cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11136332
Edit: I’m from the Global South, I should’ve clarified that on the post. The lesson has been learned.
Many leftist movements, legit or not, call themselves either Trotskyist or Maoist and keep dissing Stalin for his “socialism in one state” policy and “ruining” Comintern and Deng Xiaoping for his “liberal” policies.
I want to know what they are trying to do by distancing themselves from the USSR and PRC while fetishizing Cuba and Vietnam—you’ll only hear them talking about the Vietnam War, btw—and following either the guy who lost the power struggle or a literal Marxist-Leninist who supported one of the refused countries and founding the other.
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To answer your question more seriously, a lot of these people are part of the “compatible left” or “captured left” people who claim to be left wing, but ultimately do not support any real socialist causes and do not do anything significant to oppose capital.
They are more noticable in the west because they are often allowed to exist where successful left wing orgs would be suppressed, so people looking to join an org will end up joining these do-nothing “weekend socialist” types. The actual leftist tendency is irrelevant, they are all the same, a group of people who claim to have the One True Correct Path of Leftism and spend all their time and energy attacking other leftists for disagreeing with them rather than actually doing anything to oppose capital.
They are functionally a way for the governments of the west to funnel revolutionary energy into impotency that is no longer a threat to capital. Trotskyism and Maoism are just two of the more common masks they use to disguise their true function, because those are ways to enable people to keep their liberal brainworms about AES being “bad” while also feeling like they are opposing capitalism, which is why you don’t really see orgs like this being more traditional Marxist Leninists, because that also means they would approve of Stalin and the USSR (and possibly all other AES as well) and would make for bad controlled opposition that way.
There’s a lot to criticize Hoxha for, but lumping him in with Gonzalo and Trotsky to this extent seems kind of crass. Also, is the point of this diagram that Hoxha and Gonzalo both lead to Trotsky? Because I don’t think that’s really true . . .
I agree, I think the meme isn’t entirely accurate, I just posted it because I find it funny. However, I do think that the meme is correct in that both “hoxhaists” and “maoists” are splinter movements that hinder the unity of ML movements in a way which is, in the final analysis, similar to trotskyist parties. However, I wouldn’t lump Hoxha with “hoxhaists” (and in fact, western “maoists” probably also should be distinguished from Gonzalo)
I think Spidermen pointing each other template would be better.
I definitely forgot adding Hoxhaists to the question. They are not that big compared to the other two though; I only met one guy who claimed he was a Hoxhaist.
tbf I don’t think I’ve ever met a hoxhaist irl
sounds like you need to bunker down
What’s up with the Hoxha-bunker jokes?
I don’t think trots and maoists are that comparable. First of all, see how many trots tend to hate Mao for being himself a “Stalinist” in their estimation, and also hate basically any socialist project that controlled a state except a very brief period in the USSR. I don’t think that considering modern China revisionist, even if you disagree with that estimation, is on the level of ridiculous historical revisionism that trots engage in.
Both groups end up coming to the same revisionist conclusions just by taking different routes. In action they come out being broadly the same.
Trots and MLMs are two major factions in my country, so I bundled them together instead of asking two questions.
“Maoism” is about as real as “Dengism” is. There are people that called themselves Maoists and thought functionaries driving a minimum number of mercedes cars by year x was integral to their party’s growthy. In the 60-80ies it was the same as “Daddy Xi pls send nukes” - an edgy marker of being a cool kid in the in-group that didnt necessarily tell a lot about the person’s committment.
Identifying with people perceived to be critical of the USSR (at vastly different points… Mao liked Stalin) is sometimes a crutch for people self-conscious about communism and the objective need to do nasty shit to reactionaries which itself is kinda telling on how seriously you gotta take these people. That being said, the need for labels is kind of a sign of insecurity and need for identity labels as a shibboleth is generally a big tell on ideological insecurities as well. and inner-leftist handing out of labels, like calling everybody that disagrees with a voluntarist call to action an ultra is more name-calling and appeals to the room’s Common Sense imo. I think. Sorry for the messy train of thought - on mobile.
TL;DR: you will know a real “maoist” when you interact with them, usually it’s western leftist with hangups about needing to have show trials for every NYT editor
show trials for every NYT editor
I’m from the Global South, and the only Western leftists and “lefties” are from Fediverse. But this still holds true for the wannabe whites.
But this still holds true for the wannabe whites.
In my experience, a lot of Maoists I have met in the west are “wannabe 3rd worldists” and wish they weren’t white and were living in a developing nation waging some vague guerilla campaign against that country’s government. But they can’t do that to their own government because
. In my neck of the woods they are just as impotent and insufferable as the Trots and functionally identical in their unintentional support for western imperialism(because they oppose every AES and anti-imperialist nation for not being communist enough for them).It is funny how these deviationists like to pretend what they arent.
I don’t think they truly realise what they are, functionally, they’re still idealistic liberals in a red coat of paint, but as far as they are concerned they are leftists doing leftism the only correct way, which I think is why they attack other leftist tendencies so much, it’s the same reason liberals attack leftists so much. Their worldview cannot handle the idea that they could be wrong, so their only solution is to attack the people who can actually prove that they are wrong, so they don’t have to worry about that possibility.
Something people forget about is figures like Lenin, Mao, Che, Stalin. People like Inessa Fyodorovna Armand. These people chose the path of severe hardships.
They didn’t just lead the people, they sometimes begged for survival themselves, Gramsci was born with severe disabilities and literally spent most of his life writing in a prison, Stalin went in and out of work camp several times. Lenin was shaving his beard and coming up with fake identities to hide himself as people were out for his head, Armand overworked herself to death.
You don’t need to look so far back in history. Do you know about Huang Wenxiu? I’m assuming on Hexbear some people would, but people like her seem to be almost completely out of Western leftist consciousness. Because these kinds of organization efforts are illegal. It’s illegal to do mass organizing for actually helping people, at best it’s anarchism which operates so disjointly by the time they build 1 hospital bed a - political party could have built 1 whole hospital with trained staff.
The egg broken from the outside is dinner, the egg broken from the inside is new life.
The f-you, got mine of socialism.
The biggest issue with that phrase imo is that it ignores imperialism
The imperialists are quite happy to turn every egg in the world into dinner
Wouldn’t a socialist regime change project run into the same problems liberal democratic regime change projects (repeatedly) run up against?
I sort of agree with this, this is partially how we’ve gotten incredibly annoying Estonian and Polish fascists endlessly crying at how the USSR liberated them from the Nazis
These people are fundamentally unserious on the one hand, but on the other it is objectively better for a people to naturally reach their own revolutionary conditions and then give material assistance in the duration of and after their revolution.
Liberal democratic regime change projects tend to be about economic imperialism. The goal is never to install a democracy, so their rate of failure is a lot lower than it looks if you take the regime change explanation at face value.
One would hope that regime change projects which genuinely center proletarian liberation and are carried out by groups motivated by a more scientifically correct and useful ideology, would tend to be more successful, since there isn’t an ulterior motive of exploitation introducing basic contradictions in the project from the start. (And they have better tools for understanding reality and engineering conditions to produce favourable outcomes, without being so clouded by ones own propaganda.)
(I am not well read so I’m just doin layperson stuff here, I would appreciate being corrected in my thinking if there’s a better way to understand this.)
Read about the attempts to export revolution to Poland at the start of the USSRs life and how the party quickly learned that it was an utterly fruitless campaign and the people of Poland were not at all ready to accept proletarian lead installed by a foreign entity.
