Please ask me questions, or maybe even @Alaskaball about the party. I will answer to the best of my ability, or will refer to the party for question I do not. We need to build the base of cadre who will help lead the proletariat. It took the Bolsheviks years to develop, and we must start doing the same if there is any hope for the oppressed peoples of the world.
Passion for our Ideology, and compassion for our comrades!
What's PCUSA's take on Mao's writings such as On Practice and On Contradiction or on points about the mass line (which, I think are present in Lenin's writings but not as explicitly as Mao's)?
We’ve studied those books actually and other works from him and different revolutionaries. Scientific Socialism is the basis for being able to see what worked in past socialist states, what did not, and how to apply them (if possible) to our struggle in the modern day. Again though, we are an explicit ML party, so we have criticisms of people like Mao, but so we do of Lenin, Stalin, etc.
I think of Mao as an ML (and figure that he did too) and it's good to see that criticisms are considered. I was just a little concerned when I was poking around the site, doing a ctrl+f for 'mao' and the only thing that kept coming up was the part in the platform about defending AES from 'maoist' (amongst others), which... yeah, I could see that being a good stance. When I'm looking at an org, I'm looking for any sort of dogmatism or anti-materialist clinging to the past (or unnecessary sectarianism, by that I mean splitting hairs between whos who, labeling every little thing) , these two being something of an non-scientific socialism, I think.