Hi! Long time lurker, first time poster. Been discussing stuff with MLs of all stripes recently, and have come across a common statement used by a lot of Maoists which frustrates me.
They seem to always fall back on statements like "The CPC allows billionaires in their ranks, so they are revisionist."
Maoists have often used this as a kind of "gotcha" argument against more traditional MLs, or "Dengists" as they love to label us.
It's frustrating, because...I don't disagree really, allowing members of the bourgeoisie to hold political power is pretty much the definition of revisionism. The problem is, this feels more like a way to silence dissent or discussion rather than facilitate it. Feels like an overly simplistic hard line that simplifies history into binary divisions. Often followed by an implied "China is revisionist, therefore Maoism is the only working form of socialism."
I'm reaching out to people to see if anyone has any ways to combat this, in a way that encourages discussion rather than it just devolving into insults or truisms hurled back and forth without thought.
It just felt like I was missing something the whole time while trying to talk to them.
I've read a bit of Maoist theory and listened to them, but it just feels really...unexciting? Like PPW is basically just standard guerilla tactics. They insist it isn't, but it feels like it is special because they assign special value to it, not because it actually has additional value beyond that.
It's a shame, because they really do seem to be sincere in their beliefs, and the optimism with which they will defend Maoist groups, insisting that none have ever truly failed is almost admirable. I wish I had their optimism and confidence in my position.
I just don't understand them. It really seems like they are Maoists because it provides them with the same simple black and white worldview that Liberals have, just replacing Harry Potters and Voldemorts with Gonzalo and Revisionists/Capitalists.
I really feel like I'm missing something, but I also feel like I can't talk to them without them just telling me I'm wrong loudly and aggressively, but not substantively, never telling me why I am wrong, just that I am and should accept what they say. I don't know how they ever hope to reach people with this mentality.
I don't know if i have enough knowledge on the theory of Protracted People's War to say how it differs from regular guerilla warfare, but certainly the kind of guerilla warfare that for example Che Guevara describes in his famous manual on guerilla warfare seems to either have arrived independently at some of the same strategies or have been inspired by it.
As for the various ultra-left tendencies, i am on the whole not too worried about them. I personally gravitate towards believing in a kind of natural selection of ideologies in the sense that those ideological frameworks that are not rooted in reality will, over time, tend to be supplanted by those that are simply because the latter will invariably achieve better results in practice. Maoism has all but died out as a politically relevant ideology with the exception of a few frozen guerilla conflicts that have been treading water for decades never actually managing to seize state power.
Of course the degree to which such idealism manages to take root in the revolutionary movement, even if only temporarily, still matters because it can weaken revolutionary forces and delay their victory or cause them to blunder into some pretty serious setbacks. It is for this reason that COINTELPRO has tried to foster ultra left deviationism, promoting it over the ideologies that have an actual track record of success and which the bourgeois state actually fears.
But as it becomes increasingly impossible to deny the success of AES states and all of the progress and development that they are achieving, it will be harder and harder to still convince people to subscribe to these unserious and by now mostly meme ideologies. They will still exist in niche online communities but the people doing real work in the real world will have very little interest in them.
In the Maoist circles I was in, Che's Guerilla Warfare was considered mandatory reading.
It was pretty good, really inspiring honestly, though I can't speak to the universality of the tactics. I especially liked the bit where he admonished western leftists who excused lack of revolution on the presupposed indestructibility of the imperial militaries. Of course, Che did not have to face drones and robot dogs.
He does, however, make explicit note of how poor Cuban revolutionaries overthrew a military dictatorship supported by U.S. aircraft and other technologies well beyond the means of Cuban workers.
Funnily, though mandatory reading in my circle, I have seen Gonzaloite tweets come out since then denouncing Che's Guerilla Warfare as "Focoist revisionism", among other things. I do not see how becoming so enraged at a successful revolutionary giving tips on making revolution helps anyone, but ultras are a silly lot.
If i had to pick one word to describe ultras, "silly" would definitely be it.