The basis behind Marxism-Leninism is that people have to make the communist revolutions happen with the purpose of directing toward communism. In order to do that, they have to energize people, especially peasants to be more effective in production and also impulse the development of industry by making factories, modern means of production… For that reason, this ideology becomes a source of inspiration for a lot of leaders over the world to run their countries’ political system, or to guide their revolutions because it forces the countries to industrialize and gives them a voice against the dominant capitalist system of exploitation. However, each person adopts the Marxism-Leninism in their own way. As a result, the ways that they implemented it are different, according to their understanding and the context in which they live. In this article, I will talk about the idea of communism in China at the period of Mao Zedong, and why it collapsed.
Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist party of China, is one of the most controversial leaders on the world in the 20th century. His adaptation of Marxist-Leninist ideology became a failure because it led to a decline of political and social fabric of Chinese society. In fact, Mao’s efforts raised up the economy in term of production. However, it did not increase the general welfare of the Chinese people, and their life at that time was still miserable. First, Mao did not have a good care of his people. When China felt on hard time because of famine, the peasants had no food to eat and they got no help from the government. You live in a big city, and the Party and Chairman Mao are giving you food from the storage bins.
The peasants have to find a way out for themselves”. It’s the best sentence to illustrate clearly that the needs of the peasant were sacrificed to meet production goals. Mao expected this part of the country to dedicate all of what they have: labor and wealth, but he did not take care of them as well as their life. The only thing he cared was how to increase production. Besides the lack of food and the material facilities, there was also a big gap in the knowledge, the realization in politics of the people between the town and the countryside. The peasants were not clear about the term “revolution”. Some of them did not even know what it meant. They lived, cared and struggled just for their life and they did not know what was exactly going on outside their world. The peasants seemed to have been more interested in getting land for themselves than in Communism or Socialism.
We can see the slogan of the peasant: “WE WANT LAND, DOWN WITH THE LANDLORDS.” The harsh life of the peasants and their ignorance were the result, an example showing the shortcoming in the Mao’s policy. He wanted people to fight against capitalism, but he did not support people in the right way. “Do they want us to starve to death to fight capitalism?”, that is what the peasants think. His economic-based adaptation of Marxist-Leninist ideology lacked the understanding and right policies to support people, especially peasants. It was also the reason for the failure of the Great Leap Forward. Second, the Maoist Communist ideology was about the rejection of individual wants and needs in favor of the group. There was no room for personal life outside the one assigned to you by the Party, and the Party’s values had to govern your private life or you would be punished like Uncle Yan and Mother. We can see that Mao wanted to build up the term “Party” as a most important thing in mind of every person. According to him, it was even more important than personal life or family.
Furthermore, this emphasis on the authority of the Party even led to breakdown of Chinese families. The Party, which was supposed to serve people, gradually led to a social disorder at that time. The misunderstanding of the ideology led to the wrong direction in the way Mao implemented communism. People should be a factor who is benefited, but Mao was geared to achieving economic production rather than economic parity among the Chinese people.
So that’s some of my opinion about Marxism-Leninism communism system and how Mao Zedong ruin it because he applies it in a bad way. In my next future article, I will talk about another fans of Marxism-Leninism system: Franz Fanon, Steven Biko and Rigoberta Menchu . Hope you enjoy this article and look forward to the next one.
