I'm not sure you understand scientific socialism then. The scientific part requires communists to apply dialectical and historical materialism to improve their revolutionary methods. If you only look at the successes you don't see what not to do or patterns of failure your movement might be falling into.
What you're saying is tautological, why bother attempting any revolution if there's a chance of failure? Surely living under oppressive bourgeois and semi-feudal regimes is acceptable if you can't guarantee you'll win, right?
You're 100% correct about assessing the conditions and the gravity of guerilla warfare, but I don't think any of the extant maoist movements have made presumptions about their progress. The Naxals and CPP-NPA didn't launch their PPWs on a whim and while there's discussions to be had about the length of their PPWs the fact they haven't lost yet is notable when you compare them to how the PCP waned after Gonzalo's arrest. Even the underground group behind Austin Red Guard never had delusions that they were ready to launch a people's war.
Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea were/are not MLMaoist because MLM did not exist at the time and they don't identify as such now, so Maoists don't claim them when discussing the international Maoist movement. That's why the PCP, CPP, CPN, CPI(m), TKP/ML, etc gets brought up as common examples, because those are parties that directly contributed to the development of MLM and have adopted it as their ideology. Also Maoism is more than just PPW (and even that is still in debate), so Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, etc are all contextualized as part of the MLM continuity, but not as examples of the ideology which evolved after them.
The average Maoist is not an 18 year old white college student, they are from the third world of various ages and backgrounds. I think it's extremely dismissive of ongoing communist movements to call them romanticist and idealizing struggle after stating how heavily revolution weighs on you while people are choosing to continue their revolutions. If you're talking about your perception of western Maoists, sure, there's probably a fair number of MLM romanticists same as there are in anarchist and ML circles. I don't think it's fair to tar one particular tendency with something that's symptomatic of all western leftists to some degree.
In science you use a null hypothesis to determine like, is the thing I'm proposing even worth doing? Is my hypothesis completely wrong?
To give an example because my plain-english attempts to explain stuff are usually cruddy: I see two doors, 🚪A and 🚪B. One door, 🚪A is of average width and height and the other, 🚪B is about 2/3rd's the height, same width.
People walk through the 🚪doors, I look and think I see a pattern. What I think is that people who are tall, will not go through 🚪B, why? Yeah maybe because tall people really really don't like it. Maybe they are entitled since they are generally viewed favourable in terms of dating on average at least. Maybe tall people just don't see the 🚪B, they only see things at a certain height.
Really I know it's physically possible, I just need to start somewhere, so I put people into two bins, tall and not-tall. I count 100 people walking through the 🚪doors and my null hypothesis, is something I can be confident in saying is not true. Like the opposite of what I want. My null hypothesis then is that no tall people go through 🚪B
Ok let's look at the data to see if we can reject my null hypothesis or not. Excuse the table formatting
🚪A 🚪B
Tall: 463
Not-Tall: 3714
Oh wow look at that! Ok now I can move on to my real question, which is, do people who are tall like to go through 🚪doors which are of lower height? This is much harder. Maybe I'll say if there is a preference of like 90%, so 90% of tall people go through regular height 🚪doors that means that they don't like going through shorter height 🚪doors. I also need to know how many people generally like to go through 🚪doors of shorter height. Because if tall people prefer regular 🚪doors as much as non-tall people, then height of the individual, tall or not, would not play a role in the difference.
Since I was able to eliminate the idea that tall people do not go through shorter 🚪doors, I can move on to other questions which depend on the initial null hypothesis to be false. Because, why waste time if our hunches or guesses (i.e our _hypotheses) are not on the right track?
Ok, does this relate. I'm skipping stuff for brevity, and I think you can still get it bcuz of scientific socialism & all that goodness. These 'failures' can tell us what not to do. And more importantly, these 'failures' failed in a specific way! Why that specific way? Because the overall 'failure' is the result of a ton of smaller 'failures' and 'successes' and we will say stuff that didn't really affect anything. Did the weather during a specific guerrilla attack lead to the end failure? Did a comrade in a mid-level position decrease the fighting power of the fighters? Are guerrilla tactics different in the 80s (I think it was the 80s?) and because tactics from the civil war in China were used, that was what ultimately led to failure?
The thing is there is likely some useful information. You're not wrong when you say it is a failure and thus not worth studying or that there is no point considering it. And others with different knowledge may find something useful. The trick is–you cannot know until you try. Because a presumption or prediction is a model, or something in your head. And as dialectical materialists we must accept that what is in our head is not the same as the external world, i.e. the stuff _outside of our head.
Again it's not that you are wrong; it's only, that is a difficult, perhaps impossible thing to know without actually putting in the work and effort.
One other way, think of these as experiments, not all experiments succeed, and why they fail helps you figure out how to run the experiment next time.
Speaking purely personally, "the most advanced form of scientific socialism" is because this is the main tendency attempting to grapple with failures of past and present communist movements (including it's own). Most of the time I get in conversations with MLs about these MLM parties, especially the ones involved in armed struggles, there's often heavy resistance to paying them any sort of mind or any because the PCP lost or the CPP haven't won yet or the CPI(m) call China imperialist. I just want some comradely critical analysis instead of "Gonzalo personally ate one million babies, checkmate ultra" 😔
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I'm not sure you understand scientific socialism then. The scientific part requires communists to apply dialectical and historical materialism to improve their revolutionary methods. If you only look at the successes you don't see what not to do or patterns of failure your movement might be falling into.
What you're saying is tautological, why bother attempting any revolution if there's a chance of failure? Surely living under oppressive bourgeois and semi-feudal regimes is acceptable if you can't guarantee you'll win, right?
Removed by mod
You're 100% correct about assessing the conditions and the gravity of guerilla warfare, but I don't think any of the extant maoist movements have made presumptions about their progress. The Naxals and CPP-NPA didn't launch their PPWs on a whim and while there's discussions to be had about the length of their PPWs the fact they haven't lost yet is notable when you compare them to how the PCP waned after Gonzalo's arrest. Even the underground group behind Austin Red Guard never had delusions that they were ready to launch a people's war.
Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea were/are not MLMaoist because MLM did not exist at the time and they don't identify as such now, so Maoists don't claim them when discussing the international Maoist movement. That's why the PCP, CPP, CPN, CPI(m), TKP/ML, etc gets brought up as common examples, because those are parties that directly contributed to the development of MLM and have adopted it as their ideology. Also Maoism is more than just PPW (and even that is still in debate), so Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, etc are all contextualized as part of the MLM continuity, but not as examples of the ideology which evolved after them.
The average Maoist is not an 18 year old white college student, they are from the third world of various ages and backgrounds. I think it's extremely dismissive of ongoing communist movements to call them romanticist and idealizing struggle after stating how heavily revolution weighs on you while people are choosing to continue their revolutions. If you're talking about your perception of western Maoists, sure, there's probably a fair number of MLM romanticists same as there are in anarchist and ML circles. I don't think it's fair to tar one particular tendency with something that's symptomatic of all western leftists to some degree.
In science you use a null hypothesis to determine like, is the thing I'm proposing even worth doing? Is my hypothesis completely wrong?
To give an example because my plain-english attempts to explain stuff are usually cruddy: I see two doors, 🚪A and 🚪B. One door, 🚪A is of average width and height and the other, 🚪B is about 2/3rd's the height, same width.
People walk through the 🚪doors, I look and think I see a pattern. What I think is that people who are tall, will not go through 🚪B, why? Yeah maybe because tall people really really don't like it. Maybe they are entitled since they are generally viewed favourable in terms of dating on average at least. Maybe tall people just don't see the 🚪B, they only see things at a certain height.
Really I know it's physically possible, I just need to start somewhere, so I put people into two bins, tall and not-tall. I count 100 people walking through the 🚪doors and my null hypothesis, is something I can be confident in saying is not true. Like the opposite of what I want. My null hypothesis then is that no tall people go through 🚪B
Ok let's look at the data to see if we can reject my null hypothesis or not. Excuse the table formatting
🚪A 🚪B Tall: 46 3 Not-Tall: 37 14Oh wow look at that! Ok now I can move on to my real question, which is, do people who are tall like to go through 🚪doors which are of lower height? This is much harder. Maybe I'll say if there is a preference of like 90%, so 90% of tall people go through regular height 🚪doors that means that they don't like going through shorter height 🚪doors. I also need to know how many people generally like to go through 🚪doors of shorter height. Because if tall people prefer regular 🚪doors as much as non-tall people, then height of the individual, tall or not, would not play a role in the difference.
Since I was able to eliminate the idea that tall people do not go through shorter 🚪doors, I can move on to other questions which depend on the initial null hypothesis to be false. Because, why waste time if our hunches or guesses (i.e our _hypotheses) are not on the right track?
Ok, does this relate. I'm skipping stuff for brevity, and I think you can still get it bcuz of scientific socialism & all that goodness. These 'failures' can tell us what not to do. And more importantly, these 'failures' failed in a specific way! Why that specific way? Because the overall 'failure' is the result of a ton of smaller 'failures' and 'successes' and we will say stuff that didn't really affect anything. Did the weather during a specific guerrilla attack lead to the end failure? Did a comrade in a mid-level position decrease the fighting power of the fighters? Are guerrilla tactics different in the 80s (I think it was the 80s?) and because tactics from the civil war in China were used, that was what ultimately led to failure?
The thing is there is likely some useful information. You're not wrong when you say it is a failure and thus not worth studying or that there is no point considering it. And others with different knowledge may find something useful. The trick is–you cannot know until you try. Because a presumption or prediction is a model, or something in your head. And as dialectical materialists we must accept that what is in our head is not the same as the external world, i.e. the stuff _outside of our head.
Again it's not that you are wrong; it's only, that is a difficult, perhaps impossible thing to know without actually putting in the work and effort.
One other way, think of these as experiments, not all experiments succeed, and why they fail helps you figure out how to run the experiment next time.
Removed by mod
Speaking purely personally, "the most advanced form of scientific socialism" is because this is the main tendency attempting to grapple with failures of past and present communist movements (including it's own). Most of the time I get in conversations with MLs about these MLM parties, especially the ones involved in armed struggles, there's often heavy resistance to paying them any sort of mind or any because the PCP lost or the CPP haven't won yet or the CPI(m) call China imperialist. I just want some comradely critical analysis instead of "Gonzalo personally ate one million babies, checkmate ultra" 😔
well, we at least ought to study them to see what went wrong and why they thought it would work