Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) died half a century ago, on September 9, 1976. Mao’s life illustrated the movement’s main contradiction: the struggle between revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and reformist, anti-revolutionary “revisionism.” Mao wound up on the wrong side of this contradiction, a great tragedy for someone who’d made outstanding contributions to communism and the international working class for half a century. 

Mao was the first leader to organize masses of workers and peasants under the banner of revolutionary communism. In the 1930s, he personally led the epic Long March in the civil war against the Chinese nationalists. In the 1940s, he ultimately led the Communist Party of China to victory over Japanese fascism. In the 1950s, he backed transformational mass movements, including the People’s Commune Movement. 

Mao also made landmark contributions to communist literature. His Report on An Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan and his essays On Practice and On Contradiction lucidly explained the Marxist theory of dialectics. 

But Mao also had one glaring weakness: his position on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea that the working class must run every aspect of society to smash capitalism and advance toward communism.  

Mao’s essay On New Democracy muddles the Leninist theory of the state and essentially rejects the workers’ dictatorship. This confusion led Mao to make critical errors. In 1937, in the fight against fascist Japan, he merged the Red Army into a united front with the Nationalist Kuomintang army. Eight years later, he offered to negotiate a coalition government with Kuomintang leader and anti-communist butcher Chiang Kai-Shek. (Chiang refused.)

In 1949, on the eve of the revolution’s triumph, Mao wrote On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, a huge step backward. He endorsed the notion of a so-called “people’s dictatorship” that included the petit bourgeoisie, the small-scale employers, traders, and professionals who had not yet been won to communist ideas—and could not be relied upon to advance the revolution. 

One big difference between Lenin and Mao is this: As the revolution approached in Russia, Lenin became even sharper and more uncompromising on the dictatorship of the proletariat, as we can read in The State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. But as the Chinese Revolution neared, Mao became more tentative about the dictatorship of the proletariat. His Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee, in March 1949, failed to even mention it. 

Mao’s retreat became glaring in his attacks on Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet revisionist leader. In the Sino-Soviet Dispute of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CCP published important exposés of revisionism and Soviet nationalism.  Yet at the same time, Mao adopted a similar political line by espousing anti-Soviet Chinese nationalism. 

By 1968, when the Cultural Revolution was defeated  due in no small part to Mao’s move to disband the Red Guards, Chinese nationalism predominated. The defense of Marxism-Leninism against Soviet revisionism was forgotten. At that point, the weaknesses in Mao’s revolutionary career, once secondary, became primary. 

The last eight years of Mao’s life were disgraceful. Some of the worst capitalist scum of the world made the journey to Beijing to make deals with the Chinese leadership, from Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie to the fascist dictators of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, and Chile. 

Mao’s life must be understood as a contradiction. Even as we learn from his positive contributions and study his revolutionary writings and theoretical breakthroughs, we also need to learn from his mistakes—in particular, how his ideological weakness on internationalism and the workers’ dictatorship led to betrayal.

In the final analysis, Mao’s strengths and weaknesses are those of the mass movement of tens of millions of people: the international communist movement. By appreciating Mao’s strengths, we can draw inspiration. By analyzing his weaknesses, we can see the historic task ahead of us.