> > 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