist view all development in the world, both in nature and society, is the result of the interaction ("Struggle") of opposites which are mutually exclusive but at the same time presuppose each other. The opposites in a contradiction cannot exist without the other. Internal contradictions in processes, whether simple or complex, are its source of development.

Mao's "On Contradiction" examines contradiction from all its aspects, including the temporary unity of opposites, which contradiction is principal and which secondary, antagonism and non-antagonism in contradiction, etc.

Mao on horseback in North China during Civil War (1947)

The first great Marxist to point out the primacy of the law of unity of opposites, Mao Tsetung's whole thinking was permeated with dialectics. He once said of himself, "Take me, for example, I am not at all more intelligent than others, but I understand dialectics and I know how to use it in analysing problems. If we use dialectics to analyse un unclear problem, the problem becomes clear in a trice. You must study dialectics, its efficacy is very great."

If one looks at his many activities, it is easy to see how his grasp of the law of unity of opposites guides him in his analysis. Unlike previous Marxists, particularly Stalin, Mao Tsetung insists that there are manifold contradictions in socialist society including contradictions, both antagonistic and non-antagonistic, amongst the people, there are contradictions between the interest of the individual and the collective, between the individual and the state and so on.

His viewpoint is summed up in his work "On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People". Of great importance in building socialism is the distinction between contradictions amongst the people and contradictions between the people and the enemy. If these are not correctly handled, for example, contradictions between the people and the enemy being confused with those amongst the people, a great danger is posed for socialism's continued development. In his speech "On the 10 great relationships", Mao Tsetung analysed the 10 fundamental contradictions in China. Following this speech China made its first break with the Soviet model of economic development and began to take her own road.

Strategy Based on Contradictions

Mao Tsetung's advice on political strategy reflects his grasp of the law of unity of opposites. Mao advises that we should "make use of contradictions, win over the many, oppose the few, and crush our enemy one by one." Whether during the anti-Japanese war or in the present world situation when superpower contention is driving the world towards a new war, China has pursued this policy which is essentially one of uniting the many to defeat the few. It is a strategy which ensures victory.

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Class [unclear: St] And the State

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[unclear: Accor Mao] Testung concluded that the edge of the [unclear: revolu n] old China was set against imperialism, [unclear: bureaurcra alism] and feudalism. It was not directed [unclear: against alism] in general. In Marxist terms China was in the stage of bour geois democratic revolution. The programme of the revolution comprised, externally, the overthrow of imperialism and the attainment of complete national liberation, and, internally, the elimination of the bureaucrat capitalists in the cities, the elimination of feudal production relations in the rural areas and the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek following its desertion from the national revolution in 1927.

Chinese Revolution In Two Steps

But Mao Tsetung was no peasant revolutionary as some malevolent people have claimed. In his vision the Chinese revolution necessarily embraced two stages, the bourgeois democratic and the socialist revolutions, which were two essentially different revolutionary processes. "The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all Communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society." (The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party).

It was his solution of the problem of ensuring the uninterrupted transition from the bourgeois democratic to the socialist revolution which was Mao's first significant contribution to Marxism-Leninism.

Other Communists, both Chinese and foreign, had tried to graft the experience of the October Revolution in the Soviet Union onto China. Repeated attempts were made between 1927 and 1934 at seizing large cities but all were drowned in blood. The Canton Commune in December 1927 lasted but three days.

Mao Tsetung recognised that uneven economic and political development existed throughout China and that the counter-revolution was relatively strong in the cities and relatively weak in the rural areas. He concluded that it was impossible to seize the principal cities in an insurrection and then spread the revolution to the rural areas as had happened in the Soviet Union.

Instead Mao Tsetung advanced the following path: under the leadership of the Communist Party, arouse the peasant masses to wage people's war, unfold the agrarian revolution, build stable rural base areas, use the countryside to surround the cities and finally capture them and liberate the whole country.

The people's war would pass through a number of phases as the revolutionary armed forces accumulated strength. Initially, guerilla warfare would be waged. Its purpose would not be to hold territory so much as to tire out the enemy and to annihilate him gradually. Later, regular army units would appear which would fight mobile warfare rather than battles of fixed position. When the time was right, the regular army, backed by regional and local units, would go over to the offensive and finish off the Kuomintang regime.

During the protracted struggle in the rural areas, the Communist Party continued to work amongst the workers and urban petty bourgeoisie, leading them in judicious struggles to improve their conditions and to prepare for the entry of the people's army into the cities. This work was essential to prevent the isolation of the rural base areas.

With his theory of new democratic revolution, formulated during the anti-Japanese war, Mao Tsetung broadened the concept of bourgeois democratic revolution.

Reliance On Poor Peasants

Economically, the new democratic revolution aimed at the nationalisation of all big capitalist enterprises and the capital of the imperialists and bureaucrat capitalists. It did not encroach on either the holdings of the national bourgeoisie or upon industrial or commercial enterprises run by landlords and rich peasants.

Land reform aimed at the system of feudal exploitation by the landlords and old-type rich peasants, but it did not eliminate the rich peasant economy in general. This revolutionary process was accomplished by relying on the poor peasants (the firmest allies of the working class) allied with the middle peasants. This consolidates the worker-peasant alliance and helps lay the foundation for the new state power.

Politically, the new democratic revolution aimed at the establishment of the people's democratic dictatorship. "The people's democratic dictatorship is based on the alliance of the working class, the peasantry and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, and mainly on the alliance of the workers and peasants." Such a state combines "democracy for the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries." (On the People's Democratic Dictatorship).

Lead by the working class through the Communist Party, this form of state power ensures that the proletariat establishes its ascendancy in all social fields: economic, political, ideological, cultural and military. With political power in its hands, the proletariat can complete the bourgeois democratic revolution and ensure the transition to the socialist revolution when the time is right.

Chaiman Mao Tsetung was not content with just interpreting the world, as do some so-called "Marxists" in the West. In studying and formulating theories, his sole purpose was to put them to the task of revolutionising nature and society. A short article like this, even allowing for defects in my understanding, cannot adequately reveal the richness of Mao Tsetung's thinking. There is no substitute for reading the works of Mao Tsetung. As Jan Myrdal once said, "If you want to get a clear picture of the political thought of Stuart R. Schram, then of course you ought to read The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung' by Stuart R. Schram. If you are interested in the political thought of Mao Tsetung and find him more important than Schram, then of course you read Mao Tsetung. His works are available in editions he has published himself."