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Maoism and Marxism in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

A. James Gregor  and
Maria Hsia Chang
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Extract

A great many curious things have befallen Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition, not the least of which was its adoption by the revolutionary forces under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. Originally, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was a eurocentric doctrine that addressed itself to a postindustrial revolution that would liberate society from the disabilities produced by intensive industrialization. For classical Marxism, industrialization produced not only the “idiocy of overproduction,” the inability to effectively distribute the abundance produced by capitalism, but generated restive populations that were “overwhelmingly proletarian.” Capitalist industrialization produced both the circumstances precipitating, and the historic agents responsible for, vast social, economic and political change.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 1978 , pp. 307 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

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The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in the preparation of this manuscript.