Last time it was when we released 'The CIA's Shining Path', this time it's because they took issue with ProleWiki's Bordiga page lmao
that Bordiga page doing a lot of work with just two little sentences, they hate it so much lol
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Thank you for this! It reflects a lot of my own experiences with Maoists and other ultras. There does seem to be this kind of fantasy they have of being the "heroic savior" who fixes everything for "the people" instead of being a people's movement. I've seen them act with great contempt for "the people" when the people don't support a maoist movement. It isn't the fault of the movement for failing to reach the people, it's the people's failure for not accepting everything the Maoists say uncritically.
I've had many confusing conversations where I've actively asked for information, for theory, for understanding, and I've gotten the exact same "you should educate yourself first" response you mention here (I have also had Maoists provide me with reading of course, but it was always "read this then get back to me" not "let's go through this together as a reading group" that MLs tend to do with difficult theory.) And of course, any questions I had about the material they provided were hand waved with the "that's just a revisionist/reactionary opinion" response, instead of a real discussion.
I've had similar interactions with Jehovah's witnesses before. We'll read bible passages together, just reciting the text, but when I ask them what the passage means, or how they could apply its morals to their daily life, they get mad. It's strange, I was trying to ask questions I thought they would appreciate, something that lets them actively share their faith, but instead it upset them. I get a very similar vibe with Maoists sometimes, where asking questions is seen as a threat, not as a chance to expand upon what they support and believe.
I find that a lot of twitter maoist types also love Pol Pot, which I think lends credence to your violence theory. They see the brutal actions of the Khmer Rouge and on some level, love the idea of getting to "purge" those they deem "revisionist" or "counter-revolutionary."
I've had some very interesting conversations between a maoist and a friend of mine from the Philippines. Western white maoists often treat the movement in the Philippines as the most active and important socialist group in the world today, but most Filipinos treat them as little more than bandits in the mountains. They are notorious for being just as corrupt as the government they oppose, and even if this is completely untrue, they clearly have no control over the narrative, and have failed to win the hearts and minds of the people. Maoists just don't seem to understand this. At all. The conversation always went the same way with every maoist. My friend would try to point out that they do not have popular support, and the people don't like them, and the Maoist would respond with the sort of insults you would expect from them (I don't recall any slurs or ableist language though), insisting that they'll "be sorry" and "begging for forgiveness" when the maoists succeed in their revolution. This happened every time. It was both funny and sad to see people who consider themselves a "third worldist" type to completely disregard the voices of the people in the third world the instant they stopped agreeing with them.
They really do seem to engage in a lot of cult-like behaviour, and a big part of any insular cult is an extreme hatred and distrust for those outside their circle. Dehumanisation of everyone not in the group. I think this is connected to the violent fantasies.
This is exactly my experience as well. I forgot to mention, especially now that Netflix adapted the Three Body Problem, twitter is going wild over the depiction of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the series (a teacher is beaten to death in front of an audience for teaching theory of relativity and other bourgeois science).
I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn't really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven't investigated yourself? In China, it's seen as a failure and this is the official line of the CPC too. The author of the 3 body problem is, from what I hear, sort of a liberal though -- just something to note, like I said the government's stance is the GPCR was ultimately a failure. Some were even asking if the story of the teacher was real; apparently, it is. Certainly in some instances (over which the CPC did not have control or even knowledge) such beatings happened. Deng himself was first called a capitalist roader during the cultural revolution, and purged for it.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution
They also have kind of a contradictory relationship to the masses. They revere the Peruvian peasants for being poor and illiterate, it seems. This came up a lot when we posted the book, that we were doing them a disservice or whatever, that the revolution in Peru was a real proletarian revolution.
Being poor and illiterate does not make you a good person or revolutionary by default, beyond romanticizing poverty it seems they fetishize it to an extent I am not sure I want to explore.
Regarding the CPP, this is also the impression I get from talking to Filipinos. And like you said, the answer to these concerns is always "do you really believe this propaganda". They don't want to engage with it, they feel it sufficiently self-evident to dismiss. Though with that said, it seems the CPP is enjoying more success inland and further away from cities (The Philippines are very mountainous islands, it's very rural outside the cities and further inland). But even then it's all relative. And yes, they are seen as being just as big bandits as the government is.
On the asking questions, I think this is a problem in general on the Internet. I don't know if it's due to age (I find most ultras I engage with seem to be teenagers, if not in age then in mental state), but they seem to take everything as bad faith. I think this is something we've grown away from on Lemmygrad, and it has helped me see questions, even the difficult ones, as interest and ultimately refining my own opinions. We grow through struggle, we don't learn from passive osmosis. They seem to think they have struggled enough (must be difficult reading the three gonzalo interviews that exist online) and can now relax and take it easy.
When I say ultras btw I lump essentially Hoxhas, maoists and leftcoms in this, but of course there are differences between the three. Well, except maybe the Hoxhas and maos. They seem to overlap a lot, I've seen lots of Hoxhaists turn into maoists and back.
Huh, wonder if Mao himself ever said anything about speaking on subjects one has not investigated.
I've listened to a Maoist podcast on the GPCR, and they barely touched upon it, spending more time talking about how cool Mao was for being able to swim up and down the Yellow river even in his 80s (which yeah, that's pretty neat, but it was presented in a very hero worship kind of way, like Mao is good at swimming, isn't a great and wonderful person who was wronged by the capitalist roaders, rather than an irrelevant fun factoid.)
Their complete refusal to analyse why the GPCR failed is also very alarming to me. They just say some variation of "the capitalist roaders stabbed the gang of four in the back." acting like it was a soap opera, and not a complex historical event. I don't think I've ever heard them genuinely admit when or where it ever went wrong, only that it failed, that's where it went wrong, but they don't even seek to understand why it failed, only some vague gesture towards "purity" One of my biggest "oh shit" moments was when I realised that a lot of these maoists I was trying to learn from actually knew less about an event than I did, they just tried to act like they knew about it, by name dropping some obscure thinker and belittling me when I asked who they were talking about and how they were relevant.
And I've seen that weird poverty worship from all manner of ultra, they seem to hate the idea of a people's state having any sort of success, they seem to love martyrdom too, and the two often go hand in hand. They'll provide much more support for a "people's commune" that lasted 2 years and collapsed due to extreme poverty than they ever would to AES.
Which one anyway?
There was this one by Drew Smith, a foreign professor who decided to settle in China, called the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" podcast and in a nutshell, he said it was, in a nutshell:
A mixed bag of good and bad in terms of judgement,
A kerfufle between pseudo-anarcho ultra-lefts, lefts, and right factions of the Communist party...
From what I've heard: I guess some rural and urban areas developed not only politically but materially, like Xi'an, where Drew lives, but some turned into out-right street battles where guns and artillery were even used in the 'arm the Left' campaign...
Weird shit ranged from worshipping Mao like that of a God to forcing a professor to chug ink and kick him in the stomach to vomit, for having the wrong ideas...
Some seizures of power were genuine, some of them were just self-coups (autogolpes)
It had interviews with some Chinese and foreign people who either personally experienced it, studied it academically, or both... so I don't think this podcast is necessarily an ego-boosting ultra project...
The name sounds familiar, but I don't remember much beyond very black and white depictions of the CR, whitewashing any negative events, I think I might've listened to the first episode of Drew Smith's podcast, but his isn't the one I'm remembering and I think I may have mixed up an anecdote he told with something else, which was full "hero worship" and was just talking about Mao's "greatness" instead of discussing him, I'll see if I can't find it again.
Lol the obscure thinkers part is very true. I used to think people knowing about these obscure figures were very knowledgeable because they had read all of Marx and Engels etc. and moved on from them as they had no more to learn there, but most of the time it turns out they went straight to those obscure guys and let's just say there's a reason they're obscure.
Yeah, it was very strange having someone talk about some minor economist from the cultural revolution period (whose name I can't remember) but was unable to actually mention anything about Deng's policies while claiming they were all colossal failures. And also successes, because he was a revisionist, so his economic decisions were in a quantum superposition of both failing (because he's a bad, incompetent bad guy) and succeeding (because he was an evil capitalist roader revisionist). It was very surreal to see and was probably the point I realised that Maoists just flat out don't have worthwhile arguments, just empty rhetorical devices designed to confuse and obfuscate everything so they can "win." Funny how despite being "more left" than MLs, they function in the same way as liberals when it comes to trying to convince other people of their ideas.
I added a large edit in the meantime, I think you missed it due to the timing of your reply haha
Oh yep, looks like it lol. I couldn't agree more, a big part of the "twitter maoist" phenomenon does just seem to be western chauvinism, they want to play at being revolutionaries, living vicariously through revolutions in other parts of the world, while they stay safe and comfortable in their western existence, not actively waging PPW in their own countries, despite boasting about it's "100% success rate"
That redsails article is spot on as well, and my god does it make Maoists mad. I've shared it before and their response is a hilarious "stop sharing that article, I'm sick of people always telling me to read it."
I had some guy (who claimed they weren't a maoist but refused to elaborate) explain that the future is maoist because they are the only ones waging revolutions right now or seeing success. I left it at that because I also pulled the rhetoric questions on him and he kept ignoring them lol.
But that was a funny one. Sure, if you think AES doesn't exist and China, Cuba, Vietnam are not communist anymore, then maoism works. And sure, if you think waging a people's war for over 50 years while slowly being forced to cede territory over those 50 years is a sign of success, then yeah I guess the future is maoist.
I really want them to explain how they expect people in the imperial core to agree to leave our cozy lives and treats to go fight in the mountains or whatever biomes we have in the imperial core for the rest of our lives. To me the future is Dengist (I know it's not a real word etc.). Their little adventures will get them to a conclusion we've known for over 50 years: you will be expecting the Third World to be doing the revolution for you, because they are perhaps more keen on joining such movements. Thirld Worldism, most of us know by now, is another imperial endeavour circling back to what I was saying earlier, they want to direct the imperialized periphery into doing revolution, but not actually do it themselves. They want to be Sison, safe in the Netherlands, not one of the many officers of the CPP which they have never once name-dropped. I don't know if many of them even know about them or stopped at Sison and "the masses" (you have to see the masses like a character, like one big thing -- this is something, incidentally, Black Red Guard talked about in a medium piece, that Lucanamarca was not carried out by the "masses" but by PCP-SL militants, and now he's completely shunned by maoists for having written this piece and having joined the DSA lol).
This is the problem with Thirld Worldism, which basically all maoists I've met claim (whether they know it or not), and it's nothing new. Plenty of people have noted that contradiction.
Cause like I'm a communist and I don't want to abandon my life to be living in barracks in the woods and mountains until I get shot by a cop while robbing a delivery truck to Walmart lol. And they don't want to either or they would be doing it too. And if they want to prove me wrong, then go right ahead and start a PPW.
But this is what "Dengism" understands. There's another very pragmatic way of doing things that is beneficial for everybody.
On PPW I was made aware some time back that Vietnam also waged one, and I can't disagree with that. And certainly China did too. It seems to me, looking at historical examples, that PPW is not so much something you want to get into, but something you get into dialectically as the process of revolution develops. We could say the Bolsheviks also got into a PPW, although it only lasted a few years, not decades like the more famous examples did. From what I know of the Naxalites, CPP and PCP-SL, protracted people's war is central to their praxis and they consider it important to achieve communism.
Yeah, I touched on it a bit, but they just flat out seem to think that the entire "masses" will just join their revolution if they demand they PPW on the internet hard enough. It feels like they don't understand the concept of the vanguard party very well, or the idea of allowing "neutrality" for people who don't want to put their lives (or their loved one's lives) at risk.
And I agree, it does often feel like their ideas rely on the idea of someone else doing all the hard work, and they just get to do the "fun bits" of the revolution, they seem to love adventurism as well, which I think is quite telling, they don't want to focus on hard work and dealing with largely indifferent masses, they want to do a cool "movie moment" that just impresses the people so much that they spontaneously join the revolution. Which is probably why they don't care about winning the people's support through direct action, because to them, some big magical spontaneous event will occur that will make the people rise up.