>> > > 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
Yes, as Mao would point out, you have to look at time, place and conditions. Paraphrasing: You have to study the laws of war in general, the specific laws of revolutionary war, and the even more specific laws of your nation's revolutionary war if you want to get anywhere. And it's no surprise the U.S. left relied too much on other people's analysis of their own times and places--the Chinese did too, initially, relying too much on the Russian example. That's the tendency Mao was cautioning about in the paraphrase above. It's just a common problem, trying to translate experience through space and time.
Bobby Seale says the Black Panthers got a bunch of copies of the Little Red Book for cheap or free and were selling them as a fund-raiser for a while before he actually sat down and read the thing. When he did, his reaction was, hey, this stuff is pretty good! Mao's very sharp about dogmatism in all its forms--funny, too. I've found his writings quite helpful on internal and organizational dynamics. He's helpful if you're trying to organize a committed group--that's probably why the Panthers found him useful. I wouldn't accuse the Panthers of orientalism, nor would I make that accusation of the sections of the feminist movement that found Mao useful. As for the charge of wanting to be shocking--it was the hecklers at the first Miss America Protest in 1968 who saw the connection between women's liberation and the Chinese revolution, yelling "Mothers of Mao" at the feminist picketers as the ultimate insult. The idea of Women's Liberation was quite shocking enough.
Jenny Brown