A critique of Western Maoism: 18 Points

Haphazard musings: 18 points which will be gone into in more detail.

The categorical imperative - unconditional help for third world liberation movements, (e.g. the Maoist Le Dantec described giving every assistance to National Liberation Movements as a "categorical imperative"). This was mainly the moral appeal of Third World movements. Inflexible ideological principals meant the Maoists were unable to adjust to the politics of expediency, so finally many chose that final expediency - drink and drugs.
Populism. Bringing stars down to an everyday dimension by emphasizing their ordinariness and interest in the interviewer e.g. Simone Signoret. Maoist populism and voluntarism made them a prisoner of all the liberal help they could muster which of course they then had to justify.
The effect of subsequent events in Indo China on Maoist ideology during the 1970s particularly the protracted war between Vietnam and Cambodia and Vietnam and China in the intensifying conflict between Russian and Chinese Imperialism. This finally shattered the Maoist movement. For individuals reared on ideological dramas of national liberation the appalling deeds especially of the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia (Le Dantec disapprovingly called them, "bare footed angel exterminators") were shocking in the extreme shaking the foundation of their beliefs. This disillusion with 'revolutionary' national liberation struggles did not by any means lead to a clarification of the social revolutionary project. Rather ditching the former meant abandoning the later which shows the extent to which they had become confused and lost along with the rest of the mainstream of Western Leftism.
As a correlative of the above we must consider the enormous influence of Lenin's Imperialism on mainstream leftism and given a new lease of life by Lin Piao's notion of "the fields surrounding the factories". Actually the strategies advocated by Lenin were to be abandoned in the Comintern in the 1930s when colonial struggles were viewed as helping the fascist menace because they weakened France and Britain. This about turn on behalf of the Soviet Union towards the colonial peoples was to render an invaluable service to Western liberalism. Henceforth the colonial revolutions were viewed as happening neither at the behest of Soviet 'communism' or Western Capitalism. They were above all a human protest against degradation, a last despairing and noble effort at renewal between the infernal pincers of the dominant powers. For a decade or so they were the counterbalance to existential suffering, the incorruptible epicentre of a dishonoured planet.
The tremendous effect of Stalin's Gulag on France in comparison to its relatively negligible effect in the UK becoming the foundation of the blasé opportunist and conservative pessimism of the Nouvelle Philosophes in the early 1970s strongly influenced by that cardboard cut out imitation of Dostoevsky in the shape of that miserable throwback Alexander Solshenitsyn.
Stunted imaginations: Somewhere on earth there walks a God. The need to have a God made man - a demiurge – is an important trait in French society doubtless with a base in Catholicism. That 'socialism' was in existence somewhere on the planet had become something of need for many members of the French working class long instructed by the French Communist party to see in the Soviet Union "a socialist country". The spectacular eruption of Maoism in France meant the model could have a renewed lease of life.
Maoism was a disintegrating Leninism. They questioned Leninism and the guiding role of the party thus in a chaotic way – unbeknown even to themselves - trashing the practical and theoretical existence of 'the party'.....
...Followed by that hoary old dualism, the failure to distinguish between "the party" and class. This blatant substitutionism addresses the class from outside, from a political framework and with pre-empted prognosis, one that maintains the distinction between the leaders and the led. To realise that the smashing of state-machinery and the continued existence of an authority above that of the class itself must necessarily lead to the re-establishment of the state. It is merely the rehash of a Leninist type opportunism re The State and Revolution when Lenin used Pannekoek's ideas on the overthrow of the nation state approvingly at the same time as he wished to create a new state. The Maoists simply couldn't see that the re-establishment of the state merely reorganises capital.
Maoist practise was often at loggerheads - again unbeknown to themselves - with their ideology. They had less respect for property than the Trotskyists and were more prepared to turn over cars in barricade fighting and didn't really care (rightly) if they were workers cars or cars belonging to the middle classes. They had a gut critique of capitalist waste and had some conviction that so much of capitalist production today had no potential use-value and would have to be terminated on the morrow of the revolution. This was a factor in orienting the Maoists towards Third Worldism and a preference for underdevelopment). Their generalised attack on over-development and the useless proliferation of trivial consumption instigated reactions of horror from the Communist party and the Trotskyists who tended to label it as anti-working class. (For instance, the Maoists usually regarded the private car as a redundant mode of transport). No wonder that many Maoists in the early 1970s drifted into the ecology movement. Intuitively but again lacking theoretical acumen the Maoists could see how consumerism isolated and privatised the individual reducing the social spontaneity of people in general. Regarding some of these gut dispositions it has to be said we had much sympathy for them though that was as far as it went for reasons we will further elaborate on in this long text.
The Maoists initially were often more addicted to what has become bourgeois culture than many other members of society - listening to Beethoven etc. Then they encountered Dada and tit bits of situationist critique only to make a mess of both.
The self and a collective self-fulfillment in a total social revolutionary becoming were replaced with a self-denying / selflessness.
The French and Italian Resistance to fascism: The Maoists were anxious to find in the relatively recent past something on which to build, something that would awaken powerful revolutionary echoes in the working class. Hence on the one hand, the Maoists support for - and use of - 'revolutionary' trade union leaders in the 1920s subsequently purged by Stalin and, on the other hand, their continual evocation of the Resistance without caring if it aroused proud national sentiments which the French Communist party continually plays on.
Their desire for popularity means they are prepared to make an indiscriminate use of popular folk lore failing to see how its initial usage can contaminate its secondary function and even drown it, (e.g. La Gauche Proletarienne laying wreaths to the Resistance alongside the then leader of the Gaullist party, Georges Pompidou and hailing it as a victory!) Castoriadis's writings from Socialisme ou Barbarie (and which Guy Debord had utilised in the early 1960s) on the Resistance obviously had had no impact upon the theoretical illiteracy of the Maoists who only latterly after their collapse, have 'discovered' Castoriadis. In La Societe Bureaucratique, Castoriadis says,

"... the participation of the masses in this struggle [the Resistance] had been at once the most active and the most passive possible. It was active up to the limits of the possible, on the physical level, on the organizational level, on the tactical level. At the same time their attitude was absolutely passive on the level of the direction of the political content of the movement of consciousness..... in this struggle, no clarification was manifest, no supercession of nationalist illusions, no autonomy in relation to the organizations. It's as if the masses delegated all thought, all reflection, all leadership of the movement to the organizations.... the Stalinist party not only utilized this attitude but did all it could to reinforce it."
It was this confusion that the Maoists also thought revolutionary and probably secretly wished to reproduce it anyway though some were appalled by its reproduction. Thus Le Dantec mentions the attempt,

"to invent a totally uninhibited politics, based on the fusion between French revolutionary tradition (direct action and resistance) and the essence of Maoism, (a conception entirely emancipated from Leninism in our interpretation)."

Previously Le Dantec had said,

"We had the impression of being much more cunning, much better instructed and much less corrupt than our elders, thinking we had little chance of falling again into the ruts of the past"

(Les Dangers du Soleil).
When the Maoists called for Popular Unity in the early 1970s, they also placed themselves on the same terrain as the Communist parties - a fact, which did not go unnoticed. The more the original ideology fractured the more the mass of Maoists burnt out into an updated social democracy rather than drift into ultra leftist critique, though a sizable minority did just that. Even then however their rigid character armouring prevented them taking on board a more relevant total revolutionary critique.
A conservative opposition to tourism which emphasized not the boredom, misery and frustration of tourism but the fact that tourism was destroying the 'natural' beauty of 'authentic' peasant cultures in Brittany, Languedoc etc which of course was happening but without coming to grips with the dead life of alienated consumption and the concept of the mass tourist as a bunch of very unhappy, lost and alienated consumers.
Closely connected to point 15, a move from internationalism to regionalism took place slowly paralleling a similar momentum from direct action to terrorism.
Mao's particular relationship with the past. (C.f. Sun Yat–Sen, "In China, the majority of individual endowed with a powerful ambition, have from antiquity onwards dreamed of becoming emperor----When I began to advocate revolution, six or seven out of ten of those who rallied around were harbouring this type of imperial dream at the outset") As Cajo Brendel pointed out, in a manner of speaking Confucius still lives and a criticism of Confucius had some bearing on the contemporary behaviour of the party. We must add to this by asking another question: Taoism existed as a subversive proto scientific doctrine for millennia in China. Its influence amongst contemporary hippy circles also has its subversive side. However, one cannot say the same for either Zen or more orthodox Buddhism even though there contemporary existence does carry some subversive weight. In this eclectic borrowing from oriental sources, there is one religion which fails to have much modern appeal – Confucionism - Why?

A critique of Western Maoism: 18 Points

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