Mao & Lenin

14 Pages 3415 Words

ties. According to Mao, the most important social class to overthrow the existing regime was the peasantry. The peasantry was for Mao what the proletariat was for Marx. To be sure, Maoism is very dissimilar to Marxism. But in both Maoism and Marxism, the majority of the population is given the primary responsibility and honor for overthrowing the capitalist system. In Marx’s imagined revolution, however, the majority overthrowing the government is the proletariat. In Mao’s Revolution, that majority was the peasantry. He focused on the peasantry as a revolutionary force, which, it was theorized, could be mobilized by a Communist Party with "correct" ideas and leadership, because they were repressed the most by the old regime. The model for this was of course the Chinese Communist rural insurgency of the 1920s and 1930s, which eventually brought Mao to power.
In Leninism, however, while both the peasantry and the small Russian proletariat are to benefit from the Revolution, the primary responsibility for overthrowing capitalism in Russia is given to a rather small, exclusive and clandestine group of intellectuals; composed of people which he refers to as “professional revolutionaries.”
Like Mao, Lenin believes that the solution to Bourgeois Parliamentarism is not the Monarchy, since both Parliamentarism and the Monarchy are, for them, detestable forms of government. Concurrently with Mao, Lenin does believe in the Communist Party, which is, of course, a Revolutionary Party. Lenin feels that the Tsarist monarchy should be crushed in Russia through a Communist Revolution. What should then replace the “smashed state machine,” (4) is a Communist society, which would at first be ruled by a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (6) during a transitional period, and then, become what Lenin considers to be a “complete democracy.” (7)
But while Lenin does not believe that democracy is impossible to achieve, he does feel...