system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How Does Maoism Differ From Mainstream Marxist-Leninism?
gpt
Could you clarify whether you mean the difference between Maoism and the orthodox Leninism practiced early in the history of the Soviet Union or the difference between Maoism and the various modern intellectual Communist tendencies? Maoism is an "Anti-Revisionist" movement in communism which means they consider other communists (including post-Stalin USSR) to have lapsed into weaker, compromised forms of communism. Along those same lines, they're serious AF about communism. Mao wrote that "communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy."

Essentially, three of the core contrasting characteristics of Mao Zedong Thought are its intentional focus on agrarian (vs. industrial proletariat) organization, the idea that a revolution must be carried out by a party 'of the masses' rather than by a vanguard of the 'enlightened' class-conscious, and the idea that bourgeois ideology cannot be wiped out through simple political revolution, but must be destroyed in a continuing program of "Cultural Revolution" under the socialist regime.

Marx wrote about socialist revolution as a necessary byproduct of the industrialization of the working class. Mao saw the same revolutionary potential in the poorer farming classes and rallied them in great numbers (they were the vast majority of China's population) with promises of land reform during the Civil War against the Nationalists. Often when the word "Worker" appears in Maoist thought or in Chinese government policies and institutions it's as part of the "Worker-Peasant" pairing so valued by Mao. During the Cultural Revolution, after a period of intense industrialization, Mao even instituted a policy of "rustication" under which millions of urban children were sent to live and study in the countryside to instill proletarian values. A famous critic and political prisoner of China's communist party, Liu Xiaobo was sent to Mongolia under one of these programs and has written negatively about the experience. Mao did, however understand that educating the peasants and socializing agriculture would be especially challenging tasks due to the diffuse nature of the population and the differences in class consciousness and labor alienation between the farmer and the industrialized worker. He also recognized the need to industrialize China in order to move forward the processes of collectivization and to more effectively resist outside Imperialism.

>The present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China's central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.

Mao's theories of the "People's War" and "Mass Line" dovetail nicely with his focus on peasant farmers. The people's war is a protracted revolutionary guerilla war of attrition based on creating small centers of rebellion embedded with peasants in the remote countryside, eventually establishing political order there and linking and consolidating areas of control in order to force the government to fight the communists where they're likely to be at a disadvantage. The "Mass Line" is a related post-revolutionary tactic of embedding with the masses, learning and responding to their needs, educating them on communist doctrine, and consolidating support for the Party.

>We should go to the masses and learn from them, synthesize their experience into better, articulated principles and methods, then do propaganda among the masses, and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and help them achieve liberation and happiness.

Cultural Revolution is one of the more intense parts of Maoism. About 18 years after the revolution, Mao declared that Revisionists and Bourgeois Capitalist elements had infiltrated the Communist Party bureaucracy and that power would have to be consolidated through a program of Mass Movement to wipe out bourgeois values and replace them with socialist ones once and for all. Huge numbers of people participated in public shaming, and sometimes beating or execution of those identified as counterrevolutionaries. Millions took to the streets in public demonstrations against those suspected of advancing revisionism. This allowed Mao to purge the party of some of those bureaucrats considered to be revisionaries, including Deng Xiaopeng, who would later become Premier after Mao's death in a turn of events still decried by hardline Maoists around the world to this day.

>Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: It must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie [...] to change the outlook of society. Currently, our objective is to struggle against and crush those people in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.