Gregor Benton News Today

The CCP’s reversion to hard-line neo-Maoist totalitarianism with all its negative implications for science and innovation is usually attributed to the rise of Xi Jinping. Xi is certainly dragging China back to the Maoist dark ages in many respects.

Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo. Greg Benton editor. Brill Historical Materialism Series, 2015; Haymarket Books, 2017, xvii + 1289 pages, $55 paperback.

Zheng Chaolin (1901-98), the veteran leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Trotskyist movement, devoted his entire life to the cause of the liberation of the Chinese workers and peasants. Now at last Zheng Chaolin’s Selected Writings have been translated and published. Gregor Benton, who translated and edited these texts andProphets Unarmed (2015), deserves huge praise for making the writings available in English.

In Kashgar’s largest bazaar a few years ago, I spotted a pencil holder sporting an iconic Cultural Revolution image: Mao Zedong and Marshal Lin Biao smiling together. But Mao’s personally chosen heir apparent had been a nonperson since 1971, when he allegedly godfathered an abortive plot to kill the Chairman and then died a traitor in a plane crash, fleeing to the Soviet

Zheng Chaolin (1901-98), the veteran leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Trotskyist movement, devoted his entire life to the cause of the liberation of the Chinese workers and peasants. Now at last Zheng Chaolin’s Selected Writings have been translated and published. Gregor Benton, who translated and edited these texts and Prophets Unarmed (2015), deserves huge praise for making the writings available in English.

David Adam addresses Marx’s concept of a socialist society in relation to various concepts of the state.

John Bellamy Foster takes readers back to Marx's understanding of the dialectics of nature and society. As Marx and Engels noted, humanity must not only…

Since the Tiananmen Square killings it has become fashionable within the Chinese leadership to refer to dissident intellectuals as “scum.” That was Mao’s view, too. In 1942, the chairman, his armies besieged by both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese army, took time off for zheng-feng, or rectification movement, in which he laid down rules for “unclean” Chinese authors.

Wang Fanxi Mao Zedong Thought Brill, Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume: 210, Leiden, 2020. 326 pp., €150.00 hb ISBN 9789004358904

David Adam addresses Marx’s concept of a socialist society in relation to various concepts of the state.