The protest movements of the last ten years or so—roughly from the end of Obama’s first term—have struck observers as consistent in their themes and tactics. Based around some apparent outrage, the protesters converge around a particular message—“Black Lives Matter”; “We Are the 99%”; “Free Palestine”—and enact a camera-friendly public display of civil disobedience of varying intensity, with the bulk of the protesters providing cover for extremists in their midst whose acts of disobedience are less than civil. But where did this methodology come from?
On May 25th, 1966, a poster appeared at Peking University, in the People’s Republic of China. The poster called for a purge of “reactionary” professors and university officials. In response, mobs of students, henceforth known as the Red Guards, humiliated, tortured, and murdered these “reactionaries.” Soon thereafter, similar posters appeared in China’s universities and secondary schools, students formed new factions of Red Guards, and the violence spread. The Guards then targeted Communist Party officials identified as reactionary. The police stood aside.
The formation of the Red Guards was not wholly spontaneous. While Chinese youth, subjected to twenty years of propaganda, constituted the combustible materiál, Mao himself ignited the spark that lit the “prairie fire.” It was a revolution from above, pitting Mao’s faction of the elite against its challengers, most importantly within the Party. Mao was a close student of Lenin, who, in turn, had been a close reader of von Clausewitz, the Prussian theorist of war. Mao extended the Clausewitzian realm of war from the bracketed, state conflicts of the ancien régime, to an unbracketed, absolute war waged by a Party against its internal enemies. Following von Clausewitz, Mao accepted that, barring the complete destruction of the enemy, renewed war was always possible. Without an absolute result, the recovery of the enemy was always a threat. Therefore the Maoists, despite their conquest of China, would not leave any opposing forces in peace.
French intellectuals on the left admired Maoist theory and the Red Guards. They applauded the “purity,” violence, and “authenticity” of the Cultural Revolution. The Tel Quel journal was the Parisian locus of Maoist thought. From Paris, Maoist thought migrated to the United States, adopted by far Left intellectuals and revolutionaries. Domestic terror group Weatherman honored Mao by titling their 1974 manifesto Prairie Fire. Radicals adopted Maoist tactics such as consciousness raising, self- criticism, rectification, and struggle sessions. The Western Maoists also adapted the key principle of Maoist insurgency—the counter-state. For the Maoists in China, this was a geographical as well as institutional concept. In Maoist theory, successful insurgency requires patience, endurance, and the slow accretion of incremental gains. It is a war of position, not maneuver (until its dénouement.) To defeat the state, the insurgents must slowly but surely construct their counter-state, which incrementally encroaches upon the state, eventually absorbing and replacing it. Geographically, the Chinese Maoists constructed their counter-state in the countryside, surrounding the state-controlled cities. The Chinese Maoists dominated all the institutions—legal, educational, etc.—in their area of control. The Maoist counter-state shrank the space, resources, people, and institutions under the control of the state, until its defeat was inevitable. In contrast, our domestic Maoists have—so far—taken a purely institutional approach to the development of the counter-state. One might interpret the 2024 campus protests as a campaign by the revolutionary Left and its Islamist allies to cow the remaining liberals within the universities, thus fortifying a key redoubt of the counter- state.
Mao and his Western followers were uninterested in conservatives or the Right, whom they never took seriously as enemies. The real enemy was always Liberalism, whether overt or camouflaged. Mao despised Liberalism’s belief in law, reasonable debate, negotiation, compromise, and the common good. For Mao, these merely anaesthetized the revolutionary class and dulled its immutable conflict with the reactionary classes. Not only the Liberal state, but the Liberal mode of politics had to be destroyed; thus Maoists embrace hatred. Rather than moderating conflicts between parties, interests, and groups, Maoists seek to intensify the hatred between them, to blow away the Liberal polity’s capacity for compromise between clashing political forces.
Liberal American society of the seventies, although weakening, was still too fundamentally healthy for the Maoists to ignite the fire which would consume it. They deferred overt, violent revolution, burrowed into universities and adjacent institutions, and transmuted their lust for violence from action to thought and language. Thus commenced the “Long march through the institutions”—another nod to Mao.
This deferral of physical violence violated, in theory at least, Mao’s tenets of insurgency. For Mao, the “cause” is the most important element of the insurgency (and, by implication, the counter-insurgency); it is the cause which unites, motivates, and actuates the insurgents during the arduous, exhausting, and deadly struggle against their enemies. To advance the cause, Mao believed that insurgents must utilize both violence and non- violent politics, synergistically, at every stage of the insurgency.
Non-violent political activities include propaganda, indoctrination, and infiltrating political parties, unions, and similar institutions. Violence demoralizes enemies, cows neutrals, and, properly applied, opens up space for the insurgents to acquire greater resources. But the violence must be carefully calibrated, for what counts as a proper application of violence at one stage of the campaign could set the insurgency back at another. Improperly applied, violence repulses potential supporters, prematurely alerts enemies, and precipitates counter- attacks by the state. Most insurgencies fail precisely because they indulge in excessive violence, divorced from a proper political strategy.
What would the opening stages of a contemporary Maoist insurgency look like, when targeting a weakened, desiccated, liberal society and state? It would look like the events of the past decade. The violent tactics began with threats, vandalism, and parading outside the homes of enemies. Such actions motivated the insurgents, drew attention to the cause, and intimidated neutrals and enemies, but did not precipitate an effective response by those enemies or the neutral, liberal state. The insurgency gained recruits, allies, and support. The targets of the insurgency remained passive, vainly pleading for the feeble, liberal state to come to their rescue.
The insurgents then proceeded to escalate their calibrated violence to riots and arson. Commandeering public spaces, selective assaults, and occasional, precise murder might follow- but the insurgents will likely avoid a premature, direct challenge to the security and military organs of the state. An insurgency informed by Maoist theory will vary its assaults according to local conditions. But the tactics are clear: violence is necessary, and the cause and political aims must always control the application of such violence. The summer of 2020 called for one set of violent tactics and targets, and the Spring of 2024 called for another.
Mao noted that an insurgency will always consist of multiple campaigns, or “struggles.” For example, within the broader Leftist insurgency against American society, a Leftist-Islamist alliance is waging a narrower struggle against American supporters of Israel. The insurgents are probing the liberal state and their targets, to see how far they can go. The minds behind the broader insurgency are watching this narrower struggle quite carefully, and will learn from it.
Over the past sixty years, the Maoist-inspired insurgents have expanded their counter-state by leaps and bounds. The Liberals of the center right (i.e. the conservatives and Republican Party) and the Neoliberals in the Democratic Party have failed to decisively respond. According to the tenets of Maoist insurgency, the American Maoists must unleash further violence, combined with non-violent political assaults, upon their remaining enemies. The question is whether or not the remnant of American liberalism can muster the strength to defend itself.
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