MARXISM-LENINISM-MAOISM, BASIC COURSE.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. What is Marxism-Leninism Maoism
3. Socio-economic Conditions Leading to
the Birth of Marxism
4. Early Life of Marx and Engels
Until They Became Marxists
5. The Three Sources of Marxism
6. The Basic Foundations of Marxist Philosophy – Dialectical and Historical Materialism
7. Struggle Against Utopian Socialism and the Establishment of Scientific Socialism
8. Marxist Political Economy
9. Marxism Fuses Its Links with the Working Class
10. The Lessons of the Paris Commune
11. Spread of Marxism and Rise of Opportunism
12. Marxism in Russia – Early Life of Lenin
13. Lenin and the Proletarian Party of a New Type
14. Russian Bourgeois Revolution of 1905 – Development of Proletarian Tactics
15. World War I – Opportunism v/s Revolutionary Tactics
16. Lenin’s Analysis of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
17. The Great October Socialist Revolution
18. The Formation of the Third International
19. The National and Colonial Question
20. Early Life and Revolutionary Contributions of Stalin upto the 1917 Revolution
21. Socialist Construction – the Russian Experience
22. Fight against Trotskyism and Other Opportunist Trends
23. Tactics During World War II
24. Mao’s Early Years
25. Mao’s Fight Against Right and ‘Left’ Lines and Victory of the Chinese Revolution00
26. The Path of Revolution for the Colonies and Semi-Colonies
27. Mao on Philosophy
28. Mao on The Party
29. Socialist Construction – The Chinese Experience
30. The Great Debate – Mao’s Fight Against Kruschev’s Modern Revisionism
31. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
32. After The Death of Mao
INTRODUCTION
Most of us revolutionary activists are ‘practical’ people. We feel, “Why bother about ideology, and theory, and such other things, … that is for the scholars and ‘intellectuals’, … the most important thing is to get on with the job”. The lower level activists and members feel that it is sufficient that the CC and the higher committees do study and provide guidance; and often, many members in the higher committees also feel that other work is too pressing to ‘allow’ much time for theory.
On the other hand, there are a few others who feel it is necessary to know every work of the Great Teachers in order to work ‘properly’. They spend a large amount of time in trying to read everything. They also have a tendency to treat everything they read as dogma.
It is necessary to avoid both these attitudes in our study.
All comrades should give sufficient time and attention to study in order to understand the essence of our ideology — Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought. Rather than knowing by heart a large number of books, it is necessary to understand deeply the essential and basic aspects of our guiding ideology.
If we do this and learn to apply it in our day to day work we can greatly improve our practice, both, as individual activists, as well as, of the party as a whole. Very often we understand and analyse the world around us only according to our own limited experiences and therefore arrive at wrong conclusions.
A proper understanding of MLM Thought can help us overcome such errors. At other times a superficial understanding can lead to going by only the letter of certain party decisions and stands and not understanding their essence and spirit. Such mistakes can also be avoided by a deeper grasp of MLM Thought. By our study of MLM Thought, we learn from the positive and negative experiences of World Revolution; we learn to absorb the good in it, and we learn to differentiate between the good and the bad in our own practice. We thus learn to recognise, criticise, and fight all types of opportunism. In short, MLM Thought is a must to mould our practice in the light of theory.
This Basic Course in MLM Thought is intended to present to activists an understanding of the principal aspects of our ideology. Our ideology is, first and foremost, a ‘practical’ theory, meant to be implemented and put into practice. The theory itself emerged in the course of numerous class struggles. It is therefore essential to understand the concrete material conditions and social practice through which the Great Teachers of the proletariat – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao – discovered and formulated its basic principles. Thus, this book has been presented by relating the historical process of the growth and development of MLM Thought. The basic concepts have been presented in short by, wherever possible, linking to the socioeconomic conditions, main political events and class struggles that gave birth to them. In order to understand any particular aspect in detail, more particular study would be necessary. This Basic Course however is meant to provide an essential basis for understanding the dynamic process of the development of our ideology and in what historical conditions and circumstances certain stands and theory came into being.
Come; let’s begin our study