I’ve been reading Mao’s Little Red Book, which I gather achieved some level of popularity among the New Left in the 1960s, which is nothing short of astonishing, given its open and aggressive call for mass death against resistors and it’s dripping-with-blood rhetoric about armed struggle from beginning to end. “Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence…. All men must die, but death can vary in its significance.”
In any case, this passage struck me as particularly telling as to how a communist dictator deals with the problem of peasants who are trying to make a buck in the service of others.
The spontaneous forces of capitalism have been steadily growing in the countryside in recent years, with new rich peasants springing up everywhere and many well-to-do middle peasants striving to become rich peasants. On the other hand, many poor peasants are still living in poverty for lack of sufficient means of production, with some in debt and others selling or renting out their land. If this tendency goes unchecked, the polarization in the countryside will inevitably be aggravated day by day. Those peasants who lose their land and those who remain in poverty will complain that we are doing nothing to save them from ruin or to help them overcome their difficulties. Nor will the well-to-do middle peasants who are heading in the capitalist direction be pleased with us, for we shall never be able to satisfy their demands unless we intend to take the capitalist road. Can the worker-peasant alliance continue to stand hrm in these circumstances ? Obviously not. There is no solution to this problem except on a new basis. And that means to bring about, step by step, the socialist transformation of the whole of agriculture simultaneously with the gradual realization of socialist industrialization and the socialist transformation of handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce; in other words, it means to carry out co-operation and eliminate the rich-peasant economy and the individual economy in the countryside so that all the rural people will become increasingly well off together. We maintain that this is the only way to consolidate the worker-peasant alliance.
Oh, also he invokes phrases that have become rather popular: “Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production.”
