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Title: Thoughts on Maoism
Author: Wildcat
Date: November 8, 2020
Language: en
Topics: maoism, criticism
Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/thoughts-on-maoism/
Notes: Translated by the Angry Workers of the World

Wildcat

Thoughts on Maoism

Introduction by the Angry Workers of the World

We want to use the opportunity to say a few words about Maoism from our

perspective, primarily on an anecdotal level. First of all we feel it is

necessary to explain why we are still talking about Maoism today. Here

are some examples of initiatives within ‘our milieu’ where Maoism has a

problematic influence.

A few groups within the ‘base building tendency’ in the US and perhaps

in the UK use Maoist vocabulary and aspects of its ideology. From the

actual idea of ‘base building’ (who is the base and for what?) to the

call to ‘serve the people’ (who are the people and why serving them?).

We understand the impetus of the comrades: instead of re-hashing

electoral politics or staying within the bubble of the ‘movement’ they

suggest to ‘go to the people’ and deal with their day to day problems.

Their main framework here is not the ‘working class’ as a social group

that already has a social relationship and collective practice within

the work process, but ‘the poor’ in the territory that need to be joined

together in campaigns. We still think that the ‘base building tendency’

is an interesting development and want to discuss with comrades involved

in it.

A second current tendency where Maoism plays a role is the regional

struggle in Rojava, Kurdistan. Comrades might say that the Maoist days

of the PKK are over and that the leadership has embraced libertarian

communal theories, but ‘ideological twists and turns’ depending on

tactical manoeuvres is the prime feature of Maoism, e.g. to get off the

list of international terrorist organisations, to garner support from

the European and US (liberal) left and military aid from various states.

We understand the urge of comrades to support a regional struggle that

proclaims to be internationalist, feminist and anti-authoritarian, but

both personal experiences with PKK related groups – see below – and the

devastating historical results of regional liberation struggles for the

working class, ring our alarm bells.

The Wildcat article mentions a few reasons why Maoism seemed like an

attractive alternative to the old left, in the form of the Communist

Party or social democratic party formations. We can mention a few more:

There is an ‘anarchistic’ element in Maoism. The ‘spontaneous’ struggle

of ‘the people’ and its often chaotic nature is embraced as a necessary

process of collective learning. Revolutionaries, in particular from the

middle-class, are supposed to ‘de-classify’ by renouncing their material

privileges and their bookish knowledge. They are supposed to first go

and live with, and listen to, the people. The questioning of one’s own

consciousness is encouraged, one’s own mind portrayed as a battlefield

of reactionary and progressive thoughts and sentiments. Last, but not

least, Maoism tends to favour the ‘most downtrodden’, which could be the

Afro-American poor in the USA or the indigenous tribal ‘adivasi’

population in the Indian jungle areas. There are important elements in

all of this.

The problem is the Maoist mis-understanding of what makes class struggle

revolutionary. Many upheavals are initially led by the ’marginalised

sections’ of the working class, but without links to the world of

production these upheavals are either smashed or they turn towards

alliances with the (national, religious, fascist, mafia-type etc.)

middle-class. Maoism has little understanding of the productive sphere

and workers’ antagonistic collectivity within and therefore mirrors the

unstable character of their chosen ‘revolutionary subject’: they either

engage in a suicidal, martyr-fetishising cult of violence and/or form

tactical alliances with the enemy force. The challenge is to find

organic links between the marginal and core working class. Maoism also

intertwines personal and semi-psychological elements of

‘de-classification’ with ideological justifications for ‘personal

authority’ and violent para-state structures, which is the perfect mix

to create the most vile sects. Remember Brixton?

Some anecdotal experiences with Maoism. In Germany in the 1990s the PKK

and the Maoist Turkish Parties were the biggest organisations of the

‘far left’. There were people killed in Berlin when rivalling Maoist

organisations fought each other. We had contacts to Kurdish families and

supported them, being attracted by the community spirit and political

dedication. Once you saw more of the internal structures, things were

less pretty. In Kurdistan, the PKK stopped land occupations early on in

their development in order not to piss off the ‘Kurdish’ landowners, who

supported the ‘national’ struggle financially. This included Islamic

fundamentalists. Comrades told us how they had to attend PKK training

camps in Kurdistan as teenagers and were forced to shoot ‘traitors’ as a

form of initiation. The cult around Ocalan was combined with a martyr

cult. We attended demos where people tried to set themselves on fire,

which was celebrated as an act of heroism. People who were critical of

the organisation were threatened. Involvement in people and drug

smuggling to finance the military actions in Kurdistan seemed more than

just ‘nasty rumours spread by the Turkish state’. Together with

Turkish-Kurdish comrades’ we encouraged working class PKK members to

discuss their situations as workers in Germany and to get organised.

This was seen as a threat to the PKK and discouraged in all kind of

forms, by using moralistic arguments (“people are dying back home”) or

by pointing out that the middle-class elements are needed to finance the

organisation.

A decade later we met comrades in India who used to be part of the

Maoist CPI/ML as the only organisation on the left that opposed the

state of emergency of the Indira Gandhi government in the 1970s. They

told us how they were send to the countryside to organise the

‘self-sufficient’ adivasi populations and the peasantry, only to find

out that these had already become wage workers. When they pointed this

out to the party bosses and suggested focusing the party efforts on wage

workers they were expelled from the party. Maoism in India split in the

late 1970s. One faction focused on building the peoples army in remote

areas, others started focusing on wage workers. In the rural areas,

Maoists often build ties with regionalist movements, often leading to

violent political in-fights and massacres. Military warfare needs

resources, so the Maoist organisations tax local capitalists – and

repress strikes of workers of these capitalists, because ‘they had

already paid their dues’. The military logic and state repression

creates a spiral: each village in certain areas of the so-called ‘tribal

belt’ is seen as either a ‘pro-Maoist’ or ‘anti-Maoist’ camp, with

massacres from both sides. The Maoist organisations have little interest

in the urban working poor, but prefer to focus on the liberal

middle-class as ambassadors for the cause. For them India is still

‘semi-feudal’ and an alliance with the progressive national bourgeoisie

is needed for a democratic revolution. In the urban areas, those

factions who decided to focus on the wage working class often display

the contradictions of most vanguardist parties. Most of the young

comrades are from middle-class backgrounds, the party leaders encourage

them to organise workers during their time at university, while they

themselves stay in the background in their professional jobs. Various

small organisations compete for influence amongst workers and they use

anti-working class tactics to do so. At JNU university in Delhi, one of

the organisations supported construction workers and encouraged an

action that would most likely result in victimisation, because they saw

this as ‘beneficial for the campaign’. And there is a logic as mainly

those workers join the organisations who have been sacked and then

paraded as victims. The organisations support them, in return they

became the ‘organisation’s show-piece workers’. A lot of these young

comrades work tirelessly, but the party’s tactics are most likely to

wear them out.

These are anecdotes, but they fit the overall picture of an

opportunistic and essentially authoritarian ideology.

---

Maoism is a poisonous weed

(Wildcat issue no.105 – Spring 2020)

John Lennon knew it: “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao /

You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” … which was recorded at the

end of the album Revolution Number 9. [1]

Our “China-Trilogy” in the issues 102 to 104 started with a

misunderstanding, you could even call it a manipulation (see our

explanations in the Wildcat 104 p. 36 f.) We should have noticed it! In

the article about Jasic in the Wildcat 102 the usual fairy tales were

told, similar to those you used to read in the German Maoist paper Rote

Fahne [Red Flag]: ‚Because the vehicle that workers used to move their

modest belongings, “a borrowed electric tricycle, blocked a road… a BMW

driver got excited and hit it with a padlock”; or a worker sees on her

way to work in the morning “how a street vendor is badly harassed by the

public order office. She immediately intervenes and succeeds in getting

his cooking utensils handed over, but she is dragged to a police station

for several hours” and so on.

The accompanying pictures of the article were almost Maoist family

photos, which also clearly revealed the minority character of the

actions at Jasic! A very small minority, a group of maybe half a dozen

people, starts an action, and shortly afterwards starts collecting

signatures in the factory to found a trade union… These are the usual

shitty tactics of Maoist vanguard politicians to drag people into their

affairs. At no time was this anything like a strike. We had also tried

to make direct contact with workers at Jasic; we were denied this as

“too dangerous”. We shouldn’t have called the actions at Jasic a

“workers’ struggle” in our magazine!

The older ones among us are especially hurt because we have been

‚defeated‘ three times by the Maoist milieu. In the wake of the strike

wave of 1969, many people had the idea that one should ‚go to the

workers‘, best by going to the factories and working there oneself. The

K-groups [various Marxist-Leninist and Maoist parties formed during the

late 1960s] succeeded in turning this into the distorted image of

‚factory intervention‘, with a caricature of the heroic, industrious

blue-collar worker. They started strikes that usually ended badly for

the workers involved – just so that they could announce ‚successes‘ in

their own party papers and run campaigns for years for the reinstatement

of ‚dismissed colleagues‘. In their expectations of revolution they

lived in a world of their own.

In 1975 the Red Army Faction lawyer Horst Mahler refused to be released

in exchange for Peter Lorenz, who had been kidnapped by the June 2

movement, because the masses of workers would soon carry him out of

prison on their shoulders. At that time he was in the Maoist KPD/AO, he

later became a prominent fascist. At the end of the 70s Maoism defeated

us again. Largely out of Mahler’s experience of disillusionment (the

working masses had not come to his rescue, instead the ‚hero nations‘

China and Vietnam had waged war against each other) the Green Party was

born. Ex-Maoists were at the forefront of the Green Party formation,

people such as Trittin (from KB to the Greens), Prime Minister

Kretschmann (from KBW to the Greens) and many others. What is much

worse, however, is that the Greens succeeded in integrating a broad

extra-parliamentary movement back into the parliamentary system and

turning an anti-militarist movement against the war into the ‚peace

movement‘ of the 1980s. A Green foreign minister (who had not been a

Maoist but an operaist) and Joschka Schmierer, the head of the KBW for

many years, who now sat on the planning staff of the Foreign Office, led

the first war mission of the Bundeswehr in 1999. At the beginning of the

1990s, the leaders of the anti-Germans 2 also came largely from Maoism.

Jürgen Elsässer, former KB, even claims to have coined the term

‚anti-German’. [2] The fact that he has meanwhile developed into a

fascist is not so rare among Maoists and anti-Germans. Gedeon, the

former anti-Semitic right-winger in the AfD of Baden-Württemberg, comes

from the KPD/ML (in the meantime he has been expelled from the AfD).

… which unfortunately is still growing

Maoism has led (in some cases to this day) to insurgency movements and

the take-over of or participation in governments in Cambodia, Zimbabwe,

Peru, India, Nepal, etc. Its influence within the trade union hierarchy

in France, Italy and Germany is firmly anchored, many trade union

leaders and works council chairmen are former Maoists. The worldwide

structures of left-wing Maoists within (elite) universities have been

briefly revealed by the Jasic case… Maoism still seems to be a viable

strategy to gain power. Otherwise, the great influence of this

anti-intellectual ideology in the academic milieu is difficult to

explain. And already at the end of the 1960s it was hard to explain why

Maoism could bring so much misery to the worldwide youth movement: Not

only in Germany the K-groups quickly became hegemonic, but also in many

other countries the ‚Maos‘ set the style and determined the debates. One

reason for this was certainly this huge ‚socialist China‘, which at that

time was also incredibly far away. Today people like to forget that

Foucault was also a Maoist at that time; one of the worst kind: Gauche

Proletarienne. Ten years later, he raved about the “Islamic Revolution”

in Iran…

A second reason was certainly the tremendous simplicity and

“flexibility” in thinking, as it becomes clear for example in the ‚Mao

Bible‘, the Little Red Book:

“All reactionaries are paper tigers.” “Those who rest on their laurels

wear them in the wrong place.” “Criticism should come at the right time.

One must not get into the habit of criticising only after the disaster

has happened.” “A revolution is not a banquet, an essay-writing, a

picture-painting, a doily” “One can abolish war only by war; he who does

not want the rifle must take the rifle” “Dogma is worth less than a

cowpat” “We Communists are like seeds, and the people are like the

soil.” “Fight, succumb, fight again, succumb again, fight again and so

on until victory – that is the logic of the people, and the people will

never go against that logic. That is a law of Marxism.” [3]

These were sayings that were easy to learn by heart and used as trump

cards in internal discussions. Mao’s great saying from the beginning of

the Cultural Revolution “Rebellion is justified” was still sprayed by

the disciples of the Shining Path on every wall in Kreuzberg in the

1990s! “Consistent materialists are intrepid people… Who is not afraid

of being quartered, dares to pull the emperor from his horse’” The

saying even found its way into a hunger strike declaration of the RAF.

They could certainly have found better sayings in soldier Schwejk that

were closer to reality.

Even blatant lies circulated in the ‚Mao Bible‘ became unquestioned

truths from which political strategies were developed: “Political power

comes from the barrel of a gun.” “Everything the enemy is fighting

against, we must support; everything the enemy supports, we must fight.”

A third reason for the great appeal of Maoism was that it emphasised the

importance of the local. Against the centralist ideas in the Soviet

Union, Maoism wanted to encircle the cities from the country. This

seemed to capture the dynamics of the anti-colonial movement. And on the

other hand, your local practice had an immediate world historical

significance.

One last reason might be seen in the fact that Mao’s ‚materialism‘

presented itself as a ‚scientific law‘. “In class struggle, certain

classes win while others are destroyed. This is the course of history,

this is the history of civilisation for thousands of years. Explaining

history from this point of view is called historical materialism; taking

the opposite point of view is called historical idealism.“

In reality, however, he preached unbridled voluntarism: “the will moves

mountains”, “everything” can be achieved with “iron discipline”, or see

above: “Consistent materialists… drag the Emperor from his horse.” In

this voluntarism there lies a parallel to Lenin: the leading role of the

party, the peasant question, the national question, the relationship of

the Comintern to the national parties. At almost all of these points,

Mao takes over Lenin’s opportunism and intensifies it. Negri – who was

very aware of this Lenin-Mao parallel! – even surpasses Mao in his

“Lectures on Lenin” by declaring that “dialectics are a weapon of the

proletariat”. He thus placed himself in the tradition of both communist

parties, where –‚dialectic‘ was a cover-up term for the fact that today

one can say this and tomorrow the opposite, and only one principle is

eternal: “the party is always right”. No wonder that dialectics have

fallen into disrepute!

Maintained by an obscene leader cult…

In the People’s Republic of China, founded in 1949, a bureaucratic class

developed very quickly; as early as 1955, these cadres consumed almost

ten percent of the state budget – the CP China had planned a ceiling of

five percent. By the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, this

proportion had grown to thirty percent. The various campaigns of Mao

(“Let a hundred flowers bloom”, “The Great Leap Forward”, “Cultural

Revolution”) can all be read as an attempt, on the one hand, to

repeatedly impose the political leadership of the CCP on this layer of

bureaucrats, and, on the other hand, to use this layer to keep ‚the

people‘ under control and exploit them. (Maoism has no class analysis,

but rather divides the population quite arbitrarily into about 50

“classes” that decide on access to resources). During these campaigns

and various additional mobilisations, Mao and his entourage repeatedly

gave out target figures. For example: five percent of the population

were ‚reactionary‘ and therefore ‚to be eliminated‘. Such policies could

affect as much as fifteen percent of the population that needed to be

‚disciplined‘, ‚controlled‘ or ‚rendered harmless‘. A great role was

also played by the millions of people who were sent into sheer misery in

the countryside, where even with 12 hours of daily hard work they were

not able to sustain themselves. The “Great Leap Forward” at the end of

the 1950s had brought about one of the greatest famines in the history

of mankind, with 15 to 45 million dead (Felix Wemheuer reckons with 30

to 40 million). The campaign was stopped in 1961. Five years later, Mao

launched the next campaign and triggered a civil war with the “Cultural

Revolution”, whose repression by the military – also ordered by him –

again cost more than a million dead. In his book ‚China under Mao – A

revolution derailed‘ of 2015, Andrew G. Walder estimates that between

1.5 and 1.8 million people died. He puts the number of victims of direct

persecution at 22- 30 million, and those indirectly affected by

persecution at 106 to 150 million. “Most of the victims were neither the

Red Guards in 1966, nor the armed faction fights in 1967. Most people

were killed in 1968 and 1969, when the army carried out ‘purge

campaigns’ from above after the restoration of order.” (Felix Wemheuer:

The Western European New Left and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; in:

“From Politics and Contemporary History” 66^(th) Volume 23/2016)

… and brutal population policies

The CCP is a campaign party that repeatedly combines mass mobilisation

and violence. Since it came to power in 1949, it has resorted to these

means in all crisis situations. Within a very short time, the party

headquarters can switch to crisis mode, pushing aside bureaucratic rules

and apparatuses and sending huge shock waves through the entire system

that make resistance near to impossible. Tough collective disciplinary

measures such as during the Corona epidemic are the natural playing

field for the CP. This kind of emergency mobilisation is in their RNA.

Currently, one-tenth of the Uighurs are in re-education camps. These are

normal dimensions in Chinese domestic politics since Mao’s time. It

works less from a policing point of view than with the fear that these

camps (or, in the past, the land deportations) cause among the rest of

the population. The CCP is an extremely successful machine in ‚moving‘

huge masses of people. After the ‚Great Leap‘ experiment had to be

abandoned in 1961, 20 to 25 million industrial workers were dismissed

and sent to the countryside within two years. As a result, they also

lost their valuable urban residence status. In this context, Mao spoke

proudly of the power and efficiency of the Chinese communist state in

the comprehensive restructuring of labor: „Twenty million people can be

rounded up from one minute to the next and dismissed again with a simple

show of hands. If the Communist Party were not in power, who would be

able to accomplish such an achievement?” This quote can be found on page

148 in the German translation of the book ‚The Cultural Revolution at

the margins‘, published by Mandelbaum Publishing House in 2019.

It was published in the English original in 2014: The Cultural

Revolution at the Margins. [4] We will discuss the book in the next

Wildcat. In the second, and especially the third phase of the Cultural

Revolution, large sections of the Chinese working class turned Mao’s

call for rebellion and rebelled against precisely these forms of

population policies (land deportation, mass layoffs, temporary

employment). More on this in the next issue.

PS. The history of Maoism is also marked by fierce internal struggles

and mutual slaughter. The Jasic campaign is no exception. Several

protagonists behave like real assholes, both within their own

organization and towards supporters. Pun Ngai, for example, has deceived

and burned out some of her employees (probably not for the first time).

And after the left-wing Maoists of Utopia and RedChina had initially

supported the campaign with publicity, they then switched back to the

state line in early 2019 and lured some Jasic left-wing Maoists into a

trap and betrayed them to the police. The “cultural-revolutionary”

attempt against the establishment of the CP probably failed for the time

being.

[1] Lennon did not mean the CCP’s internal strategy paper of 2012,

“which warns of Western values and their spread” (wikipedia). But this:

During the Cultural Revolution, the “four black categories”

(counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, landowners and rich peasants)

were combined with the newly invented category of right-wingers to “five

black elements”. Then old bourgeoisie and pro-capitalists were added,

resulting in “eight black elements”. The peak was reached when “the

stinking number nine” (“traitors”, “agents” and “bourgeois

intellectuals”) was added.

[2] ’Anti-Germans’ were a political tendency in Germany that formed in

the late 1980s. They referred primarily to the Frankfurter Schule

(Adorno etc.). In their support for the state in Israel they attacked

the anti-war movement against the US-led Gulf war in 1990. They

denounced anyone who spoke of class politics in Germany as

proto-fascist, as they regarded all non-enlightened people in Germany as

right-wing anti-Semites.

[3] We know that it is unprofessional, but we could not be bothered to

find the original English translations of the Mao quotes.

[4]

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