>Those not wondering what a Maoist is wonder how I could have been one. It’s a historical moment that has vanished without a trace.
>In the early 1970s, when I came of age politically, the U.S. government was raining death on Vietnam abroad and hunting down Black militants at home. The system manifestly required more than a little tinkering to be set right. Anyhow, I had committed myself not just to a reformed world but a world turned upside down. For all its Marxist pretences, Russia seemed to resemble the United States. The grey-on-grey of Soviet-style socialism didn’t exactly fire the imagination. On the other hand, China appeared on the brink of ushering in a new world. Those coming back from Maoist China echoed the writer Lincoln Steffens on his return from Lenin’s Russia: “I have seen the future, and it works.” From Chairman Mao down to the ordinary worker and peasant, everyone seemed to be practicing a simple, austere lifestyle, contemptuous of bourgeois amenities and devoted to a larger collective purpose. I still remember the sense of moral inferiority on my first sighting of a real-life exemplar of this “new socialist man” from China (in fact, a woman, Carmelita Hinton, daughter of famed Maoist author William Hinton) at a left-wing conference in New York. Shamed by my bourgeois baggage, I decided against introducing myself to her.
>Maoism seemed irrefutable proof of an alternative to the rat-race existence. To cynics who maintained that creating a society based on non-acquisitive values was utopian, I replied: Look at China! It was even said that petty theft had disappeared. Bicycles weren’t chained up, lost items were returned. While I was taking a nap late one winter’s night in my college student centre, someone stole my brand new work shoes from, literally, right under my feet. Furious at the theft and having had to walk home barefoot in the slush, the next day in my Chinese foreign policy class I indignantly declared, “This wouldn’t have happened in China!” Many of my classmates no doubt silently thought that it served this self-righteous ass**** right.
>The precepts of Chinese Communism mirrored my own of a decent society. Prime Minister Chou En-Lai always had pinned to his lapel the button, “Serve the people.” Praising the wisdom and dignity of ordinary workers, a Mao quotation declared that the “workers and peasants were the cleanest people, and even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.” A sports meet in China would open and close with the chant, “Friendship first, competition second.” The eyes of a sceptical female co-worker of mine lit up when I quoted Mao’s aphorism, “Women hold up half the sky.” In one parable I emotionally recited, Mao wrote, “Death can be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to die for the fascists and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”
>What clinched my disenchantment was the increasing sterility of Bettelheim’s, and my own, “problematic.” After Mao’s death, his heirs, the “Gang of Four,” were in short order dethroned, and his legacy was dismantled. The theory of socialist transition, on which I intended to write my doctoral dissertation, seemed more than ever divorced from reality. In addition, the rapid collapse of Maoism forced me to rethink many of my beliefs. There must have been a lot more rot at the core of the Chinese Revolution than I was led—and allowed myself to be led, and led others—to believe. What hurt most for someone who thought he knew so much was how foolish he had been. I remember one non-believer telling this true believer that, before I ever got to China, there would be a McDonald’s at the Great Wall. I sneeringly dismissed his “petty-bourgeois” cynicism. (He in turn recoiled at being labelled merely a “petty” and not a full-fledged bourgeois.) Well, a McDonald’s did open for business at the Great Wall while I lost all interest in making pilgrimage to China. In fact, from the day the Gang of Four was overthrown to this day I’ve not opened a single book or read through to the end a single news article on China. The wound runs deep, the pain lingers. For the first three weeks after the coup I could barely make it out of bed. I was later told that Bettelheim had to be hospitalized. Whether, in my case, this was due more to disappointment or embarrassment, I cannot say. In any event, I learned an important, albeit excruciating, lesson: de omnibus dubitandum (Marx’s credo).