Maoism

El presente trabajo se propone reconstruir e historizar el proceso a través del cual el Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Argentina rompió con el Partido Comunista Argentino en 1967 y adoptó el maoísmo explícitamente en su III Congreso de 1974.
A través del recorrido planteado y las fuentes partidarias trabajadas intentamos delinear los elementos que lo fueron aproximando y los rasgos que fue adquiriendo el maoísmo argentino, del cual el Partido Comunista Revolucionario fue uno de sus principales exponentes.

El artículo está dividido en tres partes: en a primera se elabora un panorama sobre el maoísmo en Francia en una
perspectiva de mediana duración, con la pretensión de ir más allá del
Mayo 68; posteriormente se elabora una reflexión sobre la presencia del
pensamiento Mao; y, finalmente, su convergencia con los intereses de
intelectuales y militantes radicalizados después de mayo del 68.

Man möchte es nicht glauben, doch ist all das Schreckliche, was Mächtige dieser Welt im Zeitraum von nur 100 Jahren angerichtet haben, nichts als nackte Realität. Die Autoren der „Gesichter des Bösen“ gelangen zu einem traurigen Schluss: Die Bilanz des 20. Jahrhunderts, das auf vielen Gebieten enormen technischen Fortschritt gebracht hat, ist erschreckend. Die schlimmsten Verbrecher samt ihren Untaten gegen die Menschlichkeit sind in einer „Schandhalle des Bösen“ versammelt und beschrieben: 168 Männer, bekannte und unbekannte, unter ihnen Diktatoren, Regierungschefs, Massenmörder, Staatsverbrecher, Revoluzzer, Großgangster aus der Mafia. Kein genozidaler Vorgang ist übersehen oder aus irgendwelchen Vorurteilen oder Verschiedenheiten weginterpretiert. Zahlreiche Fotos und Texte aus dem Umfeld der Gegner von Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen dokumentieren den Widerstand gegen Beutegier, Ausrottungsorgien und Terrorismus.
Ist der Mensch fähig, aus der Geschichte zu lernen? Es gibt einen bedeutsamen Anfang, der, wenn auch eher einem Rinnsal als einem mächtigen Strom gleichend, einen Hoffnungsschimmer bereithält. „Es stimmt nicht mehr“, so Heribert Prantl in seinem Geleitwort, „dass Macht, finanzielle und politische Macht, vor Recht geht. Dieses Bewusstsein hilft einem, die bittere und notwendige Lektüre des Buches über die ‚Gesichter des Bösen‘ zu ertragen. Das Buch macht den Leser zu einem glühenden Anhänger der Weltstrafjustiz.“

Mao Zedong was one of the most active scholars in the camp of Communism. After his death, his ideology remains inimical to Liberalism but a strong pillar to the Chinese Communist Party. In his book, Combat Liberalism in 1937, Mao was overly critical of Liberalism. He criticized Liberalism as “corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension.” This sparks a controversial question in the camp of ideological debate as to whether Liberalism is capable of defending itself against Mao’s allegation. In this article, Mao’s motives behind the allegation will be scrutinized. To defend Liberalism, this article examines the core values thereof particularly individualism, freedom and competition. It will then conclude that Mao’s assessment is only a conjecture, and that Liberalism literally can preserve its ideological values despite crossing the line of fire.

Keywords: Ideology, Maoism, Liberalism, Positive Individualism, Freedom and Competition

As Irene Eber writes in her foreword to this book, "This is a ground-breaking work".
She is right, for it is indeed a work of utmost importance-and for many different
reasons. First of all, it is a work that explores and introduces a realm that has-particularly
in the Western world-hitherto not been researched, although it certainly
deserves to be thoroughly and meticulously investigated. Secondly, in explaining
Mao Zedong's philosophical thought, it brings forward many innovative ideas,
which allow us to see and to understand certain aspects of the Chinese ideational
tradition and its fusion with the Western philosophy in a different, more sensible and
fruitful manner. In addition, the book is essential because it deals with a highly topical
issue, one that can certainly help us improve our understanding of contemporary
China, its ideologies, its intercultural relations, and its vital connections to its rich
intellectual tradition.
The author of this highly

The role of cultural production and ideology in revolution has long been a topic of debate. Frantz Fanon, among other theorists, questioned what this role could be in national liberation struggles and socialist movements among colonized populations. In the context of Fanon’s success and his widespread contemporary use, to say that cultural production is a necessary component of struggles for national liberation and sovereignty should not be contentious; in fact at this point it may be terribly obvious. This standpoint becomes even more evident when one considers the historical struggles of Indigenous people in Canada to maintain their cultures along with their sovereignty, which have both been systematically denied and stripped from us  by the Canadian state. Like any other system of domination, settler-colonialism needs to maintain itself; often this is done through cultural and ideological mechanisms, which is precisely why it is so fundamental that these mechanisms of interpellation be broken.

This project intends to explore interpellation processes within settler-colonialism and to look at how those processes can be interrupted and broken through rejection of colonial recognition and transformative Indigenous cultural production. I will utilize Glen Coulthard’s conception of recognition and Fanon’s understanding of colonial subjects as my primary anticolonial scholarship. This is a means of framing my discussion of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation in an anticolonial manner which stresses Indigenous and colonized perspectives; as well as their connection with Marxism. Coulthard identifies the important connection between Fanon’s anticolonial Marxism and Althusser, stating:

Fanon anticipates at least one aspect of the well-known work of French philosopher Louis Althusser, who would later argue that the reproduction of capitalist relations of production rests on the ‘recognition function’ of ideology, namely the ability of a state’s ‘ideological apparatus’ to ‘interpolate’ individuals as subjects of class rule. For Fanon, colonialism operates in a similarly dual-structured manner: it includes ‘not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions but also human attitudes to these conditions’. Fanon argued that it was the interplay between the structural/ objective and recognitive/subjective features of colonialism that ensured its hegemony over time (32)

But this hegemony is not impervious. The history of settler-colonialism in Canada, being accompanied by resistance and political ruptures between the Canadian state and its colonial subjects, is often interrupted by opposing ideological forces. In recent years, the opposing ideological force of Indigenous thought in cultural production, though long in existence, has come into the foreground of Canadian politics. This development has occurred contemporaneously with a renewed interest in assimilating Indigenous cultures into Canadian culture as a means of eschewing questions of sovereignty, self-determination and secession. As Coulthard points out, this renewed interest in “including” Indigenous cultures in Canadian nationalism cannot be categorized as the same type of colonial rule that has been employed by the Canadian state in the past. Coulthard argues that “whereas before 1969 federal Indian policy was unapologetically assimilationist, now it is couched in the vernacular of ‘mutual recognition’” (Coulthard 3). This new form of assimilation necessitates a different type of colonial interpellation based on identification with the state, and while the threat of state violence remains, the pretense of multiculturalism makes frequent violence less defensible. This, of course, does not mean there is no longer overt violence against Indigenous people. Frequent police brutality, profiling, carding, botched investigations, and other such problems are still mainstays of the Canadian state. However, this, too, is becoming less defensible and is no longer the primary method of controlling Indigenous populations within the borders of Canada.

As these contradictions simmer underneath the surface of Canadian society, activists and artists alike have attempted to expose them. Kent Monkman’s film, Shooting Geronimo, works to illustrate the repressive nature of colonial values in relation to frontier attitudes as well as sexuality and gender in film practices. Likewise, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ short film A Red Girl’s Reasoning lays bare the intentional mishandling of rape and sexual assault cases involving Indigenous women, emphasizes the victim-blaming, and underscores the profound misogyny that underpins colonial ideology.  I will be examining these films alongside the theory I have already identified to elaborate on my arguments about interpellation in a specific artistic milieu. Both of these films offer distinctly anti-colonial perspectives on issues usually left out of Canadian cultural production, but, beyond that, I believe that films such as these can become methods for resisting settler-colonial ideology and interpellation in cultural production. Furthermore, it can be argued that these films produce and reproduce ideologies that disrupt the colonial narrative and the ability of the settler-colonial state to interpolate and “recognize” Indigenous subjects. They generate a new ideological framework wherein the colonial subject becomes essentially unrecognizable to its oppressors.

This paper presents a general model of the emergence and functioning of cults of personality. Drawing on the work of Collins (2004), I understand a cult of personality as a set of interaction rituals, linked in chains, focused on symbols that refer to a political leader, and saturating a significant part of the public space of a polity. I argue that when interaction rituals focused on leader symbols are embedded in patronage relations, processes of “flattery inflation” are likely to emerge. I illustrate this model by looking at three very different cases: the short-lived cult of Caligula in the early Principate in Rome, the cult of Mao in China, and the emerging cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

While thousands of Latin Americans traveled to China during the Mao years (1949-1976) to learn from the experience of the Chinese Revolution, only Abimael Guzmán went on to lead a Maoist people’s war in his home country. Chinese records on Guzmán’s time in China are closed, but Guzmán has on three occasions talked in some detail or written about his experiences in China. This paper closely examines what Guzmán has said and written in order to better understand this pivotal time in the development of one of the most important figures in twentieth century Peruvian history.

Review of Ming Wan, The China Model and Global Political Economy: Comparison, Impact, and Interaction, Routledge, 2014 and Lin Chun, China and Global Capitalism: Reflections on Marxism, History, and Contemporary Politics, Palgrave Macmillan. China Journal, 74.

Misunderstanding and misreading characterized China-US relations in an early and mid-twentieth-century narrative economy framed by distance, conflict, cultural distrust, xenophobia, and periods of closure. To exemplify these misapprehensions, the essay begins with a racist African American stereotype appearing in Mao Dun's novel Hong (1929) as a key to open discussion of political stereotyping. It then turns to consider W.E.B. Du Bois' 1959 visit to China, for which Mao Dun served as his host. The essay surveys Chinese-language newspaper coverage of the Du Bois visit, including public comment by Mao Dun, Guo Mururo, and other leading Chinese officials. Du Bois and his hosts shared a language of imminent revolutionary teleology, one that proclaimed the arrival of a new order. This rising revolutionary international order was to be guaranteed by collaboration between Africa and Asia, so Afro-Asian solidarity had become a central ideological tenet in post-revolutionary China and writers were harnessed to that goal. For their part, his Chinese hosts misunderstood the role Du Bois played as an intellectual avant-gardist and treated his visit as the arrival of an influential ally in US politics. In a major speech at Beijing University, Du Bois displayed a reciprocal misunderstanding of China as approaching social perfection and proclaimed it to be the leading global civilization. Mutual public acclaim enabled both China's government and Du Bois to frame each other through heroic stereotypes. Such misreading functioned by elevating one figuration to represent a socio-political whole. Despite errors of perception evidenced in the rhetoric, mutual misreading contributed to advancing conversation between two societies.

Adolf Hitler. Joseph Stalin. Benito Mussolini. Mao Zedong. Kim Il Sung. Vladimir Lenin. These cruel dictators wrote their names on the pages of history in the blood of countless innocent victims. Yet they themselves were once young people searching for their place in the world, dealing with challenges many of us face—parental authority, education, romance, loss—and doing so in ways that might be uncomfortably familiar.

Historian Brandon K. Gauthier has created a fascinating work—epic yet intimate, well-researched but immensely readable, clear-eyed and empathetic—looking at the lives of these six dictators, with a focus on their youths. We watch Lenin’s older brother executed at the hands of the Tsar’s police—an event that helped radicalize this overachieving high-schooler. We observe Stalin grappling with the death of his young, beautiful wife. We see Hitler’s mother mourning the loss of three young children—and determined that her first son to survive infancy would find his place in the world.

The purpose isn’t to excuse or simply explain these horrible men, but rather to treat them with the empathy they themselves too often lacked. We may prefer to hold such lives at arm’s length so as to demonize them at will, but this book reminds us that these monstrous rulers were also human beings—and perhaps more relatable than we’d like.

“Brandon Gauthier is that rare academic whose writing is both incisive and clear; even more than that, it is entertaining. Here he has chosen a subject that, on the face of it, isolates an alarming contradiction, one rarely confronted, that history’s worst butchers (he chooses Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Mao, and Kim Il Sung, but they stand for the full rogues gallery) were once cuddly infants, playful schoolchildren, and sexed up teenagers. The result is a book that is as enlightening as it is disturbing, in part because we get a fresh view of history’s criminals, more so because in them, we can also see ourselves.”

— Todd Brewster, New York Times best-selling author of The Century (with Peter Jennings) and Lincoln's Gamble

"Before Evil isn’t your average history. Written in a colloquial language. Like listening to an old friend, not a stuffy intellectual. It tells the story of some of history's most reviled men. Dictators and despots. As though they were the dorky teens we all once were. Brandon Gauthier has done a first rate job in dispelling the myth that these tyrants were anything other than human. Same as you and I."

— Steve Anwyll, author of Welfare (Tyrant Books)

“We mustn't forget the terrifying dictators who were behind the policies foreign and domestic that made much of the 20th century such a bloody hell for so many. But Brandon Gauthier in this meticulously researched, compellingly written, highly accessible volume shows why we need to remember them less as monstrous aberrations, more as human beings who ended up demonstrating the capability of our species for evil.”

— Bradley K. Martin, author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

“Before Evil opens a compelling window into the humanity of some of the most tyrannical despots of the modern era. At times poignant, powerful, erudite, and even humorous, it reminds us that those we consider truly evil are still truly human, and that the lines between good and evil are not as simple as we might like to believe.”

— Mitchell Lerner, Professor of History and Director of the East Asian Studies Center at The Ohio State University

“Brandon Gauthier has written a powerful investigation into the myriad influences that created six of the most evil men in modern history. Before Evil deftly explains in stunning detail how Lenin, Hitler, Stalin Mao, Mussolini and Kim slowly turned from unremarkable children into authoritarian adults whose choices affected the course of the entire world. By asking readers to grapple with the humanity of men who are widely abhorred, Gauthier provides a fresh way to understand why these six leaders were able to wield power—and how dictators could use those same tactics to rise again.”

— Beth Knobel, Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

“For the past 30 years I have worked as a psychological expert witness in murder cases and visited with children and youth in war zones around the world. I have struggled, as has Brandon Gauthier, to find a 'human' explanation for the psychological realities of violence and evil that I have encountered first-hand in prisons and refugee camps. His book is a significant contribution in that morally and emotionally challenging but necessary task. A fascinating book!”

— James Garbarino, Professor of Humanistic Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them

“A lively yet rigorously researched inquiry into how and why some innocent little children grow up to become mass-murdering monsters.”

— Daniel Kalder, author of The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy

The Great Leap Forward created one of the most deadly famines in human history, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 35 to 45 million. Environmentally, the leap caused the deforestation of at least a third of China’s open forests. This essay will explore why the Great Leap Forward proved to be so disastrous in so many areas, and why it failed to accomplish any of the objectives it set out to achieve. First, the essay will address the historiographical debate surrounding whether or not there was any sense in the original economic plan. The logic of diverting from a Soviet-style economic plan will then be discussed in conjunction with the equally illogical policies that followed, and their subsequent implementation. The essay will consider the context of the Sino-Soviet split and the Hundred Flowers campaign. With reference to both of these, Mao’s dominance and tenacious attitude will be discussed as key factors for the eventual disastrous outcome of the Great Leap Forward.

The attitude in how Western classical music is perceived  has drastically changed since Mao was in power in China. So much so, that it has become a hub of classical music in the world. I chronicle some of the political and social changes that led to this about-face.

This article examines the diary as a historical source and method for researching Maoist China. It surveys the changing and contested meanings of the everyday form, followed by a discussion on two useful interpretive approaches to Mao-era diaries, each of which is underpinned by distinct theoretical and historiographical orientations. It argues that the diary constitutes a complex but rewarding historical source, offering historians of modern China new possibilities and challenges, from the empirical quest for reconstructing social history “from below” to the discursive pursuit of theorizing revolutionary subject-formation in relation to shifting cultural politics of identification and everyday life.

This two-part article explores the question of how to constitute China in the twentieth century as an object of thought. This means, first of all, releasing the twentieth century from the position of being a mere object, such that one no longer regards this era as an annotation or appendage to contemporary value systems and ideologies, but instead approaches it as a process in which, passing through the liberation of the object, we may reconstruct a relation of dialogue between ourselves and twentieth-century China. Part 1 proceeds from a temporal analysis of the twentieth century, and Part 2 analyzes this era from a spatial perspective. Part 1 encompasses three sections: first, the long twentieth century, the European fin de siècle, and the century as a trend of the times; second, the conditions of the short century, imperialism, and the rise of the Pacific century; third, the Chinese Revolution and the rise of the short century: unevenness and "the weakest link." Having pursued an analysis of the global conditions of the imperialist epoch, I assert that any discussion of the birth of the "short twentieth century” must begin with an analysis of “the weakest link.” In seeking the roots of the revolutionary moment, one must look not at the geopolitical contestations in Eurasia, but instead the revolutionary conditions produced by the new situation in Asia (especially the rise of Japan and Japan’s victory over Russia). That is, it was not imperialist wars pure and simple, but instead the “awakening of Asia” called into being by these wars that constituted the multifaceted point of departure for the “short twentieth century.” Thus, from the perspective of temporality, the “short twentieth century” did not, as is often believed, begin in 1914, but rather in the period 1905–1911; from the perspective of spatiality, it did not begin at a single point of beginning, but from a whole series of points of beginning; from the perspective of the moment, it did not begin through destructive wars, but instead was born in a series of attempts to break free of the imperialist system and the archaic regime.

Maoist institutions and methods have outlived Mao. Temporarily downplayed and partially discredited in the reform era, they have made a comeback with a vengeance in the new century. Many dormant institutions and practices have been revitalized and augmented with technology, partly thanks to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The specter of a techno-totalitarian dystopia that is haunting China has its roots in Yan’an. To understand twentieth- and twenty-first-century China and the challenge it poses to the world, Gao Hua’s How the Red Sun Rose is essential reading.

This article critically assesses the recent return of “communism” in contemporary political theory. The principal focus is Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “idea of communism” and its “sequences,” which are approached here in relation to the body of work collected in Douzinas and Žižek’s The Idea of Communism. Critical of Badiou, the article argues that communism should be understood as a “real movement” immanent to the mutating limits of capital, and not as a subjective “truth procedure.” In taking the latter route, Badiou not only produces a faulty philosophy of communism but also misdiagnoses its historical record, allowing Lenin and Mao, the spectacle of revolution, to stand as its genuine expressions. In this, Badiou contributes to the contemporary nostalgic image of a “real communism” that in practice was nothing of the sort.

This report investigates a new alignment within Erdogan’s political movement towards Russia and Putin along with Iran and China, through former leftist terrorist leader Dogu Perincek’s facilitation of Erdogan’s relationships with Putin. I was assigned to arrest Perincek, now 77, in 1999, as a counterterrorism police sergeant, and at the time I learned of his surprising ties to the upper levels of the Turkish military. I didn’t know, and it did not come out until this year, that back in 1984 the CIA had termed Perincek – a figure little known in the U.S.- a terrorist and designated his organization, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey, TIKP, as a terrorist organization. We will see that Perincek’s ties with leftist military school students and mid-level officers developed from the early 70s during the cold war era. These ties have blossomed into alliances with top generals that make Perincek invaluable to Erdogan.

https://investigativejournal.org/the-strange-case-of-perincek-erdogan-and-the-russia-triangle/

https://twitter.com/ahmetsyayla/status/1171915933964800000?s=20

This article is intended to rethink a symbiotic but otherwise inadequately attended relationship between postcolonial studies and Chinese academia at a time when the rise of China evokes epistemic, ontological and empirical challenges for critical reflection. Above all, I argue that China is situated in her postcolonial conditions in such a way that these conditions largely define China's multi‐faceted positioning as colonial agent, (semi‐)colonial victim, recipient of colonialist ideology, overthrower of that ideology and its accompanying world‐system, and contender for the “top place” within such a world‐system. Postcolonial theory hence becomes relevant and productive in terms of its potential to problematize various puzzles, contradictions and tensions during China's rise like widespread disregard of basic civic values, political partisanship in scholarship, aggravation of the East‐West divide and rising Chinese exceptionalism. Additionally, however, this article also pinpoints the need to transform and reshape the oftentimes Eurocentric inclination in postcolonial studies through an incorporation of the revolutionary and post‐revolutionary experiences in China and elsewhere. Doing so therefore calls for a post‐revolutionary paradigm as proposed by Wang Hui, among others. I thus advocate cross‐fertilization, rather than mutual exclusion, not only be-tween the postcolonial and post‐revolutionary paradigms but also between postcolonial studies and Chinese scholarship/academia.