>>2681550People have this idea of Mao era China as le Chinese emperor but Communist but that's anti-communist nonsense. Chinese Communism in general always had a much larger strain of Anarchism running through it than most other places with successful revolutions because Anarchism caught on in China significantly before Marxism did. The Mao era had a lot of really interesting experiments in how to balance Leninist and Anarchist organizational models, the Cultural Revolution most obviously and importantly. And from Mao, the CRSG and the radical Red Guards factions there was a relatively consistent push for immediate higher stage Communism. For instance the opening agenda of the Cultural Revolution included abolition of commodity production, the division between town and country, the division between mental and manual labor and the reorganization of China along the lines of the Paris Commune. Pic related. The ultimate reason this didn't happen wasn't because Mao was an opportunist either, in 68 there was a military mutiny against Mao and the radical factions in Wuhan that nearly went national and Mao reluctantly backed off after that. The irony of the Chinese emperor trope is that it was the more anarchistic factions in Mao era China that were the most hardcore about his personality cult, the technocratic rightists who became the nucleus of the post-Mao CPC were a lot more wary of it.
So it's pretty obvious why Maoism would've been such a big thing on the libertarian left in the 60s and 70s and if anything the surprise is that that's not still the case today.