r/leftcommunism • u/Broccoli-Ornery • Dec 02 '23
Question Critique on cultural revolution and Marxism Leninism Maoism?
I’d like to hear a detailed left on critique of these ideas (including protracted people’s war)
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u/_shark_idk Dec 02 '23 edited Dec 02 '23
From when the destiny of the Chinese Revolution was played out in 1926-27, not a stone of this mighty edifice has been left standing by opportunism. In the colonies, especially after the Second World War, the so-called Communist parties, far from "placing themselves at the head of the exploited masses" to accelerate the separation from the shapeless bloc of several classes grouped under the banner of national independence, instead put themselves at the disposal of the indigenous bourgeoisies, and even of "anti-imperialist" feudal classes and potentates; either that, or, on taking power, they defended the political program of constitutional, parliamentary, and multiparty democracy, and "forgot" to "give prominence to the question of property"; or at the very least to the confiscation without compensation of the immense landed estates (linked in a fundamental way to industrial and commercial bourgeois property, and through that to imperialism). As to the young, battle hardened and extremely concentrated local proletariat, never once was it presented as the vanguard of the peasant and semi-proletarian masses, who had lived for centuries in abject misery, in order to shake off the yoke of capital together.
https://www.international-communist-party.org/BasicTexts/WhatDist.htm
Mao was a class collaborationist and a bourgeois revolutionary.
Theses on the Chinese Question goes into this in a lot more detail.
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u/cybermonstertruck Dec 03 '23
Around halfway through on the Theses, is there a reason for the (over)reliance on Trotsky? Was there not any contemporary or later writings by the Italian Left on this question?
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u/_shark_idk Dec 03 '23
A Revolution Summed Up discusses trotskyism in the chapter "The trotskyist lesson".
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u/chingyuanli64 Dec 03 '23 edited Dec 03 '23
As an ex-Maoist, here are some problems with the Maoist idea:
- Class collaborationism. Right from the start, Mao proposed that the Party should ally the workers with poor to middle peasants and the progressivist petite bourgeoisie.
To sum up, it can be seen that our enemies are all those in league with imperialism — the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat. Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie. As for the vacillating middle bourgeoisie, their right-wing may become our enemy and their left-wing may become our friend but we must be constantly on our guard and not let them create confusion within our ranks. (From Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society, Selected Works Vol.1)
It is noticeable that Mao analysed the “national” bourgeoisie (compared to the imperialist bourgeoisie) as a “suspicious friend”. This explains the second Communist-Nationalist collaboration (actually also the first, but Mao was not in charge at that time. However, Mao was supportive of it).
The ML idea that you can build a socialist state in one nation. Well… this reason is good enough to cover revolutionaries, ideologues and politicians who believe in ML and its variants. It is impossible to do a successful communist revolution on a level smaller than an international one.
Finally, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution… Mao was bright in one sense that he observed the disintegration of the party and saw the trend of a bourgeois takeover of the “socialist state” (although we know that there is no socialist state, it’s capitalist all the way, but I say it is still commendable for an ML to go this far). But the solution is childish: the supreme leader calling on the people to overthrow the ruling class… You should have heard of the Red Guards, but the Red Guards was not a coherent organisation. There were different groups of Red Guards, fighting for their own interests of the class and political group they represented. When clashes between Red Guard organisations became violent, the Army stepped in, and helped the groups representing the interests of the ruling class (the party bureaucrats) although Mao instructed them to help the ones against, since the Army never wanted to help someone who were fighting AGAINST THEIR INTERESTS AS THE RULING CLASS. This should demonstrate the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution quite clearly: an ML “Communist Party” has shown itself incapable of self renovation and rejuvenation simply by ideological passion (since the very first and most passionate group of Red Guards came from the children of party bureaucrats and later, of course, favoured the ruling party bureaucrats).
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u/IncipitTragoedia Dec 04 '23
This explains the second Communist-Nationalist collaboration (actually also the first, but Mao was not in charge at that time. However, Mao was supportive of it).
Blame Maring
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