this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I’ve heard the truism that MZT integrated a lot of ideas from anarchist praxis. I’ve even heard it referred to as synthesis. Not familiar enough with Mao’s entire works to say whether this is true but I’ve heard it here more than once.
At the very beginning of his radicalization, anarchism was an interest, but he quickly moved on to Marxism and Leninism and never references anarchists in his work afaik. To make a synthesis of anarchist theory he would be referencing it all the time
I think the lack of such references is meaningful (though it's not a total lack, and he worked with or at least was happy to facilitate communalist types), but there's a difference between synthesizing things and being an eclectic who just picks things out and retains those elements in their original form. He really did have important elements of his approach that bore a substantial resemblance to anarchist ideas and approaches, maybe most conspicuously in the Cultural Revolution. I would also consider this anarchist-like lean, while it did have real benefits in some cases (like the approach to land reform!), to be a contributing factor to several of his greatest failures (the Hundred Flowers campaign, a few GLF policies, and worst of all some of the Red Guard ordeal). Of course, that's hardly the only source of his errors either, to be clear.
He references Chinese philosophical ideas and texts much more than anarchist ideas and concepts to give you an idea of how little anarchism factors into his work. And like every single Chinese philosopher in existence, his works make more sense after reading Confucian text.
By the time he was doing or writing anything meaningful Mao had nothing to do with anarchism. Maoism (which was created because certain people copied Mao's ideas to their own national context even though Mao pretty explicitly said not to do that) just looks like anarchism because they are both the post-hoc philosophical justifications for the natural activity of the radical lumpenproletariat.