SpookyGenderCommunist [they/them, she/her]

I bought a Logitech mouse that lasted me well over a decade. That little trooper only finally gave out a few years ago. That’s the only kind of forever mouse that I need.

I’m doing my part! o7

Rent free

Like Stalin, Mao wasn’t creating something new.

Stalin is who codified Marxism-Leninism though. A more apt comparison with Mao would be Lenin. Lenin was not a Leninist, he conceived of what he was doing as returning to the roots of Marxism, and innovating within that framework. In contrast to the revisionism of the 2nd international.

Maoists would assert that, while Mao was not creating something new, as Mao was an ML, he was responding to Kuschev’s revisionism, and The Chinese revolution did make certain innovations that set the stage for an ideological, epistemic, break from ML, just as Lenin’s innovations set up the break of ML from 2nd international Marxist revisionism.

And for the Maoists, the thing that causes that break is the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, which they conceive of, as synthesizing MLM from a few different things.

Those things being the Chinese experience, the rejection of Deng as revisionist and Reform & Opening Up as a turn back to capitalism, and the experience of Sendero Luminoso.

I’m not a Maoist, as I don’t think it’s yet proven itself to actually be a third stage of revolutionary science, but I think it’s worth fleshing out, and representing as accurately as possible, what they think of as the ideological chain of development for Maoism.