It is often the case that newly radicalizing Marxists end up confused about our relationship to Maoism. Is it just “Marxism in China” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”? Is it a newer form of Marxism which we can learn from and engage with? What Maoist ideas, if any, have merit? How do Marxists differ from Maoists, if at all? These are questions with definite answers, and they can be answered by looking at the history and theoretical tradition of both Marxism and Maoism.
Historical origins of Maoism
Maoism is a development of Stalinism. It originated as the theoretical summation of the strategies and tactics used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the course of its revolution. Since then, it has become an international tendency in its own right, whose political and theoretical traditions supersede the experience of the Chinese revolution.
In the early 1900s, China was still ruled by a corrupt feudal aristocracy, the Qing dynasty. China itself was carved up by various imperial powers, such as the British and Portuguese. Famines were common throughout China, and thanks to the backwardness of the Qing dynasty, technological and economic progress was halted. These are the circumstances that precipitated the coming revolutionary changes in China.
The CCP was originally small, but was quite influential among the working class in its early years. It was officially founded in July 1921 with help from the Soviet Union and the Communist or Third International (Comintern). At the time, the strategy of the Comintern was international socialist revolution. This changed after Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin rose to power, managing to consolidate power in both the Soviet Union and the Comintern by 1925. The Kuomintang (KMT), the rival Chinese Nationalist Party, had been working with the Comintern since the 1920s, but Stalin’s rise to power led to a rightward shift in the policy of the Comintern towards support for “progressive” bourgeois nationalism abroad. Against this, Trotsky argued for class independence and international revolution. This rightward turn led to the Comintern arguing for a policy of alliance between the CCP and the KMT to defeat the Qing aristocracy. At the time, Wang Ming was the most well-respected member of the CCP and carried forth this perspective from Moscow.
The new regime which rose to power under Mao’s command resulted in the expropriation of the former landowning gentry and land back to the peasants. This was essentially a bourgeois revolution.
Unfortunately, in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the KMT, ordered the KMT military to mass-murder members of the CCP. Due to this disastrous alliance, the CCP was driven out to the countryside and forced to adapt. Rather than organizing the working class, which was overwhelmingly concentrated in the cities, they would organize the peasants in the countryside into a guerrilla army. In this period, Mao demonstrated himself most up to the task of organizing a guerrilla army, and began to grow in power.
In 1931, Japan invaded China and ended up quickly scoring several military victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. Estimates vary, but Japanese colonialism likely cost between 20 and 50 million Chinese lives. The Japanese engaged in numerous war crimes, perhaps the most grotesque of which was the Rape of Nanjing, in which the Japanese slaughtered millions of Chinese in Nanjing over a period of six weeks.
Wang Ming, effectively representing the Soviet line in the CCP, argued for a temporary “united front” (really a popular front) between the CCP and the KMT against Japan. (In Marxism we refer to an alliance of working-class organizations as a “united front,” by contrast to collaboration with bourgeois forces, which we term a “popular front”). After the KMT suffered numerous embarrassing defeats against the Japanese, his political influence waned significantly, leaving his rival Mao the most influential member of the CCP.
During this period, the CCP was engaged in a three-way fight between the KMT and the Japanese. The Japanese were eventually driven out after their defeat in World War II in 1945. Afterward, in a context of hyperinflation, the KMT quickly discredited itself through its corruption and ineptitude. The CCP quickly defeated the KMT by 1949, leaving them in control of all of mainland China. The KMT was left to control only Taiwan (then called Formosa), with the backing of the United States.
The new regime that rose to power under Mao’s command resulted in the expropriation of the former landowning gentry and giving land back to the peasants. This was essentially a bourgeois revolution. Mao called this government a “bloc of four classes” — the four classes in question being workers, peasants, small capitalists, and “progressive” large capitalists.
In reality, the CCP was thoroughly in control of all economic questions. Private capitalists were kept on an exceptionally short leash by the CCP, and neither workers nor peasants had any real control over the government. Officially, however, Mao called this a proletarian government and declared the socialist nature of the revolution.
Mao then attempted to apply Stalin’s policies of rapid industrial development in China with the “Great Leap Forward.” This policy led to the redirection of peasant labor away from agricultural food production towards industrial production. Due to the low productivity of China’s agriculture and low levels of industrial development, this policy resulted in widespread famines in the countryside with little to show for it. The failure of this policy led to Mao being sidelined in the CCP in 1961.
If the masses already possess a germ of revolutionary consciousness, why can’t they just form their own party? If they don’t have revolutionary consciousness, what is the point of the mass line?
In 1966, Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in an attempt to regain power. He argued that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the CCP and needed to be purged. What followed was a widespread ultra-left campaign characterized by chaos and violence. The GPCR resulted in the formation of “Red Guards” (primarily by youth and students) who massacred their fellow workers, destroyed many priceless historical artifacts, and persecuted almost everyone.
The GPCR was effectively politically exhausted by 1972, and formally ended with Mao’s death in 1976. Following the GPCR’s end, Deng Xiaoping rose to power and shifted China’s economic policy towards reconciliation and trade with Western powers, a policy outlook which it has mostly maintained ever since.
The Chinese revolution and Mao’s writings have inspired several other revolutionary organizations, including the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (also known as the Naxalites), the Black Panther Party, the Shining Path in Peru, and many others. While all of these organizations are worthy of study in their own right, for the sake of brevity I will focus on the Shining Path, since it was the most successful in applying Maoism’s strategy of rural guerrilla warfare, and was directly influenced by Maoist ideology.
The Peruvian Communist Party (AKA The Shining Path)
The Shining Path (SP) was founded in 1969 by Abimael Guzmán (often referred to by his pen name, Presidente Gonzalo). It was an offshoot of the original Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), which was founded in 1928 by José Carlos Mariátegui. Guzmán was deeply influenced by Maoism after a trip to China and felt that the original PCP had become revisionist. He distanced himself from organizing workers and instead decided to focus on organizing the peasantry. By the time the SP had emerged, the original PCP had split into several parties, all claiming to continue Mariátegui’s legacy.
For the first decade of its existence, the SP focused primarily on growing numbers and developing its members politically. It was only after the Peruvian government opened up elections in 1980 that the SP entered into the political scene. Prior to the elections, the Peruvian government had been under a military dictatorship. In contrast to other leftist groups, the SP denounced the elections and burned ballot boxes, declaring it an “act of war.”
The SP initially benefited from the government’s tepid response. The SP rapidly took over several rural areas of Peru, owing to the political vacuum. During the initial period of the SP’s ascendancy, the government relied on the police and on arming peasants to fight the SP.
The government’s reticence was due primarily to the previous military dictatorship. Peru’s president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, had been overthrown in a military coup in his previous term, and was therefore quite wary of relying on the military to suppress the SP. The rest of the government shared this viewpoint, considering the historic fragility of liberal democracy in Peru.
The SP quickly distinguished itself for its ruthless use of violence to achieve its political goals. The SP regularly attacked and killed rival socialists and labor leaders who criticized the SP. It also tended to brutalize peasants who came into conflict with its rule, which took place frequently due to the SP’s tendency to disrespect indigenous culture and its generally undemocratic political outlook.
The infamous Lucanamarca Massacre epitomizes this tendency. In response to the death of 13 militants at the hands of a few ronderos (peasants armed by the government), the SP took its revenge by entering the town of Lucanamarca and indiscriminately murdering anyone they could get their hands on. The official reports tally up 69 deaths, including 18 children and a six-month-old baby. In response to the outrage over this atrocity, Guzmán gave an interview in the pro-SP newspaper Diario defending the action as necessary in the face of “reactionary military actions,” though he did euphemistically admit to “excesses.” It is important to note that while this was the worst massacre committed by the SP, it was far from the only one.
Since Maoism is a development of Stalinism, it inherits the Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country.” Maoists argue that socialism can be built in a single country following a socialist revolution, whereas Trotskyists believe that only the dictatorship of the proletariat or a workers’ state can be built in a single country.
By 1990, the SP presented an existential threat to the stability of the government. At this point, Alberto Fujimori was elected president. Where previous presidents had resisted the complete use of military force against the SP, Fujimori decided to take the gloves off. In 1992, he granted the military broad powers to arrest and prosecute anyone suspected of being an SP guerrilla, with secret trials and suspended democratic rights.
The results of this military repression were catastrophic. The military not only attacked SP militants, but also anyone suspected of supporting the SP. The military destroyed entire villages and murdered indiscriminately, resulting in an estimated 70,000 deaths throughout the conflict. This number far exceeds even the highest casualty estimates given for the SP.
After this declaration, the SP rapidly declined in power, and in September of 1992, Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government. The result was the nearly immediate collapse of the SP, considering there was no real political successor anywhere in the party. Upon being captured, Guzmán began to call for peace talks at the behest of his jailors, which split the SP into multiple factions and led to a total rout.
Apart from the political vacuum, the SP also suffered a series of military defeats against ronderos. These were embarrassing not just because the ronderos were poorly armed peasants, but also because the SP claimed that the peasantry was their social base.
With the SP defeated, Fujimori easily won reelection, and in 1995, he and his supporters declared amnesty for the human rights violations undertaken by soldiers, police officers and ronderos against the SP. Guzmán took responsibility for the Lucanamarca massacre and like many other members of the SP, ended up serving a life sentence in prison. Fujimori would eventually end up with a life sentence as well, due to flagrant corruption and human rights violations during his presidency.
Maoism as a theoretical tradition
In this section, I am going to explore the points of disagreement that Maoism has in relation to Trotskyism. Since Maoism is influenced by Marxism, there is obviously substantial agreement on various topics between Maoists and Trotskyists, but historically these points of agreement have not been enough for Trotskyists and Maoists to coexist in the same organizations. Here are the reasons why.
Internationalism
Since Maoism is a development of Stalinism, it inherits the Stalinist conception of “socialism in one country.” Maoists argue that socialism can be built in a single country following a socialist revolution, whereas Trotskyists believe that only the dictatorship of the proletariat or a workers’ state can be built in a single country. This is theoretically underlied by the view that world capitalism is composed of various “capitalisms” rather than a single, integrated world system. According to Joshua Moufawad-Paul, a Maoist:
Trotsky’s theory of “combined and uneven development” was fundamental to his understanding of the theory of permanent revolution’s international meaning. Here we have a theory that seems to imply that capitalism is a global mode of production that develops in a combined and uneven manner, rather than a theory (as those influenced by what would become the Maoist tradition have argued) of a world system of capitalism where capitalist modes of production form the centres of capitalism, and impose/control global capitalism through imperialism, and capitalist social formations on the periphery that are still economically defined, internally, as pre-capitalist modes of production.
Moufawad-Paul meant it as a criticism, but he was correct: Trotskyists view capitalism as a single globally integrated economic system. While various imperialist blocs may vie for power with each other, and the class structure and local conditions are different throughout the world, all capitalist nation-states are ultimately economically dependent on each other. For this reason, along with the obvious looming threat of imperialist intervention, revolution in a single country is not enough to safeguard a proletarian revolution.
Obviously, the international revolution has to begin somewhere, and the only real place for this to begin is at a national stage. However, the Trotskyist position is that the revolution must spread to other countries and escalate the fight against capitalism, otherwise it will eventually revert back to capitalism. This does not mean that a workers’ revolution in one country should be held back if international revolution is impossible. It simply means that we must recognize that socialism has not yet been won.
On the revolutionary party
Maoists also inherit the Stalinist conception of the revolutionary party. Rather than being a party of the working class which convinces other workers to take power for themselves, it is thought of as a party above the working class, meant to impose “socialism” on the workers for their benefit. Moufawad-Paul is helpful here in understanding the Maoist perspective on this issue. He argues that the revolutionary party has an inherently petty-bourgeois nature. As he puts it in his 2016 book Continuity and Rupture:
The working-class caught up in trade unions cannot produce a revolutionary organization by itself because, in this context, it is only capable of producing an economism (“trade union consciousness”), or a defiant anarchism, but not a mediating party that produces a revolutionary movement with a coherent and revolutionary theory. Here we must recall Althusser’s analysis of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism where he points out that the working-class, which spends most of its time working, can only conceive of its rebellion according to the ruling ideas of the ruling class.
Essentially the argument here is that workers are incapable of coming to revolutionary consciousness on their own, and thus can only generally develop “trade-union” consciousness. Whereas those with a revolutionary consciousness seek to overthrow capitalism, those with trade-union consciousness seek to reform it and negotiate with its representatives — i.e. build unions, form labor parties, win elections, pass legislation, etc. Therefore, the petty bourgeoisie must step in to build a revolutionary party on behalf of the working class instead.
The reasoning for this position has taken many forms, but usually it boils down to a lack of faith in the intellectual capacities of workers. Regrettably, this was Lenin’s position when he wrote the classic foundational text “What Is to Be Done?”:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.
Those who continue to make this argument today ignore the work of later Marxists such as Tony Cliff and Marcel Liebman who pointed out that Lenin abandoned this elitism after the 1905 revolution and the resultant upsurge in class consciousness. In fact, following the revolution Lenin argued the exact opposite formulation. As he put it in his 1905 essay “The Reorganization of the Party”:
It would be simply ridiculous to doubt that the workers who belong to our Party, or who will join it tomorrow at the invitation of the Central Committee, will be Social-Democrats in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic.
It is at this point that we come to the main contradiction in the Stalinist conception of the party, perhaps best expressed by Moufawad-Paul:
On the one hand it is impossible for the proletariat to spontaneously develop a revolutionary party with a revolutionary ideology; on the other hand it is impossible for a party that the workers cannot possibly develop, and thus is developed instead by the petty bourgeoisie, to carry a revolution to its completion.
To overcome the contradiction between the petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the party and the proletariat, Maoists introduce the strategy known as the mass line. The mass line is often summarized by Maoists as “to the masses, from the masses, to the masses.” It was developed by Mao during the CCP’s period of guerrilla warfare against the KMT and the Japanese. It consists of collecting ideas and drawing inspiration from the masses, and then bringing forth a systematic program which they will provide feedback on. Thus the task of the party is to ask the masses how to proceed and then to systematize their thoughts into a coherent revolutionary program.
Violence is a tactical question to be answered when the time comes. But contrary to Mao, we do not believe that workers’ power “flows from the barrel of a gun.”
It is worth pausing for a second to consider the origins of the mass-line theory in more depth. During Mao’s period of guerrilla warfare, he organized peasants, not workers. While peasants and workers are both laboring, exploited classes, they differ significantly in class interests. Peasants produce for themselves and their families first, and society second, whereas for workers, the reverse is true. Thus for workers, economic cooperation is second nature, whereas peasants must generally be forced to work extra to produce a social surplus. While peasants as a class benefit from a stored social surplus, since it guards against famines and scarcity in times of disaster, a peasant as an individual is less secure for contributing to that surplus. As Marx put it in his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte”:
[The peasants] are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.
The mass line can be seen as a strategy to resolve this contradiction, to both represent and protect the interests of the peasants while simultaneously being their master. Of course, just because a strategy was developed with peasants in mind does not necessarily mean it has no applications for organizing workers. But it does mean it deserves more critical examination than other strategies that have been tried and tested among workers already.
Another point in evaluating the mass-line strategy is how it fits into Maoist politics as a whole. The belief that underlies the strategy is that the masses already possess, in some germinal form, revolutionary consciousness. Hence why the party, which is inherently petty-bourgeois, must draw inspiration from them. But this contradicts the premise that the masses are incapable of achieving revolutionary consciousness! If they already possess a germ of revolutionary consciousness, why can’t they just form their own party? If they don’t have revolutionary consciousness, what is the point of the mass line?
This is just a specific manifestation of an important contradiction inherent to Maoist ideology. On the one hand, the masses (or in some formulations, the oppressed) know best and are the authority on revolutionary politics. On the other hand, they cannot be trusted to develop revolutionary consciousness without outside intervention either.
The Trotskyist view is that the majority of workers lack revolutionary consciousness outside of a revolutionary situation. While there generally always exists a layer of people disillusioned with capitalism and looking for change, revolutionaries are almost always in the minority.
In the context which we find ourselves in today in the US, the majority of workers are not revolutionaries. This means that truly revolutionary politics will alienate the majority of workers. If we are going to maintain revolutionary socialist politics as the basis of our organization, we have to accept the fact that we will be a political minority for the foreseeable future.
For us, the role of the revolutionary party is to persuade workers to take power for themselves. Persuading large numbers of workers to adopt a set of politics ultimately requires that those politics be correct. Unfortunately, the mass line is not a scientific method for determining what our politics should be. To really be correct, our political positions should flow from a scientific analysis of the structure of the society we seek to change, not necessarily from the opinion of the masses. From the Trotskyist perspective, the role of the party is to find out and speak the truth to the working class and the oppressed, even if they find the truth objectionable. This truth does not come from polling the masses, but from careful study of history and the experience of class struggle.
On revolutionary strategy
Apart from their flawed conception of the revolutionary party, Maoists also generally hold to a strategy of guerrilla warfare over mass working-class insurrection. Briefly, the idea of insurrection is this:
- In non-revolutionary times, socialists engage in a mostly legal struggle under capitalism for reforms. The reward of winning reforms in this period is not the reforms themselves, but the cadres trained in class struggle who are formed within the struggle. These political struggles are not won primarily through contests of armed force, but through strikes and disruptive protests. The overarching goal in this period is to build a party which contains the most resolute and experienced Marxist cadres — i.e., the revolutionary socialist vanguard party.
- As the contradictions mature or when circumstances permit, socialists organize among the rank and file of the military. Since the low-ranking recruits of the military are drawn from working-class backgrounds, the military as an institution is subject to internal class contradictions, and therefore to class struggle.
- Once a revolutionary crisis emerges, supposing the socialists have done their jobs right, the military’s rank and file turn on their superiors. Rather than crushing the revolution, they become part of it, and help the working class take power.
Maoists argue that this path to revolution only worked once in Russia and is unrealistic in every other situation. Rather than engaging in political organizing in the cities among the urban working class, they argue for People’s War or guerrilla warfare. The idea of guerrilla warfare is to organize an army in the countryside and initially, engage in hit-and-run tactics against your enemy. During the initial phase, the goal is to wear down your opponent’s resistance while avoiding long engagements or decisive battles. Over time as the guerrilla army gains in strength and the opponent’s resistance is worn down, more conventional military tactics can be used.
According to this strategy, the road to victory lies in gaining control over the countryside surrounding the cities first, and from there gain control over the country entirely.
We believe that the strategy of guerrilla warfare is misguided on several counts. First, armies of any kind are not democratic institutions. A soldier must follow the orders of their superior with little room for debate, otherwise discipline breaks down. Thus the guerrilla strategy trains its adherents in obedience and following orders, rather than in democratic debate and accountability.
Second, using violence to achieve political objectives tends to discourage working-class participation. Political violence can only be used effectively if the majority of the working-class views its use as legitimate, which in non-revolutionary times, is a rare occurrence.
None of this is to suggest that we should not defend ourselves against state or fascist violence with arms. As Marxists we also critically support armed liberation movements. Violence is a tactical question to be answered when the time comes. But contrary to Mao, we do not believe that workers’ power “flows from the barrel of a gun.”
Oppression and “labor aristocracy”
The final point of difference between us and Maoists is our view of oppression and the working classes of imperialist nations. Maoists generally have a pessimistic or downright hostile view of the working class in imperialist nations. The best summation of this view is perhaps J. Sakai’s work Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, in which he argues that the white working class of the US benefits from the super-exploitation of people of color, and thus can never go beyond a reformist consciousness. According to Sakai, in the US, only people of color can rightfully be said to be proletarian. Maoists generally refer to the working class in imperialist countries as a “labor aristocracy.”
For Trotskyists, this analysis can be correct under certain circumstances, but not usually. In the US’s settler-colonial period which lasted roughly up until the end of the 1800s, all classes of the US, including poor whites, benefited from the colonial theft of Native lands. Thus the main contradiction during this period was between the settlers and the Native peoples. However, with the completion of the process of colonial theft, the genocide of Natives, and their confinement to reservations, the circumstances have changed. The primary contradiction is now between the working class and the capitalist class.
Instead of developing into socialism, China has developed from its former state-capitalist model into a more mixed economy, with elements of both state capitalism and private capitalism mixed in. The Chinese working class has about as much control over their government as any other working class does — which is to say, not much.
Maoists argue that settler-colonial theft has been replaced by imperial wars abroad. However, imperialist adventures primarily benefit the owners of major corporations and their benefactors — in other words, the capitalist class. The working class in the imperialist country sacrifices their resources, their health, and ultimately their lives in imperialist wars. In return, soldiers receive a paltry wage and, in the US at least, the promise of free college. There is a reason why the military relies on poverty, desperation, and, when those don’t work, the draft, to obtain recruits.
This view that workers in imperialist countries benefit from imperialism is something Maoists extend onto other forms of oppression. Maoists generally argue that white workers have an interest in upholding racism, for example. One could extend this to numerous other forms of oppression, including xenophobia, patriarchy, etc. But this overlooks the many historical efforts by class-conscious workers of all stripes to overcome oppression, and the ruling class’ insistence on maintaining it.
Our view is that workers of all kinds benefit from fighting oppression, even if they are not immediately affected by it. The white working class does not, as a whole, benefit from the existence of racism, xenophobia, imperialism, etc. Of course, it is a structural advantage to be white rather than a person of color, to be a citizen rather than an immigrant, and to be in the US rather than to be in a peripheral nation. But the old labor slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” applies to white workers as well, regardless of their opinions otherwise.
Conclusion
The Chinese revolution had many positive aspects to it. The CCP finally rid China of its longstanding class of feudal landlords. It beat out the KMT, which almost certainly would have left China as a vassal state to US imperialism. It was decisive in liberating China from the grips of Japanese imperialism. All of these things are towering historical accomplishments.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Maoism has not led to socialism. Its attachment to guerrilla warfare as a strategy leaves its adherents without the ability to develop a democratic politics. It has a tendency to develop personality cults around its leaders, to disastrous effect. Perhaps most damningly, it has a tendency to organize classes other than the working class — leaving it without a basis to achieve socialism.
Instead of developing into socialism, China has developed from its former state-capitalist model into a more mixed economy, with elements of both state capitalism and private capitalism mixed in. The Chinese working class has about as much control over their government as any other working class does — which is to say, not much.
As for the Shining Path, their failure was in large part due to their own undemocratic practices. Once Guzmán was captured, there was no other political leadership left owing to Guzmán’s cult of personality. Their regular and frequently unnecessary conflicts with peasants — their supposed social base — left them politically vulnerable to uprisings against their rule. And so the revolutionary situation in Peru was squandered and the Peruvian people ended up living under a neoliberal military dictatorship instead.
All of this explains why Trotskyists and Maoists have generally not organized together. None of this is to suggest that we should simply dismiss everything Maoists say out of hand, or that we can’t work with Maoist organizations on issues which we agree on. Rather, we must view Maoist ideas with a critical eye, with the understanding that Maoists and Trotskyists have a fundamentally different political outlook. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we must keep an open mind — but not so open that it falls out.
Photo by wim hoppenbrouwers
