What went right?

The cultural revolution.

Best day of my life, greatest tragedy is they didn't annihilate everything to do with Confucius when they had the chance.

good writer, shit leader
in the end it was REVISIONISM

...

A lot of stuff, but Mao was kind of an iffy leader. I always joke that Marxist-Leninist-Maoists criticize Mao more than anyone else. He made a lot of good contributions to theory (PPW, Cultural Revolution, etc.) but he also made a good amount of bad ones (Three Worlds Theory comes to mind.) When MLM was synthesized we moved away from the bad contributions associated with MZT.
Mao also had a huge issue with cult of personality. He personally helped to foster it and there were many issues as a result of the immense CoP surrounding him. Cults of Personality always compromise democracy in some form (we can see an extreme version of that today in the DPRK,) and while this was somewhat of an issue in Maoist China, it wasn't the biggest one connected to that. The Cultural Revolution and general anti-revisionism were so stored in Mao as a person that when he died everything basically immediately went to shit. The Cultural Revolution ended and people like Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping came to power (this was in part helped by Mao's somewhat rightward turn by the end of his life, but I think it can be mostly blamed on hero worship.)
A major issue that I see with MLM today is refusal to acknowledge the negative effects of hero worship. In Peru, the cult of personality surrounding Presidente Gonzalo caused the revolution to come to a grinding halt as soon as he was captured. While there are certainly groups that do realize the importance of avoiding hero worship (the NPA and the Naxalites), there are also many groups that don't (Nepalese Maoists and the RCPUSA.)

sorry for the shitty formatting lmao

DENG XIAPING DID NOTHING WRONG

What do you think about the "ultra-left" in the GPCR such as Shengwulian? Would you agree that the brutal suppression of the "ultra-left" already marked a rightwing turn from the Maoists before the 70s

Also one thing I don't like about MLM is some of you guys uphold stalin despite having intelligent criticisms of him, such as the nonsense catchphrase 70% good 30% bad.

Also what do you think about Zizek's take on Mao?

www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm

read zizek

Note: When criticized for citing Jung Chang's book zizek instead cited Yang Jisheng's book, is Yang Jisheng's book credible on the GLF?

nothing, china didn't become a strong nation until after mao died, also mao was imcompetant,

Also didn't Mao appoint Hua Guofeng as his successor?

Is it supposed to mean something?

not a famine ridden shithole

Good post

I wouldn't necessarily say that that represents a qualitative step to the right, although it could be viewed as a foundation for later right-deviations.

I had not previously read that Zizek article and I found it very interesting. However, I have a few major issues with it. It appears to me that the section regarding Mao's writings on dialectics seemed to me to be disregarding the context for Mao's statements on the nature of synthesis (many people having an idealized view of synthesis for example) in favor of a more dogmatic semantic argument.
The section about Mao's view of human cost was a major misrepresentation in my opinion. The idea that Mao intentionally starved tens of millions of people because he thought it was worth it is pretty ridiculous (not to mention rather unsubstantiated.) Mao was very focused on keeping the loyalty of the masses, and one would imagine that the sort of loyalty the masses still had for him after that would not be possible if he had intentionally starved millions of them. If the Shining Path in Peru lost the confidence of many people with a comparatively miniscule massacre, it doesn't seem realistic. In order to reconcile the support from the masses with a claim that he purposefully murdered them, you'd have to take a sort of view that the masses of people aren't intelligent and are just blindly following him. One would have to presuppose that the people were entirely mislead and believed in him for no reason. To quote Carlyle on the subject:
"Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul'd life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks."
The idea that virtually the entire country would have followed Mao so vigilantly and intensely if he had betrayed them in such a way just doesn't make sense.
Another issue that I have is his criticism of the Cultural Revolution as "not a true negation of the past, it was rather an impotent passage à bearing witness to the failure to get rid of the past." Of course there was a failure to get rid of the past, and of course that's why the Cultural Revolution happened. What sort of revolution would entirely destroy the past save a Posadas-style nuclear revolution?

There are many good criticisms, and many that I agree with. However, I agree with these criticisms in the context of MLM. MLM has never been dogmatically MZT, and it has definitely never been MTW.

In regards to Yang Jisheng's book, I haven't read it haha. I can however link you to a few resources that address the ideas presented in Jisheng's book, if not addressing the book itself (it seems to me that he switched from Chang's to Jisheng's as a cop out based on the fact that there's more material directed at Chang than at Jisheng)

monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
invent-the-future.org/2013/12/monster-liberator-legacy-mao-zedong/
strongwindpress.com/pdfs/EBook/The_Battle_for_Chinas_Past.pdf
and, although this one is specifically addressing Chang's book, it's still a good source
gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=b83ac8a7e6c2d8ce3f809842521965f1

Alright thanks, there aren't many Maoists on this board and honestly there needs to be more to combat the economism prevalent on this board. That is, the reduction of class struggle to purely economic demands while ignoring the fact that feminism, national liberation etc is part of the class struggle.

I agree! I used to think that way a lot and learning about Maoism and working with more experienced Maoists was a big part in changing that for me

The correct romanization is Mao "The Dong" Zedong though.
Just "Mao" is shorter too.

When I say MZT I mean Mao Zedong Thought

This is a joke right? I'd much rather live in Capitalist America than whatever China has going on.

Praise Bob

The advent of the New Synthesis will carry the revolution comrade, do not turn away from it's grandeur.

Winning the war. Criticizing Stalin without painting him as either an angel or Satan himself.

youtube.com/watch?v=tckvbCulVBc