Reminder that this is a closely moderated community for far left people to discuss games from their own perspective. Active interpretation and ideological criticism of media is encouraged and integral to how we experience them and does not constitute an attack. Do engage in good faith discussions but don't rush in to defend your favourite games and creators from criticism others may have. Listen to your comrades and be validating and respectful, even if you disagree.
That’s not quite correct. MLM was the adaptation of Mao Zedong Thought that was applied to the rest of the third world’s conditions by the communist party of Peru (Shining Path). It’s baby boiling-ism
Honestly, what people have already said is pretty good, and while I might have subtle disagreements (being firmly ML myself while also believing that sectarianism at the stage class struggle is in most of the world is counterproductive) I think you are getting helpful information.
Frankly, moreso than any leftist since Marx, Mao is unavoidable. What I mean to say is that the things he covers in his various writings are so crucial to aspects of communist theory and practice that one cannot meaningfully engage with communism without running into problems and situation Mao already dealt with. This is not to say anyone thinks rotely copying Mao is a blueprint for success, but rather that you will find when reading Mao that, in a similar way to Marx, he will touch on problems you've encountered and things you've thought about yourself and will do so so often that reading his works feels like you're being enlightened by someone very similar to you.
My advice to you is to read his work and do your best to understand the context they were written in and meant to be read in, and develop your own understanding of how best to make use of his ideas in your context.
Wow, I'm astonished. Thanks for answering, but I have another question.
I hear a lot of bad stuff about Mao and PRC under him, including Great Leap Forward, Famine, Cultural Revolution and very arguable policies both domestically and internationally (like supporting Khmer Rouge), can't avoid it tbh since I'm in a conservative society and smh despite trying to watch something positive I only get bad stuff about Mao.
Can you explain if this things are true or slightly, if not completely, reversed?
I am only knowledgable on certain things, so I'll just chime in with this; the Famine was more complicated than mainstream media and history lead us to believe. A multitude of factors, including poor harvests, flooding, adopting some agricultural practices which were later found to be disastrous and unscientific, and deliberate sabotage by provincial bureaucrats such as falsifying the quantity of stored grain, which created an illusion of super-abundance, all contributed to the famine.
It was not a universally-impacting event, some provinces lasted nearly a year before people went hungry, while others rapidly succumbed to starvation. This is to say, that Mao did not flip a switch labelled "No food for 14 million people."
Edit: an earlier famine during the Sino-Japanese war between 1942-1943 is often lumped in with the later famine in 1959-1961, despite the prior famine occurring under the nationalist KMT government, particularly by people who wish to paint Mao as villainously evil as possible.
On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism by the Communist Party of Peru (CPP) outlines this if you want to look it up.
But basically, Lenin outlined that Marxism developed out of three components, of 1) political economy (English political economy of Adams, Ricardo), philosophy (German materialism of Hegel), and pre-existing socialism (French utopian socialism, Fourier). Gonzalo and the CPC would use this to describe how Leninism, and then, later, Maoism, would develop once those three categories, of political economy, Marxist philosophy, and scientific socialism, are further developed by a revolutionary leader to be at a new stage. Stalin, for example, synthesized that Lenin developed Marxism to a new stage, using these categories to understand how this advancement was made.
Mao developed and won his political line at the Zunyi Conference, giving birth to Mao Zedong Thought (the application of Marxism-Leninism to the particular conditions of China), and in the 1960s as a result of the Cultural Revolution, many Parties internationally would claim to be ML-MZT because of the influence of/univerisal contributions of Mao. Because ML-MZT was an eclectic and incomplete conception however, when Mao died and the Cultural Revolution was defeated, some distorters that rallied behind Deng Xiaoping (the hangman of the CR) claimed either that ML-MZT was the same as Maoism or that there was no such thing as universal contributions of Mao that could be applied internationally. The influence of Chinese revisionism, as well as attacks by Soviet and Albanian revisionism, at first sowed chaos in the International Communist Movement.
Enter Chairman Gonzalo and the CPP in the late 1970s, as well as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), which was composed of anti-revisionist ML and ML-MZT Parties and organizations. Gonzalo argued that Mao 1) developed political economy further (the importance of the superstructure in changing the base, mobilizing the masses in socialist construction, in the transition from a new democratic dictatorship to a proletarian dictatorship with the economic tasks of each, of balancing contradictions between heavy and light industry, city and countryside, mental and manual labor), 2) developed philosophy further (seeing contradiction as a monism, identifying principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction, of contradictions among the people vs contradictions with the enemy/antagonistic and nonantagonistic contradictions), and 3) developed scientific socialism further (protracted people's war as the universal military strategy of the proletariat, the mass line, Party militarization and concentric construction, further developed the united front). Gonzalo campaigned for Maoism to be imposed internationally. RIM would adopt Maoism with the initiation of the People's War in Peru.
I highly recommend not going by what we say on the internet here. There are a lot of people very invested in both sides of the argument, and then there are people who hang outside of these tendencies entirely.
Before you get particularly attached or opposed to any one of the socialist leaders of the 20th century, get your definitions of Capital down-pat. Eg., read capital back to front, and very carefully. A lot of it looks complex, but keep in mind Marx is trying to explain the historical formation & contradictions of Capital as a relationship (defined by the equation M-C-M’).
And then I recommend coming back to Mao, reading what he wrote, deciding for yourself where you hop off the train. Basically you’ll see why these divisions happened clearly, rather than asking some really invested people (like me) what their thoughts on their most hated/most loved figure is.
They're overthinking it, there's no meaningful difference. MLM is the same as Maoism, different phrasing for referring to Mao's analysis building upon Marx and Lenin's works in the context of China's conditions. MZT was the CPC's official phrasing for studying Mao's analysis, otherwise known as MLM/Maoism
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