by Kavga

“We shouldn’t read too many books. We should read Marxist books, but not too many of them either. It will be enough to read a dozen or so. If we read too many, we can move towards our opposites, become bookworms, dogmatists, revisionists.”– Chairman Mao Zedong

It is long overdue that those who have no ideological basis in Maoism, those who incorporate every “new” fad, cease calling themselves Maoists. This is not an argument in favor of the theoretical bankruptcy of “post-Maoism”, but, rather, a call to recognize objective truth; stop pretending!

When the eclectic and postmodernist leadership of the Central Committee of the “pan-Canadian” “Revolutionary Communist Party” “jumped from the Leninist family tree” with the formation of the “Revolutionary Workers Party”—the latter of which appears to have been short lived—this was a good thing for the proletariat of Canada and the International Communist Movement, not because it provides a viable alternative to Maoism, but because the deviationists (rupturists) had matured enough to no longer confuse others with their charade. This marked them, limited their ability to influence the genuinely revolutionary and proletarian youth of their country and it was perhaps the only honest gesture they ever made.

It is time that their counterparts in the United States mature in this way and likewise jump from the proverbial Maoist family tree, nothing should cushion their fall either. Their fixation with calling themselves Maoists is not always a conscious attempt to confuse. On one hand they do this because they sympathize with the Peoples War in India, and the armed struggle in the Philippines, making some of them categorically friends of the peoples struggles. On the other hand, these and other struggles legitimize Maoism as a force for revolution, and this legitimacy is appealing to the confused non-Maoist “Maoists.” Correspondingly opportunists among them seize this opportunity and go on to counterfeit Maoism, these are categorically enemies to unite against.

Everyone without exception has ideology it can be defined well or poorly but the parts come together to make a whole picture when one takes time to examine. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism is the ideology of the international proletariat, and it is composed of fundamental principles, it is an ideology which is scientific, not a science lacking ideology. Maoism is not reduced to sympathizing with struggles waged by Maoists, sympathizing with Chairman Mao, or even with the Great Proletarian Cultural revolution; it is far more than this—it is a comprehensive whole, containing within it, Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

“Post-Maoism” on the other hand, is a conglomeration of ideas sometimes slightly influenced by the sympathies for Maoist movements on the part of its adherents. It most often comes with the insistence that MLM cannot answer the current questions, or that it has not been concretely defined, and hence there is no need to unite around it. Another variation on this theme, is that it was flawed in its major definition, and its content must be dispensed with or altered so that a new unity can be established around whatever other (bourgeois) ideas are cherished by the “post-Maoists.” The very worst of this lot are those who know what Maoism is and oppose it and lead those who lack the self-awareness and ideological clarity to simply stop calling themselves Maoists already.

A pertinent example is the “People’s Voice News” website its readers and online fans, its writers etc. When this website occasionally produces theoretical articles, there is no attempt to use MLM to answer the questions or address the issues at hand, not even so much as a superficial one in many cases. Instead the writers rely on J. Sakai, Butch Lee, Theodore Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and more, none of whom were Maoists, none of whom were using MLM as their ideological basis to reach their analysis. This is not to imply than non-Maoists are incapable of sometimes correct analysis, but that they cannot provide the ideological basis for Maoist analysis either. The fact is, Maoist analysis, and the abundant availability of it is not even approached or engaged with by false “Maoist” publications like these. What is more telling is that these outfits do not engage with Sakai, Lee, Adorno, Fanon, etc. with any critical approach at all, and they never hesitate to remind the reader to be critical of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and especially Gonzalo. This priority to criticize the architects of our ideology, with uncritical repetition of those who never approached Maoism exposes their true interests.

It becomes apparent that the rational approach to studying bourgeois thinkers is lost on these “comrades” because what they find most appealing in them are the precise positions which break with Marxism the most. This is fine, it is fine not to agree with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Gonzalo, it is fine to embrace whatever theoretical texts one likes, but one must also be honest about this, be honest about what they believe and what ideology they subscribe to and why. For Maoists the task is very clear, defend, uphold and apply Maoism. For the confused non-Maoist “Maoist’s” there is no defense, no upholding and certainly no application—and this is the most significant problem.

This problem is linked to revisionism as a whole, both in the aspect that it cites new conditions for its deviations, and in the aspect that revisionists use the prestige Marxism has earned as a cover for their bourgeois essence. The fact of the matter is that their ideas are incongruent with Maoism, and affront to it. Very well, we do not expect everyone to be a Maoist, and there are certainly progressives, revolutionary-nationalists, anti-imperialists, anti-racists, allies etc. who are not, but they must realize that the things they think and what they stand for is not Maoism, that for whatever reason Maoism is not agreeable to them. Similarly, revisionism is not simply the lack of Marxism, most proletarians lack Marxism—revisionism is that which seeks to swindle others and convince that it is Marxist in order to oppose Marxism. There are certainly these elements among the confused “Maoists” who all have noting in common or very little in common with Maoism.

Maoism has been defined, it has been established in practice, proven by the history of the International Communist Movement, this task is completed, it began with Marx and was continued by Lenin and raised higher by Mao. The necessary theoretical work to express “what Maoism is” has been completed. Our task is to defend it, uphold it, and apply it. With this last task, the process of development can continue. We believe Maoism is all powerful because it is true, and this is not an empty slogan, but an essential one to the task of defending, upholding, and applying.

In commemoration of the birth of Chairman Gonzalo and the anniversary of the Peoples Liberation Army of Peru the website Communist International (ci-ic.org) released a very important document titled, Some Basic Knowledge of Marxism. This text includes important comments from Chairman Gonzalo. Among these we wish to first highlight his comments on Althusser:

“In the 1960s we have again seen very clearly these concerns in the approaches of the French revisionist Althusser, it is he who has insisted on this problem [succumbing to bourgeois philosophical criteria regarding practice]. But what was the basis of it? He stated that the ideology of the proletariat was not scientific and the essence of his thought, of the thought of this revisionist – we must not forget what he is -, according to him is to foolishly distorting the history of the sciences. Althusser thinks that Marxism, condensed according to his revisionist criteria only into scientific socialism, was a new science that had not been philosophically founded, and that he was going to make that scientific foundation. Thus, he accused Marx of having created scientific socialism as a new science but of not having given it its doctrinal, philosophical foundations, to be precise. That is the basis of that criterion. If one analyses the works of this individual, one finds that he is going to propose that the foundation of Marxism carries a fusion of Spinoza’s materialism – Spinoza is a Jewish philosopher expelled from Spain whose family ended up in the Netherlands at that time; Spinoza was a great philosopher in his time and for his time, he was a materialist of the beginnings of the bourgeoisie. Althusser considered that the foundation of Marxism had to be made by fusing Spinozaism with Kantism which is another bourgeois philosophy. There you can see his nefarious position. In essence, what does it imply? A re-edition of the theses of the old revisionists, such as Kautsky, who maintained that Marxism had no philosophy and that Marxist philosophy was Kantism; that is to say, it put bourgeois philosophy as the basis of our conception, after all an agnosticism or an inability to understand.” [Emphasis ours]

The above unearths the problem quite well, the problem of fusion, and from a departure point of willfully ignoring basic Marxist principles. The type of deviators we are discussing are less enamored with Spinoza, Kant, or Kautsky etc. and are more convicted to departing from a willful ignorance of certain Marxists principles, long established in practice as true, to opt for a fusion of Sakai, Fanon, even Althusser, etc. How they come to the conclusion that this is Maoism is beyond reason, but after all they are not the most rational people to begin with. Chairman Gonzalo sums this problem up efficiently:

“[T]here is a whole foundation in Marx, in Engels, there is a deep understanding, and so one can see what it means to insist repeatedly on certain terms, believing that they will thus raise Marxism, when at the bottom they are bastard concessions to the bourgeoisie, and this must make us think that we cannot simply repeat all the ideologies that are swarming; first, because it falls into an easy snobbery – it is called snobbery to go after the new, after fashion, a lot of intellectuals do. We, then, have to go to the core of things and grasp the substantive things and have a high critical spirit to judge many or all of the things that are written in the world about our conception.” [Emphasis ours]

Simply by refusing to know Maoism, they are free to denounce Maoism, and include everything else in their “Maoism” it is a spiral. In response our friends who have confused themselves for Maoists would likely think that what makes them Maoists is the bits and pieces of Mao’s teachings which they attempt to use, this is a poor criteria in substitute for ideology. Sticking to our examination of Chairman Gonzalo’s comments, “Methodologism is another concession to bourgeois philosophy. Is it used sometimes? Yes, but never do Marxists oppose and even less do they reduce our conception to a simple methodology. It is a crass error to get entangled in the theory of bourgeois knowledge. None of them, neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor the Chairman did it; if they talk about methods they never refer to reducing all Marxism to a simple methodological question, it would lose its quality of conception: being conception has the method as a component, as a derivation; in the end method is procedure, nothing else.” Clear enough!

We must examine the class perspective of the various strands of counterfeit Maoism, more so than other strands of revisionist thought, because these intentionally or not confuse and conflate themselves with Maoism to such a degree that two-line struggle is no longer the principal issue, and the principal issue becomes their counterpoising a complete fabrication of Maoism to MLM. Chairman Gonzalo’s comments help demarcate these self-proclaimed innovators from us:

“False originality, that is not originality; originality is the discovery of new things, not the use of terminology, less snobbery, we must guard against snobbery and the intelligentsia is a source of snobbery, of terminology that confuses the language, confuses our unified understanding, apart from the fact that they miserably destroy the language that we speak which is an element in the shaping of the nation. Marxism is not a problem of fashions; there is no room for these useless fumes.”

Fashions play a major part in the formulations of those who express things completely alien to Maoism as Maoism. In fact the theoretical efforts of the example group “People’s Voice News” appear only as attempts to bend Maoism to fit with the shallow identity politics currently in vogue, not to critically evaluate or challenge these. They are precisely ‘useless fumes’ not in service of Marxist clarity, but in service of fashion, presenting themselves as original, in tune with “the times.”

It would serve better for them to develop the minimum honesty required to simply admit they are not Maoists, that they have substantial disagreements with Maoism, and they they believe their ideas, whatever their sources are, to be more correct than Maoism. They are the ones tasked with defining their ideology. For Maoists, our ideology—Maoism, is defined. Let their ragweed bloom and contend on its own merits if it has any at all. Should they continue muddying Maoism, certainty no good will come to them, the future collects on all debts. Too many books by Sakai, Fanon, and etc. combined with their skipping reading of the dozen or so necessary Marxist books have (as Chairman Mao indicated) petrified their minds in the end.