Maoism

What is Mao Zedong Thought?

In the Chinese party's official formulation, Mao Zedong Thought is the union of the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution. It was written into the party constitution as the guiding ideology at the Seventh Congress in 1945. 'Maoism' is the name used mainly outside China and in the international movement; the Chinese party itself has avoided the word, on the ground that the Thought is the party's collective wisdom rather than one man's doctrine. The Resolution on Party History of 1981 divided Mao's merits from his errors while keeping Mao Zedong Thought itself as guiding ideology, a distinction that still frames Chinese official doctrine.

What is distinctive in it?

First, it changed the main force and the terrain of revolution: in place of the Russian model of urban insurrection, a protracted people's war with the peasantry as main force, building rural base areas to encircle the cities. Second, it rewrote the theory of stages: New Democracy set the revolution of colonial and semi-colonial countries as a distinct stage, led by the proletariat but carried by a broad class alliance. Third, in philosophy it put the universality of contradiction and the analysis of the principal contradiction at the centre of method, and formalised the mass line as a method of leadership. Fourth, the theory of continuous revolution, holding that class struggle continues under socialism and that the party itself can become a hatchery of the bourgeoisie, supplied the theoretical ground of the Cultural Revolution.

How did it become an international current?

When the Chinese party defined the Soviet line as modern revisionism in the Sino-Soviet dispute, pro-Chinese wings split from communist parties everywhere and founded new ones. Albania sided with China as a state, and Maoist parties and armed movements grew in Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Peru, Nepal and elsewhere. The current divided once more: those who judged post-Mao China's reforms a betrayal either followed Hoxha's Albania or, from the 1980s, passed through the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path) and the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement to formalise 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism'. The Nepalese Maoists' armed struggle and entry into government, and the Indian Naxalite movement, are the present tense of this lineage.

How is it judged?

The official verdict inside China keeps the frame of the 1981 resolution: the merits are primary, the errors secondary. Scholarly judgement divides by domain. There are assessments that credit the theoretical contribution of putting the revolutionary strategy of colonised countries and the peasant question on the Marxist agenda, and criticisms that tie the human cost of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution to the voluntarist core of the doctrine. Of international Maoism, too, the judgement that it was an ideological resource of Third World liberation coexists with the judgement that it was a line that produced small sects and long civil wars. On one point there is no dispute: it was one of the deepest dividing lines of the international communist movement in the late twentieth century.