The philosopher, poet, and political leader Mao-Zedong made important and good contributions to the discussion of political economy. He was also responsible for tragic and horrific events in Chinese history.
This lecture is to introduce you to one aspect of Mao Zedong’s contribution to land use planning that could be adapted to American land use planning. As I will say again later in this lecture, it is my conclusion that many of Mao Zedong’s ideas derived not from the writings of Marx and Lenin but rather from an American philosopher, and that American philosopher, John Dewey, an extremely influential thinker.
The word “Marxism” refers to the philosophy and social theory based on Karl Marx’s work on one hand, and the political practice based on Marxist theory on the other hand. Marx’s theory was built on several other philosophies, but is not the same as them. By building on other thinking, he created a synthesis of ideas. One
History is sometimes perceived as a series of snapshots: caveman time, Old and New Testament times, Ancient Egyptians, perhaps the French and American Revolutions, the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution. Although Marx described history as “five stages,” his theory of history is much more detailed than these five stages.
Marx saw history as interrelationships between economies and what he called the “superstructure” of economies. (By economy, I mean the production and consumption of goods and services of a community.) The “base” of history is the economic base, and it includes the means of production—tools, factories, infrastructure – and the value created by labor from the means of production.
The mode of production, in Marxist theory, is the social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society’s productive assets, often codified in law; cooperative work relations and forms of association; relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes.
The “superstructure” is formed on top of the base, and comprises that society’s ideology (that is, a society’s view of the world), as well as its legal system, political system, and religions. For Marx, the base determines the superstructure. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one.
After Marx, writers referred to his thinking as dialectical materialism, that is, a theory of relationships between the economic base of society and the superstructure (ideas, religion, art, culture) that supports it. Marx himself did not use the term, although he referred to the philosophy of an earlier philosopher, Georg Frederick Hegel, who developed the idea of the dialectic, which is used in philosophical and in scientific discussions.
As method, the dialectic is meant to show the necessity of development, or transition, from one stage of consciousness or of history, or from one abstract category of logic, to a higher stage or category. One of the key principles of this philosophy is the idea of contradiction; that is, that an economic base and its superstructure will inevitably contradict itself and lead to a different economic base and a different superstructure.
There have been numerous debates among Marxists over how to interpret Marx’s writings and how to apply his concepts to current events and conditions. The legacy of Marx’s thought is bitterly contested among proponents of numerous viewpoints who claim to be Marx’s most accurate interpreters. The use of Marxist theory in politics, including the social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to define its core.
From my study of Mao’s thinking, I came to the conclusion that it had little or nothing to do with Marxism, except that he drew some clear principles from Marx’s writing that no one else had. After his split with the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong claimed to have developed or contributed to Marxism to enable an essentially agricultural country to develop a society based on Marxism. This is called Mao Zedong thought or Marxism developed for China.
My research indicated that what Mao called “Marxist” often had more to do with the pragmatic thinking of the American educator and philosopher John Dewey, who had also been influential in those thinkers who contributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” during the Great Depression, than it did with Marxist-Leninist thought.
At the core of Dewey’s philosophical theory, often called “pragmatism,” was that experimentation (social, cultural, technological, philosophical) could be used as a relatively hard-and-fast arbiter of truth. Dewey also based his thinking on the earlier writing of Georg Hegel.
This simple and clear idea – that those who fashion public policy should test their intellectual theories about, say, education or government – in the real world and then should amend, adapt or revise those theories after measuring the outcomes is almost identical to Mao’s theory of “right foot left foot,” in his collection of essays called On Contradiction.
That idea, at least shared by Dewey and Mao Zedong, of public policy shaped by ideas that are tested in reality, and then policy is amended, looks a lot like the comprehensive growth management method of land use regulation used by a number of states in the United States. In California, this is called the general plan system.
