On Mao's Self-Image as a Marxist Thinker

One important facet of the question of the relationship of Mao's thought to that of Marx which has been somewhat obscured by the pyrotechnics employed in the symposium to date is Mao's own perception of that relationship. Considering that perception, one finds that both Pfeffer and Walder appear to be advancing claims on behalf of Mao which he himself would not have made, or would have made in a different way. This fact does not, of course, invalidate the claims of Pfeffer and Walder, but it does at least cast them in a somewhat different light. It is certainly true that, in reading the corpus of Mao's writings as a whole, one cannot escape the impression that he regarded himself not merely as a Leninist, or even simply as a MarxistLeninist, but rather, in some fundamental sense, as a Marxist as well. In writing recently on this topic (Starr, 1976-1977), I noted two occasions on which, it seems to me, Mao paid particular attention to the Marxist origins of his own thought. The first of these occasions was during the rectification campaign of 19411942, when he spoke of the need to Sinify Marxism. The second was in the late 1950s, when Mao and his colleagues turned away from the Soviet model on which they had been relying. On the first of these occasions Mao used the analogy of an arrow and a

Aesthetics · Analogy · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Reflexive pronoun · Chinese history and philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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