Cable may have put his finger on something with his unlikely-sounding comparison. There are some interesting parallels, but do Cameron and Clegg really have the imagination to come up with it?
What is it about Vince Cable and communism? Barely a month seems to go by without Cable comparing others, or being compared himself, to something or someone related to it. In September, the Liberal Democrat minister was accused (implausibly) of being some sort of quasi-Marxist after making some mildly critical remarks about capitalism in a speech. In 2007, Cable made his memorable quip about Gordon Brown having undergone a "remarkable transformation ... from Stalin to Mr Bean". While having his own Mr Bean moment, revealed this week, Cable was at it again. This time it was Mao.
In criticising the speed at which the government was attempting change, Cable said: "There is a kind of Maoist revolution happening in a lot of areas like the health service, local government, reform, all this kind of stuff, which is in danger of getting out of control. We are trying to do too many things, actually." This follows his remarks in November, when Cable, responding to criticism that this reform was ill-thought-out and moving too quickly without adequate consultation, said the coalition's abolition of regional development agencies (RDAs) and their replacement with local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) was "a little Maoist and chaotic".
The sense of the analogy seems to rest on the idea that the practice of Maoism was shambolic and driven forward by a dogmatic sort of zeal rather than by any more measured and well-planned approach. Is this a fair assessment of Maoism – or, indeed, of coalition policy? What, in fact, was Maoism?
Maoism had two major distinguishing characteristics – one relating to revolutionary strategy and the other relating to domestic policy. The first of these was guerrilla war waged by peasant armies in the countryside. The second was a voluntarist conception of social transformation in which a highly mobilised population could fundamentally change society through sheer determination and force of will. Both of these features combined putative, proclaimed commitment to democratic popular power on the one hand with what was often brutal, bureaucratic and authoritarian practice in reality. The elitist and authoritarian brutality of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) under Mao was greatly informed by material conditions in China at the time, but the authoritarianism of state policy under Mao was also deeply conditioned by the nature, and lasting effects, of its guerrilla strategy.
At first, communist strategy in China took the form of mass working class struggle in industrialised, urban centres. In 1927, in fact, a proletarian uprising took charge of Shanghai. But shortly afterwards communists were forced to flee to the countryside when the nationalist Kuomintang, which had come to power, turned on them, executing thousands. It was in rural China, among a peasant population, that Mao developed a new strategy suited to these circumstances – building peasant armies to fight a protracted guerrilla war. Mao was a brilliant and ruthless military strategist. His armies were eventually victorious and the CCP took control of China in 1949. Years of guerrilla war, however, had brutalised the Chinese population and certainly brutalised the communists. The guerrilla campaign transformed the CCP into a heavily militarised and authoritarian body in which the most ruthless figures had come to dominate. In addition, China was poor and industrially underdeveloped, and its people were mostly illiterate peasants with no experience of democratic politics.
All of this profoundly affected the nature of Maoism in power. Mao's primary aim was to modernise and industrialise China as quickly as possible and – like Stalin in Russia – to condense this process, which had taken many decades, even centuries, in western Europe, into a few short years. As in Russia, this came at immense human cost. China's greatest economic resource was its large population, and Mao set about drawing upon this in inventive ways, but with little concern for human suffering. His rule was marked by bold political and social initiatives. These included collectivisation of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Many of these were dressed up in the language of democratic popular involvement, but in reality these policies were largely driven from the top, and mass mobilisation depended just as much on fear on the part of ordinary Chinese people as it did on genuine enthusiasm. Furthermore, it is impossible to understand these measures without reference to elite bureaucratic manoeuvring among CCP leaders. The Cultural Revolution, in particular, was set in motion by Mao as part of a cynical attempt to outflank his enemies in the bureaucracy.
Many tens of millions died under Mao's rule. Many of these deaths were brought about by the famine that resulted from the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. It's worth saying that, if Mao can be held responsible for these deaths from starvation (which I agree he should be), Victorian British colonial authorities can be held responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Indians from famine as a result of economic reforms imposed by Britain in the 1870s and 1880s. Further, there are grounds, arguably, for holding those who preside over the global economy today at least partly responsible for the 50,000 deaths from poverty-related causes (22,000 of them children) that occur every day. If rich countries were as committed to poverty eradication as they are to propping up financial markets, these deaths could be prevented quite easily. Still, there was something particularly atrocious about Mao's apparent complete indifference to the many millions of lives his rule snuffed out.
In view of the above, there is, perhaps, something rather obscene about Cable's analogy. Nevertheless, despite the great gulf between, say, the Cultural Revolution on the one hand and the abolition of, say, RDAs on the other, Cable has, perhaps, put his finger on something. There are some interesting parallels.
First, this is a government driven by dogma – free market dogma. Second, there is a certain reckless glee in the coalition ranks in relation to the social upheaval their reforms will unleash – the Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford recently welcomed the prospect of "chaos" as local government is cut back. Third, like Maoism, the coalition dresses up its reforms in the language of popular empowerment (the "big society" being the most obvious example), although the practical effects of these reforms are likely to be anything but democratically empowering. Cameron's invocation of ideas such as decentralisation and democratisation serves as rhetorical and ideological cover for cost-cutting and the dismantling of public services. There will be no "big society" – only cutbacks and the privatisation of services formerly provided for the public good.
Finally, this is, in an important sense, a class-struggle government – one acting consciously and directly on behalf of the rich. The role performed by the government in conditions of economic crisis is, all too often, to shift the costs of that crisis on to the poor and least well-off. The last government bailed out a banking system on the verge of collapse. Now this one is demanding that the rest of us pay for it, and is setting about that task with great enthusiasm. The choice we have is simple: hand-wringing resignation or resistance.
Ed Rooksby, the Guardian
