The Shanghai Textbook on Socialist Political Economy is a path breaking work on Maoist Economics which commemorates 50th anniversary of publication this year
Maoist Economics and the Revolutionary Road to Communism: The Shanghai Textbook on Socialist Political Economy written in 1975, is one of the most comprehensive explorations by the Maoist revolutionaries of their views on the nature and functioning of the socialist alternative to capitalism. This year we commemorate the 50th anniversary of it’s publication. It makes a path breaking contribution to socialist economic theory. In the current world climate, the book assumes heightened importance—because the claim is made that there is in fact no alternative to capitalism, relegating Socialism, to be doomed.
The book was a testament that society be organized eradicating exploitation, competition, and private gain. Alienation, social fragmentation, and bureaucratic domination have their roots in economic and technological development. What heights were scaled in revolutionary China between 1949 and 1976 were truly path breaking.
The book showcased Maoist Economics and the Future of Socialism in building a breeding ground towards creating a new socialist society as a transition to full communist society, in which men and women would consciously and voluntarily, and through great struggles, transform and govern the world by themselves. At the same time, while imbibing the positive experiences of the first efforts to build a socialist economy in the Soviet Union, Mao dialectically reformulated the prevailing model of a planned socialist economy that became institutionalized under Stalin.
The book reflects how Mao was conceptualizing and implementing a set of solutions to the real problems of developing a planned socialist economy that is not based on bureaucratized regulation or reproduce oppressive capitalist relations.
The book reveals how the Chinese revolutionaries were preparing for battle, how they were training people to identify the structures and mechanisms within socialist society that had to be transformed and to understand what was ultimately at stake—to continue the revolution or witness it overturned.
The book explored how Maoist model also represents a complete anti-thesis of the orthodox Western approach to "underdevelopment," which perceives under-development as nothing more than delayed development that can only be escalated and promoted through absorption of foreign capital and participation in the international division of lab or. Revolutionary China, by contrast, cut off from the world imperialist system. It formulated and implemented a developmental strategy based on giving priority to agriculture, utilizing simple and intermediate technologies that could be spread and adopted throughout the economy while seeking to develop and apply advanced technology in a way that would promote self-reliance, and, above all, unleashing people.
Without doubt were problems and mistakes. The economy had certain weak points; the new social institutions certainly had some flaws; and in the booming of mass struggle, errors were rampant —sometimes due to people getting carried away in their drive to change things, other times due to dogmatism. Still ll this was amidst an upsurge eradicating exploitation and class oppression.
What is at issue here is the feasibility of revolutionary communism-whether or not it is possible to end a oppression and class distinctions on the basis of the voluntary and collective efforts of millions.
The Shanghai Textbook is a concoction of synthesis and originality, conceptualizes socialism as three interrelated things. First, it is a form of class rule through which the proletariat (in alliance with other popular strata, most especially the poor peasantry in the oppressed Third World nations) rules over old and newly-engendered bourgeois and exploiting forces. Second, it is a mode of production in which social ownership replaces private ownership of the means of production and social need replaces private profit as the purpose and measure of social production. Third, it is a period of transition characterised by intense class struggle and penetrative transformation, the aim of which is to eradicate classes and class distinctions on a world scale and as part of a worldwide process of revolution.
The opening chapter examines how the object of inquiry of Marxist political economy is the relations of production of society, and the book goes on to explore these relations in China as well as the role of politics, ideology, and culture in economic development. The path and pace of the socialization of the means of production in China's industrial and agricultural sectors, and the relations between these sectors, are surveyed. The task of eliminating what Maoists call the "three great differences"—between industry and agriculture, town and country, and mental and manual labour characterises the central theme of this rework. The text is anything but formulaic and dogmatic in approach. It explores how the proletariat allot certain powers to representatives yet guard against the abuse and monopolization of these powers and loss of control over the means of production.
Of particular importance in this 1975 edition is the issue of "bourgeois right. Bourgeois right refers to economic and social relations, as concentrated in law and policy, that uphold formal equality but which morally promote inequality. The socialist principle of distribution—"from each according to one's ability, to each according to one's work"—is one example: on the one hand, an equal standard is applied to all—payment according to the amount of work performed; on the. other hand, not everyone has the same needs and not everyone can work as productively as the other—and so this equal standard actually empowers inequality. The text draws attention to the forms of existence of bourgeois right and the ideological influence of bourgeois right (using the term more broadly to showcase all the relations of socialist society that germinate capitalist commodity and social relations.
One of the strengths of the work is that it invokes the rich lessons of China's socialist revolution. It also provides a comprehensive theoretical narrative of socialist political economy. Written in direct and nonacademic language, it was designed to adress an audience that was not necessarily professionally trained. The text was one of several titles published between 1972 and 1976 comprising a Youth Self-Education Series.
This book was written for young people. They studied it, alongside companion volumes dealing with philosophy, literature, the social and natural sciences, and agricultural technology * The Afterword examines the ‘performance of China's economy during the Maoist years.
The Shanghai Textbook is an invaluable source book for students and scholars of comparative economics, China studies, and Third World development. and of special interest to all who aspire for fundamental change
Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist who has studied topic of Maoism in China. Thanks information from Raymond Lotta.
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