The US may be populated by nearly 300 million isolated monads, but do we ever love the word 'community'. On the left, it's never 'blacks' or 'Jews', it's 'the black community' and 'the Jewish community'. Presumably there's something abrupt and almost impolite about simple monosyllabic nouns, so the addition of a few Latinate syllables softens the blow. But there's a way in which the use of the word reads like a wish fulfillment, a hope that a community that doesn't really exist in any for-itself sense can be created in the act of naming it. But, beyond the left, it's also a popular formulation in mainstream American speech. Examples I've collected over the years include the reality TV community, the military community, the air-hijacking community, the mortgage community, the Alzheimer's community, the cybernerd community, the Phish community, and the copyright community. Of particular interest to readers of this volume might be one of the more ubiquitous examples: 'the business community'.
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Like the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, contemporary Maoist movements have combined peaceful protest, armed struggle, relations with the workers and peasants, and ‘the line struggle’ through practice and theoretical debate, striving to achieve political unity and forge a new political subject through a dynamic process of division and integration. These features hardly find any equivalent in the contemporary social movements centred in urban middle classes. Such movements are often short-lived, fragmented, and based on immediate interests and mainstream values. The lack of a process of remolding the subject (or of self-negation in order to form a new self) makes it impossible for social struggle to be sustained. The scale, longevity, intensity and political innovation of the Maoist movement distinguishes it from the various Occupy movements in the west. Calling this persistence of Maoist practice a ‘spectacle’ is deliberate, intended to contrast it with both the spectacular collapse of most Communist parties or their degeneration through an embrace of neoliberal globalization, as well as the spectacle of protest movements like Occupy. The ‘spectacle’ of Maoist movements also offers a sharp contrast to the overwhelming focus of contemporary scholarship on globalization, the rise of Chinese capitalism, financial crises, etc. Even the more critical currents leave little, if any, space for the possibility of overcoming capitalism through revolutionary means. As such, old categories, from class to nation, autonomism to internationalism, become the subjects of negative reflection and deconstruction. In the context of contemporary thinking, we can hardly find traces of the Maoist movement; or else it is no more than a synonym of terrorism. We have become accustomed to observing our world through the lens of the ‘end of history’, even for many people who firmly reject such a theory. This is why it is especially important to insist on asking whether Maoism as movement and party still bears lessons for people engaged in various forms of struggle.
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Pub Date : 1900-01-01DOI: 10.1080/08854308708427940
J. Petras
The issue of democracy cannot be discussed independently of political and social context. Eighteenth century democratic revolutionaries, as well as 19th and 20th century anti-colonial revolutionaries, liberal democratic and contemporary socialist practitioners have at one time or another supported varying degrees of democracy or authoritarianism according to the political context. While some writers have espoused the notion of supporting democracy everywhere and at all times, in practice this has proven to be an untenable position, leaving the way open to a number of unsatisfactory solutions which include: (1) proclaiming the principle democracy and divorcing it from practice, (2) redefining democracy to include authoritarian practice, (3) invoking vague juridical formulas to cover immediate ad hoc expediencies and then revoking them when the situation becomes manageable, (4) specifying a set of contextual circumstances in which democratic freedoms can be suspended for a specific time frame for particular sets of transcendent political reasons. It is sheer demagoguery devoid of historical substance simply to wave the flag of democracy at every point and place in history--particularly in periods of large scale, long term changes from one social system to another. On the other hand, it is a perversion of democratic sensibility to make a virtue of historical necessities, to extend and institutionalise authoritarian practices beyond the particular context in which they were evoked and to claim that the new autocratic polity represents a higher form of political governance.
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