Quotes are from “REPORT ON AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PEASANT MOVEMENT IN HUNAN March 1927” by Mao

Quote 1 - “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

I think what Mao says here encapsulates the reality of the Western Left. In my opinion, we’re still stuck in the hippie movement, one of the most performative and draining movements of our recent history. We die on the hills of vibes, feelings, culture war, astrology, tarot reading, virtue signaling, and tone policing rather than the hills of class struggle and concrete reality. We face an ever expanding rise in the amount of unapologetic Jewish-Question Hitler supporters who own more guns than I do and spend more time in the gym than we do criticizing the bulk of the content of the working class of the United States, which is why I believe this shift to the right is happening in the first place. I think that we are stuck in this permanent view of “it is us vs. the right wing, MAGA voters, Trump supporters, etc”, which never wins over people from the right wing, and further divides the country, sowing the grounds for civil war. We should be asking ourselves “How do we win over the right wing?”. After all, the so-called left dreams of the 99% beating the 1%, how come we never actually push that forward since people are being pushed further left AND further right? It is our responsibility to prevent this from happening now and in the future, seeing as we are the so-called progressive force.

We talk about the rise of fascism in the United States, but what does it take to defeat fascism? What does it take to defeat the ruling class? It took a Vladimir Lenin and a Leon Trotsky to overthrow the tsar. It took dedicated, disciplined men and women to produce a successful and lasting movement. Lenin and Trotsky didn’t decide to stop holding and attending meetings because people were mean, things were moving slow, or weren’t fun, or were hard to keep track of. What does it take to defeat Hitler? It takes a Joseph Stalin to defeat Hitler. It takes the man of steel to, despite Operation Barbarossa, despite knowing that the enemy is 12 miles away from Red Square, Lenin’s resting place, to turn the tide around, to end up raising the red banner over the Reichstag and over all of Berlin. It took a Vasily Zatisev to stop fascism. It took an Ivan Sidorenko to stop fascism. It took a Lyudmila Pavlichenko to stop fascism. Together, these three Soviet snipers were responsible for the deaths of over 1,000 Nazis. It takes a Sun Yat-Sen to overthrow the monarchy. It takes a Mao Zedong to defeat Chiang Kai-shek. It takes The Long March, a 6,000 mile long retreat; the pinnacle of hard work and determination, to preserve and ensure the future of a movement. From Mao himself:

“The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent. It has proclaimed their utter failure to encircle, pursue, obstruct and intercept us. The Long March is also a propaganda force. It has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.”

Quote 2 - "First, they represent a revolt against bad social customs, such as gaming, gambling opium-smoking. These customs arose out of the rotten political environment of the landlord class and are swept away once its authority is overthrown. Second, the prohibitions are a form of self-defense against exploitation by city merchants; such are the prohibitions on feasts and on buying preserves and fruit for ritual presents."

My thoughts on this quote are a continuation of my thoughts on the first point. Here, the Chinese peasants are revolting against escapism, something that we in the West love to indulge and revel in. There is a reason why the Soviets ran extensive anti-alcohol, anti-drug, and anti-smoking campaigns. There is a reason why Marx said religion is the “opiate” of the masses. There is a reason why the FBI funneled drugs into black neighborhoods. There is a reason why there are more places to buy liquor and beer on reservations than there are places to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. To circle back to the Chinese, there is a reason the British were pumping them full of opiates during the century of humiliation. America hasn't had a successful labor uprising in about 100 years. We on the left are forcing our own century of humiliation on ourselves.

Quote 3 - "The moment the power of the landlords was overthrown in the rural areas, the peasants' movement for education began. See how the peasants who hitherto detested the schools are today zealously setting up evening classes! They always disliked the "foreign-style school". In my student days, when I went back to the village and saw that the peasants were against the "foreign-style school", I, too, used to identify myself with the general run of "foreign-style students and teachers" and stand up for it, feeling that the peasants were somehow wrong. It was not until 1925, when I lived in the countryside for six months and was already a Communist and had acquired the Marxist viewpoint, that I realized I had been wrong and the peasants right. The texts used in the rural primary schools were entirely about urban things and unsuited to rural needs. Besides, the attitude of the primary school teachers towards the peasants was very bad and, far from being helpful to the peasants, they became objects of dislike. Hence the peasants preferred the old-style schools ("Chinese classes", as they called them) to the modern schools (which they called "foreign classes") and the old-style teachers to the ones in the primary schools. Now the peasants are enthusiastically establishing evening classes, which they call peasant schools."

Continuing my sentiment, this is very representative of the western left and its purity fetish. In this instance, we see the student, the intellectual, the urbanite, a cosmopolitan of sorts, try to impose their background or worldview or what have you on the true form of the revolutionary movement. There was a somewhat similar movement in Russia called “narodism” or “peopleism” where intellectuals approached the peasants like they, the peasants, were intellectuals themselves, and it did not work. Today, we have these left wing parties that operate more like social clubs than they do workers parties. They organize almost exclusively on campuses and in workplaces where workers are operating on this one-sided “threat of the right” or in places where the bulk of people they are trying to organize are already somewhat progressive themselves. This has been a foundation of the student-led “New Left” movement that started in the 50s and 60s that had a near wholesale abandonment of class struggle compared to the socialist movements 20 to 30 years prior. The CIA have a few declassified documents highlighting this, one report noting how the first event of this movement was Khrushchev's secret speech.