WHAT IS HINDUISM?
Mao’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ also had
themselves a quasi-theocratic character – the former
imposed from above by a supremely patriarchal ex-priest
on what he knew was a deeply religious people, the latter
being an extraordinary evocation of mass religious
feeling on the part of a divinised Great Leader, and an
attempt on his part to re-establish the democratic rural
commune as the basis unit of both industry and agriculture.
In contrast, China today is an outright state-capitalist
autocracy run by a ‘revisionist’ Communist Party of just
the sort that the Cultural Revolution was launched to nip
in the bud – but ended up fostering through the backlash
against its excesses. Russia today is a neo-Tsarist
capitalist autocracy run by ex-Stalinists – yet built on the
backlash against the distorted Stalinist expression of
socialist theocracy – the principle of which, again, only
became so distorted because it was rejected in principle.
Yet whatever the dire consequences may have been
of Stalinist of Maoist caricatures of ‘theocratic socialism’
or ‘socialist theocracy’, they only arose in practice from
the very failure of crude interpretations of Marxism to
accept the idea of theocratic socialism in principle. It was
this failure that forced the hidden spiritual dimension of
Marxism, and with it the unacknowledged spiritual needs
of individuals in ‘socialist’ societies to come to
expression in distorted ways – through divinised dictators