the prior 100 years, and the world in the 1930-45 period was in one of the most extreme wars between the
“rich capitalists” and the “working class communists.” It was interesting to me to see how Mao’s view of
capitalism differed from my view of capitalism because his experience with it was so different from mine,
though both of our views about it were true. Because capitalism provided me and most others I knew,
including immigrants from all over the world, with enormous opportunity, America was both fair and a
land of opportunity in which one could learn, contribute, and be rewarded without boundaries. I was from a
working-class background and always admired and appreciated the hard-working people who worked
together to be productive and the motivated entrepreneurs innovating and working with devoted workers to
convert their dreams into realities that the whole society benefited from. This experience of my trying to see
something (capitalism) through both my eyes and through Mao’s eyes was another reminder for me of how
important radical open-mindedness and thoughtful disagreement are in order to find out what is true. That
desire led me to study Marxism a bit so that I could imagine how it made a lot of sense to Mao and others as
a philosophy. My inclination up until then was to think of it as at its best obviously impractical and at its
worse possibly an evil threat, yet I was ignorant about what Marx actually said.
Enter Marxism-Leninism
My desire to see Marxism-Leninism through Mao’s and other Chinese leaders’ eyes, and my realization that as a
capitalist interested in economics I needed to understand it better, led me to study it more carefully, which altered
my perspective of it. As mentioned, before I examined it, I assumed Marxism was a dysfunctional resource
allocation system in which resources were theoretically distributed “from each according to their abilities, to each
according to their needs” but failed to produce much because of a lack of incentives to be inventive and efficient. I
didn’t really understand what dialectical materialism was, and I didn’t realize that Marx was a brilliant man whose
thoughts were worth better understanding. It was the process of needing to understand what Mao and those who
succeeded him, especially Xi now, found appealing in this philosophy that led me to dig more into Marx’s
writings.
Marx’s most important theory/system is about how evolution takes place. It’s called dialectical materialism.
“Dialectical” refers to how opposites go together to produce change, and “materialism” means that everything has
a material (i.e., physical) existence that interacts with other things in a mechanical way. Marx had disdain for
theories that were not connected to reality and that didn’t produce good change. So I wondered how Marx, a very
practical man who believed that philosophies could only be judged in the successes and failures they produced,
would have diagnosed communism’s near-total and universal failures and changed his thinking and modified how
communism worked using his dialectical materialism approach to do that.
In a nutshell dialectical materialism, Marx’s system for producing change, is a systematic way of observing
events transpire and influencing them by watching and influencing “contradictions” of “opposites” that
produce “struggles” that, when resolved, produce progress. Marx meant it to apply to everything. The
conflict and struggle between the classes that is manifest in the conflict between capitalism and communism
is just one of many such conflicts.
Thus far that sounds right to me—i.e., that 1) contradictions/opposites produce struggles and that having these
conflicts and reflecting on them and trying to struggle through them well is a process for making progress, and 2)
there is a struggle between “classes” that is manifest in the conflict between capitalism and communism. As you
will recall, I believe that conflicts produce struggles and that having conflicts and struggling through them
produces progress and I consider the conflicts between the classes (i.e., the “haves” and the “have nots”) to be one
of the three most important forces in driving history. You will recall that from studying history I have come to
believe that the three most powerful forces that have been behind the rises and declines of empires are 1) the
money/debt/capital market cycle, 2) the internal wealth/opportunity/political gap cycle, and 3) the external
power(s) challenging the existing power(s) cycle, which is somewhat similar, though I believe there are about 17
important factors in total. In any case, I don’t think that these two main points about dialectical materialism by
Marx are wrong.
Whether in his words or mine, in the 1930-45 period these forces were in the decline/conflict phases of their
cycles, which led to revolutions and wars around the world that brought the two big ideological approaches
—capitalism and communism—into conflict which shaped the landscape of the 20th century. These forces