Comments Elsewhere

Jesse: I think (though I’ve never been entirely sure) that Rothbard there was referring to the Leninist/Maoist views of revolution and not to their practices once in power. Rothbard liked that they were targetting feudal and colonial regimes, as opposed to industrial societies whose economies were closer to the Rothbardian ideal of markets and property rights.

That’s probably part of what he had in mind, yes. (The New Left fascination with Maoism was also somewhat, although not entirely, driven by enthusiasm for his revolutionary theory; especially his writing on People’s War and bottom-up revolution. Feminist groups used the practice of “speaking bitterness” as a model for consciousness-raising; third worldist Leftists took a lot of direction from both the Chinese government’s and the Cuban government’s support for worldwide guerrilla uprisings against empire; etc.)

But on the other hand, it does seem odd that Rothbard would foreground the Sino-Soviet split if his concern were just with Maoist theories of revolution, and not with supposed practical differences in how the USSR and the PRC regimes were operating ca. 1965 (e.g. that the USSR regime had settled into a comfortable statehood as an imperial superpower, while the PRC regime was still somehow furthering “revolutionary” “left-wing” aims while in power). It also seems odd that he would specifically mention their “scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State,” which again sounds as much like the 1965 attitude towards domestic revisionism and the bizarre 1960s experiments with mock-decentralism-from-above as anything. In any case, given that this big push in revolutionary theory by official Maoism at the time was so closely and explicitly connected not just with ongoing guerrilla uprisings in the third world, but also with internal Chinese state projects, which were supposedly aimed at reviving the old spirit of the revolution within China and at thoroughly smashing the rotting counterrevolutionary revisionist line, etc. etc., I’m not sure how cleanly the line between 1960s Maoist revolutionary theory and 1960s Maoist practices in power can really be drawn.

When was Halbrook’s stuff on Maoism mainly being put out? It may be that Rothbard had simply changed his mind by that point, or had sharpened a distinction which he hadn’t yet been ready to clearly draw in ’65.