Marxism, Maoism, and Social Change: A Reexamination of the "Voluntarism" in Mao's Strategy and Thought
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1 . This section on Marx's usage of concepts and definitions draws heavily from Ollman's (1968, 1971, 1973) highly illuminating interpretation of Marx's thought.
2. Ollman (1971: 17) cites Engels' Dialectics of Nature, where Engels wrote that "What Hegel calls reciprocal action is the organic body." To explain changes in the physical world by referring to the reciprocal action of its parts, Engels asserts, is the same thing as presenting the world as an organic body.
3. It is noteworthy that Meisner (1965: 166) explicitly rejects the concept of stages of history as fixed and distinct in Marx, even though some of his other positions on Mao's voluntarism are necessarily connected with such a view.
4. Schram (1971: 230-231) recites this original Marxian formulation—that quantitative change within stages will lead to a qualitative change between stages—as evidence of Mao's voluntaristic, anti-Marxist blurring of distinct, rigid stages.
5. The fact that Marx's concept of "alienation" has not been evoked may be due to the fact that the concept has been associated with revisionism in the communist movement since it became popular in Eastern Europe during the 1950s as a justification for anti-Soviet liberalization policies (Zhou, 1963). Munro (1974) has written a brief research note on this concept and its use in China.
6. I have throughout changed the "production relationship" of the awkward JPRS translation into the more appropriate "production relations."
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