Rev Left Radio - Maoism: The Merging Of Theory And Praxis

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

The Red Plains Revolutionary Group is a multi-tendency communist organization with an intrinsically Maoist inflection. Brett sits down with members of the group to discuss the philosophy of Maoism, and how that philosophy is inseparable from the practice of Maoism. Other topics include: The Black Panther Party, Antifascism, Peru and India, Leninism, Third Worldism, and what organizing looks like in a Maoist context.   **Please take the time to rate and leave a review on iTunes! This will help expand our overall reach.**   Follow us on: Facebook Twitter (which we are new to, and trying to build up): @RevLeftRadio or contact us at Revolutionary Left Radio via Email   Organizations affiliated with the podcast: Omaha GDC NLC   Thank You for your support and feedback!

Hello everyone. This is the host of the Revolutionary Left podcast, Brett O'Shea. Before we get to our episode, I just wanted to mention that we started a Patreon page today. It's patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. For right now, we're just taking donations to help with overhead costs and maybe free up a little time to work on the podcast and reach out to guests. But in the near future, we're going to do bonus content that we give to anyone who donates to our Patreon page. That's still in the works right now, but we just wanted to make you aware that the page exists. Also, please rate and review. us on iTunes. This increases the reach of the show, and by extension, the reach of left-wing ideas and values. If you have any questions or guest requests, we've been getting a lot of guest requests. Please just email us at the Revolutionary Left at gmail.com, and we'll do our best to reach out to whoever you think would be a good addition to the show. Beyond that, just you can support the show by sharing the podcast with friends, especially sharing it in like left-wing social media groups and pages. That increases our reach and brings more people into the show. So thank you again so much for all the support and let's get to

the show. We're educated we've been given a certain set of tools but then we're throwing right back into the working class well good luck with that because more and more of us are waking the fuck up so we have a tendency to what we have we have earned right and what we don't have

we are going to earn we unintentionally I think oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are you know the predestined people want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault.

And I think that's part of the distancing from white people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. When the main function of a protect-and-serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical

to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house, that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in any, everybody else's hands. They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and comrade Brett O'Shea, and today's

episode we are going to discuss Maoism. Now this is a topic that I myself am not totally caught up on. It's not a tendency that I know a lot about, but I do have good friends that know a lot about it. And so I invited them here today to discuss it. I have questions and about the philosophy and about the history of Maoism. And so hopefully it's going to be really educational. And I've been doing this thing where I'm trying to discuss tendencies. We did anarchism last time. I'm looking forward to maybe doing a Leninist episode, possibly a Trotskyist episode. I'm trying to touch as many tendencies as possible. So today we're doing Maoism and I like my guest to introduce themselves and maybe say a bit about your tendency and how you came to

it. Taylor, if you want to go first. Howdy, guys. Yeah, my name, I'm Taylor, and, you know, it's funny talking about Maoism. I didn't think much about it until recently. I started getting into literature from the Communist Party of Peru, and I think that we were going to talk about that as the actual synthesis of Maoism into a coherent, cohesive philosophy. And, And as I've been reading this, I think previously on this show I identified as a Leninist. And, you know, I'd like to formally rescind that. Oh, man. As I have been reading more and more Maoist literature, I'm getting this perspective, and I think

it's a valuable perspective of that the progression of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, you know, one through the other, through the other, is this progressive evolution of the philosophy from the universal to the particular, less about theory, more about praxis and actually manifesting a communist society and making it a reality. I think that the next step we're going to see in this progression is the actual comings and goings of that. Maoism, I think, is about the revolution and holding your ground while you build it. And I'm really excited to talk about this and prospectively about what might come after

in the next decades or so. Cool. That might be the first tendency update we've ever had. the show so far so that's pretty interesting all right phil i know you're a repeat guest introduce yourself again for the repeat guests uh still phil still communist uh i'm not i wouldn't call myself a mouse but i have to say reading mow has definitely helped me formulate my communism would you still say you're leninist in the past i've i haven't identified as a leninist either i'm fine with just regular old communism or communist but uh reading mow has really helped

helped clarify and helped me formulate my idea of communism in a more clear way. I think the way Mao writes in translation, obviously, is very succinct, very easy, accessible, and it's helped me a lot in my education. So I'm very partial now to Maoism. It's definitely something I'm a lot more interested in after reading Mao. I have to say that, you know, when I first sort of encountered the idea of Mao, online. It was kind of a joke to me. And that's probably, now that I think of it, you know, kind of like Orientalism, basically, where I would think of, you know, the whole Mao, Maoist,

you know, revolution, or the Chinese revolution as being sort of this one-off weird occurrence that didn't really have any impact on my life and didn't have any reverberations into the modern world. But that's really not the case at all. Yeah, and Orientalism is a term coined by Edward Said, that's a very interesting book. I encourage people to go look at. But we also have a first-time guest, Seth, if you want to introduce yourself. Yes, I'm Seth, a long-time Maoist here. I guess a little bit of background on me. I was, I got interested in these kind of radical politics pretty early on in my life. I started question capitalism pretty early. Ironically, it was the book Atlas Shrugged by Ein Rand that really made me a socialist.

My grandma gave me a copy of it, and the plot sounded interesting. So I read about half of it. And as I was getting more and more into it, not aware of the politics at all, I realized, like, this is, something isn't right here. And this book that was supposed to be, you know, just the ultimate capitalist wet dream, to me, really exposed why capitalism just sucks. And so from there, from there, I took a very hard left turn early in life, became an anarchist, progressed to, to Marxism, Leninism, and then here I am today, as a Maoist, as I have been for a few years now. All right, well, awesome. And you guys together are in a group, a local communist group called the Red Plains Revolutionary Group.

Do you guys want to say something maybe about that before we delve into the topic of Maoism? What do you think, boys? Let's give it to them. We're going to give it to you. Yeah. So I think on the subject of Maoism and pivoting off onto what we have made of it, and what we continue to make of it and other strains of Marxist thought and praxis. We began and actually found each other after, I think, like a lot of leftist groups,

after the election of Donald Trump. And I can speak for myself, actually, just that prior to seeing that things weren't, in fact, going to get better on their own, I had been kind of an academic Marxist. I thought that, you know, history is going to take care of itself. You know, the dialectical progression might not give us what I want today, but we're going to get there. And I think that that was a very, very bourgeois kind of way of thinking, a very liberal way of thinking. You know, I'll just not go to Starbucks and mind my own business, and the revolution's going to take care of itself. And after we saw the reverse happened, actually, we found each other and began thinking about ways to actually actually.

make the revolution happen today. And you guys are really good about like going into the community feeding people. I'm kind of doing that community work on the ground level as opposed to just, you know, highfalutin theory all the time. That's what I really admire about your group and, you know, I work, I'm not in that

group, but I've worked with you guys and I really admire the work that you guys do. All right, so then let's just start the conversation with some definitions and background. It's probably the best way to start these discussions because a lot of younger comrades are listening, people trying to learn about these things. And so they have no orientation to the concept whatsoever. And so for them, maybe you guys could define what

exactly is Maoism and maybe how it differs from, you know, orthodox or traditional Marxist Leninism. Well, that's certainly a big question. And I think we'll really be able to flush that out as we get into the more particulars later. But just to give a very broad sense of it. So we began with Marxism, which, you know, Marx provided us with the science of society. You know, he gave us this outline about the way things are, our relationship to ourselves and others and the means of production, and the contradictions between those things. He didn't particularly give us any way of what to do about it. And you began to see this starting to form with Leninism. And I think Leninism, again, specifically Marxism, Leninism, because they build off one another. It began to

give us a bit of a roadmap as to how to actually begin doing things and putting our communism into practice, particularly in the age of imperialism, which Marx did not account for through no fault of his own. But, you know, Lenin really took that into account, synthesized that, and gave us a bit of a playbook as far as how we as a communist party should behave and relate in order to go about achieving that. He did have a lot of shortcomings, however. And I believe that Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, really, it represents both a continuity and a rupture from Marxism. It resolved some of the problems that Leninism had, which made it keen to devolving into bureaucracy a bit. And it gives us more of a way to really put our communism into practice on a very ground-level way.

That's by talking to people who aren't necessarily communists. And I think it gives us a good guide to really doing things amongst our communities. And I think that's where Maoism begins, certainly, is that a mass context. Less focus on a party, as Lenin was, and more focused on broader groups of people who may not necessarily quite be there yet. And I'd like to spin on that as an evolution of the dialectic. You know, in Marx, we saw the emergence of sociology of observations about society and how people interact and an idea about the way that things can be and that we can have a hand in our own destiny and our own fate as a society and a species. And then Lenin took that, made observations about imperialism

and, you know, the way that the global north or Western powers export their own misery, export the least favorable parts and pieces of their project. And linen fell short in that what survived of linen, I think linen as a person did a lot, but the intellectual work that survived linen focused more so on managing the state, more specific, less universal than Marx, in that Marx brought these ideas to our attention,

and linen sought to actualize, them, but Leninism as more universal than Maoism in that, I guess, what survived of Lenin didn't do much more than address the needs of the party and the state and managing a communist society. Mao, I think, brought the attention of the masses, the people that constitute the party, the material conditions for the universal concept of a population, and how we need to conduct ourselves and among each other, and how those interactions will give way to that universal goal. And I think it also relates back to material conditions.

You have Lenin, you know, in the context of the Russian Civil War, taking up Marxism, and then expanding on it, you know, giving the First World War, expanding on it and kind of, you know, bringing up the issues of imperialism. State and Revolution was a foundational text that, you know, that I read that meant a lot to me. And then Mao took it and his conditions in China were different than Lenin's conditions in Russia. And so he made, you know, more improvements on it. And that's really intrinsically a Marxist thing to do, you know. So how does this ideology and how did this movement begin?

What are its origins? Maybe we can talk about the Chinese revolution and what exactly were the Chinese revolting against. Yeah. So, you know, as the name implies, Maoism has a lot to do with Mao and with China. So I think we got to take a little step back a little bit and think about what we're talking about here. When we refer to Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, for short, We're referring to a very particular synthesis of thought that did not occur until the late 80s, early 90s. Mao had a huge impact across the globe, certainly on the Black Panthers, on the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States,

both of which are two of the most advanced leftist movements that the United States has seen. However, at that point, while Maoism itself can really be described as a totally, synthesized ideology. At that time, what people would commonly refer to it as was a Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought, which essentially is the idea of Marxism, Leninism, as applied to the conditions of China. And people were very inspired by that. Mao contributed a lot that people drew from, that really informed a lot of the ways that various movements, both in the U.S. and outside of, thought about communism and its implementation and how to do it in the people. practical world. However, it would not be until the late 80s that the Communist Party of Peru

synthesized Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, proper. And it was later in the early 90s that the international communist movement took it up, R.M. took it up as an official ideology. And that's where it brought together a lot of these loose thoughts that all these groups have been having that were inspired by Mao, and they, between the Communist Party, Peru and IRM, kind of took those things and put them together and flushed out into a full-fledged ideology. So I think it's important, my last point that I'll make, is that we can't think of Maoism as just everything Mao did or everything Mao said. It's a culmination of experiences inspired by Mao that were ultimately brought together.

In fact, after Mao died. Right. And I think speaking to the Chinese Revolution, in particular, particular. It did and it didn't differ in a lot of ways that a lot of the revolutions in the 20th century. I mean, you have a highly agrarian society. You have a mixed economy that has strong roots and feudalist kind of or specific brand of ownership of the means of production. You have imperial forces, either Britain or Japan. And you have a lot of political and economic instability. And a lot of these people, the people that were on the receiving end of a lot of this abuse, identified with Marxism as the way out. And I think that that guides a lot of these movements, but their synthesis and the rich of their thought are really the product of the shared experience of the revolution, the shared experience of resisting, and the product, the actual synthesized thought is the product of what worked

and what didn't. And so when you ask, you know, what about, you know, what the Chinese revolution in particular had to do with it, had a lot to do with it, but still more, the successes and failures of the Russian Revolution, of the Korean Revolution, or the rather the Korean War, you know, the Chinese Revolution, and then revolutions in South America, and then across the global South. Yeah. And that's a very interesting thing that I always try, a point that I always try to make when you talk about Marxism or Maoism or Leninism or anything with a name at the front of the ism is that people have a knee-jerk reaction to say you're being dogmatic or doctrinaire and you're just worshipping this person as a prophet and you just take their thought as an individual

human being and then absorb it into your own ideology that's not at all the case they are they they are catalysts to movements and and hundreds thousands of thinkers come after them and improve on edit take their thoughts and new directions so to call yourself a Marxist is not to say I identify with everything Marxist as an individual said is to identify in the this two centuries-long tradition, you know, that Marx lit the fire to, but that, you know, countless thinkers and revolutionaries contributed to, and then we're standing on the shoulders of giants in that sense. But yeah, okay, that's interesting. So let's now go into the philosophy of Maoism now that we have some basic, you know, foundational things to pivot off

of. Let's address some of Maoism's theoretical contributions to Marxism and to communism and to revolutionary politics. So we'll just go one by one. The mass line. Does anybody care to talk about what that is and kind of what that idea represents. I love the mass line. The mass line is one of my favorite tactics fostered by meditations on Mao and Mao's praxis. So the mass line, I think, is, you know, actually very politically neutral in that it ought to be the basis for governance.

It ought to be the basis for legitimacy, for any institution, for any movement, for any person that wants to administrate. And, well, maybe I should step back a little in that the mass line, I at least conceive of it as an evolution of Lenin's vanguardism. And so Lennon's vanguardism was that there ought to be in any revolution a certain number or a certain circle of people that were knowledgeable about the principles of Marxism and were experienced in the modes of implementation for that theory. How were we going to make this happen?

and how committed are we to the cause? And this group would essentially manage the revolution. And that Leninism ended there. Mao took that further and said, okay, we're going to keep this core. We're going to keep this cadre. And instead of letting it get abstracted or cut off from the masses, the duty of this group will be to directly interact with the masses.

It wouldn't be a vanguard without direct contact and continued interaction with the masses. And so where you have this core of people, this core group, this, this coalition of individuals that are knowledgeable, committed, and tactical, and have a lot of great ideas, these people do not implement their own ideas per se. They take ideas from the masses, they interact with the masses, educate the masses, ask the masses what they think, what they should do, how their conditions could be improved. they assimilate that information and digest it incorporate it into the thoughts that they've already had change their own thinking

and then bring it back to the masses and say what do you think about this do we have your consent to implement these policies based on our ideas and your feedback and we don't want to pass this without giving it back to you again

and letting you have your say in this that's the mass line and it is quite dialectical and that, you know, it's a synthesis between this sort of maybe Leninist idea of a vanguard, but maybe more generally the party and the masses, where it's not just the party dictating to the masses, but it's a party and a masses synthesizing the direction of the revolution. Yeah, and I just want to add, like, a little practical element to that.

Like, I mean, the mass line basically says, I mean, it couldn't be summed up best by saying, from the masses to the masses. So we as, you know, revolutionaries are very privileged. in that we've had the time and the resources to be able to study all these lofty like philosophical things your average person can't do that and while you're your working class person they certainly know where their interests lie more or less you know they don't have a way to channel that or you know put a way of doing anything about it necessarily and so what the mass line does is it allows us we

go to the people and we take all this wide variety of thoughts, problems, and solutions of those problems, what do they think? And it's going to be messy. You know, everybody in a given neighborhood is going to have different opinions that are not necessarily correct, but like ultimately they all are based off of a similar sense of angst, of something needs to be done about this. And so you take those thoughts, those opinions, you bring them back, and kind of refine them and offer very Marxist, attempt to offer very Marxist solutions to them and bring them back and see if that's something that works for them. So it's really, it's the tool of doing communism, honestly.

Like I think, and I think that's been on a lot of communist movements' minds for a long time, but Maoism really synthesized that thought. Yeah, I think that Maoist concept of you were kind of hinting towards this. As I was reading into this, there's, you know, the Vanguard party that, you know, Lenin put forward. And then Mao took that idea. like yes that's interesting there always is going to be an advanced segment of the working class that knows these ideas that understands the class contradictions that you know understands as you

as you refer these lofty philosophical ideas but then we have to find a way to reattach it to the common people and he had categories like you know like um backwards not even used as a pejorative but just as an objective statement and we if you go out in your own neighborhood your community and talk to working class people you'll meet like hardcore trump supporters you'll find bernie supporters you'll find people that have complaints but have no political really orientation to those complaints and so Mao kind of set up a a category list of different types of people and then gave a way forward for the advanced segment of the working class to interact with them and I thought that's very interesting I think you know sectarianism aside anarchists could use that idea libertarian

Marxists can use that idea Leninist can use that idea it's an it's an improvement on Marxism yeah that's a great thing I mean it's a tool that literally any ideology can really use. And it keeps you connected to the people that you're supposed to serve. Exactly. And I think the other key point in the mass line is what a lot is taught is, you know, it's very aware of preventing us from making right deviations and left deviations. So for example, a left deviation would be like getting too far out ahead of the masses or

pushing things forward when like the people that are actually involved are not quite ready to do them. know and that's something that I think everybody is a mistake that everybody's capable of making and then like for example a rightist area as we know it in relation to the mass line be tailing behind the masses thinking oh they're not they're not ready to hear this we shouldn't use the big C word communism or we shouldn't talk about this because it might be too provocative or whatever and then ultimately you fall into the trap of revisionism reformism stuff

like that so I mean the mass line keep it when applied correctly keeps you very centered, knowledgeable about where the masses are at, and keep it in mind as to not get too far ahead with, you know, being dogmatic and thinking, well, this is the way we should do and therefore we're going to do it this way. Almost idealist, like you're attached from material conditions. Or then being too far behind and not putting enough faith in the masses. Which can lead to be like condescending and patronizing about the masses. Interesting.

The next major contribution is this notion of the three worlds theory or third. worldism. What do we have to say about that? I don't know much about it, so that's why I'm asking you guys that no more. Sue me if I go too fast, but I don't think that we need to uphold third worldism as a central tenant to Maoism. I think... Can you explain it before you deconstruct it? Sure, Seth. Okay. So first of all, let me clarify this question really quick. The three worlds theory and third worldism are two very separate and distinct things. Mao's theory of three worlds is certainly something that modern Maoists completely reject. He basically said that the first world consisted of the two superpowers at the time, the USSR and the United States.

The second world would be Europe, Japan, and then the third world followed by all these quote unquote backward countries, whatever, which doesn't sound particularly problematic on paper. However, at the time that Mao was formulating this, the USSR was. being ran by Krushchev, which was super problematic, terrible leader, and devolved into revisionism. And so what this theory of three worlds basically got used to do post-Mao was, I mean, with a Sino-Soviet split, you know, China and the USSR broke completely off over the question of revisionism, and China did that rightfully so. However, the three worlds theory got used later to. justify capitulating with and working with the United States and other imperialist powers

because it was a view that the USSR was the worst enemy at the time. Therefore, it could be justified to work the United States. And Deng Xiaoping used Mao's theory of three worlds to basically justify all the bad stuff that he did and ultimately working with the U.S. So I think that's something that can just lay in the dustbin of history. I don't want to get hung up on that because nobody really talks about that theory much anymore. Certainly something to be rejected. Third worldism, however, is particularly pertinent.

It's a question that needs to be dealt with within the Maoists and broader communist movement. Basically, what third worldists say is that revolution is essentially impossible within the Western imperialist countries and that can only happen at the periphery, which, you know, Lennon told us the same thing. And that's not necessarily wrong. Like Lyndon said that revolution would happen at the weakest lengths of capitalism. And we're seeing that today with Philippines and India. That is very true. What third worldists say is that there exists in these imperial centers a sort of labor aristocracy

where the proletariat in the United States or England, wherever have you, is not really a proletariat because it benefits off the backs of people from developing countries. The exploitation of the global south. Yes, correct. Which isn't wrong, which is not at all wrong. It's a very simple observation. And I think I wouldn't say don't read any third worldist literature or anything because I think there's a lot to be gained from it.

But the conclusions that people who identify as third world is draws that basically there's no chance of revolution happening in these bigger countries. And therefore it's kind of used as an excuse just, well, sit on our hands and let these developing nations figure out, which is low-key chauvinistic and kind of racist because they put the burden of this on. all these other developing countries when really i mean we have the duty i believe in the belly of the beast to be actively combating imperialism so and that's what chay made that statement before like people in america i've mentioned that in past podcast um yeah it it does so i've i've kind

of come across third worldists who self-identify as such basically excluding the first world quote unquote proletariat from the proletariat at large as if you know working class people in America who earned $10 an hour, you know, struggle to pay their bills aren't really workers. And I think that crosses multiple lines and becomes absurd. So I did not know that those differences existed. So thank you very much for informing me on that. Does anybody else want to say anything about these concepts? Well, I think that we have, we as the proletariat in the United States, have a lot to do.

And, you know, we cannot shift the burden onto others. I mean, the burden that our nations and our allies have as regards to the imperialism that we enforce and the misery that we export, that's on us to end, the least that we can do, you know, let alone improving the conditions of the workers in the United States and the global north, let alone improving the conditions for the people that live and work here, we need to take active steps to stop pushing this misery off onto others and letting these other countries, enjoy the autonomy that they deserve, enjoy the bounty of their own soil, the product of their own workers. And then on top of that, we have so many issues internal to the United States of America, such as rampant racism, such as virile xenophobia. I mean, we could engage in our own revolution here, our own demolition of the arbitrary hierarchies that our history has put on our doorstep and have left to us to resolve. And I think those feats in and of themselves,

demolishing those social hierarchies, those racial hierarchies, those religious hierarchies, that in and of itself is a congruent and hand-in-hand project with the abolition of economic hierarchies, something that we sorely need to do and something that is just as revolutionary, and if not more necessary than the economic, project of Marxism in developed countries.

Absolutely. Yeah, and as the economy gets more and more globalized, the proletariat gets more and more globalized. The Internet breaks down barriers like we've never been able to do before. And so to try to cut off segments of the proletariat and pit them against each other or to exclude large swaths of the proletariat is, I mean, ultimately reactionary, in my opinion. At the same time, we should recognize that, yes, we as proletariat and the United States do benefit off the backs of workers.

countries and I think that's something you know third world is you know it's a great observation and that's something we need to keep in mind we just can't make it the basis of yeah go ahead it's just a question of uneven development and there's there's uneven development between the imperialist countries and the developing countries but there's also uneven development within the imperialist countries and so there are classes and subclasses within the imperial imperialist countries kind of like what taylor was getting at where we do have structuralized systematic racism and so certain parts of nation that are racialized are developed unevenly from other parts, and they have different economic relations that flow out of that.

Absolutely. And so, you know, not to say that third-bler lists are totally, you know, that their theory is totally bankrupt, but it really is just a question of how many layers of uneven development are you willing to, you know, ignore, basically. Yeah, and before we move on to the next topic, I've talked about this recently in my personal life, now that we're talking about the global north and the global south, none of us here are reformists.

We're not the type that want to vote in socialism because we understand the limitations of that. And one thing I want to say to people who are oriented towards social democracies, building up a social democracy in the first world in America, you know, in Britain, in France. Fine, it's good to have working, you know, material gains for working people in these countries. But we should never forget that all social democracies in the Western world are built on the backs. of the global south, to have the safety net strengthened here in America and the United

States means and often correlates with the exploitation and domination of people in the global south. And so you cannot separate those two. And if you care about global justice, if you care about global racism and all those issues that come into play, if you are an internationalist at heart, you have to reject social democracy as an end-all-be-all because it's inherently exploitative. So I just wanted to make that point before you move on. Well made.

Yeah. So the next contribution, one that I found extremely interesting, and I had not read about this, but once I did, I thought to myself, this makes a lot of sense, and I'm going to kind of absorb this into the way I think about things, but it's the protracted people's war. Do you guys want to say something about that and kind of explain for our listeners what that means? So the rush of evolution was one kind of in this moment of insurrection. However, there was a lot building up to that.

which I think should not be ignored. But the fact of the matter is, you know, there's whatever type of revolution is going to happen, particularly in an imperialist country, it's not going to be one, we're not all just going to storm the White House one day and it's going to be over. It's going to be, as the name says,

a very protracted effort. And so the idea of protracted people's war, there's some misconceptions about it. A lot of people seem to think that it's simply very peasant base surrounding the cities from the countryside, yes and no. I mean, that applied to China, but I mean, the overall theory of protracted people's war is much broader than that and can be applied to pretty much anywhere. And I guess

in brief, it refers to the idea that we should work. It has a dual character, both a military character and a political character, and those two cannot be divorced. So while we're agitating politically, it's also be agitating militarily. And the idea is that you, build up these so-called red base areas, you know, like, so let's take Omaha, for example, you know, again, going back to the White House thing, we're not just going to storm it to the courthouse where Jean Stoddard's office and everything's going to be fixed. It's going to be really built in these pockets of communities where through the mass line, we've engaged the masses, won their support, and we begin establishing these areas that are

firmly under control of the people's army in which the idea of a red base area is like eventually the state gets afraid to go there. So you build up these small pockets of area from which you can really base yourself out of and then build off of that into a protracted effort. I would say like the Black Panthers did, where they armed themselves. They started doing things for the community, breakfast programs, youth programs, and they were very militant. And I guarantee, the police officers thought twice about patrolling a neighborhood that they knew was under control the black panthers party yeah um so in that sense the protracted people's war is kind of like setting up areas within the community that are really like hotbeds of communist revolutionary

fervor and then trying to build out from that at least that's one aspect of the protracted people's war and part of that is making police employed by the state irrelevant or unnecessary you know you through community like organic grassroots community policing exactly you know through you're through the means of the community you provide for the community the community takes care of itself the community watches over itself and the community is armed and trained by itself and it patrols itself and it trusts itself people can walk on the streets people can women can walk alone at night if they so desire because they know that their neighbors are feeding each other raising each other's children and are probably out on the street patrolling for anyone trying to cause

trouble from the outside. And in this sense, you know, you get the militarization of the mass line. You get this self-sustaining community that not only takes care of itself, but also is capable of defending itself against state violence or violence from outside invasions. And it, you know, I think in line with Maoism, it's not imperialistic. We're not going to go to the next street over and all of a sudden, you know, seize their apartment complexes and demand that they, you know, read our copy of the little red book because that apartment complex is anarchist we got to go in there we've got to respect their views well no yeah you're building a dual power you want to the idea is that you're building an alternative to the existing bourgeois state right doing that through both

political and military methods and so it's irrelevant if the state collapses if the military collapses if the police collapse the community already has the infrastructure of its own accord and it only relies on the people that live there. And that goes directly back to a theme I've been wanting to amplify over the last few podcast episodes into my personal life. The last episode we had Dr. Mark Bray to talk about and defend

anarchism. And we talked about revolutionary options. And as you spoke to earlier set, this notion like we're not going to storm the White House. You know, me and Mark Bray talked about the inability of the left at this point to take up arms because of the far right and the state would unite against us and crush us.

And we're not going to vote it in. We're not is going to vote in socialist, anything that can be gained at the ballot box can be taken away by the ruling class whenever they deem fit. So those options are both at the table. The only option left to us is to build up alternative structures, is to start building up within our own communities alternatives to what the state, as it currently stands, presents to us. And the protracted people's war is a way of doing that, you know, to self-police, to self-govern. The Black Panther Party, as you say, was one of the most, you know, revolutionarily advanced movements in this entire country's history. I totally agree with that. And so we really need to

be, we need to start thinking about building up alternative structures in the belly of the beast. Yeah. And if I could just have one last quick point on that. I mean, you know, Mao, I don't want to say Mao taught because it's just a basic observation, but you know, Mao said political power grows from a barrel of a gun. And this is obviously true. What I think we as leftists need to be thinking about now is, you know, we like to sit around and talk about revolution. But if shit goes down tomorrow, I mean, the left is just going to get slaughtered. And so I think, like, I mean, Maoism in particular puts the military as a very high priority. I think learning self-defense, learning how to use the tools to do so, et cetera, is important to do so now

because there's going to come a time where we don't have the option to learn anymore. and I think that every Maoist would certainly agree that being comfortable with those things and knowing how to use them, knowing how to respect those tools is of the utmost importance for the left right now. I think everybody on the left can agree with that. All right, and the final contribution from Maoism

is the concept of the cultural revolution. It's both a concept and it's also a movement that actually occurred in China. So would you guys have anything to say about the cultural revolution and what it means? You know, the one thing that I do want to bring up before we go into the particulars of China's cultural revolution and how it played out during that specific time in history and during the Chinese revolution, it's that, you know, if you can resolve the contradictions of a capitalist economy, i.e. abolishing capitalism. and you resolve the economic inequities that capitalism facilitates. You're not going to get rid of the latent homophobia, the latent racism, the latent xenophobia, the latent sexism.

That requires a concomitant and congruent cultural revolution that stands by and supports the politico-economic revolution. so it I think and that as a concept didn't inherently exist in Leninism it didn't inherently exist in Marxism I think that a lot of people may have taken it for granted but the like all things because nobody put it down on paper beforehand it got lost in the wash now that it's on paper and part of the program people can well and should be called out for not adhering to it and not participating in any and all forms of liberation, which I think is the heart of Marxism, liberation, liberation from economic masters, liberation from hegemonic masters, and liberation from injustice and inequitable power dynamics.

And that segues us into, I think, the cultural revolution at large and historically. Seth? Yeah, really quick, just so somebody that's listening doesn't get all cheeky and decide to call us out on something, Lennon did in fact mention that Russia needed a cultural revolution. However, he, that was in a very random writing. However, he didn't really flesh out what that idea was. And I think the easiest way is, I mean, I'm sure everybody here is familiar with the concept of base and superstructure. And we've discussed that on previous episodes.

Okay, cool, perfect. So, yeah, so the socialist revolution is a revolution of the base. you know, but like Taylor said, if we seize the means tomorrow, there's still going to be all these vestiges of liberal bourgeois thought left over. And so the cultural revolution is really a revolution of the

superstructure. And it may require multiple cultural revolutions. This is represents a change of you know, revolution in the way media is presented. All these different things. And, you know, it asks to, it really the idea is that the

masses themselves really hold people in the Communist Party who have now taken power really to account because there will always be these elements even existing within the Communist Party that want to go back to the old ways that have particular interests and reestablishing a capitalist society and so the idea of a cultural revolution is to fundamentally and very specifically attack these ways of thinking

and attempt to change them permanently it's not going to happen overnight it will take quite a great deal of time. A given cultural revolution may be focused on a particular thing. But no, it's just that idea that, you know, class struggle doesn't end during socialism. In fact, class struggle becomes ever the more heightened during socialism. I think that's a mistake that a lot of thinkers has made in the past. I uphold Stalin, for example, but he was wrongfully of.

the opinion that class struggle had ended in the USSR that that wasn't the case and that won't ever be the case when we achieve socialism there will always be we don't there won't be any there will not not be any class antagonisms until we achieve communism when there are no more classes socialism the workers may be in control of the means of production but that doesn't mean they're the only class left and so cultural revolution really seeks to to advance that material revolution and advance it into our thought and our way of being so that we can really finally dispel these last vestiges of capitalism and bourgeois

thinking. I don't know. And speaking to that in our group, I think that Mao has deeply influenced us in that we participate wholly on mass line principles yeah mass line is definitely the big one yeah I mean yeah we recently started our sort of serve the people program drawing inspiration from the Panthers in which we distribute goods and foods to working class members but also making sure there's a political edge to that and I think that's what's really central to anything that we do because I think anybody can just go out and hand out food to people you know like that's great don't get me wrong but it has to be advancing something so now how do you do that in a

way that's not condescending and patronizing right because that's something that is a tough line to walk as an organizer is that you want to help the community but you don't want to do it just because you want to push your politics but you also want to inform them of their conditions so it's like it's a very thin line to walk yeah i mean it can't be charity it has to be a food distribution program like we're not a solidarity not charity yeah charity would be from a sort of bourgeois position uh giving of the access uh for one's own gratification and for our project we it's definitely important not to be condescending at all and to simply be agents of redistributing or distributing resources in our community.

So how do you give it that political edge? So another thing that we drew from the Panthers was we attempted to synthesize our thought into what we call 10 points. And I think those 10 points are very, they're very obviously communist without. saying so. And I think that's the great thing about communism and particularly Maoism really is that like when you break down these things that all of us want, it's really hard to disagree with them. For example, like to draw from our 10 points, you know, like, you know, we demand workplace democracy. You know, we had demand equal access to resources such as food

and water, blah, blah, blah. We demand people to not only be guaranteed. deed housing, but to have determination over their communities, not over, not being based upon what some fucking developer says. Stuff like that, I mean, that's stuff that fits perfectly into the communist program, and that's nobody, unless you're just an out-and-out asshole, can really disagree with, frankly. And, I mean, the first time that we did it, I mean, people were super receptive. You know, we talked to a couple of people for quite a while that we're just thinking, you know, this you know this is really addressing what we're talking about like this is our problems they

don't realize they don't may not necessarily they're not communists they they're probably not going to go out and read marks or whatever tomorrow but the fact of the matter is like they have that sense they they know like there's problems and nobody knows their interests more than them yeah yeah yeah not just that but now we know that they have problems and that they are being served by this and that they do understand where are we coming from. And that's that back and forth, the mass line promotes. Yeah, it's the dialectic, yeah. And that's the best way to go about it.

When I asked about your political edge, you don't come forward with, you know, highfalutin jargon and ideology and buzzwords, but you just say, wouldn't you like more democracy in your workplace? You know, wouldn't you like this and that and that? And even America broadly, when you present socialist ideals and policies to the people as a whole, they're very receptive when you throw in that label socialism then the you know the percentage of people that are into that idea drop precipitously and that's obviously an outgrowth of a century of a cold war politics and taboos and all this stuff but the notion of putting these highfalut and philosophical ideas into the language of everyday class working class interests is the best way to go about it so i really admire that and you guys um so under the next question we have to address this when i

when I deal with when an anarchist comes on and we talk about that tendency I bring up critiques when anybody comes on I'll bring up critiques just to be as fair as possible so the western portrayal of Mao is one of a brutal dictator who murdered millions of innocent people in what ways is this portrayal false and what ideological purpose does it serve in the West first things first I want to see the book and I want to I want to see the sources that tell us that Mao went out house by house executing innocent people i don't think well be fair to the argument though i yeah i need you know nobody is claiming that like sure they're claiming that his policies resulted in that sure but i but i mean what he's going for is that even even even even according to the most propagandist

like uh westernsaurus you can't really describe it it's not really murder by any stretch of imagination. Like, if anything, there were policy errors or policy missteps, but I don't think even the most reactionary person is really seriously claiming that Mao cold-bloodedly decided to kill millions of people. And I think more on that, the Communist Party of China has addressed a lot of missteps and mistakes that it took. And there are mistakes and missteps that were taken. Suffice it to say there were famines. Suffice it to say there were natural disasters that led to a lot of pain and suffering. A lot of that, the Chinese government and the people couldn't control. They tried the best that they could to manage, but nature got the better of them.

And I think that a lot of the deaths that people point to are at the hands of natural disasters in a country that is not only industrializing rapidly, trying to get a foothold in the future, and so is blindsided to a lot of the issues that chance can raise today. You know, so a country that's focused on industrializing and not reserving its resources for natural disasters. And so commits a very dire act of oversight with real and serious consequences. But also, you know, this country that is also blockaded, you know, for a number of years from getting the, from even having the capacity to ask for the kind of help that that would need. And I think that when you talk about the deaths that occurred in China during the revolution and thereafter, you know, you need to hold the government and its lack of foresight accountable, but you also need to recognize the economic warfare that it had been undergoing at the time and the absolute resistance that the developed powers such as the United States and the absolute resistance. and its European allies, the amount of power that they exerted on on China at the time to prevent the revolution from happening.

And of course, the betrayal of Mao as this brutal dictator, murder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is very transparently propaganda and, you know, just sort of imperial, you know, spin. you know, it's all spin, because you could point to any Western figure, a Western prominent political figure, and find, you know, just as many famines, just as many, you know, abuses of power, just as many, you know, whatever, or much more so. Thomas Jefferson, who some might say literally invented racism. Or, you know, when... Winston Churchill, is a huge fascist sympathizer.

Totally, Winston Churchill, who very deliberately caused a famine in India. Absolutely. Why does that never get talked about? No, and never gets talked about because the fixation on the Mao and the representation of him as this dictator, as his murderer. And downplaying Churchill's atrocities and not playing Mao serves an ideological purpose. The reason that Churchill is a... Or anti-ism.

Well, the reason that Churchill is an internationally recognized icon of whatever, and Mao is a brutal dictator who murdered his own people is because it serves the imperial narrative, you know, to paint it that way. And so, and even that fact alone, you know, not that, like, even if Mao did such a thing, or was a dictator or was a murderer, it would be obvious,

it would be just as obvious that there's a spin going on, there is propaganda at play. because of the way his role in that is emphasized over the role of countless other Western figures. Seth, do you have anything to say about the portrayal of Mao as a dictator, brutal dictator? I mean, I don't really have much other that they didn't say. I mean, if you just look at history, that's just objective. There's just false. I mean, you can read through any account of what was going on in China.

um like mao struggled against both rightus and leftist lines constantly like mao did as a matter of fact did not always have happened what do you want to happen you know he can collectivize peasants as quickly as he wanted or slowly as he wanted i mean there's any given time that you know it's mow just didn't sit there and say this is what's going to happen it's going to happen you're dealing with a whole an entire party and i think we really got to reject i i don't know why it is that particularly Westerners cling on to this sort of great man theory

that one person sort of drives and gives all the shots I mean it's the same it's just it's the equivalent of saying Obama or George W. Bush was a dictator like yes they're leading the place they don't they're not the end I'll be all you it's still a it's a country of millions if

if Mao was hundreds of millions yeah hundreds of millions Yeah, hundreds of millions of people in China. Like, I mean, if Mao is such a brutal dictator that nobody liked, even like 25% of this population could have just risen up and said, no. But you have an entire country that one man is just physically incapable of, I mean, commanding. Even less than 25%. There's actually been academic research on the percentage of populations that contribute to toppling governments.

And you're talking to the three to five percent. range of active revolutionary movements in a society that can turn over entire governments. Beyond that, when you just talked about the great man theory of history, I was in the process of writing down in my little notepad, individualism. Because when you look at Hitler, when you look at Mao, when you look at JFK, when you look at any great figure, the Western capitalist liberal mindset wants to attribute immensely nuanced and complex historical events to one person. And that is reflective of an impulse to individualism, an impulse to say the collective doesn't matter.

It's almost, it's idealist in that it's like a set of ideas and individuals are the engine in history. When we know as Marxist or leftists that material conditions and the dialectic of history plays out in such a way that these things need to be analyzed in those terms. And when you refuse to do that, you're left with just propping up individual leaders as representatives of an entire. higher era of insanely complex historical events. So any analysis of Mao, whether you fall on one side or the other, needs to be done if you're going to be serious and be taken seriously at all, it needs to be done in the context of analyzing what came before, what happened during, and what caused, what those causes produced afterwards, or else don't talk to me.

So, so yeah, whatever your position on Mao is, just look deeper into the history and understand how difficult it is to operate in any circumstances, even comparable to Mao's or Stalin's. The second thing I'll say before we move on to the next topic is when you look at Russia under Lenin and then Stalin and you look at China under Mao, you're talking about very poor, impoverished, largely peasant, largely feudalist contexts in which these revolutions happened and had to make their own way. And if you look at Russia, they went from being a czarist pseudo-feudalist backwards country

to racing the most advanced capitalist economy to the stars in under 50 years. China today is just as if not overtaking America as the strongest economy

in the world. It's right on that precipice and that happened in an unprecedented amount of time. America started in the 1700s. Mao and Maoist revolution in China happened within the last half century

or a little more than that. I think in the USSR the Soviet government doubled its industrial capacity in five years, which is insane. Absolutely insane. Without the use of slave labor, mind you. And America, for the United States to achieve that same level of advancement, you're talking about a mountain of corpses. You're talking about the genocide of 80 to 100 million Native Americans.

You're talking about the forced enslavement of millions and millions of African Americans for free labor. So again, don't wag your finger. you support american capitalism i don't want to hear it enough's enough okay so my little rants over all right moving on so what role did malism play in the radical movements of the 60s in the united states we mentioned the black panthers earlier um do you guys care to elaborate a little bit on how exactly people like hughy newton were um were influenced by Maoist ideas well um i mean one major source of fundraising for the black panthers were that they'd buy the little red book and

bulk and then just, you know, sell it and talk to people about the ideas they're in. And they grew, I think, out of consuming that. I think that's just a funny anecdote, I think, about the way that groups operate, you know, truly the evolution of the Black Panther Party can't be pointed at, you know, economically. You can't finger, you know, well, this is why they grew because they had a cheap source of income. I mean, the Black Panthers were, by and large, self-funded. They didn't, to my knowledge, there weren't any due systems. There weren't any major corporate backers. You know, they self-started and self-sustained. And they took the, I think that they took the principles that

we talked about today very seriously, protracted people's war. You know, they took it upon themselves to police the police, something very brave, something very bold, and something very necessary that we see today, especially I think, you know, today we're recording just days after in Florida, the burden of proof for stand-your-ground laws has been shifted to the person that actually gets shot. You know, we need this idea, this protracted people's war more than ever because our communities are coming under increasing assault, and it's not going to stop. And the Black Panthers pioneered that movement. People forget that gun control laws were racist reactions from Governor Reagan in California to the Black Panthers arming themselves.

And to that end, Ray actually stepped back from gun right. So the Black Panthers started arming themselves. And to that end, the Black Panthers took this protracted peoples who were very seriously. And in their demands, they made very malice claims. You know, some of them, some of them being full employment, which at the time, I think before automation really entered Marxist thinking was something that I don't think anyone but Marxists were thinking about, you know, maybe, maybe Keynes, you know, and full employment, but, you know, nothing mandated by the state, something, you know, Keynes would always say it needs to be a push and a nudge. Now, Black Panthers just wanted it done, and they wanted their communities to be autonomous.

And to this end, you see the, um, the mass line working itself out. communities that rely on themselves and each other and don't need any sort of enforced policies or programs on them. And in this, I think you see sort of a forecast of the housing projects that would sweep across the United States. I mean, only a few years after the Black Panthers, you know, took up arms and took their communities into their own hands. You saw mass development programs where largely white, entirely capitalist individuals made decisions that forced communities of color and poor communities into a very specific set of living conditions that directly degraded their lives and their lifestyles.

And that kind of one above all, that great man kind of history on a micro level is directly antithetical to Mao's thinking and directly antithetical to what the Black Panthers wanted and what the Black Panthers achieved. And then on top of that, you get the you get the distribution of the product of the people. You get free breakfast programs. You get after-school education programs. I mean, the Black Panthers were not an aggressive group. They were

they practiced self-defense certainly, but the Black Panthers did not go out and assault other groups. Right. they took care of themselves, they fed themselves, they clothed each other, and they protected each other. And I think at bottom, that's what Maoism is all about, building this communal infrastructure so that regardless of the state, regardless of police, regardless of the military, and regardless of bureaucracy, your community is capable de facto of feeding itself, clothing itself,

housing itself, and defending itself. on the same thing I do I think what another movement that's really not talked about a lot anymore

but is certainly pertinent the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States came up right around the same time as the Black Panthers and currently in the RCP

is a terrible organization based on like cultish weird like revisionism stuff but however in the early 70s when they were working very closely with the Black Panthers

they did you know the black panthers weren't explicitly communist they did draw a ton of inspiration from Mao for sure and I mean I think ultimately you know socialism and then communism was their goal however that wasn't their primary focus the RCP that was their primary focus and they managed to really move a pretty significant movement that was really suppressed by the FBI in our country and they worked very closely with the black panthers and I think I would highly recommend reading into them. I don't want to go into too much detail for the sake of time, but for anybody that's interested, I would recommend reading the book, Heavy Radicals, and

watching the very short documentary on YouTube called They Say They Will. It's only 50 minutes. It's about the RCP. But, you know, and they were very explicitly Maoist inspired. And I think that's very telling. And, you know, we'll get to this later. But, you know, it is, very telling that the two most advanced revolutionary movements in the United States in the past 50 years have been very directly inspired by Mao. And I think

a very good measurement for how effective a revolutionary leftist party or group organization is, is directly proportional to the crackdown of the state on it the Black Panthers were systematically infiltrated, assassinated,

undermined Martin Luther King a systematically attacked Malcolm X. So every attempt from the left to really gain ground has always been cracked down after a certain point by the state. You don't see that on the right. Can you anybody tell me a time in history in the United States when the state has really systematically cracked down on the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis? I mean, you might have little squirmishes with some militias in the 90s and whatnot, but for the most part, most of the state will crack down on the left because the left and what they represent is fundamentally a challenge to the power dynamics

and the authority of the state and of the capitalist system, whereas the far right is just a violent reinforcement of those hierarchies and that traditionalism. Hell, even Ruby Ridge was about a sought-off shotgun, not about Nazis. Right. Yeah, they didn't attack them because they were Nazis. They attacked them because they had a gun. Yeah, exactly. And really quickly, I mean, that's what I say to anybody who says that, like, revolution is impossible. It's like, well, you know who thinks revolution as possible?

The state does, because otherwise they would not be doing all shit. They wouldn't be cracking down on a group of people with the black masks on their face on 325 in Omaha, not doing anything. They wouldn't be, you know, shooting Fred Hampton at the age of 21 years old in this goddamn bed for doing nothing. You know, like, I mean, the state evidently believes it's possible. Otherwise, they wouldn't be cracking down. So any leftists that resigns themselves to reform? or to like throw their hands up in the air, join the Democratic Party and be like just work for what we get. That's bullshit because it's doable and they think it is. Yeah, you mentioned

anti-fascism. That's traditionally and in the papers often associated with anarchists. But as we talk about protracted people's war, it comes to mind that Antifa and their tactics kind of use or draw from that sort of malice concept. and in some sense it's really an attempt by the community to protect itself from the far right and I don't know if that would exactly would you guys agree with that or would you say I'm a little off on that I would be inclined to agree with that go ahead well I think I'm interested maybe not Mao's in particular but certainly maybe drawing off of themes of guerrilla warfare and irregular warfare from communist revolutions of the past but if you if you disagree Seth

why exactly do you just so I'm clear like when you're where we're talking about like Black Block tactic specifically? Yeah, and the anti-fascist movement in general. Yeah, so I mean, I think, I mean, I wholly, wholly support Antifa. I mean, I think Black Block is a great tactic at the right time. I just don't think those two are really related. I mean, like, those type of things are really based on like these one-off shows of force sort of thing in response to a given thing. I mean, protracted people's wars about this, as the name implies,

protracted struggle to build up communities, build up this dual power that's an alternative to the state to use that as a launching point for a broader revolution. And, I mean, I just don't see that with Antifa and BlackBock tactics at all. I think that's a good point, very fair. Point, counterpoint, if I may. I think that BlackBlock and Antifa, in implementation, each instance, is not a protracted people, is not an instance of protracted people's war, because Black Block

cannot, an antifoy cannot be forgotten, are not a group. They don't meet every Wednesday at Starbucks, you know, eyeing the windows lucidiously. You know, they don't all share an ideology. They don't all share a political program. And so in that instance, you know, no, they are not, maybe, you know, the exemplars of protracted people's war, but in them, you find groups of people that are dedicated to resisting state power that are defiant towards racist, problematic, and thoroughly fascist forms of governance and activity, and you find groups of people that want to defend their communities and are willing to step up month after month to combat it. And so I think in the willingness to meet the right-wing invasion of minds and communities,

You do get that commitment, I think, constitutes a kind of conscientiousness that is inherent to the protracted people's war. But you also don't get a group of coordinated individuals that have been operating as a group that shares an ideology and that, I think, exerts a little more of what the protracted people's war entails in its entirety outside of that specific instance of Black Block. Okay. Yeah, very good. I like the back and forth there. point counterpoint listeners can pick their side ding ding ding so we're getting close to the end we have a few more questions I know we're kind of hitting the time limit at this point but I still have a few questions I really want to get to so how can Maoist living in the quote unquote first world

put their ideology into practice how does it manifest itself in the context of you know 21st century United States really I think definitely key component is an anti-imperialist struggle like I said earlier you know we are living in the belly of the beast. I think it's our duty doing so to combat the American state. I don't believe in rushing off to some country to help out with their revolution. I think that's low-key kind of chauvinistic, but not only that, but I mean we're in the perfect position. We need to be fighting. If we acknowledge like the third worldists do that

our proletariat here in America is gaining off of the backs of the exploited lesser developed countries and then like it's our duties as fellow workers to acknowledge that and to fight from the heart of the beast which we we have the position to do so right obstruct it frustrated and cease it yeah i think building you know protected people's work goes along with that really well because if we are going to become as a immediate community less exploitative of other developing nations for example our own self-reliance and our own development of independent zones of our own independent sources of food and income and housing and every other form with social support is really going to be the key for that.

And let's put an emphasis on the war, because if you don't think that this is a war, I don't think you've been paying attention, you know, our black communities have been beaten and lynched and shot at and run out of town. Our native populations have been run off their land subject to plague and torture unimaginable. And I think that specifically here in Nebraska, in the white clay incident, we see that the courts of law themselves are going to capitulate the capitalist before they capitulate to the welfare and well-being of indigenous communities. And even in Portland, we have seen the violence escalate to the point that our throats are

being cut and our blood is running in the streets. And so if we don't stand up to fight for what's ours today and to prevent that future from goose stepping into tomorrow, we are as good as dead. And I want to live. And I want our communities to be alive. And I want our communities to share in what I see as our future. Absolutely. Here, here. Before we rock up, I want to say, I have a few more questions. And this is a great topic. So I really want to get to these even if it means we have a little longer of an episode, how has Maoism been applied in the real world, especially in countries beyond China?

So I know we talked about Peru a little bit before. If you guys could expand on that, I think people would be really interested in that. Yeah. All praise be to Chairman Gonzalo. Yeah. So like we mentioned earlier, you know, Maoism was really synthesized

by the Communist Party of Peru that launched a protracted struggle in that state. I think it is important to acknowledge, however that they did make some very serious mistakes and they dealt into a lot of excesses of times that ultimately caused their downfall and I the way I would look at the struggle in Peru was basically like the Paris commune for Marxists you know it was that first like little try that had a whole lot of screw-ups but they still a lot to be learned from what they succeeded what they made mistakes moving on however we had a Maoist movement it

explicitly mouse movements in Nepal. They've since kind of capitulated to reformist politics. But however, most importantly is right now, right now, we have intensely militant, very successful revolutions occurring right now in India, in the Philippines. And these are things you, it's not on the United States media, which blows my mind. Do you think they'd be freaking out that these communist Maoists, of all people, have taken control of wide swaths of land? Like, and they're, you know, they're really putting the protracted people's war into practice.

Like, the Naxalites is what we commonly refer to them to in India. You know, they're, they've taken control of what they call the red corridors, this entire eastern part of India that they firmly have under the control. They've really established themselves as a dual power to the state. And, I mean, in the Philippines, their government has been forced to negotiate peace talks with the communist movement. both of these are very explicitly Marxist, Leninist, Maoist. And so I think the key thing to draw from that is, you know, learn from their successes, learn from their mistakes. But I think now more than ever, like, if you're a leftist and you're not paying attention

to this, like, what are you doing, frankly? Like, whether you completely agree with Maoism, you know, if you're an anarchist, if you're a left com, whatever, if you have to acknowledge the fact, that Maoism is inspiring the two most successful and active struggles going on to the world today. And for that sake alone, it is worth talking about. And I mean, these are people on the periphery that have really been screwed over by capitalism. They're putting their lives on the line, arming themselves, and attempting to take it back. And so far they've not been beaten.

So I think if you're a communist of any flavor today, you don't have to call yourself a Maoist, but you need to acknowledge it and you need to engage it. Because the fact of the matter is that is the ideology that's guiding these movements. And I truly believe that Maoism is the communism for the 21st century. I think it has a lot to offer to everybody, both to traditional Marxist-Lendonists and to anarchists that kind of bridges some of those gaps. And yeah, that's... Yeah, and passioned. I like that.

So last question then, because you... you touched on it, how does Maoism differ from anarchism or libertarian strains of Marxism? I mean, we still firmly believe that there must be a chance that we must take the state. They must be a dictatorship of the proletariat in the Marxist sense? Absolutely. And I mean, that's certainly where we differ from anarchists. Yeah. I mean, there definitely needs to, the proletary needs to take the state for its own and impose its will upon the bourgeoisie.

I mean, I think the Maoist conception of the socialist state, however, calls for that. it very be put on the communist path. Socialism is always going to have elements of both socialism and capitalism that are struggling against each other, sort of competing each other for the proper way to do things. For example, in China, when Mao instituted land reform, giving the peasants control of the land, that's not an explicitly socialist thing. Like, you know, they're still earning profits off that, but it's giving, it's a step towards socially, it's a step towards communism. So I think the key thing is that socialism must always be on the communist path. striving towards that and I'd almost say it's Maoist view of the state is a radicalization of

formulation that Noam Chomsky developed I think Noam Chomsky you know was a is a reformist you know you need to by degree elect and vote for socialism you know so that the transition can and will be smooth and you know turning that one might say idealism on its head you see this, not the gradual participation in formal bourgeois elections, but the gradual radicalization and liberation of your community from the institution, from government systems, from big businesses, you see gradual accumulation of self-procured and publicly shared resources, whether it be housing, medical attention, education, food, and shelter. And you get a community and almost a very Kantian formulation that has taught itself to be free by being free. And once that independence

has been got, that community is bound to see that they don't need the government. They don't need the state. They don't need the police. They don't need legislators or bureaucrats to put their signatures on little pieces of paper and thereby given their lives. a distance, they have seized their lives and completely and totally own them and are the masters of the products of their labor. And so in this instance, you get a gradual escalation of independence in our communities. And at that point, you can seize the state or rather bear witness to its total collapse. As you build up alternatives. Exactly. All right. And we're ending right now. So are there any recommendations that you would like to offer people who would want to

learn more about Maoism or anything else that we've discussed in this episode? Yes, big old stinking shout out to Fourth Sword Publishing, a small independent publisher that produces a ton of literature, including but not limited to the Marxist, Leninist, Maoist study book of the Communist Party of India, the general party line of the Communist Party of Peru, the collected works of the writings of the Communist Party of Peru. Fourth Sword Publishing, if you're listening, please, baby, please, keep doing what you're doing and maybe send a little bit of that sugar in my way.

I love your stuff. Keep doing it. Nice. Yeah, those are the big ones for sure. I highly recommend reading the general political line by the Communist Party of Peru, bearing in mind the mistakes that they made. But on a practical sense, I really, really, really encourage anybody,

whether they're interested in Maoism or not, to read the Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement by Scott H. is a pseudonym. It's online. He never fully got the entire thing uploaded. There's like 46 chapters, but they're all super short. If nothing else, read the first four, and I think that gives the first four chapters. I think that gives a really good and succinct way of understanding the mass line and how to apply it. And yeah, that would be my big one for sure.

There's a certain book, and it's small. might say little. What color is it? It has a striking red cover. Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, that's a little bit of a riddle, but if you can figure that one out, you know. I, too, love reading Clifford, the big red dog. Clifford was a mouse.

And I would put forward, just the general urge that I always give my listeners is to go study the actual history of China at that time. Because you cannot understand these movements and these ideologies without understanding the material context in which they took place. And then to be a little self-indulgent, I'd recommend listening to an earlier episode we had with Dr. Doug Patterson. It's called Resistance in the 60s. And he gives us really interesting, because he's a 71-year-old radical, and he was alive and active during the 60s.

He gives this really fascinating account of this Maoist group that was on campus, that was like the most radical and the most ready to fight the cops and fight the far right on campus. And he just admired them a lot. And just to go back and hear those stories, I thought, was so fascinating. So go back and check that out. That's firsthand accounts of, you know, the radicalism in the 60s. But, yeah, thank you guys so much for coming on.

I hope our listeners learned a lot about Maoism. And, yeah, thank you so much. Thanks, Brett. Keep doing what you doing. It's always a pleasure. Talk to you next time. You know what I'm going to be.