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Old 06-09-2011, 02:16 AM   #1
Alan
 
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Maoism

I think I just became one.
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Old 06-09-2011, 04:30 AM   #2
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In what sense? You believe in new democracy and peasant uprisings or you believe in the cultural revolution, cult of personality and the anti-rightist movement?
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Old 06-09-2011, 07:27 AM   #3
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In the sense you want to trawl some buddhists?

which I gotta admit is pretty lulzy. Particularly the part where you install a bunch of speakers around those noobs to play Chinese opera music, and those dipshits are all like: "They've taken away our silence".

I mean LOOK at those people. They're being taken for a ride on the lolercoaster.
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:46 AM   #4
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Why does Maoism appeal to you?
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Old 06-09-2011, 09:27 AM   #5
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Maybe Alan means he's suddenly turned into a tall, bald Chinese man with a stupid haircut and oddly shiny shoes.
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Old 06-09-2011, 11:48 AM   #6
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Surfin' Bird approved.....!

Papapapapa-Oo-Mao-mao
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Old 06-09-2011, 03:08 PM   #7
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Well his dead body IS on display 24/7, so you can hit him up anytime you please.
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Old 06-09-2011, 05:48 PM   #8
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Lenin's dead body is also on display 24-7, and has actually shrunk over time.
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Old 06-09-2011, 07:31 PM   #9
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Now, of course I'm not serious in thinking I'm a Maoist, but I was reading about the history of China before and it really put things into perspective.

Prepare for one of Alan's expositions, jumping from one place to another without transitions. I'm just trying to account for everything I thought yesterday and I think some of you will find it interesting.
It's good that the question you guys asked was not "why?" but rather "what do you mean?". All definitions are contextual, so what do I mean when I say I think I'm one.

Well, first of all, you can't be a latin American leftist, let alone a commie, without being a little Maoist. Mao was the first person to theorize that the peasant population could be radical and revolutionary. It is obvious in Mexico that this is true. Some of the most radical sectors are in the poorest states such as Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Antonio Negri says that he has always hated Maoists but empirically he knows they were right in that peasants can be revolutionary, as evidenced in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
This much, every leftist believes in Latin America, and it's a Maoist idea. But I already believed this before. That certainly does not make me a Maoist. Mao had some incredibly good theories and amendments to Marxism, but there is still the issue of praxis.


That's what this 'realization' is about. Praxis. In this sense I actually think those of you who are realists in politics (not to be confused with 'political realism') will like what I have to say more than marxists or anarchists. And to my fellow marxists and anarchists, you'll have to REALLY put your ideas aside and open up for the duration of this chunk of text. For that, let me just make a quick rant of leftists and I'll finally start talking about Maoism:

So maybe some of you are wondering why I stopped calling myself an anarchist and now I'm just a marxist. Basically I like to explain it as that it's bullshit that devils would condemn humans for not being angels. Like when people accuse Lenin of being very authoritarian, when Lenin had to fucking fight against like ten national armies at once. The Bolsheviks not only fought against the White Army, but also against national armies including that of America and Great Britain, who sent troops to help the White Army. Accusing Lenin of centralism and authoritarianism when Russia was attacked from all sides is bullshit. These same people don't blame Churchill for being a conservative authoritarian fuck, after all - he was in the middle of WAR. Anarchists are basically marxists who pretend to deny their fallibility. They say "well we'll disassociate with Lenin and Che and Chavez because they're not perfect". And guess what happens out of it: all their criticisms of marxism are trite, redundant, boring, and even outdated. The richest literature against the Soviet Union happens within Marxism itself, especially the New Left, precisely because we don't deny we'll be wrong, and we will have to always criticize ourselves lest we fall into dogma. Ironically anarchists end up falling into dogma, which is evident because for all their talk about individualism and creativity, there's little to do in terms of actual political and social innovation among anarchists.
So I, as a Marxist, fully take responsibility for Lenin's atrocities when they did follow Marxist theory, and hope that with a criticism of it, Marxism won't have to recur to such methods again. All I ask non-Marxists is that they put things into perspective. Why is Lenin a bad guy in the face of war and the total destruction of his country, but George Washington was not? Anarchists on the other hand will just condemn Lenin and be no wiser on the history of the development of Bolshevism.
My criticism of Marxists is shorter. It's just that what I am going to say below, any Marxist will just say "well, that's not true communism" and dust off their hands. And yeah, it's true, Maoism is not really communism, but that's not my point. I'm just putting Mao in perspective relative to other governments in the world and relative to China's own history.



Ok, so FINALLY! you know what? I'll start my finally in another post. I'm sorry for talking so much.
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Old 06-09-2011, 07:38 PM   #10
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Oh yeah, before going to talking about just praxis, let's give the Chinese Communist Party kudos for finally putting a stop to foot-binding.
It's estimated that over two billion women were submitted to foot binding since the 10th century. Two Billion! That's just as much as if the full population of china in the present, both men and women, would have their feet broken to the point where they wouldn't be able to walk even short distances!
And we're not talking about its peak being somewhere in medieval times. Right around the time of the Long March, it's estimated that more than half the women in China had their feet bound. The number was almost 100% among rich women, and about three quarters in northern China.
China's population back in the 50's was around 450 million, and out of that, at least 100 million were not only socially but physically oppressed and bound to the whim of men.
From a feminist point of view, you have to give the communist party credit for this.

Are 65 million deaths better than 100 million mutilations? That's up to you, but then again, isn't it a part of the American spirit to follow the phrase "give me liberty or give me death"?
However, I intend to ameliorate the apparent tragedy of these 65 million deaths even further to put things into perspective. So far we've tackled one issue: the submission of women to such an extreme point where their oppression takes the shape of actual mutilation to make them virtually useless in regards to labor.
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:05 PM   #11
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So, the point of this thread is seeing the atrocities of Mao from an objective point of view. All praxis. It won't be about theory at all.

The single most glaring thing that makes Mao unforgivable is that he is accused of 65 million deaths under his regime.
65 million deaths! That's half the population of the United states in this time, I think even slightly more than half.

But then I only found one sole source that says they were actually 65 million deaths; the Black Book of Communism. That book has been heavily criticized for exaggerating the numbers and not saying where it got its sources. Official numbers of the Great Famine were 15 million which I can safely assume are bullshit, so let's go with the second highest number I found, 43 million. You can now find this number in Wikipedia.
Maybe the Black Book was also considering the deaths of the war itself, but this still pretends there were 17 million casualties in the civil war when in reality there were only around 3 million (and most of the deaths were actually of soldiers instead of civilians, so you know, that's a better record than any war of America)

So. 43 million deaths. In a country with 450 million. That's a loss of 10 percent. If they had actually been 65 million, it would be 14 percent.
During the Great Depression, the United States lost 9 percent of its people to starvation and squalor, and 20 percent of its people were undernourished, with rural places and states in the dust bowl going as far as (no bullshit) 90% undernourishment.
My own Mexico lost 25% of its population during its Revolution, and that revolution was only military and political (although we tried to make it social). China had a military, political, social, AND economic revolution. They literally tried to re-make the world, going as far as repeating the process of primitive accumulation, and they only lost 10% of its population.

"ONLY ten percent, Alan? No death is justifiable, you're starting to sound authoritarian." some of you might say.
To which I would respond "come on, dude"
Is there anyone that would seriously imply that you won't tolerate any political move if one sole person is harmed? How is that even internally consistent? I'm not even talking about the fact that this would condemn all wars alike. I'm talking about the present state of affairs. Our very global structure kills people. The economist Amartya Sen, one of the greatest in my opinion, and a vociferous critic of China (so don't think he'd have an interest lying and making China look better) found in his research that in India, in the present, die over a million people more per year than the number of deaths in China during the Great Famine.
So if the issue at base is a matter of the amount of deaths, China actually comes victorious compared to the second most populated country, and the country which is currently trying to emulate the West.

If numbers are all we're concerned about, then even Chinese Communism seems to be a safer bet.
And this is not just comparing it to India. We must also compare it to itself. How was China before communism? That's the biggest issue, wouldn't you say?
Regardless of political ideology, those of you who are more realistic would say, the thing that interests us in politics is seeing if the country was better before or after.
"I don't care whether a government calls itself communist or capitalist, what I care about is how its people fare" I guess most of you will have this opinion, and I commend you for it.

And well, that's the thing. China has always been very centralized and authoritarian. If anything, the Communist Party made it less so.
Mass starvations have been a consistent part of China's history. Emperors have used mass starvations as a means of population control in both meanings of the term. Starvation was an acceptable tool for keeping the population stable, and also an acceptable tool to eradicate certain dissenting regions of the country. It's interesting that here we can see Stalin acted just like the old Chinese emperors while Mao refused to do so.
The Great Leap Forward was fucked up, but at least they tried to do something for the people and failed. They did not engineer the famine in the same way Stalin did engineer the Ukranian famine.

The very Kuomingtang before the Communist Party had fucked up the economy (again, at least I give them credit for trying to do good but fucking it up), which resulted in massive starvation and hyperinflation.

We must also realize that in the same period of time, namely 1952-1960, 43 million people might have died, but the total population still increased, from approximately 450 million to a whopping 600 million.

Even Minqi Li, a Chinese dissident, says that "on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949" (yeah, I just copied and pasted that from Wikipedia, but it's from an article on the Monthly Review. 'Unreliable source' my ass)






So all of these things really put things in perspective. There are still a fuckton of criticisms for Mao, but interestingly, most of those criticisms would be from a Marxist perspective itself, saying that Mao could have avoided even those mistakes had he no abandoned parts of orthodox Marxism.
On the other hand, for the non-Marxists, I argue what exactly is the criticism of Mao when the greatest tragedy to happen to China under communism had only slightly more deaths than the greatest tragedy to happen to 20th century United States, and China wasn't the one that was all modernized and shit.
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:18 PM   #12
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What about the Cultural Revolution?
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:23 PM   #13
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I'm still ambivalent about the cultural revolution, but let's not speak much about that for now. That's part of the theory, not so much of the praxis.
The number of 65 million is indeed supposed to account for all of China's deaths up to the point of Mao's own death, so the Cultural Revolution is still accounted for in the numbers. With numbers outside of the Black Book, the total number of deaths including the Cultural Revolution should be around 50 million tops, with a low on 45 million.

The Cultural Revolution was an extremely violent moment in China's history, yet at the same time it was an attempt to democratize the revolution, with students, peasants, and workers, being the ones to go to war against bureaucrats and academics. That is all I will say so far about the Cultural Revolution for those that don't know about it, but we'll discuss the ideological development of Maoism later on, after we talk about praxis from a realist perspective, and also after I read more on the Cultural Revolution so I actually know what I'm talking about.
I'll especially read the opinions of Negri (anti-Maoist) and Badiou (previously Maoist) for an outside perspective into the Cultural Revolution, if you're interested in following my learning process.
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:35 PM   #14
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My Chinese prof taught us that Mao's influence was slipping, so thats why he used the Red Guard. Was it really to prevent China from slipping into capitalism or was it to regain power and influence? Was shutting down schools and universities necessary to revolution? Was the genocide of Tibetans, Mongolians and Muslims in any way justifiable? If it was to democratize the revolution, why did Mao betray the Red Guard in the end, have the PLA crush them, send them into rural farms to learn "good communist values"?

I'm not saying the dude didn't have good ideas, especially early on, but he did grow to be a power thirsty dictator.

And while women's liberation did have a huge part to do with the revolution and the hatred for Confuscianism, foot binding was already banned in 1912, the Communists were probably stricter about it, true.
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Old 06-09-2011, 08:45 PM   #15
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The genocides were not ethnically fueled, they came, due to a violent and unbridgeable difference of ideologies. That right there would be one of my Marxist criticisms to Mao, following some sort of degenerate Gramscian idea of ideological hegemony.

The Cultural Revolution, just like any radical event, can't be reduced to one sole factor. As far as I have studied, Mao was not losing grasp, but the party was taking a different direction. There are some fine differences there that I should go into detail later on, but the point is that you can see his power was never compromised by the very fact that the Cultural Revolution was possible. He had personal reasons for fabricating the Cultural Revolution, but in his favor these personal reasons directly tied in back to the ideals of the Chinese Revolution, so we have to understand the political ploys of the Chinese Communist Party in a different way than we would see them in other countrie,s especially here in Latin America where we're used to considering all politics as just a corrupt ploy for individual gain. In China during the Great Leap Forwards individual ploys were not, because they could not, be for individual gain - it was impossible under that structure, and the problem was that many people in the party wanted to change the structure precisely because of this, so Mao technically never lied with the accusation of a "bourgeoisification" of the party.
But before I sound like an actual Maoist apologist I'll stop here in regards to the Cultural Revolution.
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Old 06-09-2011, 09:15 PM   #16
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Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. You apologize Alan for "huge chunks of text" but I find your interpretations succinct and easy to absorb compared to dry political documentation, especially with your Mexican perspective.

But I must say I enjoyed the posts in this thread regarding corpses on display too.
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Old 06-09-2011, 10:10 PM   #17
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Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. You apologize Alan for "huge chunks of text" but I find your interpretations succinct and easy to absorb compared to dry political documentation, especially with your Mexican perspective.

But I must say I enjoyed the posts in this thread regarding corpses on display too.

Your attitude is good HP, but you need to learn this
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Old 06-10-2011, 05:48 AM   #18
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I kept waiting for the car to explode or guys with machine guns to jump out and blast away lulz.
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Old 06-10-2011, 08:57 AM   #19
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I kept waiting for the car to explode or guys with machine guns to jump out and blast away lulz.
They tried to kill him...

Now the Dalai Llama is back FOR REVENGE!

This time its personal.
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Old 06-10-2011, 09:45 AM   #20
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This thread is full of *yawn*
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Old 06-10-2011, 09:50 AM   #21
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Your mom is full of my penis.
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Old 06-10-2011, 02:10 PM   #22
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Lucky her....
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Old 06-10-2011, 02:31 PM   #23
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This thread is full of *yawn*
Yeah, bring back the Morbidly Preserved Dalai Llama Corpses On Display!
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Old 06-11-2011, 01:43 PM   #24
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Your mom is full of my penis.

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Old 06-11-2011, 02:30 PM   #25
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Are you fucking seriously going to derail this thread to whine that someone insulted you? There goes my respect out the window.
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