Appreciating this history as it unfolded in 1927 in real time, it is easy to see how people, from the masses below to the young leaders, could believe that continuing the alliance with Chiang made sense. Was it mistaken? seems like it., but an easy call for us to make today. Nonetheless, that this didn’t work out and the horrific crimes that occurred as a result are squarely the fault of Chiang and the KMT which increasingly took on a fascistic character after that time.

You might have a point had not people from Marx’s time on down been warning against any alliance with the bourgeoisie. It’s not like there weren’t several sources on the arguing against popular frontism. Heck, even Stalin and company held the position until they decided to pull an ideological shift to match their heart-warming alliance with Hitler.

So the KMT “betrayal” was less of a surprise than a big tragic “I told you so.”

Sadder still is that people like you who should know better still haven’t learned the lesson.

Surely the young leadership of the revolution was influenced by various ideological sources, not the least of which was the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution and yes, Stalin, but it is simply wrong to characterize the revolution there, or in Vietnam for that matter, as “Stalinist” implying it was a franchise of Moscow or part of the “international communist conspiracy” and not something with its own deep local roots which were the primary aspect of it. This may sound a little exaggerated, but I really believe these sterile academic analyses reflect subtle anti-communist influences and neo-conservative tendencies of middle class intellectuals who grew up in a Cold War environment. In Oppose Book Worship, Mao talks about how intellectuals from privileged social backgrounds pave the way, consciously and unconsciously, for their drift to the right and counter-revolution through ultraleft and orthodox posturing while scripture quoting classic marxist texts.

Any revolution or struggle, least of all the massive, epochal, 20th Century Chinese Revolution will experience various viccissitudes, set backs etc., ones that can be analyzed and parsed in great detail by armchair revolutionaries decades later. Ultimately, however, this revolution, like revolutions more generally, was a process driven from below by deep class contradictions and often spontaneous ferment. That the 30 something leadership of Mao and his milieu, itself-like Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1789- a layer and phenomenon thrown to the surface by this massive storm, committed mistakes in the heat of this struggle is unremarkable. Attributing corrupt or venal motives to that is another matter and entirely off base.

Related to that, as with similar analyses of Spain, is the tendency of this “expert” school of trotskyoid history to shift the onus for the defeats, problems and shortcomings of the revolutionary process away from counter-revolution which was responsible for them. Thus we have little condemnation of Chiang, his betrayal and brutal repression, which is barely even mentioned while seeking to blame Mao for that. Ditto with Spain with barely a mention of Franco. Ditto with Allende and Chile. Seems like our experts need to educate themselves on basic history. “When you treat enemies like friends and friends like enemies, you yourself take the side of the enemy”-Mao

Appreciating this history as it unfolded in 1927 in real time, it is easy to see how people, from the masses below to the young leaders, could believe that continuing the alliance with Chiang made sense. Was it mistaken? seems like it., but an easy call for us to make today. Nonetheless, that this didn’t work out and the horrific crimes that occurred as a result are squarely the fault of Chiang and the KMT which increasingly took on a fascistic character after that time. A good introduction and overview of the Chinese Revolution and its background for those who in reality may be novices to this subject is Barbara Tuchman’s excellent “Stilwell and the American Experience in China”

Such is the luxury afforded a commentator in a world created by the Soviet defeat of German fascism and the Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese reclaiming of countries from U.S. imperialism.

Either way, I think Marty Glaberman’s piece that looks at Maoism on its own terms is a good place to start developing a critique: http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5594-GlabermanMao.htm

Especially note the comment by Lang Yan at the bottom.

Why Mao?
Why, in spite of its long list of crimes* and the reality of modern China, does Maoism continue to attract adherents among revolutionaries in the U.S.? Part of the answer is that Maoism represents in many people’s minds the triumph of the will (no reference intended to Leni Riefenstahl’s film of that title).
Marxism came to China around the time of the May Fourth Movement (1919), when Chinese students, enraged at the government’s subservience to foreign powers, turned to the West for new ideas. It arrived as one of many imports; particularly important was the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson argued for the supremacy of the will; here are some quotes from him, picked off the internet: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” “Always do what you are afraid to do.” “Our greatest glory is in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” “Passion rebuilds the world for the youth.” “Every revolution was thought first in one man’s mind.”
And the following (especially appealing to many young Americans): “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
If Emerson stressed reliance on will, Marx discovered the link between communism and the proletariat. Addressing the same questions Mao addressed, and writing at about the same age Mao was when he became a radical, Marx wrote:
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
Maoism was the synthesis of Marxism and Emersonianism, and that was the secret of its triumph in China, a country with a tiny proletariat, and its appeal to a new generation of radicals in the U.S., a country where the proletariat appears to be diminishing in numbers and coherence.
The history of Maoism is well known: After reactionaries crushed the workers’ movement of 1925-27 and slaughtered Communists in the cities, Mao led a faction of the Party to the countryside. There they built a peasant army that, as everyone knows, overthrew the feudal regime and brought the CP to power. I am in awe at Mao’s accomplishment in getting fastidious Chinese students, schoolteachers, librarians (he himself was a librarian), and mandarins, more steeped in class prejudice than any other people on earth, to go and live with peasants and eat out of filthy bowls and pick lice out of their bodies. It was one of the most heroic episodes in history, and one of the greatest revolutions.
Looking back after nearly a century, it is evident now that the dust has settled that Communism in China did not bring about the “complete re-winning of man” but was the banner under which the old, reactionary, patriarchal, feudal society was overthrown and a capitalist society built up in its place. Although Mao and his comrades called themselves, and undoubtedly believed they were, Communists, the revolution they carried out was not a communist revolution, nor could it be, because it was not based in the proletariat, and when it comes to revolution, communist and proletarian are interchangeable terms.
People looking for substitutes for the working class (and consequently infatuated with Maoism) need to ponder that lesson. Sometimes an ounce of theory is worth a ton of action.
Lastly, a word on the “mass line”: The Maoist notion of the “mass line” (from the masses, to the masses) omits, and by omitting denies, the active role of the Marxist organization in refracting the mass movement into its different tendencies and then seeking to clarify the different implications of those tendencies. Instead it substitutes a notion of the Party as a neutral recorder, modestly serving the masses. It is disingenuous, even hypocritical, because while declaring its adherence to the formula “from the masses, to the masses,” it also insists that the Party is the “leading force,” invariably short-circuiting the part where the “masses” make up their own minds. (The same criticism applies to the Zapatista formula “To obey is to lead.”) The view of the Party as the “leading force” is especially popular among those who see no social force that because of its position in society can give shape to the entire movement, and therefore fall back on the Party, an organization of people of no particular class who come together voluntarily on the basis of political agreement, to perform that function.** (The Marxist organization may indeed be the “leading force,” but it has to win its position every day; during the entire period of transition from capitalist society to communism, the period sometimes known as “Socialism,” there can be no other leadership than the soviets, workers’ councils, etc. and even they can only be provisional.) The vanguard party may not be reactionary everywhere—even C.L.R. James acknowledged its value in backward countries; but it is out of place in a country where the working class is “disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”
*My favorite of Mao’s crimes, which I have seen nowhere in print, comes from a professor of Chinese Studies at Harvard who lived in China for years. He reported that in the last years of his life Mao became infatuated with an 18-year-old female railway worker. He brought her to live with him in the Forbidden City, where she became for a while his intermediary to the outside world. She was the one Communist officials meant when they made statements beginning, “A spokesman for Chairman Mao declared.” According to the professor, the arrangement was an open secret among those in the know. I believe it. The irony is, it may have been the only recorded case in history of the actual dictatorship of the proletariat.
**I maintain that the working class in large-scale industry, transport and communications is the only social force capable of performing this function on a world scale, but that view is of course debatable and moreover its meaning in different situations is not always easy to see. The faction that emerged on top in China after 1927 did not solve the problem of what it meant (if ever they gave it serious consideration). Forty years later, workers in Shanghai declared the Shanghai Commune (a deliberate reference to the Paris Commune, based on direct democracy); shortly afterwards all talk of the Commune ended, and the Party line became the Three-in-one committees, according to which one part of the state administration was to be drawn from the existing cadres, one part from the People’s Liberation Army, and one part from the new forces—in other words, the coopting of the insurgents. Some Italian comrades visited China right after and asked Mao why he abandoned the Commune. His reply: China has 20 million proletarians; how do you expect them to maintain proletarian rule in a country of 680 million peasants? He may have been right. The results are there for all to see. Could total defeat have been worse than what actually transpired? (We could ask the same question about the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt.)

Noel Ignatiev

i found Goldner’s article interesting, but of limited (though not zero)
use. The core of the argument seems to hinge on what Mao did or did not
do, and the history of 20th century China on the level of state policy –
which is fine, but which simply parallels the “focus on the ideology of
top leaders” which Maoists are then criticized for in this piece. Fair
enough, perhaps, as the ideology is named after the man, but from my
conversations with Maoists and ex-Maoists (including some who have gone
on to become left communists and anarchists), it was not Mao’s personal
charms or actions or even his catchy sloganeering that initially
attracted them to Maoism, though these could be grafted on ex post
facto. (To give an example, i think what is wanting in this
understand-Maoism-solely-through-China approach is hinted at in the
sentence, “China supported Philippine dictator Fernando Marcos in his
attempt to crush the Maoist guerrilla movements in that country.”)

This is where i find the article very weak, in its survey of Maoism
outside of China (weak in the First World, both weak and threadbare in
its brief mentions of Maoism in the Third World). Leaving aside the
omissions, distortions, and errors in the cases of France and Germany
(the only two i know anything about), i want to focus on the methodology
in play. Essentially name dropping folks who at one point were Maoists
and at another point were not, and mentioning in passing some of the
worst errors and fuck-ups of Maoists around the world, does not make for
a very useful argument. As a propaganda piece it may do the trick, but
for people who are not predisposed to be anti-Maoist (i.e. for those of
us asking “what is Maoism?” and not “what is wrong with Maoism?”) this
is unsatisfying. Again, perhaps this is par for the course in a quick
survey that is supposed to also serve as a flashing neon caveat emptor,
but without mentioning any of the positives, any of the places where
Maoism might have seemed more liberatory or more useful than other
currents in the left, one is left wondering why so many people became
Maoists – were they just stupid? or ill-intentioned?

To be clear: i think the task of examining, with a suspicious frame of
mind, Maoism (or any other -ism), is completely valid. There are
questions that beg for answers; for instance, in the First World – why
did so many Maoist groups have such trouble coming to grips with gay and
lesbian liberation, even on a shallow level? how did the view of the
Soviet Union as social imperialist segue into a small minority Maoists
rallying to pro-U.S. positions? perhaps most importantly, how is it that
in the early 70s Maoist parties and pre-party formations managed to suck
in so many tens of thousands of committed radicals in a very short
period, only to leave them bitter and disillusioned just years later
when First World Maoism imploded? My guess, though, is that the answers
to these questions have more to do with the political and social
contexts in which they occurred, and the Cultural Revolution only played
a role insofar as it served as an (often barely understood) mental
reference point. An honest answer also requires acknowledging that these
phenomena were not without exceptions – they often were the exception –
and that to people today engaging with Maoism, it makes sense that they
appear as atypical problems from the past, if they even register at all.
So more sociology and less biography would be required to unravel the tale.

From what i have been told, the initial appeal of Maoism in the late
60s/early 70s had much to do with the perceived failings of the New Left
that it emerged from. Similarly, those gains Maoists are making today
seem predicated on the perceived weaknesses or shortcomings of the
broader left. Without providing this context we get a narrative which is
difficult to understand, except as a sorry story of how foolish people are.

Without a more thorough examination of Maoism in each of the countries
mentioned, it is difficult to gain more than a very superficial idea of
the dynamics at play. For instance, what was it in German Maoism so that
mutations occurred that lead into the Green Party on the one hand and
the antideutsche a bit later on – and why in each case was what was
initially a Maoist mutation quickly setting the beat for far greater
numbers of “antiauthoritarians”? What about the distinction between the
mao-spontex and more orthodox Maoists in France, the former having some
cross-over with anarchist and post-situ types? in Quebec, Maoism in the
1970s emerged at least in part as a left turn out of nationalism, with
former FLQ political prisoner Charles Gagnon leading the largest far
left group in the province at the time (En Lutte), and developing a
position that was both revolutionary anti-capitalist and
anti-nationalist. These dynamics can’t be grasped or understood in any
real way just by mentioning them, but nor can the Maoist movements in
various countries be discredited by simply mentioning Bob Avakian or
Jean Quan.

Among younger people, outside of Quebec, many if not most Maoists in
white North America are former anarchists, or at least formerly part of
the anarchist scene. i think the attraction these people have towards
Maoism is likely despite, not because of, the checkered history of
actual Maoists parties and organizations here. It also probably has much
to do with the soft hegemony of a form of soft anarchism amongst
activists (especially young white college-educated or -attending
activists) in the radical left, and the weaknesses that flow from both
that hegemony and from anarchist ideology itself. To grasp the nature of
the phenomenon i think one must start by conceding that Maoism has
continued to evolve and branch out in various forms, often nationally
distinct, since Mao died in 1976, and in ways that can only really be
evaluated on a case by case basis, by looking at the organizing work but
also at the theoretical production.

As is often the case in analyzing political traditions, starting from a
perspective of simply collecting evidence to show that something is
rotten-to-the-core is not the must useful approach, though i understand
that for propaganda purposes it is sometimes necessary.

Kersplebedeb