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Mao, Marx and Moscow

By G. F. Hudson
July 1959
Article Summary and Author Biography

G. F. HUDSON, Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, in charge of the Center of Far Eastern Studies; formerly on the editorial staff of The Economist, London; author of "The Far East in World Politics"

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ACCORDING to Marxist theory, mankind advances by evolutionary stages along a predetermined historical road. From feudalism the way forward is to capitalism, thence to socialism and finally to Communism. The main theoretical difference between the two last stages is that under socialism each man is to receive "according to his work," whereas under Communism each will receive "according to his needs." Communism in this narrow sense cannot be the immediate goal of a Communist Party when it captures power from a social and political order based on private property, but it must become so when the Party claims to have "built a socialist society." It is the claim of the Russian Communists, announced officially by Khrushchev at the Twenty-first Party Congress in January of this year, that this has now happened in the Soviet Union and that "having built a socialist society, the Soviet people has entered the new stage of historical development in which socialism develops into Communism."

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