I am not trying to reproduce this book that was written before Maoism really emerged as Maoism.

After my recent rant regarding Goldner's hatchet-job on maoist theory , a friend/comrade emailed me to suggest that I should a prolonged polemic about the actual (rather than imagined) differences between maoism and trotskyism in order to demonstrate why some of us believe that the former is a better marxist avenue than the latter. And since I've also spent some time on this blog discussing the hegemony of the trotskyist discourse in academia , as well as arguing out the historical differences between maoism and trotskyism on numerous comment strings, I figured that it made sense to provide a much more thorough engagement with this problematic.As some commenters have occasionally pointed out, I tend to give summations of certain issues and often fail to provide the historical and theoretical depth necessary to understand them in a thorough manner. Generally, this is a limitation of the blog medium; I have indicated thattends to be a place where either the germ form of my academic work goes to discover itself or where half-baked and not entirely academic ideas go to die. Those posts that are more thorough than most of the entries on this site are simply random success that happen despite the medium's limitations. And a sustained polemical engagement between Maoism and Trotskyism, though not necessarily an academic paper, turned out to be something that was too much for a single blog post: an hour into this attempt I realized that it was going to end up being the size of a small chapter in a dissertation because, if I was going to do the subject any justice and not, a la Goldner, lapse into erroneous and sectarian ramblings that utterly missed the theoretical mark, I would have to write far more than a single post.Initially I contemplated turning this polemic into a series as I have done with other subjects. I figured, about a quarter of the way through the first draft, that the size of the project was such that I could milk at least ten posts out of this topic. But then I decided that my readership might not be interested in spending the rest of this month, and maybe a good part of the next month, reading about the same issue; those readers who come from a trotskyist and/or post-trotskyist tradition might feel like I've been spending too much time attacking them, or those readers who think that is somehow taboo to exchange polemics with other anti-capitalist traditions (and who confuse principled theoretical difference with sectarianism ), might get frustrated and choose to never read this blog ever again. Or worse, as long time readers will be aware, if I broke this topic up into multiple posts I might never complete it, or might take forever to get to the next part of the series and thus readers might end up forgetting the preceding entries, losing the logic of the argument, and end up becoming extremely bored by the whole business.At the same time, however, I didn't want to stop writing the polemic––not only because I had already spent hours beginning a draft, but because I agreed with the friend/comrade who had suggested the project in the first place. The question ofis important from a maoist perspective partially because, as the Goldner essay demonstrated, the trotskyist discourse of maoism has become predominant amongst certain sectors of the mainstream left at the centres of global capitalism. And though Goldner's analysis, though influenced by a trotskyist narrative, was ultimately a "left communist" [non-]engagement with maoism, there have been a lot of other trotskyist and post-trotskyist attempts to dismiss maoism as some sort of pseudo-marxism. These dismissals might all be grounded in some great misreading of maoism , but the fact that they exist is something worth taking seriously and, since I grow tired of constantly having to point out how these engagements don't even seem to understand the bare-bones of the theory they claim to examine, it is probably useful to respond in a similar, but hopefully a more honest and respectful, manner.Thus, I have decided to make the entire sustained polemic,, available here as a downloadable PDF. [If you're already bored by this long-winded explanation, feel free to scroll down to the bottom of this post where the download link is available.] Better just to offer all 25 pages as a single file, and let people who are interested read it at their own leisure, rather than try to hammer it into the confines of the blog medium. Yes: twenty-five pages! So if you plan to respond to this document, please read the entire thing before deciding what you think it says and firing of an irate comment.Although this sustained polemic is already rather large, it is still only the bare-bones of a critical comparison. An entire book could be written on this issue––indeed there have been books written on this issue that, due to the time period in which they were written, were not very good––but I limited myself to the basics. More can always be written, but I didn't want to spend months focusing on a topic that, while important, could become too much of a distraction.The point was to produce, to borrow from the terminology of Alain Badiou, a "philosophical situation" where the reader would be confronted with a choice between two competing terms. Special thanks must go to regular reader and occasional commenter, "Red Traveller", who suggested that I write this polemic and even provided some kind edits and suggestions.