• Text here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1939/how-to-be/index.htm – about 27,000 words, so about 100 minutes to read

  • Audio here, British female AI speaker, 2h41m21s: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=aeGlxpDvoqc&listen=1

  • Audio here, American human male speaker: https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjoZVLIJX6CLKGC9Vz6Gwv9kI&listen=1

It is nine chapters, so one chapter per day for nine days seems the obvious way to go.

Liu Shaoqi is an admirable figure, Chairman from 1959 to 1968, a pragmatist who came into conflict with the worst tendencies of Mao and the Gang of Four, praised by Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. I'm getting more and more interested in the pragmatic Chinese Marxists who actually succeeded and built something with a strong eye to pragmatism, not idealism.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thoughts on chapter five:

    For a Party member, the result of this struggle should be that the proletarian ideology overcomes and ultimately eliminates any non-communist world outlook and that ideas based on the general interests and aims of the Party, of the revolution and of the emancipation of the proletariat and all mankind overcome and ultimately eliminate all individualism.

    Similar to the last chapter, the emphasis is on adapting the worldview of the proletariat, rather than memorizing particular precepts. Also, I get the impression that he’s referring to individualism in the Nietzschean sense of the needs of the masses being subsumed to those of the “ubermensches,” not in the sense that people shouldn’t be unique.

    Generally, a lot of the pie in the sky descriptions of what communist society will be like seems more selling than serious analysis. However, it’s pretty obvious this is trying to be more about installing resolve and vigor in party members than pure academic analysis of political economy or philosophy, so it’s okay.

    This is the inevitable result of the efforts of the exploiting classes to preserve their class interests and rule. For they cannot maintain their ruling position unless they keep the exploited masses and the colonial peoples backward, unorganized and divided.

    This seems interesting in light of a latter passage:

    China is still in the stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and our enemies are imperialism, which perpetuates aggression against China, and the feudal and comprador forces, which are in collusion with imperialism.

    This says to me that the history of British imperialism in China was a significant factor in the development of the communist party there. That the association between the Chinese ruling class and the British caused them to see themselves as the exploited colonial people.

    If the masses were all politically conscious, united, free from the influence of the exploiting classes and free from backwardness, as some people imagine them to be, what would be so difficult about the revolution?

    Indeed.

    But for the proletariat, victory and political emancipation are only the beginning of the revolution, and a tremendous amount of work remains to be done after the victory, after the seizure of state power.

    This this this this this. Simply seizing power in the revolution doesn’t mean socialists can then just flip the political economy switch from capitalism to communism. Political economies are social systems and those take time and need to evolve to reach new forms.