I have been listening to People's History of Ideas, which is a podcast on the Chinese Revolution. In ep 28 he covers a moment that in the 60s/70s was framed in a way that was probably correct politically, but was a bit of a lie. And how that correct decision for the moment, bolstering the cult of personality, unfortunately in the long term was part of what helped the capitalist roadsters discredit Mao.
The problem here is that there is no evidence for this account, and plenty against it. Simply put, Mao was not at that Congress. And by Mao’s own account, he did not get involved with peasant organizing in Hunan until the May 30th Movement broke out. Now, Han Suyin may not have been consciously lying. She did not have access to all the materials that have made modern scholarship on China possible, and she relied heavily on interviews with people in China. So it is quite possible that she was told this by a party historian or leading party cadre who wanted to paint the history of the Chinese Revolution in this light.
This is an example, one of many, I’m afraid, where the political imperatives of the moment, as understandable as they may be, even in retrospect, have left the history of communism as written by those sympathetic to socialism as sort of cartoonish (in the portrayal of revolutionary leaders as infallible heroes) and, in some essential points, basically false or untrue. I personally think the world would be a better place today had capitalism not been restored in China, and I do think that whoever at the leading levels of the Maoist wing of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1960s decided that it would not be possible to quickly educate tens of millions of people about the economics of socialist construction and their relationship to a larger project of human emancipation, that person was basically correct. However, their answer to that problem, the amplification of Mao’s cult of personality, has in itself been a factor which has been used to discredit the project of socialism globally.
So, an unintended consequence of the imperatives of the moment, in this case during the Cultural Revolution in China, but there are other examples which can be cited as well in the history of communism as written by those sympathetic to socialist aims, an unintended consequence is that much of the history written with momentary imperatives in mind contain easily demonstrable falsehoods and unrealistic pictures of leaders and the revolutionary process in general. In the longer term, this has made it much easier for the opponents of equality and freedom to discredit the work of supporters of socialism. After all, when one can point to one demonstrably false claim in a book, it serves to undermine the credibility of everything else that person has written. And we can see that in the long run, that lack of credibility has made it more difficult for humanity to get back on track with finding a path for ending capitalism.
Just a fascinatingly nuanced perspective and one we should all keep in mind. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, how the idea of unforced errors supposes that some errors are forced. That we have to make errors at times that are genuinely correct in the moment and needed to happen, but have bad outcomes down the line. The point is to adapt
