the need directly to work with and listen to ‘the people’. As a doctrine it is
completely anti-e ́litist, rejecting not only hierarchy in organization, but even
the authority of technical expertise. Thus Maoism represents a sort of populist
Marxism, a direct opposition todemocratic centralism, and urges a
permanent rejection ofauthority. It also stresses communalism (seecom-
mune) and the small-scale organization of social and economic units, rather
than large-scale organization with more ‘privatized’ individual life. It is a
doctrine attractive to the impatient and anarchist, rather than the gradualist and
ordered aspects of revolutionary expectations, which was why it was so
popular, for example, among the student revolutionaries in Paris in 1968. To
orthodox communism Maoism is an extremely dangerous doctrine, and the
post-Mao Chinese leadership and the leaders of Western and Eastern com-
munist parties have all sought to eradicate it. Technically it can only be
described as utopian, but its form of expression, by a man who wrote naturally
in the classic aphorisms of Chinese culture, makes it eminently more readable
than the turgid jargon of much modern Marxism. Because Mao organized his
revolution, and directed his thought to communism in predominantly agrarian
and non-industrialized societies, Maoism has heavily influenced communist
movements in the Third World, and especially in Asia. With the rejection of
Marxism in the former Soviet bloc, and the popular rejection there of the
heroes of the 1917 revolution and of orthodox communism, the influence of
Maoism is likely to increase within surviving communist movements.
Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was one of the German e ́migre ́ intellectuals
who came to the USA between the two World Wars, settling ultimately in
California where he taught and wrote political and social theory. Although his
scholarly reputation was founded at least as early as the 1941 publication of his
major study of Hegel,Reason and Revolution, his real fame came in the 1960s
when he was taken up as an intellectual leader by the radical student movement
in the USA.
Working withinMarxism, Marcuse was always more interested in the
‘humanist’ or ‘early’Marx, whose concern for thealienationof modern
society was much nearer Marcuse’s interests than the ‘economist’ Marx ofDas
Kapital. The books that earned Marcuse his role in the American radical
movement were those likeOne-Dimensional ManandEros and Civilization
which concentrated more on the emotional and ideological constraints of
modern mass society than the straightforward analysis of class struggle and
economic exploitation.
In fact Marcuse quickly realized the great difficulty of fitting a Marxist class
model to American society, where the relative affluence of blue-collar workers,
Marcuse