I know the two groups view post-Mao China in very different ways. MLM denounce everything, claiming that the entire party has succumbed to capitalist revision, that they were all pretend communists who truly believed in nothing.
Or the views of MLs who say that the CPC was right to open up like the NEP, to improve material conditions in order to develop to a higher stage of socialism. But how does this contradict anything from Mao?
How does this contradict New Democracy? Coalitions formed through the class system under the leadership of the CPC. That sounds like Deng propaganda!
Deng allowed for the creation of a new bourgeoisie that it nonetheless kept under the rule of the Party. Xi currently shows this best of all with the anti-corruption campaigns. If these billionaires lived in any other country they’d be the ruling class, but in China they’re not. It still is a DotP.
How is the improvement of material conditions not a vitally Maoist position?
Regardless of your opinions on the Cultural Revolution, for most of Mao’s life his theory was incredibly pragmatic. What mattered most was actually creating a proletarian state, and so most of his ideas comes from that war perspective.
And even the name Dengism, it’s not a real -ism. Deng is right, he was a a committed Marxist, but his thought is really just a continuation of Mao and Lenin. As such modern China is not Dengist but are still committed to ML.
But again why is there this ideological split? It seems the only aspect of MLM that ML reject is a denunciation of the CPC. Because I don’t think there’s anything from Mao that contradicts or majorly reverses previously held ideas. (thus as ML inverting the idea of revolution in the imperial core to outside it in the periphery). In the same way I don’t see much of the reform phase that is antithetical to anything from Mao.
It all comes down to dialectics and the transition from quantity to quality, basically. There’s no such thing as Maoism or Dengism, simply Marxism Leninism, and that was too what Mao thought, hence why he preferred the term Mao Zedong Thought, which would imply simply, theory written by him. The reason why there is a difference between Marxism and Marxism Leninism is because Lenin effectively changed Marxist theory in a way that modified the quality of the content in a way that it is no longer essentially the same. Lenin focused his ideas in the time were capitalism was adapting to new ways under the disguise of imperialism, and focused on praxis, creating a completely different analysis than that which Marx and Engels had written. On the other hand, all of the thinkers that came after him are simply following his steps and expanding the Marxist Leninist thought but not in a way that radically changes the thought. People who call themselves Maoists, or even worse, Dengists, are nothing but people who failed to understand dialectical materialism and are trapped within a dogmatic crossroads. If you read Mao, and you read Deng, you’ll notice that both of them have policies that are in accordance with each other and when you look at the policies taken by them through the lenses of a 50 year old time lapse in the future, they decisions improved the lives of the working class.
This is a really good text on the subject.
https://armedwithapen.com/mao-on-maoism/
😭
They discovered us, we’re finished.