In 1958, speaking of Chinese socialism’s decade of failed production quotas and the nastiness of its power-struggle schisms, Mao Zedong said this:
“Death has benefits; fertilizer is created.”
Switching to the second-person voice, Mao then said that you should embrace this: “You must be mentally prepared.” And then combining an inevitability claim with an end-justifies-the-means claim he stated:
“The destruction of the bourgeoisie and imperialism will be permanent. The setbacks, failures, and destruction of socialism are temporary.”
The ensuring “Great Leap Forward” plan and practice wrought devastation over the next four years before it was abandoned in 1962. Estimations of the death toll range from 15–55 million people.
Meanwhile, in the West in the 1960s, artists like Andy Warhol created epic-scale portraits of Mao, left-leaning students carried copies of Mao’s Little Red Book around with them, and postmodernist Michel Foucault declared himself a Maoist.
Source: Mao, Speech at the Sixth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, December l9, 1958. Section 10)
Related: “The Crisis of Socialism,” Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
“Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”
– Mao Zedong (New York Times, August 31, 1990)