AHC: An Alt-Maoism in a world without a Communist China

[jerseyguy]

Maoism was a major ideological break with doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism, but also seems inevitable in the sense that an anti-colonial communist was likely to orient a movement around rural peasants instead of industrial workers at some point. An alt-Maoism wouldn't be influenced by Chinese culture or political thought, but the emergence of the same general focus on peasants in the developing world would still be there.

In a scenario where mainland China isn't communist, or "communist china" is just a doctrinaire Soviet client like East Germany, where would a rural-oriented communist guerilla ideology emerge? Outside of China, India and Latin America seem like the most likely places for this ideology to emerge.

Could a communist India become the inventor of this alt-Maoism? Many Nehruvian socialists looked to Soviet industrialization as an example, and OTL India had a large communist guerilla movement postwar. In an ATL without WW2, I could see a stubborn British government that drags its feet on self-government leading to an Indian war of independence that radicalizes Indian socialists?

Latin America had a long 20th century history of left-wing guerillas fighting right-wing dictators, so peasant communism could also emerge under the label of Guevarism or Castro thought.

 

[Quintuplicate]

Maoism was a major ideological break with doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism, but also seems inevitable in the sense that an anti-colonial communist was likely to orient a movement around rural peasants instead of industrial workers at some point. An alt-Maoism wouldn't be influenced by Chinese culture or political thought, but the emergence of the same general focus on peasants in the developing world would still be there.

In a scenario where mainland China isn't communist, or "communist china" is just a doctrinaire Soviet client like East Germany, where would a rural-oriented communist guerilla ideology emerge? Outside of China, India and Latin America seem like the most likely places for this ideology to emerge.

Could a communist India become the inventor of this alt-Maoism? Many Nehruvian socialists looked to Soviet industrialization as an example, and OTL India had a large communist guerilla movement postwar. In an ATL without WW2, I could see a stubborn British government that drags its feet on self-government leading to an Indian war of independence that radicalizes Indian socialists?

Latin America had a long 20th century history of left-wing guerillas fighting right-wing dictators, so peasant communism could also emerge under the label of Guevarism or Castro thought.

I think China isn't likely to just be a doctrinaire Soviet client. How would it adapt to Chinese culture?

 

[EnvarKadri]

I think China isn't likely to just be a doctrinaire Soviet client. How would it adapt to Chinese culture?

Is more about how will the soviets rule a client as big as China, than about culture.

 

[Quintuplicate]

Is more about how will the soviets rule a client as big as China, than about culture.

Would China ever be a Soviet Republic?

 

[RousseauX]

Maoism was a major ideological break with doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism, but also seems inevitable in the sense that an anti-colonial communist was likely to orient a movement around rural peasants instead of industrial workers at some point. An alt-Maoism wouldn't be influenced by Chinese culture or political thought, but the emergence of the same general focus on peasants in the developing world would still be there.

In a scenario where mainland China isn't communist, or "communist china" is just a doctrinaire Soviet client like East Germany, where would a rural-oriented communist guerilla ideology emerge? Outside of China, India and Latin America seem like the most likely places for this ideology to emerge.

Could a communist India become the inventor of this alt-Maoism? Many Nehruvian socialists looked to Soviet industrialization as an example, and OTL India had a large communist guerilla movement postwar. In an ATL without WW2, I could see a stubborn British government that drags its feet on self-government leading to an Indian war of independence that radicalizes Indian socialists?

Latin America had a long 20th century history of left-wing guerillas fighting right-wing dictators, so peasant communism could also emerge under the label of Guevarism or Castro thought.

Cuba is the obvious answer

 

[overoceans]

Cuba is the obvious answer

Yeah, though the thing is...

Cuba IOTL, agrarian though it may be, never really showed the willingness to deviate from the USSR in geopolitical terms, probably because it had no territorial disputes with the Soviets, and little chance of being able to position itself as a rival for leadership of the Communist bloc(they provided a lot of inspiration, but couldn't do much in terms of material support). So there might not be that many marxists willing to break with Moscow and align with Havana, as there were with China.

 

[Shevek23]

I have to wonder, if we are breaking the link to Marxist thinking and implicitly saying Marx was incorrect in his diagnoses, anyway overlooking viable and sustainable possibilities, if we can therefore break the link to modern industrial society as well and postulate a stable, sustainable form of millenarist communism of some kind, and not being tied to industrial capabilities of the level capitalism develops, whether such a radical alternative to normal societies as we know them in history can operate in distant past situations--in medieval Europe, or ancient China, or India, or Classical era societies like Rome, Greece, Persia and so on. Can a single city state go communist in this way? How about a great big federation comparable in area to a modern nation state or a fair sized Roman province? Can they go big and communize an entire empire's worth of area, and devise suitable means of securing their borders (perhaps mainly by subverting any rival society they contact?)

I note that you are probably not speaking lovingly of Maoism nor would I ask you to. Frankly I never really studied up on Maoism and don't really understand its premises and logic very well, in part because while I do suppose Mao himself had some personal consistency I don't think he came up with a doctrine spanning the full range of his situational intuitions, so any formal doctrines would be incomplete and situational and misleading in other situations. I do credit Mao with a frankly fanatical devotion to radical equality and a deep belief the common, "lowest" denominators of humanity were capable of sufficient self-organization to accomplish anything and a deep suspicion and hatred of elites of any kind. I am not so sure this is could be a sustainable, stable basis of ongoing human society despite his notable successes, and of course noting the glaring failures of many of his notions and initiatives too.

I imagine Maoism is Marxist enough to insist on the common denominator peasants abandoning superstition and learning science, and performing quite a of sophisticated engineering; it is industrial in that sense, but probably this is one of those places where it falls flat and his hatred of the educated specialist comes up to bite the Maoist and weaken their cause badly.

People who are prepared to live "simply" at a low tech level can sometimes effectively resist being ruled by more technically advanced peoples and drive them off their land. But I don't think such successes, which cost dearly anyway, were adequate for Mao; he wanted Communist Chinese to be able, in time anyway, to match the technical capabilities of rival powers.

I think the OP or someone here would serve us well by coming up with some kind of definition of what is and is not essential to Maoism, or a refined alternative close in spirit that does not suffer from specific bugbears Mao may have had in his head detracting from success, such that a radical movement based on a peasantry can indeed match rival non and anti-communist powers and hold them at bay while perhaps subverting them with a model attractive to these foes' exploited classes. Would the attraction only work on peasants, or would industrial proletarian classes be subverted effectively as well by a working example?

 

[Karelian]

SRs in Russia could well evolve their ideology to this direction - they were revolutionary agrarian socialists with a difficult relationship to Marxism and prone to violence in OTL.

 

[jerseyguy]

I think China isn't likely to just be a doctrinaire Soviet client. How would it adapt to Chinese culture?

Edit, I forgot to add in the word Manchuria. As in, the communist state is established by soviet occupation rather than a local revolution/civil war, and looks more a Chinese version of East Germany than a truly independent state that produces some kind of distinct ideology.

 

[overoceans]

I think the OP or someone here would serve us well by coming up with some kind of definition of what is and is not essential to Maoism, or a refined alternative close in spirit that does not suffer from specific bugbears Mao may have had in his head detracting from success, such that a radical movement based on a peasantry can indeed match rival non and anti-communist powers and hold them at bay while perhaps subverting them with a model attractive to these foes' exploited classes. Would the attraction only work on peasants, or would industrial proletarian classes be subverted effectively as well by a working example?

Something to pursue here is also what difference, if any, exists between Maoism and anti-reivisionism, the latter referring to those Communists who sided with China against the USSR after Khruschev denounced Stalin. I'm tempted to say that Maoism and anti-revisionism are the same thing, though of course some anti-revisionist parties later broke with China as well(some in opposition to Mao himself, especially after the summit with Nixon and the Theory Of The THree Worlds), and I'm not entirely clear if all the anti-revisionists placed the same importance on the peasantry as did Mao.

 

[Quintuplicate]

Edit, I forgot to add in the word Manchuria. As in, the communist state is established by soviet occupation rather than a local revolution/civil war, and looks more a Chinese version of East Germany than a truly independent state that produces some kind of distinct ideology.

Intriguing. How extensive could this Chinese communist state be before it started thoughts of independence? Manchuria only? Northern China? Everything down to the Yangtze?

 

[overoceans]

I think I've speculated on this before, in other contexts, but...

What happens to the "eastward turn" among baby boomers in the 1960s if India becomes one of the major Communist powers? Presumably, the government won't be too big on Hinduism, and if they launch suppression campaigns against it, what does that do to the stature of Hinduism among left-friendly spiritual youth in the west? (Bonus points if you get Barry Goldwater publically swooning over the Maharashi)

I guess the OTL Maoist campaigns against Buddhism didn't really turn youth against that faith, but then, Buddhism had lots of spokesman who weren't affiliated with China, and anyway, people tended not to know what was going on in China at that time(I've read praise of Mao from ill-informed counterculture types saying "China is the one country in the world where the youth now have control over the society").

 

[overoceans]

"Oh, Albania....!

 

[David T]

Actually, what is popularly associated with "Maoism" (though Mao himself always paid at least lip service to the hegemony of the proletariat, and it was in fact the Comintern that initiated the CCP's turn to the countryside) seems to have been anticipated by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsaid_Sultan-Galiev a Tatar Communist and for a while a protégé of Stalin's. Richard Pipes summarizes his career as follows:

"The treatment of Asians by pro-Bolshevik Russians led the most prominent Soviet Muslim Communist to revise the orthodox Marxist theory of class struggle. The Tatar Mirza Sultan-Galiev was in his youth a teacher in the reformed schools. In late 1917 he went over to the Communists and made a rapid career as Stalin's protégé in the Commissariat of Nationalities. In articles published toward the end of 1919 in the official organ of his Commissariat, Sultan-Galiev argued that it was a fundamental mistake to rely on the West to bring about a global revolution because the weakest link in the chain of imperialism lay in Asia. This view was tolerable to the Kremlin since it did not contradict Lenin's theory of imperialism. But Sultan-Galiev did not stop there, and broadened his ideas into a full-fledged heresy in which some historians see an anticipation of Maoism. He developed doubts whether even if the revolution in the industrialized countries were to succeed, it would improve the condition of colonial peoples. The Western working class was interested not in abolishing colonialism but in turning it to its own advantage. 'We assert,' he is quoted as saying,

'that the formula that offers the replacement of the worldwide dictatorship of one class of European society (the bourgeoisie) with another (the proletariat), that is, with another European class, will not bring about a major change in the social life of the oppressed element of mankind. At any rate, such a change, even if it were to occur, would be not for the better but for the worse.... In contradistinction to this we advance another thesis: that the material premises for the social transformation of mankind can be created only through the establishment of the dictatorship of the colonies and semi-colonies over the metropolitan areas.'

"To implement his ideas, Sultan-Galiev called for the creation of a 'Colonial International' to counterbalance the Communist International, dominated by Europeans; he also urged the establishment of a Muslim Communist Party. For these ideas, in April 1923 he was expelled from the Party and imprisoned on charges of forming an illegal nationalistic organization. L. Kamenev called him the earliest victim of a Stalinist purge. Released after he had 'repented,' he was rearrested in 1928 and perished either in the 1930s or during World War II..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=pfNEY931UzYC&pg=PA157
https://books.google.com/books?id=pfNEY931UzYC&pg=PA158

Leszek Kolakowski writes in Main Currents of Marxism that "The episode is worth remembering on account of the striking resemblance between Sultan-Galiyev's ideas and subsequent Maoist doctrine, or some ideologies of the 'Muslim socialist' type." https://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA804

This certainly suggests the Islamic world as a likely site for the emergence of an "anti-European" "Third World"-oriented Communist movement. Maybe even more plausibly than China, since in the Muslim world the resentment of Europe also had a religious dimension, which had its effects even on atheistic communists.

 

[Quintuplicate]

I think I've speculated on this before, in other contexts, but...

What happens to the "eastward turn" among baby boomers in the 1960s if India becomes one of the major Communist powers? Presumably, the government won't be too big on Hinduism, and if they launch suppression campaigns against it, what does that do to the stature of Hinduism among left-friendly spiritual youth in the west? (Bonus points if you get Barry Goldwater publically swooning over the Maharashi)

I guess the OTL Maoist campaigns against Buddhism didn't really turn youth against that faith, but then, Buddhism had lots of spokesman who weren't affiliated with China, and anyway, people tended not to know what was going on in China at that time(I've read praise of Mao from ill-informed counterculture types saying "China is the one country in the world where the youth now have control over the society").

So people actually wanted a Cultural Revolution to happen in the US? Crazy!

 

[Sam R.]

Some people will actually want anything. US Maoism in the 1970s seems like an elephant in the bathtub.

 

[overoceans]

So people actually wanted a Cultural Revolution to happen in the US? Crazy!

As a limited defense, most of them probably didn't know what was really going on in China, beyond the vague idea that out-of-touch intellectuals were being re-educated by ideologically robust youth and peasants. Which, when you think about it, isn't too far removed from a lot of populist fantasies on the left and the right.

A lot of western Maoists had abandoned China, and even Maoism itself, by the early 80s, but that probably had at least as much to do with China's alignment with US foreign-policy(which many of them not unreasonably traced back to Mao). Though the ones I met at university in the late 1980s also claimed to have realized belatedly that the Cultural Revolution was a bad thing. They had become Hoxhaists, and were still ardent admirers of Uncle Joe, so their rejection of Maoism probably can't be regarded as any sort of embrace of rational thought.

 

[overoceans]

Some people will actually want anything. US Maoism in the 1970s seems like an elephant in the bathtub.

You might find this book to be of interest. It's not entirely unsympathetic to the anti-revisionists, but inevitably ends up cataloging a lot of the ideological craziness that went on in the 1970s.

And if you don't wanna shell out however much coinage for the book, you can just go straight to the source material, including hundreds if not thousands of reproductions of articles from the original publications.

(Warning: if you're a fan if sectarian left-wing politics, you can get lost for days in that website.)

 

[Sam R.]

Honestly I collect libcoms/leftcoms of excorable class background given the proletarian praxis thesis often espoused by libcoms/leftcoms…

Otoh given the “cultural” turn of pmc/nomenklatura/management liberals and progressives, reading anti-revisionism might be relevant for a project I’m thinking of doing.

In any case thank you for fifty years of agony for proles and their erstwhile allies as their parties collapsed under them and utterly betrayed their politics. It will make light reading compared to Australian labour history where proles and their allies experienced fifty ye…hang on.

Obwi: Radical Amerika journal took a non-dogmatic Maoist inspired line driven primarily by “to industry” praxis. Do they just end up as another Johnson-Forest tendency?

Sam

 

[fasquardon]

what is popularly associated with "Maoism" (though Mao himself always paid at least lip service to the hegemony of the proletariat, and it was in fact the Comintern that initiated the CCP's turn to the countryside) seems to have been anticipated by Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsaid_Sultan-Galiev a Tatar Communist and for a while a protégé of Stalin's.

Reading his reasoning for joining the Bolshevik Party, I can imagine him being drawn to join the SRs if conditions were right. A Sultan-Galievist SR Party focused on spreading the Revolution amongst the colonial peoples sounds like a very interesting setup for an alt-Cold War.

fasquardon