u/Alwaysdeadly - originally from r/GenZhou
In my experience IRL (imperial core) and online, “Maoists” are often well read and intelligent but are also somehow completely unhinged. I mean specifically that kind of Maoist who rejects MZT and uphold Gonzalo Thought, for example. You know the kind.
Does anyone have an analysis as to what makes people become this sort of leftist, or any experience helping them back to the real world, as it were? All the Maoists I’ve known would make great comrades if they weren’t constantly wrecking or trying to wreck things in a given area. It may be of use to try to pull some back from the brink.
u/aimixin - originally from r/GenZhouThere are a lot of different kinds of Maoists. If you mean online Gonzaloites, well, I don’t really agree that most Maoists are “well-read”. If they understood historical materialism, they wouldn’t be Maoists. Most just have a vague idea that socialism is about abolition of private property, and capitalism is all about private property, therefore they conclude you need to make all private property illegal immediately or else you’re not a true Marxist.
Gonzaloites aren’t just anti-China. They also claim Fidel a bourgeois opportunist and turned Cuba into a colony and now today Cuba is an imperialist country. They stan Pol Pot as well and think he was a true revolutionary. Unironically they will tell you the Cuban revolution is bad but Pol Pot was good.
No one can come to such absurd conclusions and be “well read” unless they’re intentionally reading the most absurd texts they could possibly find and refusing to read anything from the perspective of the people in those actual countries.
No Maoist reads texts from Cuban communists or Chinese communists post-Mao. They only read Gonzalo approved texts, if they read anything at all.
They won’t ever change their mind unless you can convince them to read texts from Chinese and Cuban perspective. They never consider the conditions people actually lived under but just judge everything according to how well it fits some utopian ideology.
Take Cuba for example. They constantly say it was a “colony” because they continued to produce a lot of sugar. Sugar is the staple of their economy, if they stopped producing a lot of sugar the economy would just collapse and people would starve. They had to continue producing sugar and use that to fund diversification of the economy, which they have always tried a lot to diversify the economy and have succeeded in diversifying it a good amount. But because they did not immediately abandon sugar, Maoists use this as a “gotcha” that they were a colony.
As Marx said, “The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.” If have a revolution in is a country centered around sugar production, your material infrastructure is going to be centered around sugar production. You cannot just immediately abolish this, this isn’t an ideological thing, it’s a material thing. You need to gradually change it over time. Maoists have this “gotcha” book they keep sharing around proving Fidel was evil that constantly as their evidence gives examples of Cuba producing a lot of sugar.
It’s so absurd. Maoists refuse to apply a material analysis to anything, which is why they believe China, which had just came out of a feudal society in Mao’s time, could implement a fully developed socialist economy by fiat, and think the only reason it failed is because there were too many nonbelievers.
I cannot take Gonzaloites seriously at all.