Bill Hinton, the author of Fanshen, and other books praising the Communist Chinese land reform in the late 40's and 50's, died. On the MCLC LIST, someone posted an obituary by John Mage of Monthly Review:

Hinton again and again challenged the one-sided negative account of the Cultural Revolution that is now official dogma in China, no less than in the global imperium of the United States. His belief in the revolutionary transformative power of the peasantry, of ordinary people, cannot be shaken because it has been based on what he had himself experienced.

Straightforward and passionate, farmer and revolutionary, Bill Hinton's life demonstrates the universal core of Marxist revolutionary practice. Neither cultural nor generational differences proved barriers to his learning and teaching. Live like him.

Michael S. Duke took issue with this, referring to the

"time warp" factor in Monthly Review discourse. Also, I think very few of them know Chinese. The one abiding legacy of Marxism is sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, but capitalism plus liberal democracy has done more for the poor, laboring, huddled masses than any form of socialism or communism ever has.

In response to a defense of his ethics, he writes,

As for the ethics of anyone who espoused Maoism to the world and enjoyed special treatment from Zhou Enlai et al., especially from within the protection of the liberal democratic societies Marxism and Maoism were trying to destroy at the time, I find them to be a perfect example of what Michael Polanyi called "moral inversion" -- sanctioning the most immoral actions (Maoist style anything) for passionately moral reasons. (Polanyi's Personal Knowledge). National Socialism and Communism were always shot through with moral inversion.

Here's the NYT obit, which says his books

offered an authentic — if, some critics said, an occasionally overromantic — peek at the patterns of life for the peasants...