Last week’s killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has unexpectedly made the suspect a folk hero and triggered a tsunami of class rage over the US’s barbaric healthcare system. This sudden surge in class consciousness is a hopeful sign for revolutionaries, but it also shows that it will take more than lone avengers to combat the capitalist class.

Stalinist academic Grover Furr has dedicated his career to zealous defense of the Soviet Union with cherrypicked data and crude falsehoods. His latest book, Trotsky’s Comintern Conspiracy, is no exception. Filled with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, it justifies Stalin’s show trials with the logic of fairy tales and the Inquisition.

Maoism is a political tradition with enduring appeal on the left, especially for its association with the Chinese revolution and other liberation movements. Thus it is important to understand the ways Maoism diverges from Marxism. Maoism’s orientation on guerrilla warfare, its view of “labor aristocracy,” and its dismissal of the self-emancipation of the working class contradict revolutionary socialism and are doomed to failure.