The most important thing needs to be said first. I am not well read on Maoist theory and history apart from On Contradiction by Mao (which is not really Maoist). So whatever I say, you may as well completely disregard it. It won’t any difference.
As everyone here probably knows Chairman Gonzalo died on 11/9/2021. On Reddit at least not many people are mourning. /r/GenZedong’s pretty elated about it. I personally don’t know enough to take a stance.
/r/communism mods are pretty protective of Guzman’s legacy. The truth is that every communist figure is heavily slandered in mainstream capitalist canon. Guzman is pretty unique in that he has a bad reputation among communists as well.
I have been trying to read/watch/listen about the Sendero Luminoso and there is definitely a lot of questionable aspects to them. One thing I found out about is the massacres they have conducted. The victims here are usually indigenous peasants. An example is the Lucanamarca massacre, which the party has confirmed was a directive from it’s central leadership.
The thing that makes it the most confusing is that the accusations against the Shining Path are superficially similar to PragerU/Victims of Communism-tier slander against previous communist leaders. For example, it’s said that Chairman Gonzalo fostered a cult of personality, using armed indigenous peasants as cannon fodder. I am not yet sure if this was true or not, but going to Maoist blogs and websites and always seeing him being praised as the greatest MLM thinker alive does not instill much confidence. This is just a shallow comment though. For something more substantial I will have to read a bit more.
Back to the topic, the mods of the subreddit don’t like what they call revisionism. But the refutations that I see are not very convincing. The articles that are linked are not easy to read but I guess they are targeted towards someone who is more enlightened about the broader context.
The mods seem very knowledgeable so I expected more. Since revisionism is so prevalent, I expected to find some good refutations. But instead I just find a appreciation for furthering Marxist theory, waging a war that, while it did achieve significant victories, ended up failing. As communists, I expected appreciation of results and material gains but instead the realm of preference seems to be ideological dogmatism.
Overall it’s very confusing.
Gonzalo ( and the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM) movement he created in the 1980s), is an ultraleft deviation of Marxism that took all the wrong lessons of the cultural revolution, and based itself on the universal applicability of people’s war, and “anti-revisionism”.
In practice, both of these lead Gonzalo to denouncing every instance of actually existing socialism, including Cuba, the USSR, and China, as “revisionist” failures, and upholding the shining path ( an absolute failure ), as the only “successful revolution”. No wonder modern Maoist parties write book-length diatribes against one another and constantly issue each other death threats.
“Anti-revisionism” is really up to the individual using that term, because it doesn’t mean much without context. Its much more transparent and revealing when they say things like: “Cuba benefited from soviet social imperialism”, showing that they are no different from anarchists in being unable to define imperialism. They’re denunciation of Cuba, Vietnam, and China along “anti-revisionist” lines, means they really deserve the title of red anarchists.
MLM’s claim to practice the mass line ( learning from and building trust with the peasantry ), yet Gonzalo had only a small cadre of 3000 fighters, and his Shining Path movement alienated the peasants by seeing them as enemies, and massacring them whenever their ideas weren’t as advanced, like at Lucanamarca. Mao has this to say:
Since they can’t win the support of the people, like anarchists, they rely on individualist terrorism and assassinations to try to jumpstart the revolution. After feminist community organizer Maria Elena Moyano criticized the shining path, they assassinated her. This is why the adulation so many ultraleft westerners have for the shining path is so despicable to latin american communists.
Assassinations and individualist terrorism do as much harm to the communist cause as the CIA could hope for. It alienates your movement from the people, and invites crackdowns on the people you’re supposed to be supporting.
As a former mod of /r/com101, I can tell you that MLM’s dominate the /r/com mod team, and any criticism of MLM, Gonzalo, or the gang of four, will earn you a speedy ban. Its really unfortunate, because especially /r/com101 has a lot of great informative threads, and they’ll hand waive away any supporters of AES as revisionist.
Latin america already has better, more successful models to follow, some even more recent than the Cuban revolution, such as Chavez, Evo, Castillo, that are winning state power and moving forward the proletarian cause.