[lbo-talk] Re: stupid americans?

uvj at vsnl.com uvj at vsnl.com
Mon Sep 27 16:50:46 PDT 2004


Carrol Cox wrote:


> > North American "third worldists" usually know little about the "third
world".


> The theory was incorrect, but it was leaders in the Third World that
> invented it, and then it was imported by North Americans.

It was also imported into other "Third World" countries such as India.


> The error's source lay not in knowing little or much about the "Third
> World" but in misconceiving the level of abstraction involved in "Mao
> Thought."

This is commense. Do we have to learn this Mao? .


>But Mao (or someone in the leadership of the CPC) made that
> error first. As originally developed, "Mao Thought" implied that each
> national movement had to work out its own strategy for revolution, and
> hence at the concrete level Mao thought to begin with applied _only_ to
> China.

How much Mao understood post revolutionary China?


>Then the post-1960 Chinese leadership generalized it to the whole
> world by a false analogy. The third world was analogized to the country
> side in China and the imperialist core was analogized to the cities in
> China. The Countryside (third world) would envelop the City (the
> imperialist core).

This is banal. Everyone knows it.


> Wrong, yes. But you can't criticize a theory unless you have a much
> better understanding of it than you seem to have of the so-called "third
> worldist" theory.

IMHO, I haven't discovered substantial theory in my encounters with Maoism. The notion called "Maoist theory" is contradictory.


> Its errors had nothing whatsoever to do with not
> understanding of the third world and everything to do with not
> understanding their own "First World."

Subsequent generations of US leftists seem to carry on that tradition in the 21st Century.

Ulhas



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list