The Great Leap Backwards

This blog is no great fan of Hindu fundamentalism. But the Maoist abolition of the monarchy in Nepal is even worse. Moaists linger on in Peru as well. Still, even the Chinese have given up on it, for all the pictures of the man himself. So that’s pretty much the end of Maoism. Isn’t it?

If only. The present President of the European Commission is an old Maoist who went on to become the rabidly “free”-marketeering and pro-Bush Prime Minister of Portugal before being wafted into his present position. He is as utterly unrepentant as all the old Stalinists and Trotskyists in the rabidly “free”-marketeering and pro-Bush New Labour project, and all the old Trotskyists around Bush himself, Eurofederalists every one.

These people have merely changed the ending so that the bourgeoisie wins. They have retained intact their Marxist dialectical materialism; their Leninist vanguard elitism, “democratic centralism”, and use of religious and other interests as “Useful Idiots”; their Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also their Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class must be created in a superstate (and I don’t mean the EU) in order to be exported throughout the world, including by force of arms, while vanguard elites everywhere owe their patriotic allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own respective countries.

Perhaps large, Maoist-run Europe will become China to the American Soviet Union. But that’s not exactly much to look forward to.

Meanwhile, the popular persistence of open Maoism in Nepal and Peru is oddly reminiscent of how open Trotskyism once managed to make itself the mass movement of the workers in Sri Lanka and Bolivia. Any thoughts?