Aight, so Imma put on my grad school hat for a minute. ‘Maoism’ as a term, isn’t stuff Mao did, or things that happened in China in that period. Heck, it doesn’t really even come from Asia.

Maoism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, is an ideology which proclaims itself to be the next stage in the development of Marxism, and was codified, largely, by the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso), and the network of parties that it a part of, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.

It’s called Maoism because the PCP and the RIM were grappling with the legacy of the Chinese revolution, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Reform and Opening Up under Deng Xiaoping, etc.

Think of it like this, Jesus Christ was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew, responding to the context of first century Roman Judea. Other people came along later, had a bunch of ideas about what the legacy of Jesus was, and what came out of that was Christianity. But if you hopped in your time machine and asked Jesus if he was a Christian, he would not have known what that meant.

Similarly, Marx was not a Marxist, Lenin was not a Leninist, etc. Other people had a lot of ideas about the legacies of these people, their ideas, and the revolutionary movements that they were apart of, and what develops are these ideological lineages.

So Maoism asserts that, for example, the experiences of the Mass Line, and Cultural Revolution (or at least the idea that class struggle persists under Socialism) from the Chinese experience, are universal lessons, applicable anywhere. Rather than being specific to China.

There’s more to it than that. But I really want to make it clear that Maoism is more than just “and then we kill all the sparrows and our grain harvest will collapse!”

So no, not close enough. We don’t get to throw around words, if we claim to care about opposing fascism. Don’t make me pull out the Sartre Quote.

We can, and should criticize the Trump admin, but we can do it in a way that doesn’t boil down to “what are we, a bunch of Asians?!”