It’s finally happened. r/communism is formally a Gonzaloite cesspool. This happened after a few months of openly displaying the Shining Path hammer & sickle as the sub’s logo.
At last they’re honest. Took them a while.
I prefer the honesty.
Being honest is a big improvement, actually. From de facto to de jure and de facto.
But you’ve got to admit that the most successful communists is/were maoists.
Other than the CPC, the Indian maoists and Philippine Maoists are at the forefront of struggle. Both parties hold significant territory in their respective countries.
The CPC aren’t Maoists, they are Marxist-Leninist who follow Mao Zedong Thought, as a part of Socialism with Chinese Charecteristics.
I should have scrolled to the bottom before posting, I missed that you had already made this point and much more straightforwardly than I did. Well put.
The most successful have been Marxist-Leninists (the vanguards of socialist states - China, USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, etc.). If you look at what the CPC has done in substance, it is the practice of ML with changes in response to material conditions, but still on the path toward developing socialism. The CPC is only “Maoist” in the sense that Mao is known for leading its creation, but Mao was also clear on being against dogma and “book worship.” I believe the term would be something like “Marxist-Leninist with Maoist Thought”, i.e. Mao was not creating a whole new branch of Marxist theory that was meant to replace ML, but Maoist Thought certainly contributed to the methodologies used in China’s particular revolutionary context. Maoism as its own branch of theory is, afaik, dogmatism; if Mao were alive today, Maoists would be saying that Mao isn’t Maoist enough, in other words.
Like to try to make a comparison, imagine if people called themselves Ho-Chi-Minh-ists and focused on exactly copying the kind of guerilla warfare that Vietnam had to wage. This would not make sense because the context of Vietnam is not something you can copy/paste onto every other struggle for liberation. ML practice is the consistently successful one not because Lenin was cool and started the USSR, but because Lenin expanded on existing Marxist theory and outlined the need for a socialist state / vanguard party in a particular way that has been shown to consistently work and has been able to weather great imperialist threats while managing to increase quality of life for people, sometimes under very trying conditions. Maoism has not produced any such successful project led by a proletarian vanguard, as far as I’m aware - and again, counting Mao as an example of it would be misguided because Mao did not practice “Maoism”, he practiced ML with variation on it for the Chinese peasantry context. I’m not sure what you’re referencing with India or the Philippines, but I’ve only ever heard of movements that struggle to have traction with Maoists in India. The Philippines I’m not really familiar with in general.
Does that make sense?
Maoists (as in MLM) have been the least successful communists by far, taking all the wrong lessons of cultural revolution.
I feel like LeftComs and AnComs are less successful, but yeah MLMs are up there.
Throw in trots as well. Arguably, after MLs, Maoists probably are the most successful, at least because their struggles aren’t disintegrating into splinters instead of fighting their peoples wars. Also, Nepal was arguably a successful revolution that simply fell to opportunism.
Anarchists, Trots, and Leftcoms have barely had a whiff of any kind of established power let alone a successful revolution.
For that I’ll give the Maoists their due credit.
maoism as a current makes a lot more sense if you subscribe to the theory that it was started to exacerbate the sino-soviet split.
“MLM” as in “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”? I have no idea what this is though. The only mention of it that I have heard was a YouTube video discussing the Philippines years ago.
The other days, there was a guy discussing about Vietnam claiming Vietnamese kids have no idea who Marx, Lenin, and Mao were. Well, I can understand freting over Vietnamese kids not knowing Marx and Lenin, but Mao? Did the guy just ignore the historical disagreement and dispute just for the sake of being alarmist? Tbh, I did not like that guy.
Cultural revolution? I thought Maoists were ones that follow the doctrine of protracted warfare as revolutionary praxis? That’s several decades before the cultural revolution.
Maoists typically believe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Protracted People’s War, and the Mass Line are all universally applicable, and that all existing AES states are revisionist (with some making an exception for the DPRK). Mao himself was not a Maoist, but created Mao Zedong Thought as Marxism-Leninism applied to contemporary conditions in China.
Maoism was created / synthesized by the shining path in 1988.
Mao-zedong-thought (MZT) is different, and was and remains one of the guiding ideologies of the CPC.
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China didn’t start it’s transformation into a modern nation until Deng Xiaoping took power, pivoting away from strict maoism with market reforms. Modern China is far from maoist, the majority of their GDP is from private companies. And for their state owned enterprises most are run as if they were a private company once they have stability and an established market.
And many state owned enterprises started out as publically traded companies, so in those cases the state has no motivation to tamper with production as it would risk the enterprise becoming unprofitable and burdensome.
