My favorite is the class collaborationist USSR where they treated the Kulaks with gentle care and fostered peace with them.
class collaboration is when the entire peasant class revolts against their landlords, publicly executes them, and then redistributes the land among themselves
a government with no mechanisms for accountability to the people
I’m no Mao expert, but isn’t accountability to people (especially the mass line) a huge component of Maoism?
That depends on your definition of “people”.
Are we talking about the urban professionals and military officers working on behalf of the colonialist occupation? Or the unwashed savages doing manual labor in the mines and fields and factories?
Hypothetically the mass line is about only doing things that the people want. In practice there’s a disconnect between the people and the privileged political class (same as basically every country to ever exist). I will say that China at least has been creating systems to try and understand the needs of the people that can absolutely be expropriated at some point and serve them more effectively.
Like with the poverty alleviation stuff, there was constant surveying and asking the people what they wanted and allocation of resources based on those surveys. Like if a town had a lot of people who wanted to brew or make bread or get into textiles, investment in education and production would be allocated to those things.
A lot of people wanted more ability to travel for work, so expansion of rail and road infrastructure was a big thing.
I think these tools are a new step towards a better democracy, but by no means are they an ends. They still aren’t wielded by the people directly and are still controlled primarily by the party.
But you can clearly see the outline of Maoist mass line theory existing even withing the bureaucratic systems of the CPC.
My favorite part about maoism is how traditionalist it is. That’s why they had a great leap backwards where they all politely appreciated ancient statues.
Thesis: very wordy leftist memes
Antithesis: anticommunist memes
Synthesis:
