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ALVIN W.
GOULDNER
workers and intellectuals. Top academicians may earn as much as
seven to eight times more than the average worker, and the gap
between top and bottom levels in the University itself is about 12-to–
one, and has over the years been growing. This inconsistency, how–
ever, would be reconciled if we did not accept the self-understanding
of Maoism, and, instead of conceiving it as an effort to overthrow
all
elitism, we think of it, rather, as an effort to make a
new
elite, an
elite which has broken radically with the traditions of the past, above
all, an elite which rejects Western models of economic development.
Maoism's policy toward the intelligentsia is, in part, grounded
in the very special conditions of the Chinese economy and social struc–
ture. Michael Frolic quotes a Chinese official who makes the major
point: "The new Chinese educational system is designed to maximize
the even development of a peasant society." The crucial statistic is
that China has 150,000,000 city dwellers but
~ome
650,000,000 peas–
ants. (Contrast this with the United States where the college popula–
tion now exceeds the farm population, even when the latter includes
women and children.) Maoist policies limit the priorities assigned to
urban development and aim to curb urbanization as well as to de–
centralize industry.
Michael Kosok formulates this development from the standpoint
of a Critical Marxism:
... the Chinese are attempting to destroy at its root the classical
Western antagonism between
c~ty
and country, industry and agri–
culture, culture and the hinter-Jands, "production-control-direc–
tion" centers and "consumption-liV'ing" centers ... to decentralize
and ruralize the land instead of regimenting the country-side to the
city and turning the whole land into a gigantic production unit.
(The proletariat is therefore not just the
industrial
worker, but the
entire workling population which is alienated from its praxis and
the control of its living process.)
This
is
an historically unique policy of economic development
that must be understood as the domestic counterpart to the
foreign
policy of a country whose technologically superior enemies threaten it
with nuclear blackmail. In one part, Mao's hedging about urbaniza–
tion is an effort to arrange China's internal social order so that,
if
it must, it can survive even nuclear warfare. China will, therefore, for
a long while remain a predominantly peasant and rural society, and,
given Maoism's unique conception of development, it has far less
