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.
Maoism was invented by Gonzalo himself, and therefore is inseparable from his person.
Mao Zedong Thought is certainly something else entirely, integrating the contributions of Mao to Marxism-Leninism and understanding their specific character that made them applicable to China at the time, NOT universally. Also bear in mind the CIA distributed copies of the little red book in south american universities to exacerbate the sino-soviet split.
Gonzalo was more akin to Pol Pot than Lenin, despite what white Gonzaloites on Twitter may say (though many of them also like Pol Pot, so). In Peru, he enjoyed so much popular support that people voted for Castillo in this year’s elections! But I guess Maoists will defend it as saying that the SP did not participate in elections… and that they actively prevented people from voting in elections, sometimes with violence.
There is not a shred of dialectical analysis to be found in Gonzalo’s weird little cult, that was so centred around him it died the moment he was arrested. r/communism mods are in the wrong here and I’ve seen some of this stuff too. They’ll ban you if you say anything bad against him. I’m not sure if it’s because of left unity concerns or if they actually like Gonzalo, but this is what being online too much does to you I guess.
I am actually in the process of translating a book exposing SP and I can add you in to the project if you want, the book’s already in English and we’re formatting it now.
They’ll ban you if you say anything bad against him.
I don’t know what you mean.
Lol, probably downvoted because they said he did nothing wrong and even they can’t deny the lunacamarca massacre
Yeah sure. I might even be able to be of some help on the technical side. Feel free to DM me.
One thing I forgot to mention is the nature of this discourse on /r/communism. The mods say something vague to defend SP and there are no responses calling them out. Only downvotes. I understand why. But it still muddies the water a little bit.
Responses calling them out get instantly banned x)
I’ve dmed you!
Very good answer. I don’t have anything to add except this excellent post on gonzalo.
Lmao this reply:
How is killing a centrist social democrat spreading propaganda a bad thing?
Some people are nuts
Its sad. As ppl pointed out there, some ultras seem to fetishize death and killing. Maybe its because their movements have been so unsuccessful, that they see no other way… or they’re just edgelords.
Large part of it is they are just edge lords. Another part of it is that a lot of terminally online left leaning losers tend to think that marxism means killing everybody who stands in the way of progress or that are against the Proletarian Political body that has formed.
So you have on the one hand the ultra leftists who will say that Stalin and Mao were the worst most devilish leaders who abandoned marx’s teachings because insert vague thing while on the other hand you have another sect of ultra leftists who will say that any form of government is anti-marxist because they have literally read 0 theory and instead get their entire political framework from memes on the internet. (sorry for run on sentence)
So the two groups of ultra leftists end up having very wildly different views on killing. One group thinks that we need to literally kill any form of opposition to the popular movement no matter how harmless. While the other group thinks that any form of political violence is the most abhorrent thing imaginable.
Much like how Anarchists like to romanticize the black army and completely ignore the history of the Bolsheviks going out of their way to protect, reason with, and form compromises with until Mahkno decided to fuck off and do his own thing in the Ukraine. On the one hand they will criticize the Bolsheviks for “mass murdering anarchists” while completely ignoring the event that they cite was literally a field battle between the two armies. While on the other hand they will glorify the petty theft, robbery and murder of supply trains/caravans that were vitally needed to supply the reds.
It really is endlessly frustrating to watch continuously happen on reddit.
Maoism was invented by Gonzalo himself, and therefore is inseparable from his person.
Mao Zedong Thought is certainly something else entirely, integrating the contributions of Mao to Marxism-Leninism and understanding their specific character that made them applicable to China at the time, NOT universally.
This is just semantics, but I thought Maoism/MZT referred specifically to Chinese communism under Mao and Marxism-Leninism Maoism (MLM) alone was Gonzalo’s interpretation?
I’ve heard that as well, and maybe if you go to China people will call themselves Maoist (though there have been “crackdowns” on maoist groups in China as they were subversive). In the English sphere, if someone calls themselves Maoist, chances are they’re a Gonzaloid.
edit: though I’m translating a book (with generous comrades helping out) exposing the shining path from a peruvian perspective and the author consistently calls their ideology Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and, I don’t think, makes references to “Maoism” itself.
Pol Pot supporters in the current year? I couldn’t even imagine it
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.
I think this is generally a big red flag. If there is an important point, then it should be possible to explain it in a way that everyone understands. If they link that to someone who is new, they might do it on purpose to avoid any discussion.
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:
Those with a “Left” deviation in their thinking magnify contradictions between ourselves and the enemy to such an extent that they take certain contradictions among the people for contradictions with the enemy and regard as counter-revolutionaries persons who are actually not.
- Mao
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.
