On Thu, 29 May 2008, Carrol Cox 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.
That's actually not true if you count the wars of decolonization, all of which were won eventually.
> 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."
No, as a theory of guerrilla was it's much more than that. It's a completely different framework for conceptualizing your ends and means, and what counts as success. It's not entirely new with Mao -- a lot of it goes back to Sun-Tzu and the very eastern different tradition of warfare and thinking about war (main difference: the west assumes 2 sides, the east assumes many, and that changes everything) -- but he added key parts about political organization and the provision of welfare as an element of war that AFAIK no one did before. And this model is completely different from the conventional war model. So even though both of them have to be adjusted to particulars, that not enough to negate its independence as a theoretical framework. The world looks entirely different through this perspective. It has different salient points, and suggests different courses of action.
Here's a good recent article using the maoist framework to analyze why the Sadrists are kicking America's ass -- and why America doesn't know it because it can't think straight because it can't theorize straight:
http://www.alternet.org/story/81147/
It's by Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, who is neither a lefty nor an orientalist nor a sentimentalist, but knows a lot about war and guerrilla war.
Michael