What is Maoism? | Ideology explained

This video is an explanation of the basics of Maoism. What it means, how it seeks to start a revolution, who is supposed to be the driving force in it and why the bourgeoisie is supposed to stay in power under a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Twitter:   / viki1999yt  

Transcript:
Hello everybody. Today I will tell you about Maoism. Or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as it’s sometimes called. It’s just a different word for the same thing. As the name suggest Marxism-Leninism-Maoism heavily builds upon the ideas of Marxism and Leninism. Well really putting “Marxism” in the name is just intended to make it seem more legitimate by tying it directly to Marx.
A big core of Leninism which I glossed over in the Last video for the sake of time is. The idea of Imperialism as the highest Stage of capitalism. Lenin wrote a book about that and to sum it up with almost painfully few words. In short the theory goes that capitalism always needs exploited labour in one place to be able to create wealth.
Lenin predicted that industrialized countries would use cheap labour from their colonies for manufacturing instead of the local proletariat. This would mean that the capitalists would only be surrounded by relatively-wealthy workers who would not be ready for a revolution and that the working class of a semi-capitalist country, like Russia at the time, has to take power before capitalism can manifest itself like that.
Mao build on this so it will be important in a second. Let’s have a look at the context in which those theories where though up. Essentially to skip over a lot of detail china was attacked and forced to submit to imperialist nations for the entirety of the and 19th and early 20th century. In the 1930s the Chinese civil war was going on and Mao was already fighting in that.
Then the Japanese attacked and the different factions of the civil war all allied to defeat the Japanese fascists. After that they continued to fight, and Mao won, eventually proclaiming the people’s republic of china. And Mao came up with his theories around here. During the civil war and before the Japanese invasion.
Mao’s theory was shaped by his experiences and he experienced that china was no where near a capitalist state as Marx assumed it was necessary for the revolution. But Mao also saw that the proletariat in the industrialized nations began to become comfortable in their conditions. The bourgeoisie had shared their wealth and privileges with them and Mao theorized that the proletariat of the imperialist nations may never rise against the bourgeoisie.
So, Mao noticed that a) His fellow Chinese weren’t quite the industrialized workers Marx wanted to lead the evolution and b) That the industrialized workers may never start the revolution. Because of his experiences Mao’s theories changed. He moved away from the industrial workers as the driving force of revolution and towards the poor exploited farmers as the driving force.
He also took notes form the model of the Vanguard party Lenin had used and implemented those. During the civil war Mao relied on Farmers to fight for him and this convinced him that they would carry the revolution and liberate the people.
Since it is widely believed that only capitalism can produce the abundance of resources socialism needs. Mao decided that a transition from, de facto feudalism to socialism was not possible since there was not enough wealth around to distribute. Because of this Mao implemented a rule of the proletariat but allowed the bourgeoise to continue to exist in the form of the national bourgeoise.
The national bourgeoise was used as an ally to the working class in the liberation from imperialist rule. This is called new democracy. Later the bourgeoise would be allowed to develop the nation under the rule of the proletariat. Once the industry of the country is sufficiently advanced the proletariat takes over the means of production and uses them to liberate the proletariat of all nations.
There are of course problems with this plan. The main one is that it can be very hard to judge when the industry is sufficiently advanced and can be given to the proletariat. And that’s not to mention the fact that it feels really immoral to have the proletariat fight for freedom just for them to have to go back to work for the national bourgeoisie the day after the revolution.
Though on the other hand I have to admit that not industrializing like that might have led to china simply being overrun by imperialist forces again. Nowadays Maoism is very popular with socialist parties especially in the 3rd world. China still holds onto those theories to some extent. China is often accused of betraying the revolution by allowing their national bourgeoisie to continue to develop industry but looking at the theory they use it seems like that was the plan.