Talk:New Democracy

Wrong or misleading?
what, if anything exactly, is "wrong or misleading" about this article? who added this tag and why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.99.1.189 (talk) 00:32, 11 December 2021 (UTC)


 * I just read the article. I actually liked how it neutrally just reflects the Maoist standpoint but I think that after the many crueltys under Maos reign some fundamental critique on those ideas would help the article gaining depth. Denkenohnegelaender (talk) 16:51, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Untitled
OK, got it wrong the first time. 71.125.171.8 19:04, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Atheism, but what form of cosmogony?

 * Greek text, anti-rightist. Please translate it.
 * nilogony (cosmogony from nil/nothing) vs topogony (cosmogony because any solvable algorithm of algebraic topology necessarily exists, without the need of any precosmic person; also the informational components (study: information theory) of personhood, aren't mereologically and metalogically more fundamental than the natural fields as described in physics)
 * https://textuploader.com/1d7dj

Add also the Chinese version or relative texts. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:587:4106:6100:F590:E48D:17B:832F (talk) 00:58, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

Revision of theoretical documents and other issues.
The article as it currently stands ignores the major changes that were made to Mao's writings in the 1951 and 1952 Selected Works.

he major sources for Mao's views on New Democracy are "On New Democracy" and "On Coalition Government" but the version published in the 50s and onwards change many of the postulates to say the opposite of their original meaning, with the usual interpretation being that it was a face-saving measure because the New Democracy period was quickly abandoned after being a miserable failure, so he wanted to act like he always expected it to be a very brief stage, when he had originally said it would be 20-30 years at least.

The larger capitalist interests almost all tried to defect to Chiang in Taiwan, and the Communist leadership found themselves getting into conflicts with non-Communists in the executive like Zhang Lan of the China Democratic League. Zhang wasn't worried about the Communists being too radical...he was pissed off they wouldn't nationalize the banks and kept trying to prop them up by bailing them out, and merging them into larger private banks. The whole thing finally fell apart when the Korean war started and they had to go ahead and nationalize a lot of stuff to fight the war.

Some quick examples of changes that were made:

For example: The 1940 edition of On New Democracy speaks of a “joint dictatorship of all revolutionary classes of China” and "The democratic revolution will undergo several stages of development, all under the slogan of a democratic republic, not that of a soviet"

In 1951 this is changed to say:

“the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes of China headed by the Chinese proletariat,” and that the revolution “will then be carried forward to the second stage, in which a socialist society will be established in China.”

It bears mentioning that the version quoted from and linked to from the Marxists Internet Archive is marked as being from 1940 but if you look at the index page you see it's actually from the 2nd edition of the Selected Works in 1951 and the publisher was just being sneaky.

A separate mistake is this statement in the comparison section:

"According to this, the bourgeois-democratic revolution paves the way for the industrial proletarian class to emerge as the majority class in society, after which it then overthrows capitalism and begins constructing socialism. Mao disagreed and said that the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution could be combined into a single stage, rather than two separate back-to-back stages. He called this stage New Democracy."

Mao never believed this in either his more conservative original interpretation of new democracy, or the "revised" edition from the 1950s. In the early version he said the stages would be really long, and later on he said they could be much shorter but there were always strict stages:

"We advocate the theory of the transition of the revolution, not the Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution nor semi-Trotskyite "Li Li-san- ism." We stand for going through all the necessary stages of a democratic republic in order to arrive at socialism"

Even during the Great Leap forward when Mao started using the phrase "Permanent revolution" himself he said it was "permanent revolution by stages, and also of continuing the revolution by stages." Chilltherevolutionist (talk) 12:25, 27 December 2022 (UTC)