

Fascism, as exemplified in Chiang Kai-shek’s campaign against the communists, is of course “the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat”, and the urgency of distinguishing this fight from the general struggle against all trends which arrest the class struggle is well-established. When the fascist trend emerged, Mao Zedong is widely recognised even by leftists otherwise not predisposed to praising him as having responded with exemplary guerrilla strategy and tactics. The People’s Republic of China was declared, and the international communist movement reached its highest heights of practical power for a few short years before disaster befell us.



Splits in the International Communist Movement





A few years after the declaration of the People’s Republic, Comrade Stalin died, opening a new chapter in communist history. With Khrushchov’s rise to power, the dictatorship of the proletariat was declared obsolete, and the foundations for a profit-based economy were laid again. These changes were recognised by the Chinese and Albanian parties as “modern revisionism”, and the two countries became firm allies for a period before disaster struck again (for a fuller discussion of the international context, I again direct the reader to the Abstrakt piece on the matter).



In private, Enver Hoxha was concerned about the gulf between China and Albania, but in public, he spent years heaping praise on Mao and China, something which, in light of later firey condemnations, has not gone unnoticed by the Maoists. But these disagreements were indeed present decades before the split. Chairman Mao flirted with Tito whilst condemning Khrushchov, an act which, even if excusable in the mind of the reader, certainly displays a considerable distance between Enver Hoxha and Chairman Mao, as the former bordered on fanaticism in his attacks on “the Titoites” (although it must also be mentioned that Mao publicly compared Tito to Bernstein, thus it would seem that diplomatic considerations determining who is and who is not a revisionist scoundrel were not a monopoly of the Albanian party).

In his fight with modern revisionism, Mao rightly concerned himself with enemies at home as well as abroad. In the process, we begin to see take shape the beginnings of a distinctly “Maoist” approach. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which included attacks on the “capitalist roaders” within the party, copies of the so-called “Little Red Book” (properly: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung) were the main theoretical weapon of young revolutionaries in China, and Mao was in effect the interpreter of Marxism-Leninism (laying the foundations for the later emergence of an ideology of “Maoism” proper). The text itself was compiled by the People’s Liberation Army, then under the leadership of Lin Biao, prior to his falling out with Mao).



The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, for its part, failed, and there are countless Maoists around the world today who rightly declare that the Chinese Party itself descended into revisionism. Many Maoists blame Deng Xiaoping for the current state of affairs, and view him as something of a Khrushchov to Mao’s Stalin. This may all well be true, but Mao Zedong himself seemed to have accepted this state of affairs by the end in a way that Stalin is not accused of doing, along with the “Three Worlds Theory”, a part of Maoist history that is not merely an incident, like so many in the history of Marxism-Leninism that can be brushed aside, but a theoretical point which led to differing interpretations of the core concepts of imperialism and social imperialism among various Maoist groups for years to come





Having already implicitly and explicitly criticised Mao Zedong in this piece, and before I continue to discuss points of purported Maoist distinction from Marxism-Leninism (as our common 20th century heritage), I wish to reemphasise that I have no aim to relegate Mao to the “dustbin of history”, as Hoxha and his comrades at the time of the Three Worlds Theory (perhaps understandably, given the urgency of the matter) once did. My personal line on what lessons we can draw from the 20th century Chinese experience can be summed up in two points:

1. Mao Zedong was a genuine struggler for socialism and against modern revisionism for some period, even if he seems to have surrendered near the end.

2. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whatever its merits or shortcomings, had a similar effect to Stalin’s purges: It held back but could not prevent the victory of revisionism. China under Mao was no more successful in establishing an unshakable new socialist society than Albania or the Soviet Union, “losing its way” after “the great leader” passed on.

If the reader agrees with these points, the former point in particular forces us to look at Mao as somewhat less of an exemplary figure than Lenin or Stalin, much to the disappointment of many Maoist comrades. However, I am hesitant to condemn Mao in the language I would use for Khrushchov, Tito, and Trotsky for this. The Chinese revolution was a part of the world revolution, and not a contest with Albania or the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. Like Hoxha or Stalin, and unlike Trotsky or Tito, Mao Zedong was for a time seen as a great champion of the poor and oppressed to people in far away lands. Like Lenin or Che, and unlike Khrushchov or Deng, we can in retrospect emphasise that Mao Zedong significantly pushed forward the cause of revolution in his own social context.

I am, to be fully clear, not a Maoist, but somewhat Mao defensive. But while attempting to criticise a cult of Mao necessitates something of a critical stance, my purpose here is also to determine what Maoism is and what specific parts we can judge against “non-Maoist” Marxism-Leninism.



In other words, having briefly summarised my views on who Mao was in the historical context of the splits in the international communist movement, I now wish to ask:

What is Maoism?

A particularly dogmatically anti-Mao Marxist-Leninist might use the term “Maoist” to deride Maoists with a mostly correct understanding of the world and a mostly revolutionary stance within it, as well as the base Three World Theorist revisionists who are in communion with the Chinese party today. While I wish to show due respect to the many Maoists whose line is close to my own by not over-emphasizing the Chinese party post-Mao, when, it has to be said, both in China and abroad, those who most sincerely defend the Mao era are exactly those whose positions on China today are closest to my own.

Besides, even without these caveats, a “Hoxhaite” like myself will still be painted with the same brush by our ideological enemies. Consider that Trotskyites have found occasion to refer to anti-revisionism as a whole as “Maoism”, just as they might refer to “Maoism” as “Stalinism [with Chinese characteristics]”.

If we are concerned with the essence of things, rather than pithy labels, we must turn to what positions those really sincere Maoists have themselves identified.





The closest thing to a retrospective document which concisely and coherently identifies the doctrines of “Maoism” is the document “Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!” released by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. While I consider that there are many Maoists close to my line who do not identify with this particular tradition (of RIM/MLM), none of them have identified any “Maoist” positions not found in this document, which I will take as a kind of “Maoist manifesto” that we might assume other Maoists may take less than all of in forming their own Maoist ideology.





But let me also be clear: with an “official” move by the RIM towards “recognition of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the new, third and higher stage of Marxism”, they forced other Marxist-Leninists, regardless of their views on Mao and the Chinese struggle, to formally declare that we do NOT view “Maoism” as a “third and higher stage” (a debate that up until then we would not have realised we were meant to have). Consequently, in their eyes, we suddenly become “dogmato-revisionists”.

Of course, we are not “dogmatically anti-Che” for not holding that “Marxism-Leninism-Guevarism” is a “new, third, and higher stage of Marxism”, even if we do think Che is an inspiring figure and a great Marxist-Leninist. The parallels may seem odd to “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists”, for whom Mao is indeed a second Lenin, but in fact, many (likely most) Maoist comrades continue to self-identify as “Marxist-Leninist”. We do not see this level of confusion over the division between Marxist-Leninists and so-called “Orthodox Marxists”, with whom we have so little common ground on the question of Lenin as to prevent debate from occurring in the first place. And anyway, we do not consider that “Marxism” is “retroactively” “dogmato-revisionist” in upholding Lenin and the developments in theory and practice associated with him and the 20th century experience. There is simply no parallel for the sectarian fashion in which some Maoists insist on the specific acceptance of Mao as co-equal in a Marxist trinity with Marx and Lenin.

If I invoke religious language to make my point, it is because, to outsiders (including many Maoist outsiders), this brand of “Maoism” appears, more than anything else, to be pointlessly sectarian. While dogmatic Hoxhaites are viewed as very sectarian by Maoists, we cannot say that any Hoxhaite organisation has ever defined revisionism negatively in terms of Enver Hoxha the way “Marxist-Leninist-Maoists” do with Mao.



We are told, by those who uphold the RIM’s line, that Mao did indeed have unique theoretical insights which must be grasped in order to be a true communist (to not descend into “dogmato-revisionism”). What are these insights? The document “Long Live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!” emphasises several ideas which are often repeated by various kinds of Maoist, the most frequently repeated of which seem to be “cultural revolution”, “the mass line”, and “people’s war”. If I am mistaken that these are the issues which separate Maoism and/or “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” from “dogmato-revisionist” Marxism-Leninism, I invite Maoist comrades to correct me. However, based on this assumption, I will give my appraisal of these ideas in the order I have given them above.

Cultural Revolution

I have previously commented briefly on the fact that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution failed (as well as published elsewhere on some theoretical discussion of why it may have fated itself to do so). It is a fact that it failed in its mission to defeat the revisionists, but I do not mean this, as I had implied, merely in the sense that Stalin’s purges failed to prevent revisionism in the Soviet Union.





I mean it failed in the most immediate sense, while Mao was alive, to the point where he was forced to accept Deng as a power player even while Jiang Qing and others continued to (rightly) condemn him.





I do not intend to use this space to detail every mistake that was made, as almost all Maoists would admit that mistakes were made and have their own views on what they were, etc. (without any admission of mistakes, we are hard-pressed to explain our failures without resorting to the “logic” of the Trotskyites, by which every failure is just blamed on our bad enemies and if only everyone listened to us).

What is worth discussing, in my view, is why this particular revolutionary moment is not merely upheld, but held up above all others. Maoists would respond that it is important because it represented the masses taking power into their own hands, in a way that, they claim, was typically Maoist. Indeed, I agree that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution resembled Mao’s practice in general: it was but one of Mao’s many mass campaigns. Mao’s “mass line” meant that such mass campaigns were a tremendous part of his practice, something which they frequently mention as a reason to uphold Mao. Why then the emphasis on the last one? Was it the most successful? One may argue to the contrary, that this was the mass campaign that led to Mao’s surrender, and the military stepping in per the wishes of Mao’s opponents, etc. By contrast, the Cultural and Ideological Revolution in Albania resulted in no such immediate counter-revolution, or indeed, any such regression until the 1980s.



In short, was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution the most important moment in Chinese history, or merely the largest (but still ultimately unsuccessful) example of “the mass line”?

The Mass Line



I did not merely redirect the Cultural Revolution to the mass line in order to degrade Mao’s practice in this area. Marxism-Leninism has always been a radically democratic ideology, in spite of our enemies willful misunderstanding of our theory and practice. The idea of “the mass line” comes out of a thorough and scientific investigation into the dialectical relationship between the vanguard party and the masses. It is the idea that the party must lead the masses not merely by standing one step ahead of them in the march towards victory, not merely by agitating among the masses to teach them the way forward, but by learning from the masses, so as to better teach them. One of Mao’s many succinct aphorisms explains the concept in terms I have always found sympathetic: