Maoism

[Red Subverter]

What exactly is Maoism? Can someone please explain?

[Tablo]

It is my understanding that is an adaptation of Leninism focusing on a protracted peoples war acted out largely by the peasants, but I may be way off.

[Invincible Summer]

There are like 5 threads on the first 2-3 pages of this forum on Maoism...

But Tsukae's post is a fairly concise definition, from what I know about Maoism.

However, I'd like to add that Maoism also has an emphasis on:
- the continuation of class struggle even during the revolutionary period (basically a 'weeding out' of reactionaries);
- the unity of the majority of people (lumpen, proletariat, peasantry, I believe even revolutionary petit-bourgeois) to further revolution
- the above is done with the use of the "Mass Line": this is basically the revolutionaries taking the concerns, etc of the masses, applying revolutionary Marxist-Leninist theory to these concerns to attempt to create solutions, then bringing these "revised" ideas back to the masses to radicalize them

I believe that the reason Maoism focuses on the peasantry is simply because China at the time was primarily composed of peasants, not an urban proletariat like the industrialized West. Maoism basically promotes the idea that the peasantry can carry out both the bourgeois and socialist revolutions, contrary to more traditional Leninist thought.

Yeah, it's not 100% applicable to industrialized nations (although people are working on the theoretical aspect of this), but it's pretty important stuff for the developing world, which is where it's more likely for radical communist movements to take place anyway