It’s finally happened. r/communism is formally a Gonzaloite cesspool. This happened after a few months of openly displaying the Shining Path hammer & sickle as the sub’s logo.
It’s finally happened. r/communism is formally a Gonzaloite cesspool. This happened after a few months of openly displaying the Shining Path hammer & sickle as the sub’s logo.
The most successful have been Marxist-Leninists (the vanguards of socialist states - China, USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, etc.). If you look at what the CPC has done in substance, it is the practice of ML with changes in response to material conditions, but still on the path toward developing socialism. The CPC is only “Maoist” in the sense that Mao is known for leading its creation, but Mao was also clear on being against dogma and “book worship.” I believe the term would be something like “Marxist-Leninist with Maoist Thought”, i.e. Mao was not creating a whole new branch of Marxist theory that was meant to replace ML, but Maoist Thought certainly contributed to the methodologies used in China’s particular revolutionary context. Maoism as its own branch of theory is, afaik, dogmatism; if Mao were alive today, Maoists would be saying that Mao isn’t Maoist enough, in other words.
Like to try to make a comparison, imagine if people called themselves Ho-Chi-Minh-ists and focused on exactly copying the kind of guerilla warfare that Vietnam had to wage. This would not make sense because the context of Vietnam is not something you can copy/paste onto every other struggle for liberation. ML practice is the consistently successful one not because Lenin was cool and started the USSR, but because Lenin expanded on existing Marxist theory and outlined the need for a socialist state / vanguard party in a particular way that has been shown to consistently work and has been able to weather great imperialist threats while managing to increase quality of life for people, sometimes under very trying conditions. Maoism has not produced any such successful project led by a proletarian vanguard, as far as I’m aware - and again, counting Mao as an example of it would be misguided because Mao did not practice “Maoism”, he practiced ML with variation on it for the Chinese peasantry context. I’m not sure what you’re referencing with India or the Philippines, but I’ve only ever heard of movements that struggle to have traction with Maoists in India. The Philippines I’m not really familiar with in general.
Does that make sense?