1.2 The Many Faces of Maoism
A brief aside to discuss Maoism before looking at how it has influenced the Palestinian Resistance coalition
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” -Mao Zedong
As we move further and further away from the events of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7, 2023, there may be pressures to forget about the historic alliance of Palestinian groups created in order to organize the operation. This, in my opinion, would be a misstep as the conflict is continuing to show an incredible coordination between groups. One of the burning questions moving forward is how these groups, ranging from secular liberals to anti-clerical communists to fundamentalist Islamists, were able to be connected and stay a cohesive unit even during the genocidal retributions of the Israeli occupation forces that would have historically even left many internally coherent organizations completely shattered on what and how to move forward.
Through my research on both this developing conflict as well as the history of the different militant groups organized for the Al-Aqsa Flood, I’d argue that at the center of this alliance is, at least in some form, an ideology of Maoism. This does not mean every group or even most of the individuals fighting Israeli forces right now are Maoist or subscribe to that particular ideology; however, it has become clear that a major factor in the creation of the Palestinian Resistance coalition is due to the good-faith relationships members of the Saraya Al-Quds and the DFLP have with Al Qassam, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, the PFLP, Lions’ Den, and other militant groups.
A Brief Introduction to Maoism’s Many Masks
Before diving into the two major Maoist-influenced factions of the Palestinian Resistance, I think it’s important today at least to clarify some terms. “Maoism” the way I am referring to it is meant to be an umbrella-word for many different ideologies that form from the Marxist and Third Worldist camps (two different but related ideological strains) during the 20th century. Within that broad umbrella of “Maoism” are Mao Zedong Thought, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Maoism-Third Worldism (as well as other ideologies which aren’t relevant to the conversation today). As briefly as possible, which I want to note is necessarily going to take away much of the nuance and intense political debate between and within these camps, I am going to try my best to describe these groups and their differences so that next we can better understand the Palestinian offshoots of these ideologies.
Mao Zedong Thought (MZT)
Mao Zedong Thought is the culmination of the theories and practices of the Chinese Communist Party. While Mao Zedong did serve as chairman for the CPC, he does not have a monopoly on the development of the ideology with other notable Chinese communists, including Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, making important contributions to the ideological system. As it is an ideological reflection of the material actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party, it is in every sense a living ideological system that is consistently self-critiqued, revised, and debated on. Deng Xiaoping would argue that this movement is consistent with the dialectical aspirations of Marxism-Leninism, and in fact Mao Zedong Thought is not a departure from that political system at all. Mao Zedong Thought stipulates that in the context of China, the proletariat could not feasibly be the only revolutionary subject utilized by communist rebels and that instead peasants could be the backbone of a socialist revolution (MZT does adhere to the theory of socialism developed under Lenin as a transitionary period towards communism). Some Marxist sectarians would argue that the focus on the peasantry instead of the proletariat confirms the departure of MZT from more Orthodox Marxist readings, though these accusations never seemed to be leveled against Lenin for similarly updating Marxism, an ideological system explicitly meant to exist within the Western Europe, for the conditions within Tsarist Russia. MZT remains skeptical of the greater population to naturally develop philosophically past trade unionism without a guiding professional vanguard force to lead it but does innovate on this Leninist model with the concept of the mass line. This was a program which was developed as a partially-tailist tool to develop party policies based on, depending on who you are talking to, either an arguably Fichtean or Taoist dialectical model; a party program would be created within the revolutionary vanguard, an ethnographic analysis of what regular people actually wanted would be implemented, and the party program would be adjusted from that feedback. This practice, as well as Mao’s initial focus on the peasantry, likely was influenced by both his early anarchist influences as well as a material need to maintain good relations with the peasantry after the Long March, a communist retreat from the Kuomintang which left many of the initial proletariat rebels dead, and exile to Jiaxing where the revolutionary vanguard formed their first soviet.
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM)
Also known as Gonzalo Thought, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is actually an offshoot of the Marxist-Leninist tradition that was meant to universalize Mao’s political theories through an analysis of the Peruvian Communist Movement. The Shining Path, another name for one of the communist parties in Peru, came to the conclusion that Mao’s ideological contributions to the Chinese communist movement were not just geographically confined to China, and that defining concepts, like the mass line or the Bloc of Four Social Classes theory, were the next development in universal Marxist revolutionary theory. Developed in 1980, MLM proponents argued that by that point the Soviet Union had entered a revisionist period and the Chinese communists led by Deng Xiaoping had betrayed the revolution with the 1978 Open Door Policy which sought to increase through foreign financial investment into the country. Due to these criticisms, the Shining Path declared themselves the leaders of the true global communist movement simultaneously putting them at odds with the ideologies of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China. This also meant that the Shining Path actively fought against other Latin American communist revolutionaries in Peru and developed notably different revolutionary tactics than the popular foquismo model created by Che Guevara. Under the leadership of Abimael Guzman the Shining Path, and thereafter other MLM organizations, used a strict “concentric cellular structure” so that the central committee headed by Guzman could maintain control over guerilla fighters both ideologically and strategically. The inner circle and initial propagandists of the Shining Path were filled with former university students of Guzman who had become teaching interns to spread communist thought to the often-illiterate and impoverished Peruvian indigenous population. These students and indigenous Peruvians then went on to become the backbone of Guzman’s revolutionary movement as the supposedly left-wing Juan Velasco passed a law banning free high school education in 1969, essentially neoliberalizing public school only a few years before Pinochet’s coup in Chile and the Chicago School’s neoliberal, genocidal, experimentation on the Chilean people. The Shining Path outright rejected Mao’s Three Worlds Theory as well as Deng’s appropriation of it to defend Chinese commerce with non-communist countries, curiously siding with Enver Hoxha’s Albania even though Guzman originally led the efforts to break apart the pro-Soviet Peruvian Communist Party at the beginning of the Sino-Soviet Split.
Maoism-Third Worldism (MTW)
Mao Zedong developed a concept in the early 1970s known as Three Worlds Theory. It is important to say now that this is not the same as the Three-World Model, which is the forebearer to Maoism-Third Worldism, because of course it isn’t. This piece isn’t already tedious enough semantically, we might as well make it even more unapproachable.
Luckily the difference between Three Worlds Theory and the Three-World Model is fairly simple. Mao differentiated the “three worlds” by their relationship with the international superpowers. The First World contained the United States and the Soviet Union, the Second World included the so-called lesser powers (or proxies of the superpowers) like Canada, Japan, and European countries (including Soviet-aligned ones), and the Third World was comprised of what Mao called exploited or colonized nations which also included China. Unlike the Three-World Model which was an attempt to differentiate non-affiliated countries in the Cold War amidst the ever-so-popular “if you’re not with us you’re against us” rhetoric from predominantly United States propaganda, I’d argue that Three Worlds Theory is more so a savvy political move to coalesce popular national movements under China’s banner after the Sino-Soviet Split instead of the Soviet Union. This can be seen most clearly in the United Front strategy, which was central to Three Worlds Theory even after Mao’s death. This strategy of revolutionary development which emphasized working with non-communists was historically grounded in the communist alliance with Chinese nationalists during the Japanese invasion and then the Four Social Classes Theory during the civil war. Through Three Worlds Theory, China promoted itself to be the national vanguard against the United States and Soviet Union, whom they called “the common enemies of the people of the world,” and vowed to support national revolutionary movements without exporting their own ideas into these movements. While the United States and Soviet Union, in very different capacities, demanded at least some ideological coherence within their alliances and proxies, this model by Mao was not as worried with ideological allegiance as it was developing a sphere of influence outside of the United States and Soviet Union. This, while again simplifying dramatically, can arguably be seen as a reason the existing state of international relations exists today. Within the United States sphere of influence there is an overwhelming predominance of right and far-right liberalism, as it has maintained its strict ideological allegiance structures through so-called international organizations like the IMF, while the Chinese sphere contains a wide range of political belief systems from right-wing nationalism to social democracy (left liberalism) to communism.
The Three-World Model was coined in 1952 by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy. He compared the international world order during the Cold War to the estates of pre-revolution France; the First World was defined by industrialized capitalist nations, the Second World contained the industrialized Soviet bloc, and the Third World were all other countries, both communist and capitalist, that took an unaligned stance between the two groups. In his comparison to the French estates, the First World was nobility and aristocracy, the Second World the clergy, and the Third World the “unknown, exploited, and scorned.” Third Worldism as its own ideological system was defined by Western European self-described socialists and communists seeking to model a third political pathway that didn’t embrace the Soviet or United States systems. This can easily be confused with Trotskyist third camp socialism, which essentially became a hyper contrarian United States left-wing tradition of no importance to either this conversation or world history in general. The primary leaders of the Third-Worldist movement though are incredibly relevant, as Egypt’s Nasser and Pan-Arabism as an ideological form was directly birthed from this movement.
The emergence of Maoism-Third Worldism was an attempt by communist thinkers to combine Dependency Theory, Third Worldism, World Systems Theory, and the Marxist tradition. Because of the vast and sometimes contradicting bodies of work making up Maoism-Third Worldism, there isn’t exactly a defined doctrine of thought like Mao Zedong Thought or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Overall though, MTW postulates that the primary class antagonism in the world today is not between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as is understood in Marxist traditions, but between the colonizer and the colonized. While this is a departure from orthodox Marxism, MTW stipulates that while the national bourgeoisie of a colonized nation may help in the decolonial process, once that process is complete the bourgeoisie will turn around to oppress the proletariat of that nation. The fulfillment of the national bourgeois revolution, such as in France, but in formerly or currently colonized nations is the first step towards communism according to MTW. What defines a colonizer and colonized is a hotly debated topic with some like J. Sakai arguing that there is no such thing as a white proletariat in the United States, just settler and colonized nations. Others like the now-defunct Maoist International Movement (made up of Maoists in Western Europe and the Americas) propose that the third world proletariat would be the primary drivers of the eventual communist revolution, thus continuing the proud" tradition of certain left-wing radicals in the Global Core to wave away their agency in hopes the people they benefit from oppressing will do the dirty work for them. Even still other proponents of MTW will argue the opposite, claiming that modern capitalism is so oppressive that the third world/subaltern/periphery does not materially have the capacity for an internationalist revolutionary movement and that the primary focus of Marxists should be to decolonize these nations in order to build up global revolutionary capacity. Needless to say, MTW is a much broader and more complex planet of research, practice, and debate than I will ever have time to describe in this piece. It both encapsulates and builds upon the foundations of Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism while also incorporating other traditionally non-Marxist perspectives on global capitalist development that has made at least certain aspects of it incredibly convincing while others can be seen at best as a total departure from any of its grounding ideological strains.
With that though we have worked through three sects of Maoist thought. Next time we will look into its influences in the DFLP and PIJ (Saraya Al-Quds).
An Even Briefer Note
Why care about this? Why dive into a semantic investigation of the different strains of of a particular niche in a predominately Global South movement? What does knowing all of this have to do with the Palestinian Resistance? What does this have to do with It Can Be Different?
These are all questions I’ve been wrestling with while writing particularly this piece. I think I can answer the last one, and that its answer may lend itself to as an answer to the others. Fundamentally this piece, but more generally all my very tedious linguistic investigations and arguments, are an exercise in particularity. In the United States at least, we live in a world where democrat is a synonym for liberal is a synonym for leftist is a synonym for Marxist is a synonym for anarchist is a synonym for atheist and republican is a synonym for conservative is a synonym for traditionalist is a synonym for fascist is a synonym for religious. I wholly and completely reject that framework outright. Just from my own lived experience I’ve found that when my world was flattened, that world was simultaneously confusing and scary but also intellectually boring. Once my own world became more complicated and nuanced, not only did systems and individuals start to make more sense but seemingly common sense understandings of the world began to be less convincing. I hope in some way, the tedious nature of this and many more pieces to come highlights all the ways humanity refuses to be put in a box, to be confined. In regards to this continuing series, I hope that the complicating of our own understanding of these ideologies at play help to showcase how the resistance movements in Palestine and elsewhere are driven by complex and nuanced beliefs about both how the world works and how a people in a particular circumstance in that world can change it.
Because it can be changed.