maoist-not-maoist political organisations that emerged from the new left [Archive]

ed miliband

17th April 2012, 18:46

"maoist-not-maoist" - wtf does that mean right? idk, i just needed to find a way to describe groups like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sojourner_Truth_Organization

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Flame_(political_group)

i don't know much about them but they interest me, particularly the way they seemed to arrive at politics similar to groups like lotta continua via the work of clr james et al; "autonomy of social struggles" and stuff like that. but then they are also often described as either maoist or "libertarian maoist", so i'm interested re: where that description emerged from. (tho a big flame pamphlet i found described their politics as "libertarian marxist", based on the works of "marx, lenin and mao" lol).

also modern groups like:

http://gatheringforces.org/
http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/

seem to have similar positions.

islandmilitia

17th April 2012, 19:10

"maoist-not-maoist" - wtf does that mean right? idk, i just needed to find a way to describe groups like...

What you have to keep in mind is that during the 1960s, China had appeal across a large section of the left, and a large part of this appeal was to do with the aesthetics of the Cultural Revolution. Elbaum talks about this explicitly in his book, Revolution in the Air, and in particular he says that the Cultural Revolution was admired because it seemed to promise a less bureaucratic form of socialism compared to what had come into existence in the USSR, because of ordinary people theoretically being able to challenge and criticize officials through mechanisms like big character posters, for example, and because of Chinese socialism being about moral transformation rather than the pragmatic and technocratic priorities of the Soviets. If you acknowledge that China was admired because the Cultural Revolution was identified with spontaneity and mass democracy (regardless of whether this was an accurate interpretation of the reality in China) then it becomes understandable as to why groups like Lotta Continua were sometimes associated with the Maoist tradition.

There has arguably always been something of a tension within international Maoism between those groups who identified with China because they saw the Chinese leadership to be following the policies of orthodox Stalinism and those groups who identified with China because China was seen to be breaking away from the Soviet legacy - and you can see that individual countries often leaned towards one of the two trends, so that France, for example, was characterized by more Maoist organizations of the more anarchist and democratic kind, which is why there was such close contact between French Maoism and the emergent feminist and queer movements. On the specific case of Big Flame, you might be interested in this history site, bigflameuk . wordpress . com, and the posts under the China tag in particular, as the authors argue that there was actually no unified position within the organization on whether China could be understood in the same terms as states in Eastern Europe, for example, but that terms like "Maoist" and "soft-Maoist" have generally been applied by people outside of the organization, because Big Flame never definitively identified with the Maoist tradition, and were overall ambiguous in their orientation towards China.