The Dialectical Mode: With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War

Mao Zedong has occupied us a lot; let us come back to this. Or, rather, let us go there. Because it is there that the category of historical mode of politics finds a field of application. At least, that is, if we hold on to the strict identification of a mode as a rapport of a politics to its thought. Is there, consequently, something like a "Mao Zedong thought" if by this we understand here a politics, a thinking of politics, and the rapport of a politics to its thinking?

Thought and Knowledge

For Mao there exists a problem of knowledge whose central category is that of the law. There exists a multiplicity of laws; take, for example, one of his texts on the war: The Chinese Communist Party and China's Revolutionary War. Here we can identify laws of war in general, laws of the revolutionary war, laws of the revolutionary war in China: all in all, a whole spectrum of general and specific laws. It is not a question of enumeration but, through the passage to a multiplicity of laws, of an approach that requires the formation of a conjuncture.

Immediately, indeed, the laws are considered in relation to their time, to the conjuncture. We are not in dogmatic acceptance of the law: laws change, and they change because the situation changes. The situation itself is "complex": it is a situation on the whole and in parts.

Law, Conjuncture, and the Relation of the Subjective to the Objective

Thus thinking is largely assigned to the elaboration and formulation of laws. The rule of elaborating and the process of formulating a law have as a characteristic feature the fact that they put into place a rapport between the subjective and the objective, that is to say, in this case a rapport of thinking and that which lies outside the spirit and which Mao calls the objective reality. The formulation of the law is thus a dialectic. The dialectic operates by accumulating sensible knowledge and by leaping toward the concept. It possesses a great mobility, which lies in its uninterrupted allure, its extreme attention for that which changes, for the "new," which at all times marks it with a nondogmatic touch. The goal is to identify politics as knowledge.

Politics as Specificity

We thus find ourselves in a process of knowledge. In contrast to Mao's philosophical texts, in which all forms of knowledge are treated, in the one I am commenting on it turns out that political knowledge is specific. Specific, Mao will say, to those who rally to dialectical materialism, that is to say, to Marxism, that is to say, to the proletariat. Dialectical materialism differs from all others (1) because it serves the proletariat and (2) because it is grounded in practice. It has a class assignation: our tactic and our strategy cannot be used by others except by us, says Mao. "No army opposed to the people can use our strategy and our tactic." Tactic, or law of the part (the battle, the commitment), strategy, or law of the whole: these laws do not circulate; they are the laws of a politics. Politics, here, has certain laws.

The Dialectical Mode

I name such a disposition of a politics to its thought the dialectical mode.

Why tie the name of the dialectic to this precise mode and not find it in Marx or in what I call the Bolshevik mode? In Marx there is a dialectic, but it is one of History. In Lenin, there is a dialectic of consciousness, with a split between History and politics, whereas the party is the signifier commissioned to resorb this split. In Mao, by contrast, History is absented in favor of the law. Thinking is no longer the thinking of the adequation between politics and History. No hope for fusion is ever present. And, at the same time, there is a political optimism, not that historical optimism for tomorrow presented in a falsetto voice but a political optimism whose major category is...