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Why do MLM's believe Maoism is the best form of Communism?
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Communism
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It makes sense where there hasn't been a revolution yet because it appears to work. But it's not MLM that works, it's the ML bit. Trying to apply the Maoist bit outside of twentieth century China will go about as well as trying to recreate 1917 in Russia.
The problem with MLMs is a misunderstanding of the trajectory. They think it goes M&E > ML > MLM. But it's M&E > ML. The MLM stage is not it's own path. Like Stalin, Mao wasn't creating something new.
This is why MLMs tend to dislike China. They think Deng and Xi betrayed Mao. But they were faithful to Mao's adaptation of ML. Because they realised that Mao's approach was suitable for securing a revolution but not so much for socialist construction. It would be anti-Mao to treat him dogmatically.
Maoism is not a 'form of communism' but an ML framework adapted to seizing power, expelling imperialists, and consolidating a dictatorship of the proletariat. Regis Debray talks about a similar problem with assuming that Castro's approach to Cuba can be rolled out across the Americas like a flat pack, ready-to-assemble revolution.
Maybe MLMs should read OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP instead of dogmatically cargo-culting Mao’s specific path to liberation, which was for a specific place at a specific time.
Thanks for linking this
Stalin is who codified Marxism-Leninism though. A more apt comparison with Mao would be Lenin. Lenin was not a Leninist, he conceived of what he was doing as returning to the roots of Marxism, and innovating within that framework. In contrast to the revisionism of the 2nd international.
Maoists would assert that, while Mao was not creating something new, as Mao was an ML, he was responding to Kuschev's revisionism, and The Chinese revolution did make certain innovations that set the stage for an ideological, epistemic, break from ML, just as Lenin's innovations set up the break of ML from 2nd international Marxist revisionism.
And for the Maoists, the thing that causes that break is the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, which they conceive of, as synthesizing MLM from a few different things.
Those things being the Chinese experience, the rejection of Deng as revisionist and Reform & Opening Up as a turn back to capitalism, and the experience of Sendero Luminoso.
I'm not a Maoist, as I don't think it's yet proven itself to actually be a third stage of revolutionary science, but I think it's worth fleshing out, and representing as accurately as possible, what they think of as the ideological chain of development for Maoism.
This is very helpful. Thank you!