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The legacy of Mao Zedong: A study of contradiction
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- 18 October 2026 559 hits
Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) died half a century ago, on September 9, 1976. Mao’s life illustrated the movement’s main contradiction: the struggle between revolutionary Marxism-Leninism and reformist, anti-revolutionary “revisionism.” Mao wound up on the wrong side of this contradiction, a great tragedy for someone who’d made outstanding contributions to communism and the international working class for half a century.
Mao was the first leader to organize masses of workers and peasants under the banner of revolutionary communism. In the 1930s, he personally led the epic Long March in the civil war against the Chinese nationalists. In the 1940s, he ultimately led the Communist Party of China to victory over Japanese fascism. In the 1950s, he backed transformational mass movements, including the People’s Commune Movement.
Mao also made landmark contributions to communist literature. His Report on An Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan and his essays On Practice and On Contradiction lucidly explained the Marxist theory of dialectics.
But Mao also had one glaring weakness: his position on the dictatorship of the proletariat, the idea that the working class must run every aspect of society to smash capitalism and advance toward communism.
Mao’s essay On New Democracy muddles the Leninist theory of the state and essentially rejects the workers’ dictatorship. This confusion led Mao to make critical errors. In 1937, in the fight against fascist Japan, he merged the Red Army into a united front with the Nationalist Kuomintang army. Eight years later, he offered to negotiate a coalition government with Kuomintang leader and anti-communist butcher Chiang Kai-Shek. (Chiang refused.)
In 1949, on the eve of the revolution’s triumph, Mao wrote On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, a huge step backward. He endorsed the notion of a so-called “people’s dictatorship” that included the petit bourgeoisie, the small-scale employers, traders, and professionals who had not yet been won to communist ideas—and could not be relied upon to advance the revolution.
One big difference between Lenin and Mao is this: As the revolution approached in Russia, Lenin became even sharper and more uncompromising on the dictatorship of the proletariat, as we can read in The State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. But as the Chinese Revolution neared, Mao became more tentative about the dictatorship of the proletariat. His Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee, in March 1949, failed to even mention it.
Mao’s retreat became glaring in his attacks on Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet revisionist leader. In the Sino-Soviet Dispute of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CCP published important exposés of revisionism and Soviet nationalism. Yet at the same time, Mao adopted a similar political line by espousing anti-Soviet Chinese nationalism.
By 1968, when the Cultural Revolution was defeated due in no small part to Mao’s move to disband the Red Guards, Chinese nationalism predominated. The defense of Marxism-Leninism against Soviet revisionism was forgotten. At that point, the weaknesses in Mao’s revolutionary career, once secondary, became primary.
The last eight years of Mao’s life were disgraceful. Some of the worst capitalist scum of the world made the journey to Beijing to make deals with the Chinese leadership, from Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger to Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie to the fascist dictators of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, and Chile.
Mao’s life must be understood as a contradiction. Even as we learn from his positive contributions and study his revolutionary writings and theoretical breakthroughs, we also need to learn from his mistakes—in particular, how his ideological weakness on internationalism and the workers’ dictatorship led to betrayal.
In the final analysis, Mao’s strengths and weaknesses are those of the mass movement of tens of millions of people: the international communist movement. By appreciating Mao’s strengths, we can draw inspiration. By analyzing his weaknesses, we can see the historic task ahead of us.
HYATTSVILLE, MD, OCT 10—The campaign to keep ICE agents out of the building at 6505 Belcrest Rd in Hyattsville, MD has taken another step forward with the involvement of Howard University students. Since the start of the academic year, members of Progressive Labor Party and Hyattsville and Greenbelt Resistance Networks have reached over 100 Howard students who live in the dorm next door with leaflets and CHALLENGE newspapers. This week a core group of Howard students met at La Vie (the student dorm)with PL’ers and members of the Prince George’s County Coalition for Police Accountability to plan next steps. We aim to broaden the struggle with a new petition to demand that Howard University administration lean on Prince George’s County Executive Braveboy and the Bernstein management of the building to rescind the ICE permit and keep ICE out of the 3rd floor of 6505 Belcrest. The students planned campus outreach including speaking up in class, involving other campus organizations they are involved with including the Skate Club Good Trouble, and Call to Chapel.
A former Howard student at the meeting urged the students to tell their peers that Black students as well as immigrants are at risk from police brutality and murder. He movingly urged them to learn the history of the police murder of Prince Jones, a Howard student who was brutally shot in the back five times (out of 16 shots fired) by an undercover Prince George’s cop in 2000. The recent murder of Tawfiq Bernard and the William Greene and Leonard Shand cases a few years ago are examples of the brutality of the Prince George’s Cops that has continued since the murder of Prince Jones.
Publications by a PLP faculty member at Howard who attended the meeting provides both historical detail and analysis of the failure of the Department of Justice oversight in the region and the country(contact
Student solidarity with faculty
Students and youth will always lead the way. This lesson was made clear to me again recently.
I teach at one of the colleges in the City University of New York system, which reached new lows in racist austerity when it failed to figure out how to pay many faculty members on my campus at the start of the new semester. CUNY, like many university systems, increasingly relies on low-paid, insecure part-time faculty called adjuncts, to teach its courses. It doesthis so that they can easily lay off and rehire professors as student enrollment goes up and down. Even at a public institution like CUNY, the dollar determines everything.
This semester, due to understaffing in HR and Payroll, many faculty did not get paid, over the course of multiple pay periods! Our union chapter called a demonstration and while there were a decent number of faculty there to support our unpaid union siblings, there were more than a dozen students there to support their unpaid professors! They spoke of the quality of professors, how this attack on professors was really an attack on them and the need for solidarity to defeat racist austerity.
The students on my campus see the contradictions of capitalism clearly. They see the racism and sexism and exploitation. They see what unemployment and hopelessness can do to a neighborhood. And they see the need to fight back! Some of these students will attend the upcoming College Conference and I consider myself extremely lucky to be surrounded by the future leaders of our Party and the revolution.
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Newspaper seller meets communist
This summer, during a visit to Europe, where I grew up, I encountered a street vendor selling newspapers to passersby. Out of curiosity to find out the content in the newspaper, I stopped and talked to the vendor. It turned out that the newspaper was sold by workers experiencing homelessness, extreme poverty and social marginalization. This destitution is a direct product of workers exploitation by the capitalist ruling class. Cashing in on the backs of street vendors - through newspaper sales - is obviously an attempt, at best, to mitigate the problems of a profit – based economy.
Our conversation led to a friendly relationship, especially when I offered in exchange a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) CHALLENGE newspaper. We both agreed to continue our discussion a few days later. The street vendor invited me to their house where we talked more about the daily tasks and challenges of homeless people, which evolved into discussion of revolutionary communism where work for wages, money and profit will be abolished. Instead, work will be done based on commitment to the good for all. Products and services will be free, and distributed in accord with people’s needs.
I will call my new friend John. He explained that he agrees with revolutionary communism, but he is doubtful it will be accomplished. That said, John was enthusiastic, adding CHALLENGE newspapers to his street vendor repertoire.
Besides various local, state and national institutions posturing as substantive reformers of this rotten capitalist society, there is one particular non-profit organization, which since 2013 manages street newspapers across six continents: the International Network of Street Papers (INSP), headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland. The INSP has 92 street papers in 35 countries, published in 25 languages, with 3.2 million readers. The organization ‘s own statistics show a staggering 300 million working class people around the world facing homelessness, and an additional 2.8 billion people living and working in inadequate conditions. This industrial reserve army of poor workers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade.
John and many others buy the newspaper at the supposed production cost, and sell them to the public at a mark-up, which they get to keep. As we walked to the bus stop, John expressed how he is aspiring to publish and edit the newspaper, which will truly reflect the lives of unemployed workers. He was critical of the editorial team of the current newspaper, because the street vendors’ daily lives are seldom addressed and written about. John and other street vendors are welfare recipients, and they are being used as ultra–low wage labor, standing on the street corner for several hours a day, selling newspapers. John manages to sell between 40-80 newspapers monthly.
Acting as reformers behind the struggle of unemployed and homeless workers are the capitalists, disguising themselves under such names as “Sisters of Charity organization”, “Santander USA”, Dedication 2 community”, and many more in Europe and Asia:”Grameen Bank”, “Seventh Generation”, “Better world Books” - they are nothing more then welfare organizations aiding the ruling class and throwing crumbs to the working poor. The educational institutions in Europe and the U.S., which go hand in hand with such organizations, are a long extended arm of the ruling class capitalists. They offer various degrees of programs in so-called social-economics. Their slogan “triple bottom line” – people, planet and profit –says it all: workers exploitation and resource extraction equates to wealth accumulation. They produce the next generation of capitalists striving to cash in on the backs of the working class. Communism will replace such institutions, now run by the ruling class, with a worker-run society where everyone contributes and shares- like a large sisterly, brotherly family- in society’s benefits and burdens.
We as communists are obligated to point out the reality of such practices, expose such institutions, and organize workers around the world into a revolutionary movement for communism. Join PLP!
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In Hiroshima: vet turns chance into solidarity
I traveled to Japan last month, eager to explore its history and reconnect with memories of the vibrant anti-capitalist movement that had inspired me years ago. I was particularly interested in learning about the struggles of Japanese workers and students today.
But meeting people and engaging in meaningful political discussions proved difficult. Language differences were an obvious barrier, and traveling as part of a tour group offered few opportunities to get beyond the usual tourist experience.
Then, in Hiroshima, I spotted a young man distributing political leaflets. Although I couldn’t read what he was handing out, I approached him. With the help of translation applications on our phones, we managed to have a lively political conversation lasting nearly half an hour.
He was a young Japanese communist organizing support for a demonstration against police repression following a recent mobilization of workers and students. They were protesting the growing threat of Japan’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a favorite of Donald Trump.
His leaflet described an August 19 demonstration in which 15,000 people reportedly gathered outside Japan’s National Diet, their Congress, to raise their voices against war. It warned that established opposition parties and traditional left-wing forces were increasingly accommodating themselves to the Takaichi administration rather than organizing serious resistance.
The leaflet called for the urgent building of a new revolutionary working-class party. Drawing on the August 6 Hiroshima struggle, it urged workers and students to expand the ranks of the Modern Revolutionary Workers’ Party through the coming autumn struggles.
Despite the thousands of miles separating us, and despite our language differences, we quickly discovered something important: we shared a commitment to fighting capitalism and building a revolutionary working-class movement.
After our meeting, I emailed him a copy of CHALLENGE and introduced him to the history of the Progressive Labor Party and our continuing struggle to win workers to communism. We exchanged email addresses, and I invited him to write for CHALLENGE about the political situation in Japan and the struggles of Japanese workers and students.
I hope he accepts.
This brief encounter in Hiroshima reminded me of something fundamental. Capitalism is an international system. Its wars, exploitation, racism, and attacks on workers cross every national boundary. Our resistance must do the same.
The working class has no national borders. Whether in Japan, the United States, or anywhere else, workers face a common enemy in the capitalist system. Our languages and histories may differ, but our interests as workers are fundamentally the same.
What began as a chance encounter on a Hiroshima street became a small but meaningful act of international communist solidarity.
We must turn such encounters into lasting political relationships, deepen our international ties, and accelerate the growth of our Party. The fight for communism is international, and so must be our movement.
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Think-tank expert argues that U.S. military can’t leave the Middle East
Foreign Affairs, 10/12–The Iran war has not demonstrated that the United States no longer has interests in the Middle East. It has demonstrated, very painfully, that it does and that the way Washington has been pursuing them for a generation is unsustainable. The lesson is not to abandon the region but to rethink an approach that has become both too costly and counterproductive…Oil is a fungible commodity with a single global price. As the Iran war has shown, when supplies are cut anywhere, Americans pay more at the pump, and slower growth in Asia and Europe drags down the U.S. economy…and fossil fuels still supply roughly 80 percent of the world’s energy…
Pakistan’s opposition party leaders arrested in latest crackdown
The Guardian, 10/12– Politicians from the party of the former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan have been detained after the suspension of a provincial government now under emergency rule. Pakistan’s president declared a state of emergency and suspended the government in north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province…The imposition of emergency rule and suspension of the provincial government have sharply escalated confrontation between the 74-year-old former cricket star and the country’s powerful military. The emergency rule came a week after Khan’s supporters had rallied for days in the province, intending to march to Islamabad to demand his release and provide medical treatment.
Chinese workers protest capitalist tricks to extract profits from their work
Reuters, 9/28–With China set for a week-long holiday at the start of October, many workers are taking to social media to complain about the widespread practice of requiring staff to work weekends either side of the break to maintain output. The online outcry is the latest in a series of social media flare-ups over gruelling schedules, low pay and weak labour protections, with growing calls to punish employers through consumer boycotts or legal action emerging as a new tactic and highlighting deepening labour market strain…Today, promotions, wage growth, and employment are all much more uncertain, yet excessive overtime persists.
Miners in Sudan killed in air strike
Al Jazeera, 10/12– An air raid at a gold mine near the disputed Sudan-Egypt border has killed at least 72 workers, according to a Sudanese rights group, after survivors described scenes of chaos in the mountainous region. Emergency Lawyers, which documents atrocities in Sudan’s war, accused the Egyptian military of carrying out the attack…It was this year’s second attack on the mountainous border region of Jabal al-Uqaydat, a gold mining area. Similar strikes, also reportedly carried out by Egypt, killed 23 workers at the gold mining site in June… The border between Sudan and Egypt is disputed, with both countries claiming the resource-rich Halaib Triangle.
Economist explains why grocery bills will continue to rise
New York Times, 10/11–For decades, we had expanding globalization, and effectively infinitely elastic supply. If you had…a component that failed, or you had a problem sourcing it, easy just to substitute it and get another one. Just wait for the next container ship, and you’re all set. That has started to change because of the fracturing of the global economy…We’ve built supply chains that have these multiple single sources of failure…This is the inevitable consequence of the ever-expanding globalization period ending. Globalization worked really well from a cost perspective…It will be more expensive to create more resilience amid this fracturing of the global economy.
Haitian elections not coming any time soon as bosses fight over control
LeMonde, 10/6– Haiti, which has been engulfed by years of gang violence and political chaos, has indefinitely postponed elections due to be held later this year, officials said Tuesday, October 6. The first round of presidential and legislative elections had been set for December 13, and the second round for February 21, 2027. Haiti has not held elections since 2016, and its last president, assassinated in 2021, has not been replaced…Of its approximately 11 million inhabitants, nearly 1.5 million are internally displaced by violence…A UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF) is being slowly deployed to assist overwhelmed local police.
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Editorial: From Germany to worldwide - SMASH RISING FASCISM
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- 03 October 2026 594 hits
In a clear sign of rising fascism, the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, pro-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won state parliamentary elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt, where they may soon form the first openly fascist state government in Germany since the Nazis’ Third Reich. After decades of failed liberal political leadership and economic decline, brought to a boil by a worldwide crisis of capitalism, masses of mostly white and male workers have been won to racist scapegoating, the bosses’ playbook to hide the true problem: the profit system. Whether it’s the Nazi AfD, the centrist Social Democratic Party (SPD) or Christian Democratic Union (CDU), or the German fake left (Die Linke), which recently won a state election in Berlin, all of the bosses’ political parties will gladly sacrifice workers’ lives to serve their masters’ interests. When it comes to electoral politics, there is no lesser evil–only evil. To protect the rulers’ profits in a period of sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry, liberal reformists—most of all the U.S. Democratic Party—will lead us to slaughter in World War III just as readily as Trump’s Republicans or the AfD. We have only one real choice: Organize for communist revolution to rid the world of all capitalist parasites and their political stooges.
The lessons of Nazi Germany
In the 1930s, the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party attracted workers amid an economic breakdown that followed Germany’s defeat in World War I. The fascists scapegoated Jews, Roma people, trade unionists, socialists, and communists, and went on to target them for elimination. Now, with Germany facing another economic crisis, the AfD is casting blame on immigrants. Then, Hitler served German arms producers, bankers, the Church, and landowners. The German rulers stoked a nationalist fever to plunge into World War II, mostly to stabilize their economy and generate more profits. Today, the AfD is supported by the same banking family that backed Hitler, and by the medical diagnostic and automotive bosses. More broadly, the German ruling class just raised its military spending by 25 percent (deutschland.de, 9/7).
When the bosses invest in more arms, as World War II proved, it’s because they intend to use them–against our class!
The most critical lesson to be drawn from 1930s Germany was laid out by R. Palme Dutt in his 1934 book, Fascism and Social Revolution. Dutt showed that the road to the Third Reich was paved by the "social fascists" of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who collaborated with the proto-fascist Freikorps militia to crush a workers' uprising led in large part by communists of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919. The SPD stayed committed to the parliamentary process even as the Nazis used it to consolidate their lethal power. Today, the international working class can't afford to repeat that fatal mistake. Voting can't beat fascism. As the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union ultimately showed the world, only mass armed struggle can end the fascist threat. More than 20 million Soviet workers gave their lives to crush the Nazi war machine (globalpoliticaleconomy.com, 2/9/2014).
Across Europe, millions of /workers have mobilized against open fascism. In Germany, the AfD’s win in Saxony-Anhalt was met by demonstrations of 150,000 workers in 20 cities (France24, 9/12). In Italy, two million workers and youth have joined anti-austerity, anti-fascist, anti-genocide protests led by labor unions and peppered with pro-communist sentiments (Reuters, 12/25). What’s missing is communist leadership to free angry workers from the liberals’ clutches and guide them toward a revolutionary movement. Progressive Labor Party is committed to winning workers’ confidence to lead this critical struggle.
Liberals pave the way for the racist right
The open fascists’ rise in Germany is no isolated case. We’re seeing it in Italy and France, in Argentina and Brazil, in the U.S. and Israel and Turkey and India. Much as in the 1930s, the door for these gutter-racist parties has been opened by the utter failures of the old liberal world order–and, this time around, by the spiraling decline of U.S. imperialism. Capitalist misery runs wide and deep, from acute poverty and hunger to live-streamed genocides in Gaza and Sudan. The reversals of the great communist revolutions in China and Russia have left our class disarmed. They’ve also helped to lay the groundwork for the AfD and its rotten ilk to gain a foothold within the working class.
Germany’s mainstream capitalist parties are exploiting fear over the AfD’s breakthroughs to advance their own anti-worker agendas. The CDU’s Freidrich Merz declared he would stay on as chancellor “for Germany’s democratic future” (Guardian, 9/21). Yet these same reformist parties have overseen decades of falling living standards. They have enabled and assisted the war crimes of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and beyond. The ruling CDU in tandem with other EU rulers has contributed to the killings thousands of migrants with harsh immigration restrictions, and has fiercely defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza while brutally repressing pro-Palestine sentiment (Al Jazeera, 12/7/2025) While the AfD has proposed using military funds for mass deportations (Correctiv, 9/11), it’s the Merz regime that has launched a record-breaking € 377 billion ($436 billion) military rearmament plan to prepare for looming inter-imperialist war (Politico.eu, 10/27/2025).
Communism: only way to smash Nazis and liberal bosses alike
Whether they’re open Nazis like the AfD or “social fascists” like the SPD or the centrist fascists like CDU, none of the bosses’ political parties–including the Democratic Socialists of America–can begin to meet the needs of the international working class. None of the reformist misleaders can offer workers more than a few crumbs from the bosses’ table. As Zohran Mamdani, the fake-left mayor of New York City, holds yet another chummy meeting with the vile Donald Trump, we’re reminded that none of them can stem the crisis of capitalism or the inevitable rise of fascism.
The bosses’ flimsy political sideshows and blatant deceptions can be opportunities to convince workers that we must destroy capitalism root and branch to build a new communist world. With communist ideas leading mass workers’ movements, there is no limit to our power. We can smash not only the Nazi goons, but their lying liberal counterparts as well. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
What is fascism?
Capitalism is constantly riddled with economic and political crises. When these crises reach a tipping point, and the bosses’ state power is threatened from within or without, they shed the mask of liberal democracy and implement fascism, the rulers’ class dictatorship in its open form.
The conditions that typically lead to fascism include the drive toward global war; the rise of a militant working class armed with leftist and communist ideas; and the decay of a ruling class beset by a falling rate of profit and a lack of unity and discipline in their own ranks. While the best-known fascist regimes include Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini, Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, Haiti under the Duvaliers, and the Dominican Republic under Trujillo are other cases in point.
