What Is the Mass Line?

Mao Zedong developed one of the most devastating dialectical techniques for mass mobilization ever conceived: the mass line. The idea with the mass line is that it is drawn from the masses, repackaged into a campaign for Communist Party goals, and then fed back to the masses to mobilize them to accomplish those goals, often including ruthless purges. For students of the New Discourses material, this pattern will seem familiar, both in terms of George Soros's dialectic of "reflexivity" and Paulo Freire's disastrous "generative themes" method of education (which Freire openly admits he got from Mao). In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay explains the mass line and its relationship to these other ideas. You don't want to miss it.