how did Maoists in the west react to the Nixon and Mao visits and later trade agreements
72 posts and 20 image replies omitted.>>2021509I have read Mobo Gao's The Battle for China's Past and he is a self-professed Maoist who engages with Chinese sources.
From this I think youre sorta on the right track, though it is less "revision to his class collaborationism" and more "denunciation of class collaborationism after its period of strategic usefulness had ended." Mao is viewed as a socialist revolutionary who allied with feudal-bourgeois elements in an anti-imperialist revolution leaving the communist party holding power. In his period of leadership he is understood to have pushed for more socialist elements and opposed introduction of market incentives and western managerial techniques. He is viewed, in hindset, to have predicted wrongly which imperialist power was the greater threat, but otherwise the cultural revolution and its policies (supporting international revolution, decommodifying essential services and making them availible in rural areas, promoting more workers and peasants to higher positions, maintaining a "socialism under siege" mentality) are upheld, if seen as failing to achieve their negation-goals like attacking the bureaucracy. Deng is loathed for tearing apart late-Maoist society and replacing it with essentially 1950s Maoism, and one of the big failings of Mao according to Maoists is not purging the nationalist-bourgeois elements of the party harder
>>2021509>>2026967It's actually interesting to compare Maoism to Stalinism, Stalin's rule was far more chaotic than anticommunists prefer to depict that era with the Party as some overpowering force. It was a lot of social chaos. Large parts of the USSR were more or less frontier towns plagued by bandits who had been expropriated ex-kulaks. It would not be rare to be working on a collective farm and coming under an armed attack. Some of the most vigorous Stalinist types who spoke up to denounce people as traitors and counter-revolutionaries (doing so to save their own skin) also ended up becoming suspect later on and were often sent to gulags or eliminated, since there was no official policy on how Stalin should be viewed most people could just have liked from liking him marginally more than Nicholas II to worshipping him as hard as the Japs worshipped the Emperor. believing they wouldn't have won the war otherwise cause he was a divine leader
>‘It’s worse in the army than doing forced labour on the Baikal railway,’ one soldier grumbled to his mates. Some harked back to the Red Army in its democratic years in the early 1920s, when they talked to officers as equals and treated orders as the signal for a general debate. The memory rankled like a broken promise. The Soviet army was supposed to be comradely and open. It did not use barking NCOs. Instead junior officers, backed up (or undermined) by political representatives, were charged with drill and training. The results were predictable. ‘If they send me to the front,’ remarked a young recruit as he contemplated mobilization for Finland, ‘I’ll sneak off into the bushes. I won’t fight, but I will shoot unit commander Gordienko.’ ‘As soon as we get to the front,’ one deserter said, ‘I’ll kill the deputy politruk.’ ‘Red Army discipline is worse than under the old tsarist regime,’ the older veterans complained. The young heard all of this and learned. ‘We’ll only get leave when we’re dead.’
>Among the Red Army, attitudes towards the nation’s leader were complex and various. Many soldiers avowed less respect for him than their respective front commanders. ‘Stalin won the war, but he was responsible for so many deaths,’ said Corporal Nikolai Ponomarev. Major Fyodor Romanovsky of the NKVD was unsurprisingly a passionate admirer: “He saved the Soviet state. He possessed a very good mind and picked good people. Stalin destroyed our traitors and malingerers. We were real communists in those days.’
>Yet for every party zealot there were those whose families had suffered badly at the hands of Stalin. Nikolai Senkevich, a Red Army doctor, often asked himself: ‘Is there no one to rid us of this cannibal?’ His father had died in the Gulag after being convicted of hoarding flax seed. His brother had served ten years in a labour camp for ‘political crimes’. Corporal Anna Nikyunas said: ‘We were fighting for our country, not for Stalin. To be honest, in the trenches, the last thing we thought about was Stalin.’
>But repression alone could not have achieved the state’s triumph: it also commanded real support among most ordinary citizens. Such people’s motives were more positive than fear. ‘Life is getting better,’ the huge posters told them. Inch by inch, for millions, it was. With Europe and America in economic depression, the Soviets could boast full employment and rapid growth. A village boy who sought work in the towns would not be looking long. For the young, the prospects started to look bright. By 1938, the Soviet Union had the largest engineering sector in Europe. But more immediately, people could also point to improvements at home. Things had been so bad for so long, after all, that almost anything looked like progress.
>Whatever else, the Soviet regime offered work. Not surprisingly, its most enthusiastic supporters were the people whose careers flourished in a fast-transforming labour market. >>2033414Coming from a lower-class background, Stalin was also willing to get his hands dirty in ways many Bolsheviks weren't but also had the intellect and cunning to become an actual leader instead of just a goon.
At the time of the February Revolution he was one of the few Bolsheviks actually inside Russia (not in exile) and was able to set up a agitator network against the Provisional Government before Lenin had even arrived with Germany's help. Lenin soon became fascinated with the "wonderful Georgian" as he described Stalin. Lenin was a self-hating intellectual and despised the overly academic/intellectual nature of the inner circle of the Bolsheviks. Stalin came off as a salt-of-the-earth simpleton. He also appreciated Stalin's overt brutality, particularly in dealing with the unruly minorities during the Civil War.
Following Lenin's death, Stalin was successfully able to manipulate the top Bolsheviks while having them underestimate him as an idiot Georgian peasant. He first allied with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, and once Trotsky was defeated politically he allied with Bukharin and Rykov against Zinoviev and Kamenev. Having taken control of the left and center-left of the party, Stalin then attacked Bukharin and Rykov and had them defeated, leaving him at the top.
How was he able to do this? Lenin had made him General Secretary of the Central Committee. This was not a particularly respected post pre-Stalin, the position of Premier and the Council of Ministers were viewed more prestigious under Lenin. The supremacy of the Party bureaucracy over the state posts is a feature Stalin introduced and still endures in places like China and North Korea today.
Stalin was able to use the then-underestimated post of General Secretary to control mid-level party appointments and stack local cadres with more brutal thugs similar to him and loyal to him. This is how the careers of the likes of Khrushchev, Bulganin, Brezhnev, Beria, Yagoda, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, etc. began. Thus when Stalin instigated major political assaults on the Zinoviev-Kamenev bloc and later the Rykov-Bukharin bloc, they found that they had very little low to mid level party support.
>>2004539>bourgeois revolutionary supports bourgeois nationwho wouldve thought
mautists are retarded
>>2006963Depends on culture / subculture; you have Southern petit booj aristo mentality, as well as Northern SOE / state service mentality.
In any Communist state, the military often has great prestige, especially since information control prevents adventures like Abu Ghraib from leaking out to the masses.
>>2044510Well, most people here are more likely to have read Sakai than Marx at this point, so you shouldn't be surprised.
>>2049842>In any Communist state, the military often has great prestigeYes, because militaries under socialism have different missions that imperialist militaries.
>especially since information control prevents adventures like Abu Ghraib from leaking out to the masses.Well, China hasn't been at war with any country for over 45 years and persues peace instead of escalation, so things like that don't happen.
I am a philosopher, what I have to say is very important so read below.
>>2004665>>2004539>>2004592>>2004925>>2004928Further proof that revolutionary socialism cannot work because it runs out of steam due to laws of physics. Find me a person that is super disciplined and willing to go to the end even if it is unprofitable and i will find you one million opportunists who would bail out and return to individualist pursuits. The only way to have a functional working socialism is what China TODAY is doing, ie, Join our party, Start your business. China's socialism works because it has become a fact of life for the average pleb without him having to show ideological fervor or some political signaling as was the case in Ost Block countries. The pleb does not want to be constantly involved in politics, since politics for the pleb is like going to a whorehouse. He wants to bang a hooker but not live with her. Capitalism, Feudalism and Liberalism are very successful because they don't demand constant participation from the populace. They just modify social relations, institutions etc and the people have to adjust. Communism on the other hand demands loyalty and constant politicking, everything has to be viewed through the principles of the ideology. This is the same reason why very corporate-culture-heavy workplaces are totalitarian hellholes and everyone gets tired of them. Religions that demand excessive obedience to religious leadership and dogma are the same thing. People get tired of being used as a resource. Demanding people "work together" quickly breaks down as such a state of affairs goes against the laws of thermodynamics. You can either purse a radical transformation of people's natures or you can use the existing institutions to "nudge" the person into the direction you want. Successful regimes have a deep state and they know how to manipulate the public to maintain their power. Further point elaborated below:
>>2007365After watching that video, it is clear to me that putin is a fascist in the materialist sense since he is devoid of ideology (inb4 ilyin) and is only focused on maintaining power in order to have freedom of political movement. He uses populism, nationalism, social justice in order for russkie plebs to keep trusting him and fight for his mansions in Ukraine.
>>2007365Fascism is reactionary and revolutionary, a utopian attempt to remake society from the bottom up based on mass activism. This is unorthodox for something that has typically been seen as a right-wing movement, because that kind of radicalism (destroying the old structure and building a transformed society of transformed individuals) was more typical of the far left. It also has really peculiar economic tendencies. It was all hot steam and bluster in its opposition to socialism, and a big part of its message was that it would preserve business against any attempt at socialization or collectivization. And it did do that, along with opposing the labor movement. But at the same time it represented the interests of the farmer and "petty bourgeoisie", which wanted land reform and opposed the monopolists, financiers, and general excess of free market capitalism. And masses of unemployed also made up a big supporter of the fascist parties, and they demanded relief in the form of public jobs programs. So basically the fascists have a weird, hybrid pseudo-socialism where technically-private firms were so controlled by the government and subordinated to "public interest" that they were basically socialized, while their rhetoric was based on a violent opposition to Marxism and Communism.
>>2097393>UPIglowie source
about as reliable as Radio Free Asia
>>2103787>>2005046On the other Maoists, there was a maneuver in the 70s called the "industrial turn," which was basically American Maoists saying, we're a bunch of upper middle-class students who don't know what we're doing, so let's get factory jobs and actually become proletarian and merge with them and organize them.
There are really only two surviving groups of 70s American Maoism. One is a cult led by a guy named Bob Avakian, they're deranged:
https://youtu.be/vhsYu9p2KhoThere's also the FRSO. They're much more focused. Relatively small but, like, when there were strikes recently by the UAW and Teamsters, their channels would feature interviews with members of those unions who are (basically) FRSO members. Not, like, a lot. But they play a role in protest movements as well, they were involved in BLM, the Palestine protests going on now.
I saw a video on the news recently of the police breaking up a Palestine encampment in my city, and most of the people there were MENA youth, but then I saw the local FRSO people (I know who they are) there with bullhorns shouting instructions to people while they were being arrested about what to do. They might have set up some kind of organization to bail them out. They're not usually going at people with communist symbols or red flags and all that, more like a cell that exists within these other movements.
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