Moaists

Naxalites (Maoist) in Bihar

Maoism, variably and officially known as Mao Zedong Thought (traditional Chinese: 毛澤東思想; simplified Chinese: 毛泽东思想; pinyin: Máo Zédōng Sīxiǎng), is a variant of Marxism derived from the teachings of the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong (Wade-Giles Romanization: “Mao Tse-tung”), widely applied as the political and military guiding ideology in the Communist Party of China (CPC) from Mao’s ascendancy to its leadership until the inception of Deng Xiaoping Theory and Chinese economic reforms in 1978. It is also applied internationally in contemporary times. Maoist organizations exist in Peru, India, and most prominently, Nepal. Its basic tenets include a revolutionary struggle of the vast majority of people termed a People’s War involving peasants, and its military strategies essentially involved guerrilla war tactics focused on surrounding the cities from the countryside with a non-professional, popular armed forces. In its post-revolutionary period, Mao Zedong Thought is defined in the CPC’s Constitution as “Marxism-Leninism applied in a Chinese context”, synthesized by Mao Zedong and China’s first-generation leaders. It provided the CPC’s first comprehensive theoretical guideline with regards to how to continue socialist revolution, the creation of a socialist society, socialist military construction, and highlights various contradictions in society to be addressed by what is termed “socialist construction”. The ideology survives in name today on the Communist Party’s Constitution; it is described as the guiding thought that created “new China” and a revolutionary concept against imperialism and feudalism. Maoism generally discredits the socialist framework of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev and dismisses it as Communist revisionism. Some critics claim that Maoists see Joseph Stalin as the last true socialist leader of the Soviet Union, although allowing the Maoist assessments of Stalin vary between the extremely positive and the more ambivalent. whereas some political philosophers have seen in Maoism an attempt to combine Confucianism and Socialism – what one such called ‘a third way between communism and capitalism’