Tbh, I think my anarchist friends here would find a lot to appreciate in Mao.
I once heard Maoism jokingly described as “Anarcho-Stalinism” and that comes from Mao’s insistence, via The Mass Line and the Cultural Revolution, that the party should always root itself in the masses, and that the masses, in turn, should act as a check on the party’s petty bourgeois elements.
He’s very interested in the dialectical relationship between top-down and bottom-up structures in revolution,and how they interact
And anarchists are more interested in destroying the top/bottom approach and focusing on the sideways interactions.
Just as capitalism will always exploit, so will the state. Systems where we must constantly battle to keep them under control while we offload our duties onto them are bound to fail over time.
Tbh, I think my anarchist friends here would find a lot to appreciate in Mao.
I once heard Maoism jokingly described as “Anarcho-Stalinism” and that comes from Mao’s insistence, via The Mass Line and the Cultural Revolution, that the party should always root itself in the masses, and that the masses, in turn, should act as a check on the party’s petty bourgeois elements.
He’s very interested in the dialectical relationship between top-down and bottom-up structures in revolution,and how they interact
And anarchists are more interested in destroying the top/bottom approach and focusing on the sideways interactions.
Just as capitalism will always exploit, so will the state. Systems where we must constantly battle to keep them under control while we offload our duties onto them are bound to fail over time.