Mao

Abstract

It is the aim of this and the following chapter to illuminate much of the foregoing in terms of available but contrary historical experiences of socialist construction. We shall argue that the class struggles within the People’s Republic of China, and between the CPO and the CPSU, illuminate Bolshevism’s social problematic in a unique manner; not least because those struggles — over two lines, two roads, two paths — present and represent the supposedly impossible, or utopian, alternatives denied a priori by both Bolshevism and many contemporary marxist analyses of socialist construction. Here, we shall concentrate on presenting a theoretical account of events within China in the years after the Long March up until the early 1950s.¹