Whole Lotta Lotta
Maoist writer Raymond Lotta’s lecture at the University of Chicago last Tuesday promised to hold potential for two possible kinds of entertainment: enjoyment of a genuinely thoughtful discussion on the merits of a Communist revolution in America, and a more malicious pleasure taken from watching the reaction of the libertarian members of the audience. But the talk failed on both counts.
Lotta’s lecture began with his moderator listing his major works: a smattering of articles for leftist periodicals, a co-authorship of a polemic which is apparently esoteric enough to not appear anywhere on the internet, and his magnum opus, “America in Decline,” a 1984 treatise on the global effects of capitalism. The real kicker, though: he writes his own blog. Astonishingly, the content of his talk was even more questionable than his credentials. He spent an egregious amount of time showing how many of Mao’s more sinister quotes were either fabricated or taken out of context. It was particularly amusing when he pulled up a slide showing the actual text of 1958 speech by Mao to dispel misconceptions about a popular misquotation (“Half a million may well have to die…”) not realizing that earlier on the same page Mao justified the murder of a somewhat smaller number of Chinese citizens. After inconclusively demonstrating that Mao never expressed intent to commit genocide, Lotta moved on to the next point of his lecture about Bob Avakian’s modern Communism without even mentioning the fact that Mao in fact did order the deaths of millions of people. The historical accuracy of the presentation was spotty at best and his points about the benefits of Communism in the modern world fell somewhere between vague and incomprehensible. In short, the presentation can be summed up in Lotta’s own words: “It’s quite amazing what passes for intellectual rigor with regard to Communism.”
Indeed—it is amazing what passes for intellectual rigor when it comes to communism. The above writer takes it as self-evident that “Mao in fact did order the deaths of millions of people.” Just keep repeating it with no need for citation or historical context: trust us! Mao was a mass murderer: end of story!
The fact that this person is not some random blogger, but a writer for a daily paper of the nation’s third largest city, just serves to prove Lotta’s point. Nowhere does this author try to falsify the statistics laid out by Lotta in the speech—readily available in non-Marxist sources—that China’s life expectancy more than doubled between 1949 and 1976, for example. Sigh… I guess the fastest and most widespread rise in life expectancy ever recorded just doesn’t lend itself to smug anti-communist one-liners.
The author is not even compelled to respond on a serious level, except to attack the speech as “vague and incomprehensible.” What’s incomprehensible is how they could sit through the whole lecture and still feel they have the license to trot out these ideologically charged claims…like (trust us) “Mao justified the number of a SOMEWHAT SMALLER number of Chinese citizens.” Let’s see, the Chinese population at the time was several hundred million. So according to our bonafide China expert Cullen Seaton, some page in some book somewhere says Mao supported (ordered? directly caused?) the deaths of…somewhere less than half this many. Talk about “vague and incomprehensible”!!
“Mao justified the murder of a SOMEWHAT SMALLER number of Chinese citizens” is what this should say…my bad.
What is so insanely maddening to me, a socialist, about Mao defenders like Pablo and Raymond Lotta is not that they want to contest the dumbed-down and often outright-false narratives that pass for history in our country and the world when it comes to leaders like Mao. Indeed, a critical investigation into the things Mao really believed and wanted to achieve in China would do a lot of people good, if, for no other reason, than that it would reveal the mixed bag that is his legacy. The same can be said about Trotsky, Lenin, Castro, etc.
But this is not the task that folks like Lotta set out to accomplish. In fact, they take the opposite approach: they try to correct the lies that have been spread about Mao and create their own falsified historical record, one in which Mao was not a brutal dictator but a tireless defender of the working class whose record contains not a single blemish or act of tyranny. Folks who are interested in building a just society should not be employing either approach.
@ Pablo – Well said!!!