Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Book Review: Maoism: A Global

History by Julia Lovell
Dr Ben Margulies

10–12 minutes

The Marxist for our times? Julia Lovell’s fascinating new history of
Maoism, Maoism: A Global History, reveals the resonance of the
‘Great Helmsman’  in a populist age, finds Ben Margulies.

Maoism: A Global History. Julia Lovell. Bodley Head. 2019.

1 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48
Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

Find this book: 

Since 1989, the world has debated whether Marxism and

Communism are history or current events. Francis Fukuyama took
one decided view; the editors of Jacobin another. Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe told us that the age of class warfare was over,
and that instead those seeking social justice should appeal to ‘the
people’. Populism defines our current decade, much as Marxism
defined much of the twentieth century. But the strength of self-
described socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, and the willingness of figures like Brazilian President Jair
Bolsonaro to condemn ‘red outlaws’, suggests that Marx and his
ideological heirs remain very much alive.

It is into this ideological and political flux that Julia Lovell has

2 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48
Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

brought us a fascinating and timely work on one of the most

influential and disruptive strands of Marxist thought: that of Chinese
leader Mao Zedong (1949-76). Lovell, a scholar of Chinese history
whose previous work includes an account of the First Opium War,
takes a broad view of Mao across time and space, rather than
isolating him within the most garish manifestations of his rule in the
Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, she
demonstrates that Maoism developed long before the 1960s, and
has lasted long after the Cold War. She reminds us that Maoists are
very much with us today, whether they are directing Naxalite
columns in eastern India, sitting in ministries in Nepal, imprisoned
in Peruvian jails or inflaming the Chinese internet with bitter attacks
on America and ‘revisionism’. In taking Maoism into the modern
day, Lovell invites comparison between Mao’s ideology and practice
and those of contemporary politicians, uncovering a Mao who, in
many ways, feels familiar to observers of our populist age.

Lovell begins her work with a recapitulation of Mao’s key political

commitments. She covers Mao’s doctrines of ‘protracted people’s
war’ and peasant-led revolution; his unstable mix of mass
mobilisation and iron political control; his hostility to imperialism and
colonialism; and his abstract commitment to feminism (rarely
honoured in his relations with actual women). She examines Mao’s

3 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48
Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

irrepressible rebelliousness, which led him to constantly agitate

against any settled institutional structures, even those he
established. She then examines the history of Maoism in China,
paying especial attention to Mao’s courting of foreign intellectuals,
above all his biographer Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China, 1937).
It was Snow’s portrayal of Mao’s Communists as ascetic, earthy,
patriotic democrats that won him the admiration of the progressives
across the globe, even as Mao began his first purges and terror
campaigns at Yan’an in the early 1940s.

Most of Lovell’s book is an examination of Maoism’s international

career. Although Lovell stresses that Maoism hardly ended with the

4 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48
Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

Cold War, she is also very good at explaining exactly how Maoism
fit into the dynamics of that conflict and that era. She explains the
Sino-Soviet split, and how Chinese foreign policy deployed Mao
Zedong Thought against its Soviet rivals. Lovell argues that we
cannot really understand Maoism without comprehending its role in
the struggle against colonialism, a ‘defiance’ which ‘gave Mao and
his programme a global moral glamour’ (53). She traces Maoist
progress from Sukarno’s Indonesia and Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania
to a fractious Indochina, where international solidarity failed to
overcome the purely nationalist conflicts between China, Vietnam
and Cambodia.

Perhaps Lovell’s biggest contribution is to analyse Maoism not just

as an ideology, but as a sort of discourse: a system of signifiers,
ideas and emotional cues that can be disassembled and
reassembled as needed – or swallowed whole as a seamless and
mindless dogma. It is, in a way, a pliable technology of certain kinds
of governance and mobilisation. Its ‘perplexing, inconsistent
mutability […] has given the political line which carries his name its
potency, persuasiveness and mobility’, Lovell writes. ‘Somehow,
Maoism is the creed of winners and insiders, of losers and
outsiders, of leaders and underdogs, of absolute rulers, of vast,
disciplined bureaucracies, and oppressed masses’ (59).

5 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48
Book Review: Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell | LSE Review of Books about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.lse.ac.uk%2Flsereviewofbooks%2F2019%2F05%...

Lovell shows us how Maoist slogans about ‘rebellion’ and

decolonisation inspired dilletantes and liberals across Western
Europe, whose most radical act was to work at an auto factory for a
few years before becoming Greens (a lifepath also chronicled in
Richard Vinen’s The Long ’68, and neatly evoked by a lyric in
Chumbawamba’s paean to Ulrike Meinhof (‘Don’t wait for me to say
I’m sorry – I won’t/Who wants to be a green MP? – I don’t’)). A bit
later, we encounter the uncompromising Maoism of Peru’s Sendero
Luminoso, calling for the expropriation of the landlords only a few
years after Peru had, in fact, broken up the big estates (one
peasant asked if she was meant to occupy her neighbour’s garden)
(337).

Lovell devotes two chapters to Maoist activities in India and Nepal,

where Maoism continued as an active military force into the twenty-
first century (in India, Maoist guerrillas are still active today).
Another strength of Lovell’s work is the way she shows how Mao’s
appeal to the ‘colonised’ became an inspiration for oppressed
minorities within nation states, even though Maoist groups tend to
be led by upper-class intellectuals. Often, these intellectuals deal
with working-class resistance either by retreating to the middle
classes or resorting to extreme violence – the latter being the more
authentically Maoist response.

6 of 10 13/4/23, 10:48