Eastern Marxist Leninists have refuted this position multiple times. I refuse to be apart of this community if its going the route of maoists.

This is a long essay, so right now I'll just respond to a few points.

(1) Cultural Revolution. This is a very complicated topic, with much more nuance than either ultras or ML's give it. But to speak very broadly, the problem isn't that it mobilized the people to do nasty things to the bourgeoisie; the problem is that it was voluntarist and anarchistic. Hurting and shaming the bourgeoisie is a worthy goal, but it accomplishes nothing if it isn't accompanied by a real increase in people's living standards. The tendency of late Mao, and even more, of the Gang of Four, was to think that communism could be built simply by instilling in people the right ideology; which is idealist rather than materialist, for ideology is a function of material conditions. Thus Deng's corrective, "socialism is not poverty," was desperately needed. One can argue that Deng went to far, and ultimately fell into right deviation. But we should not allow this to obscure the fact that Gang of Four were massively left-deviant, and that Deng's occasional rightism was simply the inevitable reaction. Thus, if China during the 1990s came dangerously close to neoliberalism, it was ultimately the fault, not of Deng, but of the Gang of Four.

The DPRK, by the way, does uphold a cultural revolution -- it is an integral part of the Three Fronts theory, so the writer of this article is wrong again. The difference is that here the cultural revolution is ongoing process, proceeding alongside economic development and gradually transforming the whole of society. It is planned, rather than voluntaristic. And this brings us to the central problem with "Maoism" and all forms of ultraleftism. Processes need to be guided; you cannot simply hand people guns and assume good things will happen.

(2) On "Vladimir-Fucking-Putin." The author finds it odd that MLs give critical support to the Russian Federation in its fight against Ukrainian Nazis, but not to the Shining Path in its struggle against the Fujimori and his goons. The difference is this: Putin, by stomping the Ukro-Nazis, is actually performing a useful service. What Gonzalo did was the reverse of useful: it alienated the masses, and drove people who otherwise might have sympathized with socialism straight into the arms of the Fujimori regime. There is a reason that many Peruvian leftists today believe (in the face of any real evidence) that the Shining Path was a CIA op. Which brings us to --

(3) Gonzalo was violent, but so were the Bolsheviks. The implied "goodness" of violence smacks of anarchism, or of Georges Sorel. As Marxists, we are not for violence; we merely recognize its occasional necessity. We don't do the fascist thing of walking around and advocating violence for its own sake; that is adolescent. We would all prefer a peaceful transition to socialism; the problem is that the bourgeoisie never lets it happen. We advocate, not violence as such, but the right of people to defend themselves by any means necessary. If some Gonzaloite can explain to me how killing pregnant women and scalding peasants to death constitutes necessary and appropriate revolutionary violence, I'll gladly become an ultra; but until then, I'll keep thinking of the Shining Path as basically Azov with a red flag.

(4) Why don't AES states export revolution anymore? The DPRK does, in a limited way; obviously it can't do much given present circumstances, but they do give what aid they can to revolutionary movements around the world. The question really comes down to: Why doesn't China export revolution?

The flippant answer is that we should be grateful China doesn't; after all, their attempts to export revolution during the 1970s led to some of the strangest foreign policy the world has ever seen. The serious answer is this. Global capitalism is in its last, decadent stage: accumulation through destruction. No longer able to produce real wealth, the bourgeoisie create wealth in the imperial core by destroying it elsewhere. Thus, it is imperialism that now must export revolution in order to survive. To uphold stability, and global trade, in the face of never-ending destruction is now, ironically, the revolutionary position.

I am from China and this reply was translated by DEEPL. In my province there is a high school with outstanding results called Double Ten（双十）. We often hear stories about this school. This school was established to commemorate the Xinhai Revolution, which took place on the 10th of October. The Xinhai Revolution overthrew the imperial system and established the Republic of China, which retreated to Taiwan Province and part of Fujian Province in 1949, which was under the control of the People's Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution that school was plundered several times because of its name. There were many absurdities during the Cultural Revolution and the victims were not bourgeois, maybe they were just returning from studying abroad, maybe they just had problems with certain people but were criticised for it. Ordinary people in China respected both Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. Although Mao produced mistakes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he established the People's Republic of China and the industrial, political and military achievements of the Mao era laid the foundations for Deng Xiaoping's reforms. Mao and Deng were not adversaries, they were close collaborators, and together they made China what it is today. (Of course without the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution perhaps China would be a better place today) Workers did have a high status in Mao's time, but the peasants, who made up the majority of the population, were not well off. In the north, a peasant could only keep 180 kg of grain, in the south it was 200 kg. In many places peasants therefore kept arable land for themselves and refused to allow it to join collective farms, but these were disparaged as "capitalist". Some peasants felt that they could not benefit from joining a collective farm and wanted to leave but were refused. Incidentally, today China has about 500 kg of food per person and the quality has improved, not only in terms of corn and potatoes, but also in terms of meat, vegetables and fruit. Mao promised to give the peasants a better life, but from the 1950s to the 1970s the food situation in China did not improve much and could even be described as stagnant, with the vast majority of peasants still living in poverty, excluding some of the model socialist villages, and it was in this context that Deng Xiaoping began his reforms. Deng Xiaoping's reforms introduced Western capital, which came to China to exploit the Chinese. But on the other hand, the Western investment also increased China's productivity and a large number of peasants became workers, which did not affect China's agricultural production, as there were too many peasants compared to the cultivated land. As for agriculture, since Deng Xiaoping no longer collected surplus grain but used taxes, farmers would not only grow 180 kg or 200 kg of grain, they were willing to grow more. Every era has its own problems, but to reject reform because of the problems is like 因噎废食（Refusing to eat because of fear of food getting stuck in the throat） Without Deng Xiaoping's reforms, socialist China would probably have disappeared long ago, as the Soviet Union did. Marxism is about keeping up with the times. Mao's measures were out of date and therefore had to be reformed, and the left had to be realistic.

The evidence for the Marxist-Leninist position becoming increasingly correct is a few reddit posts and one excellent Roderic Day article. Lol. A lot of my pro-China comrades hate Duterte and support Maoist revolutions in India and the Philippines, as do I, not even Joma hates China as much as online Maoists do.

This chasing of ideological purity and discarding real-world information is undialectical.

If I wasn't really busy and this wasn't so long, I'd tackle the arguments, because this is rehashing everything the maoists are completely wrong about, disproven by history. I hope others tackle these arguments in the spirit of zhou enlai and deng xiaoping.

Maoists do make compelling points. As communists we should be considering the Maoist point of view without shit-slinging and we should consider criticisms to be in good faith.

The obstacle for me is that Maoist organizing has only gotten weaker support from the masses since the 90s and there has not been any successful projects. From an analysis of theory standpoint, I often find them spot on in many of their observations. The global communist movement is a lot weaker than we (in the West at least) would like to admit. China may be making advances for China and helping to weaken Western imperialism's hold on the world, which we all obviously applaud, but there's no concrete evidence to suggest that they will be leading the global communist movement from a place of ideology anytime soon.

We are in a period of retreat and concession to the bourgeoisie still. Are there encouraging signs for the future? Sure. But we've got a long way to go. It's no surprise that there are some overwhelming obstacles for M-L parties in the world that have nerfed the revolutionary energy. But communists are still in the position of gaining support among the masses and you can't force the revolution without a truly revolutionary situation, especially after 30+ years of unimpeded neoliberalism. Perfect theory is never perfect in practice, and Maoism from Peru and the RIM is proof of this. Meanwhile, the general strike happening in India is a result of the M-L party organizing workers, not the Maoist party. We're really only just getting started. We can't let our desperate hopes put the cart before the horse.

Sorry if this comment wasn't the most clear or connected. I'm just kind of spitballing what's coming to mind. I personally thought it was a good article. Thanks for sharing.