Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> On Wed, 28 May 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Could you please explain what you find valuable in "MaoTHOUGHT"? It's
> > long struck me as juvenile, but I'd appreciate hearing an argument to
> > the contrary.
>
> Well as a theory of how to win a guerrilla war, it's pretty good.
Well, very few guerilla wars have, in practice, been won. If one takes the theory/thought distinction seriously, as I do, then one would have to reword this in terms such as "It was a fine bundle of interlocking tactics and strategies embedded in the specific conditions of China 1935-49." So-called "Maoist" groups in the U.S. tried to mime those strategies (centrally a specific version of the "United Front," in a totally different context -- and it was silly. I don't think you can abstract much of a theory from that bundle. And the generalizations one can make are pretty banal, however impressive they were in their initial context: See one of the gratest books written in the U.S. in the last century, William Hinton's _Fanshen_. But the 'equivalents' (if they exist) for such processes in a core capitalist country would have to be worked out concretely in context, not extracted from Hinton.
Carrol