/gulag_archive/ - Gulag Archive

I used to like Mao as his writings on Marxism as they were very clear. However at this point in my evolution and political education I can no longer consider him a great leader or decent Marxist.

Mao's decisions, including the hundred flowers campaign, the great leap forward, the cultural revolution and to do the sino-soviet split, call the USSR social imperialist and buddy up to the US, laid the groundwork for the downfall of socialism both globally and in China, and laid the groundwork for revisionists like Deng to take over. If Mao had simply died in 1956 he would have been considered a great revolutionary, hero, and successful applier of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions. Instead he is now seen, rightly, as a failed statesman, discrediting traditional socialism and paving the way for Dengist reaction.

The brainlet take is to stan Mao and disdain Deng. The fact is that the problem actually started with Mao himself.
>Liu's work focused on party organizational and theoretical affairs. He was an orthodox Soviet-style Communist and favored state planning and the development of heavy industry
Purging Liu Shaoqi was retarded, he wasn't a capitalist roader, he probably would have been the an orthodox soviet style ML, maybe slightly revisionist like Khrushchev, as opposed to Deng who was the gorby/thatcher of China.

Liu would have been a good successor to Mao instead of Deng. Furthermore Mao's implementation of agricultural collectivization and industrialization was poorly implemented. Mao blamed this on others but the truth is he himself was to blame for a ton of it. The maoist tendency to anti intellectualism, distrust of technical experts, all lead directly to that terrible implementation of the GLF. It's possible agricultural collectivization and rapidly industrialization, at least at the rapid pace Mao wanted, would have always resulted in some deaths.

But the excess deaths are 100% due to Mao's retardation like trying to smelt farm tools into metal to do industrialization fast, meanwhile it just produced low quality shit-iron, failed irrigation projections, farming techniques influenced by lysenkoism (that one was shared with the USSR). All of this shit could literally have been avoided if Mao had just allowed more technical experts to have input and done things at a slightly slower pace. For all of his whinging about Khrushchev betraying Marxism, Mao himself's goals were influenced since the late 50s by Khrushchevite productivism. The anti-intellectualism, the reliance on the mass of the peasantry instead of the urban proletariat, all resulted in a bunch of mistakes being made that were 100% avoidable.

But then Mao had to stack retardation on top of retardation, break up with the soviets and make friends with fucking Richard Nixon of all people.