Maoism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise

Introduction

Maoism—the ideological trend rooted in the speeches and writings of Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party—is a nebulous concept. The term itself refers to multiple contradictory political lines adopted by the CCP throughout its history, both during and following Mao’s leadership, as well as to more distinct offshoots adopted by various parties internationally, such as “Mao Zedong Thought” and “Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.” As contradictory as these varied strains of Maoism are, they share the same rotten ideological root. Hailed by its adherents as a creative development of Marxism-Leninism adapted to the conditions of “semi-feudal,” “semi-colonial” countries, this ideology actually represents a radical reversion away from the core principles of scientific socialism, corrupting dialectical materialism by infusing it with metaphysical and idealist elements. Rather than advancing the cause of socialism-communism, Maoism has acted as a blatant counter-revolutionary force within the world communist movement, disrupting the working class revolution globally. It has thus served to undo the valiant work of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and countless other leaders of our movement, dragging the working class movement back to the morass of age-old utopian socialist delusions.

Through its theoretical distortions and practical failures, Maoism became a force that insidiously undermined socialism worldwide in the 20th century. Now, it hinders the growth of the revolutionary working-class movement in the 21st century. Maoism remains pervasive throughout the global communist movement, particularly in the United States. Exposing the pernicious counter-revolutionary essence of this petty-bourgeois trend is a prerequisite for the development of the workers’ revolution in the US. Clarity on the strategy and tactics of party-building and socialist construction requires that we dispel the baggage Mao and the CCP’s legacy heaped on our movement. We cannot afford to let the errors of Maoism obstruct our fight today. Any inaction on this front—as demonstrated in Mao’s China—will be disastrous for the working-class revolution. Here, we aim to contribute to this exposition by providing a basic introduction to the theoretical and practical errors of Maoism and their resultant counter-revolutionary policies.

Theoretical Distortions and Practical Consequences of Maoist Dialectics

Mao’s reinterpretation of dialectical materialism, particularly his understanding of contradictions, is the central point of departure of Maoism from the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist worldview. From this foundational error flows the river of political and strategic errors that lay the foundation for the CCP’s counter-revolutionary foreign policy choices as well as the ultimate termination of socialist construction in China.

Specifically, Mao departs from Marxism-Leninism primarily through his metaphysical, idealist conception of contradictions, which introduces a simplicity and rigidity that runs counter to the fluid and dynamic nature of dialectics as described by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

In his defining work, On Contradiction (1937), Mao explains that contradictions can be identified as principal or secondary. According to this conception, the principal contradiction within a system determines the existence and development of all the other (secondary) contradictions. Thus, to successfully carry out a revolution, revolutionary forces must focus their efforts on resolving the principal contradiction. At the same time, however, a contradiction’s status as principal or secondary is understood by Mao to be variable, so that the primary contradiction in one situation becomes a secondary contradiction in a different situation, and vice versa. While this may at first glance appear as a nuanced development of dialectics accounting for greater complexity and change, upon closer examination there is neither sound reasoning nor material basis for such a framework. Rather, his conceptualization reveals an understanding of contradictions as mere logical opposites, devoid of objective bases. In On Contradiction, the list of examples of contradictions Mao provides illustrates this anti-Marxist outlook:

“Without life, there would be no death; without death, there would be no life. Without “above”, there would be no “below” without “below”, there would be no “above”. Without misfortune, there would be no good fortune; without good fortune, there would be no misfortune. Without facility, there would be no difficulty, without difficulty, there would be no facility. Without landlords, there would be no tenant-peasants; without tenant-peasants, there would be no landlords. Without the bourgeoisie, there would be no proletariat; without the proletariat, there would be no bourgeoisie. Without imperialist oppression of nations, there would be no colonies or semi-colonies; without colonies or semi colonies, there would be no imperialist oppression of nations.”¹

In this excerpt, Mao mixes actual dialectical contradictions alongside simple, logical opposites, revealing a confused and ultimately anti-Marxist definition of contradictions. In reality, a contradiction, according to the Marxist definition, is a difference between things that drives development. In contrast, Mao’s conception of contradictions only pits opposites against each other, identifying the “conflict” between them as the contradiction. This definition does not conceive of development, of actual dialectical change. The fact that two things are opposites does not mean the difference between them drives the development of a phenomenon. Mao's view is entirely backwards.

Marx and Engels discovered that the core contradiction in capitalism is that between social production and private appropriation—the working class produces all of society’s value, while the capitalist class keeps the surplus value to themselves. This contradiction drives the development of capitalist society, and only by resolving this contradiction can a new stage of societal development be reached. Maoist dialectics, on the other hand, perceives only the surface-level opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie, divorced from their historical development, the “contradiction” becoming principal one moment and secondary the next.

Such a foundational error within Mao’s philosophy removes any possibility for Maoism to correctly guide the working class out of capitalist relations. The Maoist understanding of classes and class conflict abandons dialectical materialism and the objectivity of the scientific method in favor of a metaphysical understanding of contradictions and their development, rendering class struggle functionally unresolvable. Instead, the contradiction between workers and capitalists is a permanent opposition with no end, only oscillating periods where one is dominant over the other. Revolution, then, must necessarily be continuous—or permanent, if you will.

A pillar of the Marxist worldview is the recognition of development, wherein the resolution of contradictions drives the evolution of all phenomena in nature. The core laws of dialectics, as elaborated by Engels, provide us the method for articulating revolutionary strategy based on a correct, objective understanding of society. We could not design a jet engine without understanding propulsion, nor could we produce medicine without an understanding of biology. Similarly, we cannot devise revolutionary strategy without an understanding of historical materialism, the science of society and its development. Maoism deprives us of this critical tool set. Mao explicitly rejects core laws of the dialectical method, namely the negation of the negation:

“Engels talked about the three categories, but as for me I don’t believe in two of those categories. (The unity of opposites is the most basic law, the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the negation does not exist at all.) The juxtaposition, on the same level, of the transformation of quality and quantity into one another, the negation of the negation, and the law of the unity of opposites is ‘triplism’, not monism. The most basic thing is the unity of opposites. The transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the opposite quality and quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of the negation.”²

The law of the negation of the negation is a cornerstone to our understanding of contradictions not merely as logical opposites but as aspects of processes that drive their development through time. But this is just an abstraction. To ground our understanding more concretely, let us further explore the dialectical contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

The proletariat—the working class—arose out of the progression of society through time. This class has not existed forever, but emerged from certain historical circumstances. Once, peasants and serfs were tied to the land, producing only as much as they needed to subsist in addition to what they were required to produce for their landlord. As capitalism developed, this class of people became dispossessed as fewer hands were needed in agriculture and the nobility declined in power and holdings. This dispossessed class now had no method to make a living beyond selling their ability to work, to rent out their labor power—they became the working class. At the same time, the merchant class and small producers who had, over centuries, consolidated their operations and amassed considerable wealth—due largely to colonial enterprises—needed more and more workers to produce goods on an ever-larger scale. With the workers only having their labor power to sell and with the emerging capitalist class requiring ever more labor, a contradiction emerged. The capitalists direct production for profit, for the sake of accumulation in their own pockets. The workers produce all of this wealth, yet only receive a small fraction of the value they produce. Social production, private appropriation.

As we can see, this contradiction is rooted in a historical process. The class conflict between the workers and capitalists—the contradiction Mao includes in his confused list—lies not in the workers and capitalists being logical opposites of each other, but in the fact that the difference between the two drives the development of a historical process. Workers and capitalists are not locked in an eternal struggle, where one dominates at one time and the other dominates at another time. Rather, there is a resolution to this contradiction, wherein the capitalists are negated, are removed from the equation. Once the contradiction between social production and private appropriation is resolved, the material basis for the existence of the capitalist class is negated. In this way, society—like all things in the universe—can be said to develop in an upward spiral.

Mao’s metaphysical understanding of contradictions as mere opposites contrasts completely with the Marxist—that is, dialectical-materialist—definition of contradictions as differences that drive development. With such an anti-scientific philosophy, what is and is not a contradiction, and which contradictions are “primary” or “secondary,” need not be based on any scientific analysis. As an example, by treating imperialism as the “primary contradiction” in relation to class, the CCP elevated a purely political consideration to a philosophical truism:

“At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily [our emphasis] relegated to a secondary and subordinate position.”

No objective analysis of social conditions as a basis for this policy is ever offered by Mao, his philosophy does not require it (to say nothing of Mao’s ill-conceived definitions of imperialism and classes, which fall beyond the scope of this work).

Mao’s mechanistic approach leads to un-scientific determinations of the principal contradiction in various contexts, such as in the example above, resulting in long-term strategic errors that diverted the revolutionary movement away from addressing the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Mao’s arbitrary philosophical categories of “antagonistic” and “non-antagonistic” contradictions provided the theoretical foundation for the policy of “New Democracy,” which institutionalized the social alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, and bourgeoisie in the government of the People's Republic. This class-collaborationist alliance facilitated the rapid capitalist development of China, making the country the modern imperialist behemoth it is today.

Further, Mao’s over-emphasis on the subjective factors (on human will and consciousness, i.e., on ideology) over objective material conditions (the political-economic base, the means and relations of production) reflects a form of voluntarism that sanctified individual will and consciousness above objective social conditions. Mao’s separation between subjective and objective factors overlooks the fact that human consciousness and will are themselves products that emerge from, and are determined by, the material conditions of their time. This erroneous separation exposes the underlying idealistic elements in Maoist ideology.

Mao’s flawed understanding of the theory of knowledge, truth, and the development of the revolution is concretized in the idealist “mass line”. In brief, the mass line is a political and organizational method, summarized as “from the masses, to the masses”. Developed by Mao and the CCP, this methodology is best elaborated by founding Chairperson of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Jose Maria Sison:

“The mass line is to learn from the masses their conditions, needs, demands and aspirations through social investigation and class analysis. Thus, we know how to arouse, organize and mobilize the masses more effectively than ever before in accordance with the general line and program of the party. What we can learn from the masses can improve our work and style of work and further enrich and substantiate the existing program and the party’s stock of knowledge in order to advance revolutionary practice. Revolution is a mass undertaking.”³

This political line enjoys much uncritical use today, even outside of explicitly Maoist organizations.

Maoism’s over-emphasis on subjective factors over material bases, as expressed by the mass line and most catastrophically implemented in the Great Leap Forward, led to a half-baked socialist construction in Mao-era China, the only response to which could be the half-baked Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Great Leap Forward, with its focus on achieving communism through “local initiative” and radical agricultural policies, resulted in one of the worst famines in human history, causing millions of deaths and undermining the socialist character of production by promoting decentralization as an objective. Similarly, the Cultural Revolution, intended to prevent capitalist restoration and invigorate socialist consciousness, devolved into chaos, factionalism, and widespread persecution. The emphasis on “the masses” alongside the denouncement of perceived counter-revolutionaries led to severe social and economic disruptions, undermining the stability and progress of the half-baked socialist state and, ironically, paved the way to “Reform and Opening-Up” under Deng. These events illustrate how Maoist voluntarism and idealism, abandoning the materialist foundations of Marxist-Leninist theory, led to devastating practical failures in constructing socialism in China and set the stage for capitalist restoration in the country.¹

Ultimately, Deng Xiaoping theory did not abandon Mao's philosophy, but applied it with equal arbitrariness in the reform era. Now, the principal contradiction was "the ever-growing material and cultural needs of the people versus backward social production". We can see how neatly Mao's worldview was used as the theoretical basis for capitalist development in the People's Republic. This worldview is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the working class and its struggle for liberation, for socialism-communism.

Consequences of Mao’s Philosophy Summarized

Maoism’s approach to class struggle and revolutionary strategy exposes its counter-revolutionary essence. New Democracy, which proposed an intermediate stage between capitalism and socialism—the “joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes,” including the national bourgeoisie—deviates from the Marxist-Leninist principle of working-class leadership in the revolutionary process. This strategy of alliance with the national bourgeoisie based on the, at the time, “principal contradiction” (fighting imperialist oppression), introduced significant roadblocks to the socialist construction process, compromising its proletarian character and facilitating the resurgence of capitalist elements within the socialist state by laying the ticking-time bomb of bourgeois ideology in the governing apparatus itself.

Mao’s terminological confusion in class analysis, with what are essentially arbitrary distinctions between, for example, the “comprador” bourgeoisie, “bureaucratic” bourgeoisie, and state monopoly capital, further muddled the theoretical clarity required for effective revolutionary strategy and cohesion within the socialist states of the time. The CCP’s strategy of class collaboration is rooted in the Maoist conception of dialectics, wherein Mao argued that the principal and secondary contradictions can swap place in a given situation. He argues in his work On Contradiction that the contradiction between “imperialism” and “the country concerned” became the principal contradiction while the contradiction between social production and private appropriation (between workers and capitalists) was relegated to a secondary contradiction, “the contradictions change position.” It bears repeated emphasis that Mao provides no concrete method for identifying when contradictions change places—aside from purely political considerations, that is. This stands in total opposition to the Marxist-Leninist method. Mao’s “dialectics” must be denounced for the veiled opportunism that it is, concealed under the top-dressing of radical left aesthetics by Mao and the CCP.

The philosophical sleight of hand played by Maoism led to the adoption of New Democracy, the freezing into place of private property and class relations in China under the auspices of defeating the imperialist Japanese invasion. The errors in philosophy led directly to errors in strategy and the failure of socialist construction in China, leaving the world communist movement with a great practical and ideological burden.

Maoism’s Impact on the International Proletarian Revolution

Maoism’s influence extends beyond China, impacting the international communist movement with devastating effect. Mao’s support for the dissolution of the Comintern, for example, as well as his subsequent campaigns against the Soviet Union and its allies, fostered divisions within the global socialist camp. These actions, driven by Mao and the CCP’s narrow national interests, weakened the unity necessary for confronting imperialism and advancing the cause of global socialism.

The spread of Maoist strategies, in particular Protracted People’s War, has often resulted in the mechanical application of these principles in contexts to which they are ill-suited, leading to the failure of revolutionary movements and the arrested development of Marxism-Leninism worldwide. Following the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the Sino-Soviet Split, communist parties throughout the world that sided with the Chinese in many cases attempted to launch Protracted People’s Wars of their own, most notably in India with the Naxalites of the CPI(ML), the New People’s Army of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the infamous Shining Path in Peru. Protracted People’s War served only as a viable tactic for the CCP in the specific context of the existence and support of the USSR, which provided decisive military and technical support to the communists in the Civil War; the scattered state of the Chinese political system in the wake of the collapse of the central state authority of first the Qing and then Republic of China; and the invasion of China by Japan.² These factors did not exist for the cases listed above, rendering the application of Protracted People’s War to India, the Philippines, and Peru a grave error, the consequence being greater division amongst the working class and peasantry and the lack of a revolutionary line.

Equally disastrous, Mao’s China following the Sino-Soviet Split worked as an antagonist to the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Mao’s support of the reactionary anti-communist dictator Mobutu in the Congo, the right wing UNITA and FNLA rebels in Angola against the Soviet and Cuban-supported MPLA, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia against the Soviet-aligned Vietnamese, and, most treacherously, the alliance with the US via Nixon and Kissinger. These alliances and maneuvers were made with the intention of combatting the Soviet Union on an international scale, resulting in support for reactionary, counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, and even genocidal forces. Mao’s brazen chauvinism and great-power aspirations do not represent a break from the philosophy he expounded in the 1930s and 40s. Rather, they represent their extension to the geopolitical level, to the utter detriment of the workers of the world.

Conclusion

From our Marxist-Leninist grounding, Maoism must be reckoned as a counter-revolutionary force obstructing the working class revolution to this day. Its theoretical distortions in dialectics, practical failures driven by voluntarism and idealism, opportunistic class alliances, and catastrophic impact on international proletarian solidarity stands in the way of victory for the working class. A critical reassessment and rejection of Maoist theory and practice are essential for advancing the cause of scientific socialism and achieving the ultimate goal of a classless, communist society.

Many aspects of Mao's philosophy are taken for granted as part of the historical science of Marxism-Leninism even beyond officially Maoist formations. Many "Fundamentals of Dialectics" or Basics Courses uncritically include the works of Mao alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and other giants of our tradition. It is practically taken for granted within our movement that Maoism represented a continuation of those figures. The works of Proudhon, Kautsky, Bernstein, Duhring, Trotsky and innumerable others are rightly excluded from lists of foundational texts of scientific socialism. Maoism belongs alongside these opponents of the socialist revolution, but has yet to be fully reckoned with as such. The corruption of the workers' movement runs deep, indicating a need to tear up this perverse weed from its roots.

There is a need to further study the ideological history of the Chinese Communist Party in its historical context: how and why the 28 Bolsheviks were defeated; the policy of the United Front; the trajectory of the Chinese Revolution from 1911 to 1949 and beyond; socialist construction and its ultimate defeat in China; and many other factors have yet to be thoroughly examined. This short work is intended as an introduction to the criticism of Maoism.³ It is by no means exhaustive, but it is nonetheless an essential step in the fight against the counter-revolutionary Maoist trend.

With rising tensions between the imperialist blocs alongside worsening climate crises, the contradictions within the capitalist-imperialist system are reaching a fever pitch, ripening the objective conditions for socialist revolution. However, the communist movement worldwide has suffered decades of ideological degeneration, in no small part facilitated by the counter-revolutionary ideology of Maoism. Presently, our task in the United States is to regroup the revolutionary forces for the building of a new communist party in based on the science of Marxism-Leninism—the science of the working-class revolution. If we sincerely aim to launch the revolution—to build a new world free of oppression, misery, and exploitation—solidifying revolutionary theory is the starting point for this historic mission. We cannot afford to be bogged down by the idiocy of Maoism. This pernicious trend must be relegated to the bucket of all the “rejected bastards” of utopian socialism.

Footnotes

1. Following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the Chinese state did implement a Five-Year plan (1953-1957) with emphasis on building heavy industry and central planning. However, the turn away from central planning of a socialist character in favor of implementing communes and “local initiative” during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) fostered small production and accumulation of private property (commodity-money relations), ultimately paving the way for Deng Xiaoping’s reform era transition into the full-fledged capitalist state dominated by private monopolies without the need to overthrow the state apparatus and the CCP.

For further reading, see Capitalism: the Inevitable Product of Mao Tse-Tung’s “Decentralized Socialism” by Dennis Strawn. 

2. The following conditions are the specific to the context in which the CPC’s Protracted People’s War saw success:

2a. The USSR provided arms and technical support, most notably with the Red Army’s capture of Manchuria from Japan in August 1945, which was immediately turned over to the People’s Liberation Army. This handover brought the PLA extensive military supplies and access to the wealth of resources and industrial capacity in the region. No such source for military training and supplies existed for the Naxalites, the NDA, or Shining Path.

2b. The collapse of the 2000-year dynastic system with the fall of the Qing dynasty was brought about by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The new government, the Republic of China, under Sun Yat Sen’s Kuomintang was unable to assert centralized authority over the whole of China. This led to what is known as the “Warlord Era” of 1916-1928, where large swathes of China were administered by local military rulers. No analogous situation existed in India, Philippines, or Peru.

2c. Foreign invasion by Japan. In the case of India, the Philippines, and Peru, none of these parties launched their Protracted People’s Wars in the context of a foreign invasion. The foreign invasion by Japan and the ineptitude of the KMT afforded the CPC major propaganda victories as well as the opportunity to claim the galvanizing flag of national liberation. Yet again, no analogous conditions existed in any other case in which PPW was launched.

3. For further reading, see KP’s The Great Leap Back, which served as the foundation for this piece.

Sources

[1] Zedong, Mao. “On Contradiction”

[2] Zedong, Mao. “Talk On Questions Of Philosophy”

[3] Sison, Jose Maria. “On the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism” Sison Reader Series, Book 2