Mao more than ever! posted by Richard Seymour

I am nothing if not promiscuous. Like Mrs Prentice in What the Butler Saw, I was born with my legs apart and shall go to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin. Of course, I'm not a Maoist and have never supported the Chinese government or revered the rather repulsive figure of Mao himself. But the question we now face is why the Maoist movements are gaining such a foothold across South Asia. This article by Henry Maitles comes some way to answering that question. This follows a somewhat equivocal piece by Alex Callinicos a couple of weeks ago.

Maitles simplifies matters a bit, necessarily so, but the gist of it is correct - the Maoists do not look to the Chinese government as the model for development (rather they see it as a capitalist sell-out); they are successful because they are the most brave and committed fighters; they have generally emerged as national liberation movements; their strategy of rural mobilisation has excelled as a military strategy in economies with strong or majority feudal-agrarian structures, but has the flaw of relegating the role of the working class; and because these post-revolutionary states must survive in a hostile world, they end up being extremely authoritarian and coercive. Maitles doesn't mention the role of Stalin's Comintern in encouraging the Maoists to form a disastrous coalition with 'progressive' capitalists, and it might also be worth going into how the idiom of Marxism had to be adapted by the nationalist intelligentsia who adopted it first to fit their surroundings, which - because the urban centres were hostile and dangerous - inevitably turned to mobilising the peasantry. At any rate, whatever the misgivings one has about Maoism as an ideology, movement and strategy, it is an extremely positive development that these movements are growing in South Asia. To some extent, one has to acknowledge that radicalisation was always likely to be hegemonised by the Maoists because they are the best fighters and also because there is not a real embedded tradition of Trotskyism there - in fact, the Trotskyists in South Asia are by all accounts quite mad.

A couple of other articles worth reading. Yuri Prasad has an article in Nepal here, and Charlie Hore assesses some of the myths and monsters in a bestselling Mao biography.