Maoism

Mao Zedong Thought or Maoism is the Marxist ideology of Mao Zedong. Maoism differs at the start from standard Marxism-Leninism in that it looked to the masses of rural peasants rather than to the urban industrial proletariat as the driving force (along with the Communist Party) of the revolution. Maoism began as a form of Stalinism, but in the mid-1950s Mao became distrustful of the Soviet-style concentration of power in the hands of the Party bureaucracy and its "managerial and technocratic elites", which led him to promote the continuous revolutionary mobilization of the masses. These divergences from Stalinism were elaborated in Mao's writings on guerrilla warfare and his "Red Book" and carried out through programs such as the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.

The Maoist strategy for world revolution is based on the global version of the strategy employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which led to Mao's victory in 1949. The analogy went like this: through "peoples war" the CCP forces who controlled the countryside of China encircled the cities of China, isolated the foe, and destroyed it piecemeal. The logic followed that the countryside of the world as a reaction to the super-exploitation suffered at the hands of the city of the world would become united and defeat the latter, and in the process establish a world socialist order. This grand design would come about not through the struggles of working classes in revolutionary fervor inside the advanced capitalist countries as prescribed by Marx, but through the vehicle of national liberation struggles of the colonial and former colonial peoples of the Third World.

How Maoism differs from traditional Marxist theory

Maoism introduced an innovation to traditional Marxist and Marxist-Leninist theory. Traditionalist labeled it "Deviationism". However, since 1949 when it was first used to topple the government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Republic of China, Maoist theory has been more successful at seizing power in nation states where other socialist revolutions as Marx envisioned it has never succeeded.

Maoism greatly opposed Soviet "revisionism", which Mao believed to have destroyed Communism in the Soviet Union. Mao believed that a Soviet style government was doomed to fail and return to capitalism. It was in the 1960s that his ideas truly started to separate from Stalinism and become its own, identifiable form of Communism.

Maoism became a trendy ideology among leftist extremists starting in the 1960s, who saw the poor of the Third World, rather than the white proletariat of the industrialized West, as having the most "revolutionary" potential. Maoism with its origins in China rather than Europe was thus deemed by these radicals to be more credible an ideology than the Soviet-line Old Left. The Maoists fought against the Soviet backed leftists in most countries around the world, with the usual result of two Communist parties that fought each other.

China played down Maoism in the 1980s, adapting it to create their currently successful "socialism with Chinese characteristics", or a socialist market economy. However, Maoism is popular in certain insurgent movements in several countries, and in 2008 the Maoists legally won elections in Nepal.

Mao Zedong Thought has been incorporated into Chinese Communist Party's constitution and advocates the promotion of state atheism and scientific technocracy.

The government of India has designated the Naxalites, which follow Maoism, as a terrorist organization.

See also

• Khmer Rouge
• Militant atheism
• New Left

Further reading

• Alexander, Robert J. Maoism in the Developed World (2001) online edition
• Alexander, Robert J. International Maoism in the Developing World (1999) online edition

External links

• Indian Christians killed by Maoist Naxalites - Barnabas Fund
• Christian father of five beheaded in Odisha, India by Maoist Naxalites - Barnabas Fund