askchapo

central pole holding up the umbrella of Maoist philosophies is that the government has the responsibility to create moral citizens by requiring them to directly serve their country

This is simply not a thing. "Moral citizens" are not a Marxist or Maoist concept. This is more of a liberal civic-nationalist thing if anything. French revolution type shit. Modern national conscription was invented there, not with Mao.

What your coworker is probably misremembering is the Down to the Countryside Movement, which was a response to the particular conditions in China after the Great Leap Forward. Maoism traditionally centered the peasantry as the main driver of revolution, but there's nothing in Maoism like a person needs to go farm for awhile to become "moral". Class struggle is the true central pole holding up Maoism (and Marxism); morals don't come into marxist theory because morals are idealistic, not material.

I'm also not sure what your coworker means by the "umbrella" of Maoist philosophies, unless she just means like Chinese politics = Maoism or means Marxism (or she's into some mega deep Gonzaloist Thought or something).

Maoism generally refers to MLM, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. This is confusing because it is not something Mao ever believed or forwarded, but is a later construction by formations like the Shining Path (complete with Chairman Gonzalo) who named their work after Mao because they liked (their interpretations of) some of his salient approaches.

You will need a dedicated glossary to read and understand MLM publications, they use their own internal references for things and they are sometimes references to the CPC under Mao and even in those cases they can still be imbued with a specialized MLM meaning (like the "mass line").

But the short of it is that Maoists tend to pose themselves as anti-revisionists above all who seek revolution through a protracted people's war. They appreciate the CPC's military strategy of embedding with the countryside people and fighting a direct violent revolution from this basis, with their own modifications. They are hyper-critical of all other tendencies and their writings are often dense and obscurantist when doing so. There are, however, existing MLM or MLM-ish armed revolutionary projects with some level of foothold, more than many other tendencies. The Naxalites in India and the CPP in the Philippines, and much respect to both for actually doing the work.

In the West, Maoists are known for being very pessimistic and not very active, which aligns in many ways with MLMs holding to the (arguably correct) line that the imperial core has no revolutionary potential. In the West, MLMs are known to focus on reading groups and trying to figure out how they can assist movements outside their countries, in the periphery, including the CPP.

I recommend searching for information about MLMs since many people still think "Maoism" means "what Mao enthusiasts in China believe". And because I have in no way provided a comprehensive description.

Oh and also regarding this:

the central pole holding up the umbrella of Maoist philosophies is that the government has the responsibility to create moral citizens by requiring them to directly serve their country, such as farming or millitary service

That's just plain not Maoism in any sense. It's actually capitalist countries that have tended to have compulsory military service and tie this to being moral.

maoism is when i [redacted] landlords

Maoism is when you make the cat sound and the more times you make it the more Maoist you are hth

Common Misconceptions About Maoism:

MLM is a qualitative development of Marxism. Maoism isn’t just the "Chinese application" of Marxism-Leninism—it redefines important elements of revolutionary strategy and theory. MLM is the summation of two centuries of scientific class struggle. Key developments include: People’s War as a universal strategy (not just for agrarian societies), the Mass Line as a method of leadership and organizing, a deepening of the theory of contradiction, with the most important discovery being that class struggle continues under socialism, especially seen in Mao’s analysis during the Cultural Revolution, the principle that class struggle continues after the seizure of power—an answer to why previous revolutions were reversed. The necessity of the Left to impose itself on the Right to combat modern revisionism and prevent the restoration of capitalism, the three instruments of revolution: Party, People’s Army, and United Front, and the thesis of two-line struggle and its importance for the development of the Party.

"Maoism" is a floating signifier. The policies of Mao starting either from the GLF or the CR are "Maoism," the disparate ideologies of several different segments of the Red Guard are all "Maoism," Gonzalites are "Maoism," Naxalites are "Maoism," some Nepalese electoralists are "Maoism," etc. Most of these are different (I think Mao's two entries and the Naxalites are probably the most similar, along with some of the Red Guard splinters probably).

Your coworker was right in that it was literally an approach of Mao's to have bourgeois, intellectual, and bureaucratic segments of the population do proletarian labor to have a better understanding of it (and maybe even empathy), most famously the "Down to the Countryside" movement. I think it's reasonable, though in a richer country you probably shouldn't be putting children in factories as was done then (just wait until they are young adults).

I agree with others that this is not the core of Mao's thought or approach, not even remotely, it was just one of the many things that he did to try to oppose having an elite class disconnected from the masses. See also how he complains about some people reading a lot but never investigating things themselves.

A Maoist is someone who fully self-saturates in water, you have to Maoisturize

Not an expert on Mao, but the idea that every country with mandatory military service is Maoist doesn’t pass the sniff test.

My broadest possible understanding is that Mao Zedong Thought's main innovation was seeing rural peasantry as a potentially revolutionary population, as opposed to previous communist movements' reliance on an urban proletariat.

The thing you were talking about bears some similarities to the Down to the Countryside Movement, but I don't know that I would call that the central pillar of MZT.

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Maoism

Pretty sure a part of Mao's biographical history is him, as a young member of the communist party either volunteering to go out and work among the peasantry/farmers or being ordered to go out and see what was going on in the countryside away from the cities and industrial centers (can't remember which.)

Literally a "walk a mile in somebody else's shoes" experience to get some perspective outside of the academic sphere and from people other than "big city folks" while at the same time bringing the party's purpose and plans to those rural areas and people.

Wish there was a remind me *bot like in reddit so I could remember to check this thread later. I'm curious about future more in-depth answers to this.

Mao's application of Marxist Leninism to civil war and WW2 era China

Certain innovations and principles that emerged from that application have been adopted by socialists around the world