Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (1950s) – Theory of the Great Leap Forward

So with the intellectuals tamed, what was Mao’s great theory for China that went beyond valid criticism of the soviet planning model and that no one now felt able to challenge? He reckoned the Soviets were obsessed with the economy at the expense of correctly managing socialist society and politics and that his education campaigns were more the go. The correct consciousness would then translate into the enthusiasm that would drive the economy.

So it was really a reversal of Marxism-Leninism as I’ve discussed in an earlier post, more of Mao’s emphasis on voluntarism and more, too, of his love affair with or at least admiration of the peasants for good measure. His idea of how to arrive at Communism when compared with Lenin’s could be simply stated in the following equations:

Lenin: Communism = Party control + electricity (literally)

Mao: Communism = Party control + mass mobilisation (who cares about electricity?)

So how did he envisage the Great Leap Forward in these kinds of theoretical terms? He thought he could give peasants the ideology and the idea of greatness and it would then happen. He wrote his famous ‘Poor and Blank’ thesis in Red Flag’s 1 June 1958 issue:

Apart from other characteristics, China’s 600 Million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.

This was Marxist turned on its head. Backwardness was now a good thing for Mao.

Central to this too was his idea of ‘continuous revolution’. There was never to be any sense of resting on one’s laurels in Mao’s conception. He was an incessant driver and saw this as vital to producing the goods of this revolution. So where Stalin had devised a ‘smooth growth’ model, Mao’s ideal was to be a rather more stop-start and violent process. Only under fully fledged Communism would there be no contradictions, after all. Bourgeois ideology would continue to require periodic crushing out of the peasants’ brains. This would improve the society, politics and, finally, the economy. The next contradiction would arise and require crushing and so on until Communism. So he thought all of the conflict and upheaval were good things. The Great Leap Forward was Mao’s effort to prove that enthusiasm produced by social reform and political education could abruptly transform the economy where soviet economic planning seemed to him to be failing (at least in relative terms).