Maoism
Maoism is Mao Zedong's adaptation of Marxism–Leninism to an agrarian country. It gives the peasantry a revolutionary role, favours protracted people's war, and holds that class struggle continues after the revolution, requiring repeated mass campaigns against new elites.
- In agrarian societies the peasantry, not only the industrial working class, can lead revolution.
- Revolutionary power is won through protracted people's war from the countryside.
- Class struggle continues under socialism and requires ongoing mass mobilisation against bureaucracy.
The doctrine grew out of the Chinese Communist Party's civil war strategy in the 1930s and 1940s and was codified as "Mao Zedong Thought" in 1945. Its most radical forms appeared in the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Outside China it inspired insurgencies in Peru, India, Nepal and Cambodia.
Historians attribute tens of millions of deaths to the Great Leap Forward famine and to the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Even China's own leadership officially judged Mao's later campaigns to have been serious errors in 1981.
Countries and historical regimes whose 12-axis profile is closer to Maoism than to any other ideology in the test.
Countries today
- Cuba84%
- North Korea78%
Historical regimes
Maoism is also the second-closest ideology for: China, Jacobin France.
Method: each ideology is placed at a typical position on the 12 axes, scored from 0 to 100 toward the first pole. Ranks compare it with the other 45 ideologies; matches are 100 minus the average distance across all axes. The positions are our own calibration, not taken from any third-party source.