Quoting Mao

Hardly a day goes by where I do not quote Mao Zedong, in conversation or in writing. His influence on my thinking has been both obvious and difficult to explain. Do I think that he was a great philosopher? No. In fact, I think his most famous philosophical works are deeply flawed. Have I learned a lot from his works on political economy or history? I can not say that I have. Am I simply a fan of him as a political figure? Well, I appreciate him as a revolutionary, but his record is far from spotless. You can only shake hands with Nixon so many times before I start looking at you sideways. So what is it? Why is it that his words always seem so close to hand?

I think the answer lies in the fact that Mao’s work consists largely of a collection of incredibly useful truisms, cliches, and catchphrases. He had an undeniable talent for finding simple ways to express profound truths. In a sense, his work does not function at the level of theory but of wisdom. You read certain passages in Mao and think, “Of course! That’s so true!” You carry them with you through life, and you find no shortage of scenarios where some quote or other aptly applies. In fact, his best lines only seem to grow more true by the day.

When I first heard the phrase “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” I immediately saw its usefulness, its basic truth. It also sounded really cool, even if it wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. But the older I get, the more I am able to appreciate just how profoundly true it really is. When reading a book like Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, one can not help but notice that those who are most effectively able to mobilize armed violence are also those who seem to emerge successfully from every crisis. As public discourse breaks down, as the electoral system proves itself completely ineffective at actualizing the desires of the people, and as government agents flood the streets, Mao’s words ring out louder and clearer than before. If you study the history of the Chinese revolution at any depth, it will also become clear that this is a lesson Mao learned throughout the course of an almost unfathomable struggle. It is not just a cool line or a hollow cliche. It is an elegant condensation of a lifetime of experience. It isn’t basic; it’s fundamental. Mao’s best lines have real weight to them, and like anything else, they get heavier the longer you hold them.

The attentive reader of Mao will start to see him everywhere. In Walter Smolarek’s recent letter on his resignation from the PSL, he states that their leadership has often, “opted to conceal their views on a controversial issue so as not to risk a debate that could weaken their grip on the organization.”¹ The result of this is that tensions have mounted within the party until prominent members feel that they have no choice left but to leave. I immediately thought of Mao’s “Combat Liberalism,” where he criticizes those who “indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestions to the organization.” Honestly, I think it would be possible to annotate that letter using the complete text of “Combat Liberalism,” as there is hardly a word that Mao said which does not apply. The context may be radically different, but Mao’s talent for deceptively simplistic truths allows his commentary to remain stubbornly relevant.

In part, this mode of communication can be explained by Mao’s education. Many of his most famous slogans were borrowed from classic Chinese authors. Mao himself described “A single spark can start a prairie fire” as “an old Chinese saying.”² The slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend” combines the words of Li Ruzhen (the first half) and Ban Gu (the second half). My most referenced Mao quote, “No investigation, no right to speak,” is a punchy update to a line from Confucius’ Analects: “Where a gentleman is ignorant, one would expect him not to offer any opinion.”³ Mao was part of a writing tradition that emphasized these kinds of sayings, favoring both brevity and wit. Certainly, he wrote longer pieces, explorations of philosophical, economic, and political questions that are not without their merits, but his particular talent seemed to lie in coining or popularizing a phrase. He was a bit like Oscar Wilde in that way.

When you begin to approach Mao as a man of experience and a great writer of wise sayings, rather than a great theorist, many things about his place in Leftist discourse begin to make sense. For starters, it seems significant that his most famous work is not a dense tome but a collection of quotes, the Little Red Book, which is more reminiscent of a Karl Kraus aphorism book or a collection of Heraclitus fragments than something like Marx’s Capital. Mao never wrote a book that could stand next to Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia, but he never really tried to. His writing was never operating at the level of painstaking historical reconstructions and theoretical innovations. Rather, he was attempting, almost constantly, to popularize particular ideas, to make certain kinds of knowledge appear intuitive to the public. As a result, his work can (and should) be frequently approached at the level of a single line. Marx and Lenin were quotable, but the best passages in their work can hardly serve as summaries for their thought. There is no equivalent to the Little Red Book for them. Yet, if this statement implies that Mao is less theoretically impressive than writers like Marx and Lenin, it by no means implies that there is not much to learn from his work. It is simply education at a different register. It is the kind of education you receive from a grandparent, rather than a professor, which is no less useful.

Thinking of Mao in this way also helps to explain a peculiar feature of his popularity. He seems to connect most strongly with people who are either extremely stupid or extremely intelligent, while those in the middle have no clue what to do with him. On one hand, you have the various “Maoist” goofballs and psychos, from your standard Dengist MLs to your Gonzalo cultists, people who should probably have to complete a competency test to earn the right to tie their own shoes. On the other, it seems like half of the French Marxist theorists of the last century had some sort of serious admiration for Mao. In my personal experience, the most committed, knowledgeable Leftists I’ve met have all spoken at least somewhat affectionately about him. The only people who seem to like him more are the dullest idiots I’ve ever met. Meanwhile, the average person, the true midwit, just seems to ignore him or laugh him off.

We’ve all seen those memes making fun of Mao’s quotes; the ones where they show some clip of a guy crying with text displayed over it that reads, “Maoists when Mao says some shit like ‘you’re either a smart fella or a fart smella.’” This is the basic attitude of the averagely intelligent person towards Mao. They see the same obvious truth that the idiots see, but they are not impressed by it. It’s too obvious. What they do not see is the richness that clearly captures Mao’s more intelligent audience. I think this is part of the nature of the “wise quotes and slogans” approach to rhetoric that Mao used so often. There are many true statements that function in this same way.

For example, a 19 year old gets high and thinks to herself, “Wow, we’re all just monkeys on a big rock in space.” She thinks she has cracked the code to reality. When she tries to communicate this thought to her sober friend, the friend laughs it off as both silly and also not news to anyone. After all, “Everyone knows that.” But who really acts like it, or thinks like it? If you take the statement seriously, it represents a genuine scientific and ethical revolution. If we are monkeys, what does that say about how we should relate to other-animals? What does it say about all the mythical “human natures” that philosophers and politicians keep discovering? How are we to discuss our own history once we realize that we are not the center of the universe? The high 19 year old is not asking any of these questions. She is not taking her basic insight seriously and pushing it forward into something truly meaningful. In her hands, the thought is impotent. However, in the hands of another, or maybe in her own hands once she sobers up, the line may suddenly transform itself into a tool, it may gain some genuine substance.

The exact same phrase can represent both a banal and a profound truth. This is something Hegel recognized in The Phenomenology of Spirit. There is a crucial difference between those who recognize a truth at the level of picture-thinking and those who are truly conscious of it. There are some who are able to state profound truths, and recognize them as truths, while remaining ignorant of their real content. In describing this process, Hegel provides us with one of his better analogies: both urine and semen come from the same hole.⁴ Some people think that they’re cumming when they’re peeing, and some, having seen them pee, dismiss the project of cumming altogether. Others, like Hegel, make it their mission to actually cum.

Mao himself was not immune to this kind of mistake. For example, Lenin once wrote that the essence of Marxism is a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” Mao borrowed that phrase to great effect, and it has never left my mind since. Lenin made it a hot line. Mao made it a hot song. But then Mao went on to basically never do that. He saw the truth of the statement, but he remained at a rather surface level. In the same piece, he writes paragraphs like these:

War and peace, as everybody knows, transform themselves into each other. War is transformed into peace; for instance, the First World War was transformed into the post-war peace, and the civil war in China has now stopped, giving place to internal peace. Peace is transformed into war; for instance, the Kuomintang-Communist co-operation was transformed into war in 1927, and today’s situation of world peace may be transformed into a second world war. Why is this so? Because in class society such contradictory things as war and peace have an identity in given conditions.⁵

Not only is this not concrete analysis, it basically isn’t saying anything at all. But that does not mean that the slogan of “concrete analysis of a concrete situation” is in any way false. It still holds up on its own terms. The same is true of the Mao quotes that get constantly misused and abused by the dumbest “communists” on the planet.

I think this all goes some way to explain the odd demographics of those who take inspiration from Mao. Marx and Lenin are relatively popular across the board. The more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to take Stalin seriously as a thinker. It’s a pretty straight line, honestly. But Mao seems to appeal mostly to the extreme ends of the spectrum. If you are a dumbass who wants easy answers, you’ll love memorizing Mao quotes. If you are a midwit, you’ll laugh at the easy answers, but you won’t see anything beyond them. If you’re intelligent, you might laugh at the easy answers, but you’ll see something else lurking underneath it all. Being standalone quotes, there is always a feeling that they are open to elaboration, that the kernel of truth they provide really is just the kernel. They call out for iteration and creative application. Idiots don’t see the vagueness of the quotes. Midwits see the vagueness of the quotes as a problem. Writers like Althusser and Badiou see the vagueness as space to innovate.

I’d like to imagine that I am in the latter camp, one of the intelligent readers of Mao who appreciates the richness and wisdom of his sayings. But the truth is probably not so flattering. I just like aura farming.

1. PSL Resignation Letter

2. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_6.htm

3. Book 13 in the Penguin edition

4. §346

5. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm