For some reason I get the impression I talked about Maoism with you on another occasion, but maybe I’m confusing you with someone else? Or maybe I just invented this whole conversation lol.
Maoism refers to two things: either MZT (Mao Zedong Thought), which is taking Mao’s theories he developed for China and applying them where they fit, and Maoism proper, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, invented by a man named Abimael Guzmán in Peru, in the 90s, holding that Mao’s theories form a distinct body of theory superceding Leninism (much like there cannot be effective Marxism today without Leninism), but history has not proven him right. First of all because the Shining Path has its share of controversies (but of course you shouldn’t just believe everything imperialists say about it), and second because… it just doesn’t apply universally.
Maoism, in China specifically and only there, is also sometimes used interchangeably with MZT. But there are also MLMs there, and they want to take power from the “revisionist” CPC. This is objectively wrong and would be detrimental to Chinese socialism.
I otherwise agree with Makan that Maoists are a more relevant subject for MLs because they are active on the ground. The Communist Party of the Philippines is a Maoist party, and has been waging a protracted people’s war for 60 years now against the government. They are also so much against the PRC that it’s become dogmatic. These are people with real power, they do organising and try to win over the working class on top of actively taking up weapons against the government – for the New People’s Army, I am not aware of any controversy that turned out to be true. But they are anti-Leninist, because they claim China is “social-imperialist” (objectively wrong) and that the USSR after Stalin was also social-imperialist (can be debated, but social imperialism does not exist at all in ML theory). On top of that, many Maoists in the west sound more like ultras, where they like to use grandiose speech (seriously, read a Maoist newspaper once, it’s amazing) and exalt the virtues of anything they do, but then they end up alienating themselves from the working class because the workers are not left enough, or they alienate themselves from other communist orgs because they don’t live up to their impossibly high standards.
There’s also a weird cult of personality in MLM parties, where they look towards their leader. I don’t really understand it, but maybe I could try to. If you look at the Philippines again, their leader (not of the NPA but of the party itself) has been living in exile abroad for decades now. I’m not sure what you can achieve leading a communist party when you’re seven time zones away, but they really hold him up as a leading figure.
But overall if we’re staying strictly on theory, it’s just not universal and I’m not sure what gave Guzman the authority to synthesize Maoism and declare it as such. With Leninism, it was Stalin who synthesized it, and I can get that because they worked together prior to, during, and after the revolution. Stalin continued what Lenin left. But with Guzman, honestly, he just ended up in prison halfway across the world from China.
Maoism is a “rupture” from Marxism-Leninism as many Maoists will tell you and Gonzalo, who created Maoism, even announced it as such.
Mao Zedong, in a few speeches of his, even said that any additions or added focus to Marxism-Leninism by him in regard to Chinese conditions should not be made into an extension of ML itself.
But… Isn’t Maoism an extension of Marxism-Leninism?
For some reason I get the impression I talked about Maoism with you on another occasion, but maybe I’m confusing you with someone else? Or maybe I just invented this whole conversation lol.
Maoism refers to two things: either MZT (Mao Zedong Thought), which is taking Mao’s theories he developed for China and applying them where they fit, and Maoism proper, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, invented by a man named Abimael Guzmán in Peru, in the 90s, holding that Mao’s theories form a distinct body of theory superceding Leninism (much like there cannot be effective Marxism today without Leninism), but history has not proven him right. First of all because the Shining Path has its share of controversies (but of course you shouldn’t just believe everything imperialists say about it), and second because… it just doesn’t apply universally.
Maoism, in China specifically and only there, is also sometimes used interchangeably with MZT. But there are also MLMs there, and they want to take power from the “revisionist” CPC. This is objectively wrong and would be detrimental to Chinese socialism.
I otherwise agree with Makan that Maoists are a more relevant subject for MLs because they are active on the ground. The Communist Party of the Philippines is a Maoist party, and has been waging a protracted people’s war for 60 years now against the government. They are also so much against the PRC that it’s become dogmatic. These are people with real power, they do organising and try to win over the working class on top of actively taking up weapons against the government – for the New People’s Army, I am not aware of any controversy that turned out to be true. But they are anti-Leninist, because they claim China is “social-imperialist” (objectively wrong) and that the USSR after Stalin was also social-imperialist (can be debated, but social imperialism does not exist at all in ML theory). On top of that, many Maoists in the west sound more like ultras, where they like to use grandiose speech (seriously, read a Maoist newspaper once, it’s amazing) and exalt the virtues of anything they do, but then they end up alienating themselves from the working class because the workers are not left enough, or they alienate themselves from other communist orgs because they don’t live up to their impossibly high standards.
There’s also a weird cult of personality in MLM parties, where they look towards their leader. I don’t really understand it, but maybe I could try to. If you look at the Philippines again, their leader (not of the NPA but of the party itself) has been living in exile abroad for decades now. I’m not sure what you can achieve leading a communist party when you’re seven time zones away, but they really hold him up as a leading figure.
But overall if we’re staying strictly on theory, it’s just not universal and I’m not sure what gave Guzman the authority to synthesize Maoism and declare it as such. With Leninism, it was Stalin who synthesized it, and I can get that because they worked together prior to, during, and after the revolution. Stalin continued what Lenin left. But with Guzman, honestly, he just ended up in prison halfway across the world from China.
Maoism is a “rupture” from Marxism-Leninism as many Maoists will tell you and Gonzalo, who created Maoism, even announced it as such.
Mao Zedong, in a few speeches of his, even said that any additions or added focus to Marxism-Leninism by him in regard to Chinese conditions should not be made into an extension of ML itself.