Is this a misguided idea? That different ideologies, such as ‘vanilla’ Marxist-Leninism are more applicable to more industrialized countries, or perhaps countries closer to the imperial core, while ideologies such as MLM are more applicable to the most imperialized, agragrian/feudal countries of the world?
Lenin’s ideology was not dogmatic as it was simply an adaptation of Marxism to the imperialist stage of capitalism and the Russian conditions. Dogmatism means the refusal to change. This would be people who think they can copy and paste the Russian or Chinese experience onto other situations. It’s also when people refuse to give up positions that have been proven false in practice and refuse to take up new developments (ex. Patsocs who hold onto reactionary nationalism and deny new Decolonial theory). MZT was an adaptation to China’s conditions, but it was not significantly different to ML and not all of its discoveries applied elsewhere. Thus there can be dogmatic “Maoism,” but there can also be better versions like that in India. There was a recent post on the difference between “dengism” and Maoism, so I suggest you look for that (search dengism in posts sorted by new).
Where would you say MLM falls into this? I read that post and the dogmatic thing seems to make sense. But there are elements of MLM such as the Labor Aristocracy and such that I unabashedly agree with.
Dogmatic MLMs are like those who think they can do a protracted people’s war in an industrialized country like Italy even though the tactic was specifically formulated for a largely peasant country, or those that hold up the words of Gonzalo like it’s the Bible. Honestly, a principled MLM shouldn’t be much different than a principled ML. Both need to study Mao, and both need to study material conditions. Of course there are good aspects of MLM, we should integrate them, I just don’t see why they need their own tendency name.
Cool, I think that’s the same conclusion I’ve come to aswell. Haven’t been able to put words to it that well though. What are your thoughts on Gonzalo in general?
