how did Maoists in the west react to the Nixon and Mao visits and later trade agreements
>>2004592>>2004539Here's the actual text
>Those not wondering what a Maoist is wonder how I could have been one. It’s a historical moment that has vanished without a trace. >In the early 1970s, when I came of age politically, the U.S. government was raining death on Vietnam abroad and hunting down Black militants at home. The system manifestly required more than a little tinkering to be set right. Anyhow, I had committed myself not just to a reformed world but a world turned upside down. For all its Marxist pretences, Russia seemed to resemble the United States. The grey-on-grey of Soviet-style socialism didn’t exactly fire the imagination. On the other hand, China appeared on the brink of ushering in a new world. Those coming back from Maoist China echoed the writer Lincoln Steffens on his return from Lenin’s Russia: “I have seen the future, and it works.” From Chairman Mao down to the ordinary worker and peasant, everyone seemed to be practicing a simple, austere lifestyle, contemptuous of bourgeois amenities and devoted to a larger collective purpose. I still remember the sense of moral inferiority on my first sighting of a real-life exemplar of this “new socialist man” from China (in fact, a woman, Carmelita Hinton, daughter of famed Maoist author William Hinton) at a left-wing conference in New York. Shamed by my bourgeois baggage, I decided against introducing myself to her. >Maoism seemed irrefutable proof of an alternative to the rat-race existence. To cynics who maintained that creating a society based on non-acquisitive values was utopian, I replied: Look at China! It was even said that petty theft had disappeared. Bicycles weren’t chained up, lost items were returned. While I was taking a nap late one winter’s night in my college student centre, someone stole my brand new work shoes from, literally, right under my feet. Furious at the theft and having had to walk home barefoot in the slush, the next day in my Chinese foreign policy class I indignantly declared, “This wouldn’t have happened in China!” Many of my classmates no doubt silently thought that it served this self-righteous ass**** right.>The precepts of Chinese Communism mirrored my own of a decent society. Prime Minister Chou En-Lai always had pinned to his lapel the button, “Serve the people.” Praising the wisdom and dignity of ordinary workers, a Mao quotation declared that the “workers and peasants were the cleanest people, and even though their hands were soiled and their feet smeared with cow-dung, they were really cleaner than the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals.” A sports meet in China would open and close with the chant, “Friendship first, competition second.” The eyes of a sceptical female co-worker of mine lit up when I quoted Mao’s aphorism, “Women hold up half the sky.” In one parable I emotionally recited, Mao wrote, “Death can be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather. To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to die for the fascists and oppressors is lighter than a feather.”>What clinched my disenchantment was the increasing sterility of Bettelheim’s, and my own, “problematic.” After Mao’s death, his heirs, the “Gang of Four,” were in short order dethroned, and his legacy was dismantled. The theory of socialist transition, on which I intended to write my doctoral dissertation, seemed more than ever divorced from reality. In addition, the rapid collapse of Maoism forced me to rethink many of my beliefs. There must have been a lot more rot at the core of the Chinese Revolution than I was led—and allowed myself to be led, and led others—to believe. What hurt most for someone who thought he knew so much was how foolish he had been. I remember one non-believer telling this true believer that, before I ever got to China, there would be a McDonald’s at the Great Wall. I sneeringly dismissed his “petty-bourgeois” cynicism. (He in turn recoiled at being labelled merely a “petty” and not a full-fledged bourgeois.) Well, a McDonald’s did open for business at the Great Wall while I lost all interest in making pilgrimage to China. In fact, from the day the Gang of Four was overthrown to this day I’ve not opened a single book or read through to the end a single news article on China. The wound runs deep, the pain lingers. For the first three weeks after the coup I could barely make it out of bed. I was later told that Bettelheim had to be hospitalized. Whether, in my case, this was due more to disappointment or embarrassment, I cannot say. In any event, I learned an important, albeit excruciating, lesson: de omnibus dubitandum (Marx’s credo). >>2004665>I still remember the sense of moral inferiority on my first sighting of a real-life exemplar of this “new socialist man” from China (in fact, a woman, Carmelita Hinton, daughter of famed Maoist author William Hinton) at a left-wing conference in New York. Huh. Interesting. I like reading about such people.
>What clinched my disenchantment was the increasing sterility of Bettelheim’s, and my own, “problematic.” After Mao’s death, his heirs, the “Gang of Four,” were in short order dethroned, and his legacy was dismantled. Yeah that happened a few years later. From what I've read, some Maoists accepted the meeting with Nixon as the American imperialists basically giving in. I think there is a case to be made for that in some kind of Machiavellian way. Lenin said something similar when the Soviet Union entered into trading relations with some capitalist states in the 1920s (I can't recall which ones, maybe France) and there were cadre who were really upset by that, but Lenin was like "no, this is them admitting they've failed." On the other hand, that may have concealed some desperation at their isolation and the situation they were actually in.
>In any event, I learned an important, albeit excruciating, lesson: de omnibus dubitandum (Marx’s credo).Good lesson.
>>2004928>Now he's a massive shitlib voting blue no matter who, but weirdly will still praise Cultural Revolution>>2004937>So he went from a shitlib to a shitlib?Mao: the world's greatest liberal revolutionary. I heard a leftcom joke that the word "combat" in "Combat Liberalism" turned into an adjective instead of a verb means the same thing.
>>2004946There's some cultural context, after the Second World War there was a Western leftist disillusionment with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and this led to the abandonment of the traditional communist parties in the West and more people going to universities than ever, and there ML was rejected and new theories were invented and this all came ahead during the Vietnam War protests. From this emerged the hippies, second-wave feminists, queer theorists, and other diverse movements and intellectuals who still dominate academia today, but the strongest and most radical were the Maoists, according to Mark Rudd there was an obsession with Mao and Che and the concept of people's war, they believed that if a group had enough revolutionary spirt, they could defeat any army in the world.
The Weather Underground's were advised by the Vietnamese communists to build a broad anti-war movement rather than commit acts of terrorism and WU took that as proof that the Soviets had corrupted Vietnamese, this mass delusion lasted until the Nixon-Mao talks, after which it basically destroyed them all, in their minds Mao had personally betrayed them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left Briefly going through Marxists.org of fringe Maoist groups in the 70s, because you can find different points of view from "Nixon goes to China on his hands and knees!" to "workers will smash the betrayal of the revisionist clique of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai!"
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=8859-1&oe=8859-1&as_occt=body&num=25&sitesearch=www.marxists.org%2F&as_epq=Nixon+Mao&as_oq=&as_q=&as_eq=&as_occt=all&btnG=Google+Search%21
>One might say, “Well, the CCP is doing this because they are also threatened by the Soviets. They don’t want to be squeezed on two fronts.” Never in the history of the world have alliances with bosses led to anything but disaster. During W.W. II the Soviets allied with the U.S. to defeat Hitler. But, in the end, the Soviets became bosses themselves. Capitalism exists in Germany. And all of eastern Europe has become a bastion of capitalism.Though I really wanna find a Maoist group who though this could get Nixon on the side of Communism
>>2005150>communism is about le experimentingIt either was a DotP, which still has a capitalist mode of production at first obviously, or it wasn't.
You're kidding yourself if you think China ever was one.
>>2005825In fact, it was suggested by the designer that the four small stars represent the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie.
However, there is no official definition specifying which classes the four stars specifically represent.
其实是设计者给出的说四颗小星代表工人阶级、农民阶级、城市小资产阶级和民族资产阶级
但官方没有明确的定义四颗星具体指什么阶级
>>2005946>>2005825They propbably just looked nice.
IDK why you people are always sperging about the meaning of the number of stars like schizos why on earth would you just work under any assumption other than it was a stylistic choice that
maybe got some post-hock rationalisation?
>>2006139The Secret Army Organization was a RW Para-Military group that split off from another RW Para-Military group whose leader was arrested for illegal weapons stockpiling and planning to commit acts of terror, the SAO was very small(no more then 30 members) but all those of members were Veterans and the FBI thought it could be a good use to use these wackos to beat up hippies
>The A.C.L.U. alleged that when the F.B.I. set up the Secret Army Organization here in 1971, in advance of the Republican convention, it chose as one of its two leaders Howard B. Godfrey, a former San Diego fireman, elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints and, for three years, an F.B.I. informer in the Minutemen. Mr. Godfrey testified at the 1973 trial of another member of the Secret Army Organization who was convicted ofd bombing a motion picture theater that the F.B.I. furnished him or paid for $10.000 to $20.000 worth of weapons and explosives for the so‐called Secret Army Organization over. a period of five years. As a member of the Minutemen and later the Secret Army Organization, he said he was paid about $250 a month by the bureau. In addition to the F.B.I.'s direct control over the Secret Army, the White House allegedly maintained contact with the group through Donald H. Segretti, who was later convicted for directing a campaign of political espionage and sabotage against the Democrats in 1972. Mr. Segretti was quoted by the A.C.L.U. as having told the Secret Army that any potential troublemakers at the 1972 Republican convention would be “gotten rid of,” an apparent reference to the so-called Liddy plan described during the Senate Watergate hearings, whereby the leaders of anti‐Nixon elements would be kidnapped and taken to Mexico. The plan was devised by G. Gordon Liddy, former counsel of the Committee for the Re‐election of the President, who was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in the Watergate case. >>2004534>>2004539Lol if this is true how do turd world moasists like Jason Unruhe still exist? Like what mental gymnastics does he have to go through everyday in order to justify his beliefs.
>>2005946Lol sounds more like fascist italy and nazi germany than any socialist state. Is the PRC the continuation of the fascist tradition?
>>2006660>Lol if this is true how do turd world moasists like Jason Unruhe still exist? Like what mental gymnastics does he have to go through everyday in order to justify his beliefs.it's a fanom for him retard.
He's not politically active, he isn't in a party, he isn't part of campaigns in his community. he has no relationship with politics.
>>2006672>Fascism is slippery, but I’d say personally I doubt the PRC are fascist in any meaningful sense. A thing to keep in mind is that Chinese society is much less militaristic than the United States is. Like, from what I can tell… there's a whole lot of Chinese parents who don't want their kid to go into the military, it's not seen as particularly prestigious compared to the United States. The U.S. is actually a very militaristic society and you see politicians trying to use their military careers as leverage in politics. Militaristic spectacles at athletic events, it goes on.
>Rather they’re acting in a rational rather than ideological mannerI think Chinese are generally very pragmatic. There are strong elements of conservatism in Chinese politics and it stems from Confucianism among other sources, but that also works against extremes, holds that humans are basically good, and that war is not an optimal way to solve problems, but is rather an abnormal state of affairs caused by blinded human nature.
>>2006982>>2007338Fascism is at its core organised state violence without restraint, It can only function with Total war which cannot be sustained, The USSR, Cuba and China cannot be compared to that, you can argue that they aren't "proper Communist" but they wouldn't be Fascist, simply due to the fact they didn't end in mass violent bloodshed
Vidrel is unironically one of the best video's I've seen on Fascism, cause it's by a rightist who actually read Fascist texts and recognised it's obvious issues
>>2005046I always saw the 4 star/ New democracy shit as just Mao applying Marx and Lenin's notion of winning the battle for democracy but to a semi-fuedal and semi-colonial context
>>2007236>collaboration with rightist forcesI've noticed a similar pattern where right wing nationalists/religious traditionalists and commies often end up on the same side during anti-colonial and national liberation struggles, which if anything shows how absurdly evil imperialism is that people who would normally be fighting a civil war against eachother have to fight a common foe. KMT and CPC being the most famous example I know of
>Mao's reactionary phase at the end of his life wait what? where does one read about this?
>>2007292On day Sabocat, you are going to slip right through your asshole and break your fucking on the kosygin-liberman reform.
Revisionism, not even once.
>>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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