This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Revolutionary Definitions

Born December 26th, 1893, Mao Zedong (also spelled Mao Tse-tung and other variations) was the leader of the Communist Party of China and the "founding father" of the People's Republic of China established October 1st, 1949 after the leftovers of monarchy, foreign occupation and fascism finally died. The remainder of Mao's political opponents fled to Taiwan. Mao died in 1976 after doubling the life expectancy of China's people by ending chronic starvation, homelessness and the common diseases of the poor.

revised January 3, 2002 by MC5

Maoism. It does little to say that Maoism is the writings of Mao Zedong --or the doctrine which guided the first successful Third World peasant revolution that liberated China in 1949. Maoism is famous for land reform, collectivization of agriculture in what was then a poor country, ejecting both foreign occupiers and pro-landlord elements with the strategy of "People's War" against numerically, financially and technically superior enemies, abolishing China's huge drug addiction, ending pornography and prostitution, eliminating the practice of breaking wimmin's feet (footbinding) to make them smaller and supposedly cuter, establishing China's first law allowing divorce and eventually instituting worker-run industry without private property in the means of production.

Complete revolution is fundamental to MIM's view of Maoism. This means that all social, cultural, political and economic relations must be revolutionized and that people will not be liberated by simply breaking the state or smashing capitalism. Groups, individuals or ideologies which choose one issue -- imperialism, racism, capitalism, sexism-- as central typically cede the other areas to the status quo. Maoism dictates that while struggling against the state, the Party must establish a new and revolutionary culture not based on ideologies of domination and greed. The Party must lead a revolution against class, gender and national chauvinisms within its ranks and against the state. Maoism accepts Lenin's concept of a vanguard party. This means that MIM believes there is a best way to do things given the options at hand and this must be struggled for.

Mao proved that it was possible to lead socialist revolution in a poor and backward country with the main forces coming from the peasantry in the countryside led by the political ideology from the city called "proletarian ideology" and this point remains controversial in the imperialist country so-called communist movement. Even more importantly and dividing supposed communists everywhere, Mao was the first communist leader to argue that class struggle continues under socialism and that such struggle must go on within the the communist party and against the bourgeoisie inside that party. Mao warned that without successful struggle against the bourgeoisie in the party, there would be a restoration of capitalism done in the name of socialism at first--as in fact happened in the Soviet Union and China. Since much of Mao's writing merely continues previous Marxism-Leninism or because many of the new parts of Marxism-Leninism contributed by Mao are now widely accepted, it is Mao's doctrine on the bourgeoisie in the party above all which continues to separate Maoism from other varieties of supposed communism to this day.

In a historical sense, Maoism as a doctrine liberated China, influenced all the subsequent anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia and inspired many other revolutionary movements including ones inside the United $tates. MIM also draws on the history of other revolutions and other social movements to form its analysis.

Read some biographical material about Mao

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Some notes on the term "Maoism"

Modes of production--how an economy is organized

Capitalism. Capitalism exists where non-workers control the production of wage-workers, even if private property is officially state property. Under capitalism, democracy for the working classes is undermined through people's lack of control of their own workplace and society as a whole. Workers have little say in how their workplace is organized or what will be produced. In the United States, people in the inner cities have little control over their environment. They do not control the police or the spending of their tax money. And certainly the "justice" system is out of control.

Socialism. This involves organizing societies according to peopleÍs needs, not what is profitable. MIM's vision of socialism involves the highest amount of proletarian democracy possible. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the system of power which maintains democracy, means that all the people will be able to control their own environments collectively rather than having them dictated by a more powerful class. In the United States, the rich (the capitalist class) dictate how the government runs and how work and culture are structured. Under socialism, the capitalist class will be disarmed in favor of a dictatorship of the proletariat (the people instead of a few rich pigs).

State Capitalism. Under state capitalism, the state nominally owns the means of production, but production is organized around the profitability of individual enterprises or sectors, not the needs of the people. The Soviet Union became state capitalist under Khrushchev, and China became state capitalist under Deng. In both cases, a new bourgeoisie developed within the state apparatus and the Communist Party itself.

Ideas and political systems

Dialectics--A term referring to or describing the nature of change in the natural and social worlds, the spiral-like character of history, the interconnection of causations and especially the development and resolution of contradictions. We provide Mao's essays on dialectics here: see "On Practice" and "On Contradiction"

Liberalism

Roughly speaking, within Maoism, "Liberalism" translates into "tolerance" for things that should not be tolerated. "Liberalism" in Maoist usage also has a strong undertone of "laziness" in the face of injustice, again as if individual tolerance extended to letting classes of people starve etc.

Materialism


Classes

Bourgeoisie

Labor aristocracy. "Labor aristocracy" refers to the working class that benefits from the imperialist world's superexploitation of the Third World. For example, white workers in the United States benefit from the superexploitation of the Third World so greatly, that as a class, they are no longer exploited at all and in fact benefit from imperialism. This has gone on long enough and with enough intensity in the West that we should say these "workers" are not workers anymore, but petty-bourgeoisie.

Proletariat

Terminology on getting off the best road to communism

Political error--all Maoists make errors. Those who think they do not are probably not doing anything and counting that as not making an error. Another common cause of believing one makes no errors is Christianity or other forms of metaphysics. Those who take action realize that they are going to make errors. Our best leaders simply make the fewest.

Deviation--when there is no recognizable pattern underneath errors, they are just errors, but if we start to see a pattern, the next most serious problem is a "deviation." Underneath a deviation is usually a line that may not be well-expressed but which nonetheless causes a deviation, a pattern of errors. Recently in the Philippines there was an ultraleft deviation that favored urban insurrection. The underlying idea was that the cities have a larger role in the revolution than they do there, combined with some overly simplified copying from other political struggles. The process of deciding what is the correct line and what is a deviation can only be carried out through scientific summation of practice. Deviationists may be disgraced but not necessarily considered official enemy.

Opportunism--in the process of political struggle we find unprincipled people sometimes taking up the cause of communism. "Right opportunism" underestimates what the revolutionaries can accomplish, while "ultraleft opportunism" or "left opportunism," overestimates what can be accomplished in the given conditions. On the basis of both "right opportunism" or "left opportunism" it is possible to attack the correct road, the political path that yields the fastest way out of oppression and exploitation. Opportunism and deviationism may overlap, but deviationism may be more principled but wrong about the balance of forces and the fastest road out of oppression and exploitation.

There were two key breaks with opportunism in recent history. During World War I, Lenin decided that what he was calling "opportunism" was actually worse than "opportunism," thanks to the development of historical events. People he was willing to share parties and conferences with before became beyond the pale. They became known as chauvinist social-democrats while Lenin's followers became known as Bolsheviks. Of course, if people have been called "opportunists" for years, it becomes difficult to change terminology overnight, so sometimes we gather that "opportunists" are also enemies. Thus, there are shades of opportunism.

Likewise, in China, Mao decided that he had some people on his Central Committee that were not just "right opportunists" but wannabe Khruschevs, revisionists seeking to come to power and carry out counter-revolution. Thus he explained it was time to rename "right opportunism" "revisionism," which we explain below.

Revisionism. Revisionism refers to political views that claim to be Marxist yet revise Marx's work fundamentally by failing to apply the scientific method of dialectical materialism. Revisionists commonly downplay class struggle, overplay the struggle to increase production and technical progress compared with political matters, don't believe imperialism is dangerous, advocate reformist means of change and don't uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat. MIM also calls revisionists phony communists or state capitalists if they are in power. Revisionism is bourgeois ideology, enemy politics. It relies on Trojan Horse tactics and we seek to drive it into open bourgeois opposition to Marxism.

The most opportunist revisionism can be difficult to distinguish from outright bourgeois opposition to communism and cops. The cops furthest undercover spout perfect Maoist rhetoric, but there are also cases of revisionism where there is basically no difference in line from the imperialists. Today for example, the revisionists of the so-called "Communist Party USA" favor Bush's occupation government in Iraq and oppose violence against it.