A discussion of Mao where no one in the thread is calling him a red fascist? We can't have this, I'm calling up all my reddit bros asap to fix this
It's how you frame the history and present the facts. Under Mao, millions of landlords died but Mao was literally just letting the peasants do what they had wanted to do for dynasties. The Chinese landowning class was FAR worse than the kulaks
I was just reading the wiki article on Mao and it sounds like before him revolutionaries thought revolution would be fought by the urban poor and they ignored the rural poor. Mao basically said "fuck that I'm organizing the rural poor too" and it fucking worked. In hindsight it seems so obvious but it took until Mao for it to happen
Yeah it seems to very much cover the same issues that have drawn me to Luxemburg/Lukacs in my readings. I need to read Mao dammit
Farmers really hated sparrows eating their crops. One disrupted ecosystem later, and...
Also its worth noting that the based violence against the landlords also included local officials that worked with the landlords and local “law enforcements” and serifs and every kind of bootlicker. Basicaly not only the landlord class but also the “petty bourgeois” of the villages if you can say so.
I read once that -- because it was ultimately the people on the ground who determined punishments and carried them out -- it was not a blanket "kill everyone in this class" policy. The worst offenders (of which there were many) were killed, but some were exiled, some had all lands beyond their homestead taken away, some (probably the local officials you mention) were allowed to continue on basically as before, etc., all roughly scaled to what crimes the person had actually committed.
If I'm remembering correctly (and someone please jump in if I'm not) this makes those actions even more comprehensibly justifiable, because there was some individualized treatment baked in.
man if that happened today America would be mowing down peasants and propping up fascists quicker than i can blink
As we speak, masses of human shields are blocking courthouses and stalling evictions. Let me correct that, enfranchised Americans would be mowing down peasants and propping up fascists, but haven't they been doing that for all of US history? Let's be realistic here, BLM (in its actual on the ground contingencies) is pro-gun police abolition movement with direct demands to redistribute wealth to the proletarian classes. Their vanguard is largely comprised of MLs, MLMZT adherents, and AnComs who have managed to put the idea of full police defunding into the mainstream liberal discourse. When has this happened since the War On Drugs began? Never, not once. There were ideas before it in the 60s, but Americans were much more reactionary then and fell in line with Nixon's Southern Strategy.
What I'm saying is that we live in a time when GDP is dropping at double the rate of the Great Depression and electoralism at the national level is considered fully moot by the vast majority of Americans. Now compare this situation with other Anglo countries like NZ, Aus or UK. Sure they have better social safety nets now, but look at the people. Americans under 30 are mostly PoC and are radically anti-capitalist, don't give up the fight before it begins. If you do, BLM turns into liberal parades and progress gets set back a generation in reaction to liberal hypocrisy.
The choice is yours, which side are you on?
Right, it's why they work so hard to prevent organizing from reaching that level. Theres only 3/4 of a million cops in the whole country. They couldnt ever possibly hope to suppress an actual mass uprising of even ten million organized people, let alone half the country.
Give it till February. Fimbulwinter is coming and ordinary people are gonna be homeless.
I don't know if you have your terms right. Lumpenproletariat is the underclass of chronically unemployable people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
Sometimes there's an inclusion of career criminals in the lumpenproles. Marx didn't see them as having revolutionary potential but Mao and the Black Panthers did.
In modern parlance we refer to this as "Army of Thieves and removed" but some people want to amend it to "Army of Thieves and Sex Workers".
An admin on a site that looks like reddit (works sooo much better ngl), but they endorse landlord purges? BASED
If they did’t want to be purged, they could have simply chosen not to be landlords
Clearly they lost in the Marketplace of Ideas and need to stop being such sore losers about it.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
the peasantry
Note that 1950s China was semi-feudal (or more fully feudal) in many places, and that "landlord" in this context does not mean "guy who owns your modern apartment building but still (kind of) has to operate in a modern legal framework, complete with tenant protections and meaningful criminal law enforcement." In many situations it was much close to "a lord who governs your land, who can do all sorts of horrible stuff with the only real limits being a peasant uprising or pissing off a higher official." The horrible (and often illegal or even criminal) way many landlords treat tenants today is the tip of the iceberg for how tenants could be treated in pre-Revolutionary China.
If you've read much on this topic what do you recommend?
I haven't read as much on this as I'd like, but a relevant and fairly brief source is Friendly Feudalism - The Tibet Myth by Michael Parenti. It makes the case that Tibet (which was under the control of the last Imperial Chinese dynasty from about 1720-1912) still had many of the hallmarks of a feudal society by the time the PRC annexed it in 1950. There were various forms of serfdom (or at least a serf-like class of laborers), chattel slavery, and disfiguring corporal punishment. If one remote part of formerly-Imperial China was still effectively feudal even in 1950, I think it's likely that other parts may have been pretty close to feudal, too, and that matches what I've read in other places (but can't put my hands on now). It certainly seems like there's a big gap between how landlords operated in ~1950 rural China and the "guy who owns your modern apartment building but still (kind of) has to operate in a modern legal framework, complete with tenant protections and meaningful criminal law enforcement" framework people think of when they hear the term "landlord" in a 2020 American context.
Oh perfect. I just read Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti and wanted to read another. He is definitely accessible and I bet he does a good job separating the real history from the western propaganda like he did in Blackshirts. Thanks
