Red?

Now here's ironic for you: a collection of rare, early editions of Mao Tsetung's 'Quotations...' [I use the rendition of his name into English prevalent at the time: now characterised as Mao Zedong; you pays your money, you takes your choice, folks], ie. The Little Red Book; is to be sold at auction, and it's expected that it will fetch £1m. For those of us of a certain age, the Little Red Book - although the original cover was weirdly actually blue - was a kind of talisman of the counter-culture at a time when class struggle was actually starting to mutate away from whence it came. Socialism in the West by the time of its first publication in 1964 [my first copy - the open one - dates from three years later, at the height of the sixties' 'revolutionary' zeal] had already made great inroads into the class war between worker and owner, and had realised, to a large extent, the social contract that forms the basis of the Welfare State.

My dad always said that what he read in the "Little Red Book" didn't seem that far different from what he had gleaned from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf": it was all bad in his view: he was probably right, he usually was. In some ways I concur that there are in places great similarities in political approach, particularly where the "education of the proletariat" was concerned. Where the two opposing strands of political thought diverged of course, was the perceived root causes of the class struggle: one economically, and the other principally racially based. What is interesting, though, thumbing through Mao's [curated] thoughts in the book, is just how the class structure as perceived sixty years ago compares to where we are at present. The  various sub-classes; the proletariat, the semi proletariat, the vacillating bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, etc., etc., along with said Marxist distinctions have not only largely kind of, not exactly disappeared, but rather mutated and shuffled into a different order. No longer can it be said that '... The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie...'. 

Judging by the events of the last fifteen or twenty years or so, such cut and dried Marxist analysis no longer rings true; but the remainder of that particular 'thought' holds as true today in essence as it did then: '...As for the vacillating middle-bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend - but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks...'. Of course, neither Hitler nor Mao can be held in any positive regard for their depersonalising approach to solving the ills of society: they both got it utterly wrong, with tragic effect in both cases; but the traces of society's underlying ills can be found in both their approaches and their writings. Both were deeply disturbed individuals who offloaded their psychological baggage onto millions of ordinary people in the form of mass killings, pogroms and deliberate programs of mass extermination. Both sought to avenge their being wronged at the hands of other deeply disturbed individuals and an unjust society. The abused becomes abuser.

Have we ever seen any great change to this systemic malfunctioning of the human condition? I truly believe we did, in the immediate postwar decades of the twentieth century in Britain. For a brief period we almost managed to make a mixed socialist/capitalist economy work. We simply took our eyes off the ball through the inevitable complacency that comfort brings. So Mao's reflection on the vacillating bourgeoisie wasn't that far off the mark, except that it now refers more properly to the working class itself, viz The Daily Mail and Reform. The irony is that this held true in the 1930's as well: plus ça change...