It seems that a big part of Maoist communism is the act of self criticism. A person gets up and berates himself as a worthless scumbag who doesn’t deserve to be a commie and must increase his efforts to contribute to the greater good.
I have never seen such actions in Soviet-style communism. Whenever something is being denounced, it’s never the speaker. The closest moment of self-criticism that comes to mind is Kruschevs “secret speech” denouncing Stalins old crimes. And that is really just a rationalization of why no one did anything to stop Stalin and get things done right.
Are there any examples of self-criticism (apart from forced confessions) in the the Soviet-style communist ideology?
Do you have any examples. I’ve never seen any evidence that a Soviet or Soviet client state ever practiced it. They were always quick to denounce others and “admissions” of evil invariable made an appearance at their show-trials. But what speeches have been made where the speakers drags himself over the coals?
I grew up in Cuba and attended Lenin school, where all good future commies attended (yes, that’s why my user name is ‘La Lenin’, that’s right I registered just to answer your question.)
We worked in the fields half a day and attended school the other half. At night we showered, ate, and attended self-criticism sessions. At these sessions we were all expected to announce our revolutionary short-commings and announce our plan to overcome them. Since the school ran, at the time, from grades 7th-12th a lot of the self-criticism were along the line of ‘I failed to achieve good grades, but I will study harder’.
The meetings were run by some teachers and ‘student leaders’, these leaders were appointed by the teachers and tended to be sons and daughters of government honchos. About once every couple of weeks the ‘student leaders’ chose someone to make an example of. We never knew who would be the unlucky student, but we knew how it started every single time.
A student would get up and announce his or her token shortcoming: ‘I did not cut my quota of sugar cane, I will work harder tomorrow.’ The teacher who was leading the meetings would then give the toker response ‘Thank you compañero (comrade)’, but instead of asking the student to sit and request the next confession, he would be interrupted by one of the student leaders, who would then ask the other leaders if they agreed with the victim’s confession or if they thought there were other sins to be discussed.
Some students got raked over the coals, for everything from general lazyness to their family’s lack of revolutionary zeal. This would go one for abut 10-15 minutes. At which time the meeting moved on.
The school is still active, but I’ve heard they don’t run self-criticism anymore. I am no longer in Cuba but I still have nightmares sometimes about this crap.
There are considerable other differences. Some of the major concepts involved agricultralization of the “workers”. In practice, Mao actually expropriated many of the old Confucian notions of society (Peasant-farmers above the craftsman above the merchants, etc.) and adapted them to Marxist-Leninist theory. There wasn’t a vast gap in actual behavior.
However, you didn’t see things like the Rustication program in the USSR. Red China actually wiped out a generation of its own young people, more or less, by dumping them in the farms and fields. Since the best and brightest tended to be the ones who volunteered for this BS, they wound up shooting themselves in the foot (more or less a succint history of Communism, actually). In addition, it was true that the Soviets took a dim view of traditional Intellectuals, but they rarely purged them until after having trained new, loyal successors. The Chinese often did not, and wound up with a legacy of incompetent professionals they are still dealing with.
Hey, lalenin, why don’t you start a thread like “Ask the former Cuban Communist!”? It might be interesting to hear your point of view living under that regime.
big difference in China was that Mao’s revolution came from the peasants rather than the proletariat.
china had so many movements to ferret out bad elements that most of this was criticism. one only did a self criticism after being hauled in front of the neighborhood watch. after the first years no one did a self criticism uncoerced.
self-criticism is much more akin to a confession or officiall statement to the police.
many of the public self criticisms were an act by one already ‘convicted.’ eg, tanks to the thoughts of chairman mao & guidance from the communist party, I realize the errors of my ways and look forward to reform thru labor for the next 5-10 years to improve my outlook.
plenty of books out there
life and death in shanghai, lien chen
the private life of chairman mao, dr li su
son of the revolution,
I don’t recommend anything by jung cheng (wild swans, mao the untold story). IMHO, her stuff is fiction masquerading as reality. YMMV
I remember hearing a chinese man talk about going to work in the fields as an undergrad. He was a complete city-raised boy and was surprised to discover that potatoes did not grow on trees.
I wonder how much progress china has made towards mechanization of agriculture. It seems to me that that is the greatest advantage that the US has in agriculture (Apart from not having to feed 1.5 billion people!).