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ALVIN W. GOULDNEF
links with the past and the limits of the past itself; it is not an ex–
pression of a contempt for mind or learning.
Mao has proceeded from the profound understanding that the
most fundamental limits on the revolution were not located outside, in
the enemy. The diagnosis that the main danger to the revolution is to
be found in the resistance and power of the enemy
outside
was
certainly compatible with the experience of the Soviet State. But
a more voluntaristic Marxism such as Mao's, sensitive to the potency
of consciousness and commitment, is especially alive to the dangers
that derive from ambivalence and faintheartedness. From a voluntar–
istic standpoint, intellectuals have a very special importance and, for
that reason, it becomes especially important that they be viewed as
politically trustworthy.
Those whose ideological view has been sharpened by a kind of
Hegelian consciousness look out on the world with a very special per–
spective. They have a finn insight into the way in which the "Ob–
ject" is the creation of the "Subject" - even
if
the Object be the
enemy and the Subject the revolutionary Self - and they therefore
always know that the trouble is not only in the stars but also in them–
selves. They are not, in short, given to vulgar externalizing; their
talent and weakness is instead for the subtle searching out of the ene–
my within, and for internecine vigilance and struggle against him.
Maoism has the deepest and most troubling understanding that
a Marxist can have: it understands that Marxism, too, has a false
consciousness; it knows that the weakness of Marxism
is
not only
produced by its
enemies
but also by Marxism's
friends.
Maoism under–
stands
this:
that Marxism is the child of the very society that it seeks
to overthrow and that, as such, there is a way in which Marxism not
only opposes the Old Regimes but also has a measure of affinity with
them. Maoism understands that if the capitalist order gives birth to
the "seeds of its own destruction," then the new order is indeed the
product of the old order's seed, not only its enemy, and that there is
a certain continuity between Marxism and the old order, not only a
revolutionary rupture. Maoism's fear is this: that the old order
lives
on
in the new one; that the old order conquers in the midst of its
defeat; that the old order passes part of its seed-heritage on and lives
through
the very triumph of the new order. Maoism understands that
this is how it is with Marxism, too, in its relation to the old order
that it seeks to destroy.
