Maoism

Maoism adapts Marxism-Leninism to a largely agrarian society by treating the peasantry, not the small industrial proletariat, as the principal revolutionary force, and by developing protracted 'people's war' waged from the countryside to encircle the cities as the strategy of revolution.

Its method of leadership is the mass line: gather the scattered, unsystematic views of the people, concentrate them into policy, and carry that policy back to the masses as their own. Paired with an emphasis on the analysis of contradiction — distinguishing principal from secondary, antagonistic from non-antagonistic — it presents itself as a living dialectic rather than a fixed doctrine.

It was realized in the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and became a model exported across the decolonizing world, inspiring insurgencies from Peru's Shining Path to Nepal's Maoists and the naxalites of India. Its distinctive claim — that revolution can be made by peasants in a pre-industrial society — spoke directly to the global South in a way Soviet orthodoxy did not.

It further holds that class struggle continues under socialism, because a new bureaucratic stratum can restore capitalism from within the party itself. This premise drove Mao's later campaigns — the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution — mobilizational upheavals meant to prevent ossification, which instead produced tens of millions of deaths from famine and political violence.

Critics across the spectrum point to that catastrophic human cost, and Marxist critics argue that a peasant revolution led by a party substituting itself for an almost non-existent working class departs so far from Marx that it is a distinct doctrine wearing his vocabulary.

In the West the label survives mostly detached from its origin — as a byword for permanent upheaval or radical-chic sloganeering — which obscures its serious content: a theory of how the rural, colonized majority of humanity might make a revolution the classical theory said they could not.