Concept

Maoism

Overview

Maoism, officially Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. A difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that a united front of progressive forces in class society would lead the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than communist revolutionaries alone. This theory, in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, purports to represent urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.

From the 1950s until the reform and opening up of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, Maoism was the political and military ideology of the Chinese Communist Party and Maoist revolutionary movements worldwide. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union each claimed to be the sole heir and successor to Joseph Stalin concerning the correct interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and the ideological leader of world communism.

The English term "Maoism" was coined in 1951, by Benjamin I. Schwartz to describe as Mao's pragmatic strategy of revolution which adapted elements of Marxism-Leninism, particularly a disciplined and hierarchical Communist Party, onto a mobilized peasant mass base.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
States what Maoism is; the author is tied to Maoism in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
These our philosophic ideas have had an incubation period of about twenty years since they were first given to the world in Marx's "Misere de la Philosophie" and the Communist Manifesto until they obtained a wider and wider influence through the publication of "Capital" and now find recognition and support far beyond the limits of Europe in all lands where a proletariat exists together with progressive scientific…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what Maoism is; the author is tied to Maoism in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such,…
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
The author is tied to Maoism in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed Maoism

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Hu Jintao

Place in the tradition

Part of Outline of philosophy.

Narrower topics:

Explore Maoism in the interactive graph →