Maoism: A Global History is a milestone in describing a harrowing legacy

Julia Lovell's book on Maoism is concerned with understanding the phenomenon of Maoism when it swept the globe, in some places politically and in most places ideologically and intellectually.

Anyone who has visited China would have seen that Mao Zedong has a larger-than-life posthumous presence there. It is difficult to escape him. His body lies embalmed in a huge mausoleum at one side of Tiananmen Square, which is also dominated by his portrait. But it is not just through symbols that Mao is omnipresent in China. His presence, as Julia Lovell notes, is more palpable “in the deep politicisation of its judiciary; the supremacy of the one-party state over all other interests; the fundamental intolerance of dissident voices”. Yet, present-day China has turned its back on Mao’s communism. The Chinese economy is a hugely successful state capitalism. The state that ruthlessly pushes through capitalism in China still has communism emblazoned on its banner and still worships at the altar of Mao.

Outside China, Mao’s reputation and image has taken a severe beating. It is now empirically established that in the period known as the Great Leap Forward (roughly between 1958 and 1968) because of Mao’s policy of rapid industrialisation and collectivisation, 40 to 50 million people died through politically induced famine and terror. Add to this a million more who were killed or died in the late 1960s as a result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These statistics alone make Mao as big a killer of human beings as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The Dutch historian Frank Dikotter, has with every justification called Mao a mass murderer. He occupies a prominent place in the 20th-century gallery of monsters.

Yet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mao was a hero — more than that, a living deity — to radical students in campuses strung across the globe and among sections of the intelligentsia. Joan Robinson, professor of economics at Cambridge, extolled him, and I remember, as a student in the early 1970s at Presidency College, Calcutta, the nerve centre of Maoism in India, reading with awe Robinson’s admiring account (entirely misleading, it later transpired) of the Cultural Revolution. There is no denying that Maoism as a soft power — even before the term had been coined or had gained currency — had become China’s most potent export to different parts of the world.

Julia Lovell’s book — breathtaking in its coverage — is concerned with understanding the phenomenon of Maoism when it swept the globe, in some places politically and in most places ideologically and intellectually. She narrates how this happened and through her narration attempts to explain why this happened. The big question that haunts her as she sets out is: What is Maoism? It is not an easy question to answer since Mao never defined it. Also, he did not ever set out a coherent body of ideas: his ideas changed, sometimes even quite whimsically.

Book cover of Maoism: A Global History

Lovell concedes that Maoism “is a body of contradictory ideas that has distinguished itself from earlier guises of Marxism in several important ways”. Maoism, unlike the Soviet version of communism, accorded centre stage to the non-Western world (Mao coined the term Third World), to an anti-colonial agenda and to the peasantry. The revolution, Mao told communists of the Third World, would not start in the cities; it would have to start among the peasants in the countryside where revolutionaries would have to be like fish in water. The revolution, Mao also emphasised, would have to adapt itself to local, national conditions. Thus, in some ways Mao differed from the model of the revolution in Russia but, like Lenin and Stalin, he also believed in building a one-party totalitarian regime. He poetically wrote about letting a hundred flowers bloom but never in his life did he practise it.

MAOISM: A GLOBAL HISTORY; 
Author: Julia Lovell; 
Publisher: The Bodley Head; 
Pages: 428; 
Price: Rs 999
 

It was perhaps this emphasis on the peasantry as the agency of revolutionary change that was most attractive to radical political activists in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The other aspect of Maoism that attracted them was spontaneity or, in communist terminology, voluntarism. The peasantry was inherently revolutionary. Though Mao spoke of adapting to local, national conditions, he spawned imitators and encouraged imitation. As Lovell notes, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia saw Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a model to follow. Mao also provided aid and interest-free loans to the Pol Pot regime. The price that Cambodia paid in terms of human lives as a consequence of such imitation and support is too horrible to recall and is now well documented.

Lovell does a global tour, drawing out in detail the Maoist insurgencies in Indonesia, the Shining Path in Peru, in Africa and finally in South Asia — India and Nepal. For this reviewer, and I guess for readers of this newspaper and Indian readers of the book, her discussion of Maoism in India — what has come to be called the Naxalite movement — is of special interest. The title of her chapter on India is borrowed from the famous Naxalite slogan that was written all over walls in Calcutta and small towns of Bengal — “China’s chairman is our chairman”. Nowhere was the phenomenon of craven imitation and the deification of Mao more blatant than in that slogan and the kind of actions that followed from it.

A protester holds up a poster of Mao during a rally in Kolkata in 2006. Photo: Reuters

Lovell writes that analysis of the Naxalite movement too often ignores the personal and instead focuses on “doctrinal debates or collective causes and effects”. To correct this she attempts to reconstruct the life and revolutionary career of Charu Majumdar, who she describes as “a cosmopolitan sectarian”. But the problem is that the rise of Majumdar cannot be understood unless it is placed within a doctrinal context and the context of a peasant struggle in a corner of North Bengal. The doctrinal context was the debate within the undivided Communist Party of India between the revisionist and the revolutionary lines; this became imbricated with another debate in 1962 when during the Sino-Indian border dispute, the revisionists took the patriotic line and the revolutionaries took a pro-China line. The party was to split on these differences in 1964 with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) claiming the revolutionary and Chinese heritage.

Majumdar was with the pro-China group and like all others of that group he was arrested in 1962. In jail, Lovell records, Majumdar “declared himself to be a member of the Chinese Communist Party”. What pitchforked Majumdar into leadership was a peasant movement to which Lovell does not devote anything more than a longish paragraph. In 1967, the CPI (M) was an important partner in a coalition —  the United Front — government in West Bengal. There was widespread expectation that the CPI(M) would introduce a programme of radical redistribution of land. North Bengal had a long history of peasant struggle and in 1967 this struggle enjoyed the support of the peasant front of the CPI (M) in North Bengal. Most of the participants of this movement were sharecroppers who cultivated the land under the most oppressive conditions. Frightened by promises of land redistribution, landlords began to evict these sharecroppers. This incited the struggle to turn militant — in March-April 1967 peasant committees and peasant militia were formed, landlords’ lands occupied, debts cancelled, records burnt and a parallel administration was set up for the villages. Within one month, large tracts of Naxalbari, Phansidewa and Kharibari police stations had passed into peasant hands. There were pitched battles with the police. Repression followed. One factor in the repression was the strategic location of these areas — all proximate to the East Pakistan border. There was pressure on the United Front government from the Centre. The suppression of this movement led to a further split in the Communist Party with men like Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal and others who had been involved in the peasant struggle forming the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) on May 1, 1969. That day the party heralded its presence in Calcutta through a mammoth rally in the heart of the city.

There are three features, all unnoticed by Lovell, that emerged from that peasant struggle and its immediate aftermath. One was the emphasis that Majumdar articulated: The peasants had fought for political power, not for land or share of the crops. Second, it reinforced the idea, embedded in Mao’s doctrines, of peasant voluntarism. And third, almost unobtrusively and largely because of the ideas of Majumdar, the movement’s focus shifted to the city. Majumdar’s subsequent programmes, urban guerrilla and annihilation, were executed by urban young men who gave up their careers, not for Majumdar, but for Chairman Mao.

The history of the initial moment of the Naxalite movement is also an inseparable part of the history of the most bloody repression that the state unleashed to suppress the movement. Majumdar’s line stymied the potentialities of the movement to take India towards an agrarian revolution. India still has a powerful Maoist movement spread across large tracts of the country. It will be a misnomer to call this a Naxalite movement since it is not focused on cities but on tribals living in forests, and on India’s poorest. This movement recognises the repressive presence of the state but I am not very sure that its goal is to seize power through an armed insurrection. I am not even sure if on ideological terms it can be labelled Maoist. As one of India’s leading academics, Nandini Sundar, who knows this movement better and more closely than anyone else, told Lovell, the only solution to the problems that the Maoist movement continues to highlight is the proper exercise of India’s constitutional democracy — “a predicament and promise that no citizen can escape from”.

Lovell’s book will remain a milestone in  understanding Mao’s contradictory and harrowing legacy. Her reconstruction of the Maoist movement is gripping even if her analytical prowess does not match her narrative skills.

The reviewer is chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University