I know the two groups view post-Mao China in very different ways. MLM denounce everything, claiming that the entire party has succumbed to capitalist revision, that they were all pretend communists who truly believed in nothing.
Or the views of MLs who say that the CPC was right to open up like the NEP, to improve material conditions in order to develop to a higher stage of socialism. But how does this contradict anything from Mao?
How does this contradict New Democracy? Coalitions formed through the class system under the leadership of the CPC. That sounds like Deng propaganda!
Deng allowed for the creation of a new bourgeoisie that it nonetheless kept under the rule of the Party. Xi currently shows this best of all with the anti-corruption campaigns. If these billionaires lived in any other country they’d be the ruling class, but in China they’re not. It still is a DotP.
How is the improvement of material conditions not a vitally Maoist position?
Regardless of your opinions on the Cultural Revolution, for most of Mao’s life his theory was incredibly pragmatic. What mattered most was actually creating a proletarian state, and so most of his ideas comes from that war perspective.
And even the name Dengism, it’s not a real -ism. Deng is right, he was a a committed Marxist, but his thought is really just a continuation of Mao and Lenin. As such modern China is not Dengist but are still committed to ML.
But again why is there this ideological split? It seems the only aspect of MLM that ML reject is a denunciation of the CPC. Because I don’t think there’s anything from Mao that contradicts or majorly reverses previously held ideas. (thus as ML inverting the idea of revolution in the imperial core to outside it in the periphery). In the same way I don’t see much of the reform phase that is antithetical to anything from Mao.
It seems to come down to idealism and dogmatism. This is true of certain ‘Maoists’ and other types of Marxist who criticise modern China for various ‘impurities’.
Roland Boer argues, as do you, that Deng was an ML who directly borrows from Mao, especially early Mao. But who challenges later Mao. Deng says that following Mao even when he was wrong (he’s talking about much of the cultural revolution) is dogmatic. It comes down to a question of following the letter or the spirit of Mao.
It seems clear that Deng was largely correct because it’s now a historical fact that his approach materially lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Was there another way? Possibly. But it’s irrelevant. The way that was tried worked. And the CPC remains in control even though opening up gave some power to the bourgeoisie.
We’re still in capitalism, so it’s not without antagonistic contradictions. So e.g. critics might rightly point out that recent land reforms are giving power to the banks: https://michael-hudson.com/2023/06/buying-us-debt-subsidizes-imperialism/. But this doesn’t mean that China is betraying the revolution just yet. This situation will be worth keeping an eye on, to see how China resolves this and other contradictions.
To simply say that Mao’s successors aren’t doing what Mao did or would’ve done is remarkably blunt thinking. Perhaps that’s why so called Maoists, as with other non-ML (and non-Juche) Marxists haven’t had much success.
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Haha, fixed!
The strangest experience I have with Maoists is that they would insist they have a lot of success, that they are the most successful ML organizations working in the world today (of course, they naturally exclude all other movements and AES for being “revisionist” so they are the only ones left.)
They seem to define success quite differently to more traditional MLs, instead of looking at QOL of the people, they seem to think that the more ideologically pure a movement is, the more success it has. I’ve heard outright Trot statements from them before, that if China wants to be seen as no longer revisionist (and impress all those mighty western leftists) they should actively export revolution around the world, geopolitical and material conditions be damned.
Ironically, these same people will call all the exporting of socialism the USSR did “social imperialism” so if China did flip the trot switch and engaged in permanent revolution, it’s probably not going to actually sway these western Maoists anyway, China could do exactly what they say it should do and they’d still find some impurity in their methods and dismiss them.