u/Financial_Might_6816

So I am a rather new Maoist here, in the sense that i keep learning about it and I’m convinced by many aspects of it.

But there is mainly one thing that troubles me. Revisionism and anti-revisionism. I recognise how dangerous revisionism is and how it has led to the USSR‘s collapse and China capitalist roading. But at the same time Maoists defend things like the NEP or the New Democratic period in China highlighting that these only lasted less than ten years while chinas reforms have been going on for decades. And that makes sense, but how do you recognise the revisionism prior to the reforms having been there for 50 years? How did Mao know that Dengism was revisionist and not just a strategic retreat? Because thats exactly what Deng framed it as but I mean it’s been 50 years and it does seem like it’s more than just a temporary retreat.

Hello people, I am relatively new to Marxism and its deviations. I’m of course fully convinced of its political aspects and its philisophicak aspects aswell. I’m just not sure if I completely understand the latter.

One thing that has always troubled me, even before learning about Marx, is counsciousness. How does it work? What is it? Where does it come from?

Obviously the question of consciousness is adress in most idealist philosophy but I wanted to know how Marxists/materialists explain it.
My only understanding would be that the consciousness is the result of material conditions/environment/nature and not the opposite

Thanks in advance for your help <3

So Laos is actually one of the few remaining „socialist“ countries (in quotes because for some of these it’s debated if they actually socialist) but it’s the only one I like never see anyone talk about.

Why is that?

What specific ideology do they follow?

Are they aligned with anyone internationally (china? Russia?)

When did they have their revolution?

I think we can all agree that the great man theory is all liberal bullshit and that cult of personality is also mostly problematic.

But I’ve always wondered why socialist experiments always had such big cults of personality. Be it Stalin, Mao, the Kims, Ceaucescu, and even non established socialist movement like the Peruvian communist party.

Why is that? Especially when communist are the ones criticising the great man theory

I understand that having a unifying figure can help but it mostly brings problems imo

C’est une de mes séries de jeux préférés et comme il a fait une vidéo sur Fnaf je pourrais m’imaginer qui fasse une vidéo sur d’autre séries d’indie horror connues

Now first off im not a Trotskyist, in fact im not really sure which ideology I am because I’m very new to all this and I’m still figuring out what exactly is revisionism.

So the way I understand it, revisionism is the act of deviating Marxism from marx’ original theory. So for example a Democratic socialist is revisionist because Marx made it clear that socialism comes through revolution.

And Marx also said that Socialism was an internationalist movement, not one that develops in a single country. In fact I’ve heard many people say that communism can only exist as a global system, not in a single country, so why try to advance towards it while being isolated and without supporting revolutions worldwide.

Now I know theres probably a simole answer to that, this is not me trying to make a gotcha argument or trying to disprove Stalins idea, but rather to understand it (though for now I am not really convinced of it)

Thanks in advance and thank you socialist Reddit for helping me understand all these things about socialism🙏🙏🙏

I’ve been a bit unlucky with the matchmaking right now and so I was wondering if anyone of you might wanna play like right now or tomorrow

Now I don’t expect this to be made into a game because I don’t think it’s scary enough and rayll probably has better things to do than read random Reddit posts.

This happened to me a few months ago, I live in Berlin and so does my grandma but her house is on the edge of the city near a small forest. I’m pretty familiar with the part of the forest thats close to my grandmas house so I often go there to chill and just walk around. There are usually a lot of people in this forest because it is very close to Berlin and it’s generally pretty open to visitors, it has big enclosures with deers and boars for visitors to look at. But that day it was winter and it was in the afternoon so it wasn’t dark yet but I only had like 20min before the sun would set. I decided to go on a little walk alone because I enjoyed it and I really didn’t mind that it was about to go dark soon.

So I went off on my little walk and soon enough the sun went down and the sky was slowly turning dark blue. On my way back I spotted a deer in one of the enclosures and I had a pretty cool moment where I looked it in the eye for about 5 minutes until eig went off in the distance. From this enclosure there were 2 possible paths to take to walk home, one I usually took and another one I wasn’t too familiar with. I decided to take the latter because it was right next to the enclosure with the deers and I hoped to see more of them but I heard sounds coming from the bushes, I remembered that I had once seen a boar there (walking free so not behind and enclosure) and I was scared to come across one so I decided to turn back and take the other path. A family with a little girl was walking in front of me which reassured me because I was a bit creeped out because of the noises from the bushes and because I had played too many horror games. I heard from the side of the path some more noises it was like rustling leaves which scared me more. Right after that the family took a turn on a path I couldn’t take to walk home(it was going in the approximate direction of the noises I heard).

So I continued my way home alone, I was starting to get a bit scared when suddenly I heard loud bang ahead of me. It was very loud but at the same time I wasn’t sure if it was loud enough to be a gunshot, I figured it was either a gunshot in the far distance (I had never heard actual gunshots so I wasn’t sure how loud exactly it was) or someone playing with fireworks. I heard a few of these bangs which scared the shit out of me.

Then I approached a crossroads, the path either went right (which was the way I was going to go home) or it went up on hill straight ahead. And suddenly I heard the bang again, this time extremely loud, but what really scared me was the fact that I could see the flash of the gunshot (I was now pretty sure it was a gunshot)… and it was right at the top of the hill, about 25-30 meters ahead of me.

I started to panick, at the same time the shortest way home was to continue forward and turn right at the crossroads and then I would only be 20 meters away from the edge of the forest (which was right at the suburbs where my grandma lived) but again taking that path would mean that I would have to walk about 10meters below where I heard the gunshot. I then heard another shot, and the flash was still at the top of the hill. So I decided to turn back, but in the moment I took this decision I saw in the distance (from where I came from and was planning on going back to) a tall man walking in my direction. Going back on my footsteps to find another way home meant that I had to walk right past this tall man and I had no idea who he was and if he maybe had bad intentions, maybe he was just a random guy, but I didn’t want to figure it out myself because it was already completely dark and I was shitting myself. I started getting paranoid and since he was pretty far away and it was dark, I couldn’t see him very well and it looked like he was running (I don’t know if he was actually running or if that was just my paranoia mixed up with bad vision) so my heart beat really started pounding and I had to take a decision quickly. I opted for the first option, running right past the hill with the gunshots (that might sound stupid but the gunshots clearly weren’t directed at me and it was the shortest path to go home). And so I did.

When I ran past the hill I saw the silhouette of the guy at the top of the hill and he was clearly carrying a firearm, I think he was looking at me when I ran past him but again I’m not sure because it was dark and didn’t take the time to stop and clearly look at him.

Anyways I managed to reach the city and get home safely, however a few days later I went to see my grandma after school and was followed from the train station through the neighbourhood (though I managed to lose the mansion who was following me from a distance). Though I have to say maybe that guy was coincidentally walking the same way as me and I was just paranoid

Now to clarify some things:
- first of all, I know some will think it could be a hunter, but I really don’t think hunters are allowed to be in this part of the forest as it has many visitors and secondly, which hunter hunts in winter, when it’s dark
- and also firearms are illegal in Germany.

So my theory is that this person was a hunter or knew a hunter in order to acquire that firearm and was either illegally hunting in the area or shooting at nothing for fun… or they had malicious intents that I don’t know of. As for the tall man in the distance, in the moment I was thinking it might be a trap: someone scares me with a firearm ahead of the path while he comes toward me from behind. But looking back thats quite silly and that guy was probably there independently from the shooter. But I’m glad I didnt have to figure out myself what that random guy was doing in the forest at night.

When Mao came to power with the communist party, china was a backwards agrarian society and was in a dire need of an Industrial Revolution. And in the 50s thats what Mao wanted to do. He launched the Great Leap Forward which ended up being disastrous, with many dying of famine or disease.

Now I believe that a « great leap » was necessary in some way but it obviously failed. I know of a few policies that in part led to its failure like the 4 pests policy or making people make their own steel, but could it have been done in a better way, could it have led to great economic advancements like it was planned.

I also think that Maos economic failures are what led to the market reforms that came after, which in my opinion completely blocked the advancing of the Chinese socialist project.

So could it have gone better? Or were Market Reforms necessary either way?

First of all I’d like to say that I agree with a lot of Maos work on mass line, criticism, new democracy etc…
But what’s keeping me from being a Maoist is anti-revisionism. Of course I agree that revisionism should be fought, but how? Just executing everyone who deviates from Marxism isn’t a viable option, and if that is necessary for the system to function then maybe theres a problem with the system. I also feel like Stalinist purges were in a way problematic. I doubt that all party members that were purged were Nazis. Bukharin might’ve been a revisionist, but his core idea wasn’t problematic: socialism isn’t just poverty for everyone. So his ideas should’ve been adapted to Marxism instead of killing him.

I feel like anti-revisionism most of the times just end up being « youre not my exact type of socialism so you’ll be sent to a gulag ». Of course thats an exaggeration but it often becomes an excuse to fire someone or to make someone look bad until it doesn’t really mean anything anymore

I personally think worker self management is great and the tiroirs system is very interesting and im also a fan of a lot of Maos theory so I was wondering what Maoists think of that (not necessarily titoism but worker self management as a whole)

I often hear Maoism being called gonzalo thought but isn’t like gonzalos shining path of Peru like the most extreme and brutal version of Maoism? Or is this just propaganda? Like I’m interested in Maoism because I agree with a lot of maos theory and as it appears many advanced revolutionary groups today are maoists, but I can’t get around the fact that one of the main groups of this type of socialism has things like the „blood quota“

So is the Shining Parh and exception that Maoists generally distance themselves from? Or do they like what they did or am I completely wrong and they actually weren’t that violent

I want to note that this is only to get myself educated, it’s not to argue against anyone on whos wrong whos right and I don’t want to accuse Maoists of being blood thirsty baby eaters either

I hear people defending the market reforms and all as “building the forces of production to better be able to build socialism”. Which would be cool if they actually planned on building socialism. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that they have now built the forces of production and that they can finally turn leftwards, why do they still not do it? It’s been 50 years. Do you think they actually plan on doing it or is it just something they do to make leftists like them?