Maoism

The text that we are publishing below was written by the ICC’s section in India, in the context of an ongoing discussion with comrades in the Philippines who have begun to orient their activity towards the defence of the internationalist principles of the Communist Left. During the discussions, the comrades asked us to undertake a theoretical critique of the positions of Filemon “Ka Popoy” Lagman, one of the leading founders of the Partido ng Mangagawang Pilipino (PMP – Filipino Workers’ Party), which is one of the main left-wing formations in the Philippines.

The leftist controlled capitalist government machinery has pounced upon the unarmed exploited masses of people and agricultural workers in Singur and Nandigram in the rural areas of West Bengal. The holy alliance of state armed forces and the cadres of the CPI(M), the predominant leftist political party of India have attacked the masses of exploited people rising against the government policy and practice of snatching agricultural land for setting up new industrial units and special economic zones giving special privilege and right to the capitalists to exploit the working class people as much as they please.

In the first part of this article (International Review No.81) we endeavoured to reclaim the real historical revolutionary experience of the working class in China. The Shanghai proletariat’s heroic attempted insurrection of 21st March 1927 was both the culmination of the spontaneous movement  of the working class begun in 1919 in China, and the last glimmer of the international revolutionary wave that had shaken the capitalist world since 1917.

According to official history, in 1949 a “popular revolution” triumphed in China. This idea, defended as much by the democratic West as by the Maoists, forms part of a monstrous mystification produced by the Stalinist counter-revolution about the supposed creation of “Socialist states”. It is certain that in the period between 1919 and 1927 China lived through an important working class movement, which was fully integrated into the international revolutionary wave that shook the capitalist world in that epoch, but this movement was ended by a massacre of the working class. What the bourgeoisie’s ideologues present on the other hand, as the “triumph of the Chinese Revolution”, was only the installation of a state capitalist régime in its Maoist variant, the culmination of a period of imperialist struggles on the terrain of China that began in 1928, after the defeat of the proletarian revolution.

In this article, we focus on the central aspects of this mystification: Mao Zedong himself as a “revolutionary leader”, and Maoism as a revolutionary theory, and one which claims to be a “development” of marxism to boot. We intend to demonstrate that Maoism has never been anything but a bourgeois ideological and political current, born from the guts of decadent capitalism.

The three Conferences of the Communist Left held at the end of the 1970s provided a reference point for all the emerging groups and organisations of the time who were returning to the heritage of the Communist Left. After sabotaging the conferences, the CWO and Battaglia Comunista held a fourth - which turned out to be nothing but a miserable fiasco.

In October the ICC held a public meeting in Calcutta attended by a large number of people from a diverse milieu. Their participation was testimony to the ICC's success in pushing for discussion and reflection. The debate that unfolded in the meeting took this process of clarification further.

Far from being an expression of the petty bourgeoisie or an ‘activist', ‘centrist', or ‘opportunist' proletarian current, the leftist movement is part of capital's left front. There is nothing proletarian or revolutionary about either Trotskyism or Maoism. On the other hand, they share any number of basic agreements with Stalinism and social democracy even if they may differ on secondary, tactical questions.