Maoism (MSH)

The roots of Maoism emerged as a trend within the Second International. The Chinese People's Party was the first nonEuropean party to be admitted to the 2nd International in 1912. Zhou Enlai served as the Chinese delegate to the 1912 Basel Conference where he vigorously supported anti-militarism. This placed the CPP along the Left trend with the Bolsheviks. Within the CPP itself the three trends were industrial social democracy, peasant agrarian populist anarchism, and anti-imperialist nationalism. Mao Zedong was the leader of the Marxist faction but he was able to win the support of the peasant factions by organizing democratic people's cooperatives in the countryside during the Long March. Mao's early works on dialectics challenge the mechanistic materialism of Kautsky.

Mao played a major role in securing the October Revolution, by defeating a White-Imperialist army in Siberia, and leading an internationalist defense of Russia against Germany. The Chinese People's Liberation Army played a major role in sparking Red revolutions in Germany, Poland, Austria-Hungary, France and Italy.

At the first Congress of the Communist International, Chairman Mao laid out his thesis that imperialism is a paper tiger. Mao elaborated on Lenin's theory of uneven development to propose that the global countryside could encircle the global cities.

In 1927 Mao Zedong Thought was systematized by Josef Stalin in his work Foundations of Maoism. Stalin declared that Maoism was Marxism in the era of imperialist collapse. Mao richly developed Lenin's theory of imperialism into a fighting weapon in the hands of the oppressed people's. Mao also discovered the importance of subjective factors in socialist construction.