57
I don't get Maoists at all
(lemmygrad.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
57 points (100.0% liked)
Comradeship // Freechat
2395 readers
63 users here now
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
China began its period of peaceful development and opened up to Western markets while the US was bombing Vietnam and Laos, while there were coups in Indonesia and Congo and Chile and throughout the third world, and while the US was pulling farther and farther ahead in the Cold War. It implemented sweeping reforms that rolled back collectivization and opened up its people to Western exploitation.
In hindsight it's clear this was a strategic choice to buy time to peacefully develop their productive capacity and geopolitical strength, and it worked, but for fourty years it looked like a betrayal of the revolution and liberal revisionism and capitulation to capital etc etc
Even now, it seems China would be fully willing to go back to collaboration with the US to continue peaceful development. China will let allies fall and let genocide wipe out other potential allies without taking action, won't support revolutionary guerilla movements or risk international peace to engage in international militant struggle, and will let their own people be used as cheap disposable labor 48+ hours a week making US toys.
The extreme caution is definitely frustrating, even as China keeps being proven right and their caution keeps paying off. I think Maoists will have to confront the fact that there's a new Cold War eventually, and I'm interested in seeing how they respond politically.
This is so important. I think, frankly, it would have been naive to defend China as a socialist project in the 90s and early 2000s, the height of capitalist restoration. What possible reason would an observer, internal or external, have to believe that China was sticking to a socialist path and not undergoing a total surrender to capital? The only thing to go off of was a frankly ridiculous promise from the CPC that they were actually definitely pulling off history's greatest long game to dupe the capitalist west into building up their productive forces for a big socialist switcheroo. It's preposterous, unprecedented, and unbelievable.
But... time has proven
to be perhaps the greatest long-term geopolitical strategist of all time, the CPC to be a genuine vehicle for working class democracy, and 
to be a world-historical contributor to the development of socialism. If people remain stuck in the old analysis (which, again, was obviously the reasonable conclusion at the time!), then they are not doing living, materialist Marxism. Our understanding must continually evolve and incorporate the new lessons being learned by those struggling for socialism around the world, and at this point that clearly includes the PRC.
I really enjoyed reading Socialism Betrayed. But I did take note of the page or two when they talked about contemporary China. They did kinda say “this sure seems like what the USSR did wrong under Khrushchev only on a much larger scale”. But that book was written in 2004, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for western Marxists to come to that conclusion, albeit incorrectly, at that time. Not to mention the authors did approach it with some humility, not outright saying China was doomed but still pointing out it sure seemed the same as revisionism the USSR in 2004.
Even Parenti made that mistake in Blackshirts and Reds. I don't hold it against him, since it came from his methodology of using western sources, but it was a mistake after all.