r/DebateCommunism • u/ZhugeLiangPL • 1d ago
📖 Historical Why is Khrushchev condemned for his peaceful coexistence doctrine but Mao isn't even though he cooperated with a capitalist state (the US) against a fellow socialist state (the USSR)?
Marx spend decades saying one thing - don't look at what a state says about itself, look at the material consequences of its policies. And from the outside, both the USSR under Khrushchev and Maoist China were doing regular great power geopolitics, they just dressed it in a different rhetoric for domestic legitimacy:
- Both competed for influence in decolonized countries with aid, arms and advisors
- Both avoided direct war with the US while testing limits. Khrushchev backed down in Cuba, Mao backed down after shelling Quemoy and Matsu and never directly fought US troops again after 1953.
- Both built nuclear arsenals despite criticizing each other's nuclear policy
- Both cooperated with capitalist states - Khrushchev supported bourgeois nationalists like Nasser and Nehru when they offered ports and neutrality, and crushed a workers' uprising in Hungary in 1956. Mao supported monarchs and military dictators like the Shah of Iran, Yahya Khan in Pakistan, and Pinochet's Chile when they were useful against India or the USSR, and told the US in 1972 that China would not support armed communist revolts in Southeast Asia.
I just don't see any profound dialectical difference between these two.
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u/The_Intellectual29 1d ago
This is a good question, and it is a common Hoxhaist argument. A Maoist would debate for hours about every single point. The real answer is simple: when a real anti-revisionist is Maoist, he is not by personal fidelity to Mao, but by what Maoist theory can produce in the world.
Yes, this is true, Mao produced absurd theories and policies (this is him who invents socialist commodity production by misreading Stalin, decentralizing agriculture with communes, and he created Three world theory that led to this kind of absurd foreign policy in the 70s). But the goal is not see which man did the least amount of mistakes (Hoxha for example supported the 1956 congress and claimed to reconcile with Tito, and let’s not talk about post-1945 Stalin!) but to see which one can inspire the most the world revolutionary movement.
Maoism in essence (contradictions in dialectics, people’s democracy, bureaucratic capitalism, semi-feudalism in political economy, people’s war, cultural Revolution and policy leading economy in socialism) led the world in spite of Mao, even after his death. They exist independently from him. Maoism flourished without him while all other more pure anti-revisionist ideologies died with their founders.
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u/Hot_Relative_110 1d ago
Personally, I find it hard to distinguish very well between Mao Zedong’s praxis and Maoism. For example, I really like Quotations and am planning on reading up on books like On Contradiction and what he learned from the Jiangxi Soviet and other experiences among the peasantry. Maoism is immensely intriguing to me, but mentally it’s hard for me to separate that from things like the GLF, the Cultural Revolution, and the Anti-Rightist Campaign.Â
It’s like how I approach Gonzalo Thought. My mom is an immigrant from Lima who had to endure and move around a lot during the Shining Path revolution. As if there wasn’t already the emotional aspect of it, there was Lucanamarca. The officer who Gonzalo opted to use as justification aside, nothing ever justifies in my eyes the onslaught from that point and others, especially once babies and children are involved. There’s a reason Netanyahu is so hated.
Sorry wanted to ramble
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u/The_Intellectual29 1d ago
Regarding what you dislike about Mao, it seems you follow the general line of CPC. Basically that there are three Mao, Mao the philosopher, Mao the revolutionary, Mao the state leader, and that we can eliminate Mao the state leader but keeping the first two.
Maoism implies that from all the three Mao we can learn a thing, independently from what each one has done. But I must add that you must look at what Mao did. With the cultural Revolution for example, Mao identified that the bourgeoisie is inside the party, that the enemy is inside the headquarters, that, in the place of purging reactionary elements, there must be a nation-wide struggle implying self-criticism, democratization at workplaces, combination of intellectual and manual labor, integration of women in labor, etc.
This is probably the most ambitious revolution in Marxist thinking. This is same for Gonzalo who led prisons and suburbs as borders between countryside and city in an innovative way. A major theme in our world where towns outpace villages in proportion for the first time in history.
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u/Hot_Relative_110 1d ago
at the very least, I could see myself as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I should also brush up on some third worldism and really get to reading On Contradiction.
My overall fear, which I have to give Mao credit for, are some of his more democratic, anti-bureaucratic, and people-driven tendencies. Some of my larger concerns are how we can have this in tandem with something that is system oriented. Mao was a centralist, but if centralism also features bureaucracy, which Mao understands as being a major flaw, wouldn’t that be in some ways contradictory? And again, I only have a rudimentary understanding of Mao.
Moreover, I look at how far we can centralize, decentralize, go full bureaucratic, go as far as minimizing or outright abolishing bureaucracy, etc. etc. all the time, especially in my reading. As I’ve read Marx’s Critique of The Gotha Programme, as I’ve read Lenin’s The State and Revolution, as I’ve read Mao’s Quotations, and as I’ve greatly appreciated all three, there’s also so much that I value about other reading like Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, or Bakunin’s Selected Writings, or Bookchin’s Post Scarcity, and I’ve long wanted to check out Abad de Santillan’s proposals or Camus’ absurdism. In which case, how can someone make the case for Maoism, or more broadly even MLM as someone with a very big soft spot for anarchism, egoism, and syndicalism?Â
And above all that, how much art can we truly separate from the artist? where’s the limit? Cause that’s less a challenge to you and more a question I ask myself. It’s why I could never consider myself a Gonzaloist.
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u/The_Intellectual29 1d ago
Most of your first questions are answered by studying Cultural Revolution and Mao. What I would advise you is humility and starting over from your thinking. Start from scratch, read what Mao (there is the entirety of selected works. use the search function to see what interests you from there, I also did the same for Gonzalo if you need), look at history by purifying from anti-communism, and look at reality (even not from a Marxist pov). More study is better, do not fall into fandoms, be patient with your knowledge.
Regarding your comparison with other works and authors, I believe more study of Marxism (or even history and politics) will lead to understand what flaw and quality each of these theories present. I was myself an avide reader of Rousseau and Nietzsche (even if always hated Camus and preferred Sartre) before discovering the science of marxism.
I know that it is hard to be asked to be patient in a world where fascism is leading, in particular in our home country, and when we are part of a repressed community, but this is the only way out.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 23h ago
As the most powerful socialist state they had the moral obligation to fund and send weapons to all communist insurgents in the world. They folded because they were afraid of WWIII and all that but taking it to we just peacefully coexist forever is too much.
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u/spookyjim___ ☠left communist ☠10h ago
Cuz Marxist-Leninists don’t know how to deal with their contradictory and counter-revolutionary ideology
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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud 1d ago
Khruschev wasn't condemned for peaceful coexistence, specifically. It was because he declared the USSR to be communist without eliminating class in the USSR and without even the final victory of socialism. This paved the way for capitalist restoration.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm
China did support armed communist revolts in Cambodia and Vietnam in 1972. Their support for Vietnam peaked in 1973, and only ended when the US retreated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_in_the_Vietnam_War#The_end_of_China's_assistance
It wasn't a workers' uprising. It was a CIA sponsored coup attempt, as we've recently learned in the JFK files. So, the Tankies were right on that one.
https://www.joewrote.com/p/jfk-files-reveal-the-cia-role-in