Marxism–Leninism

Marxism–Leninism–Maoism (MLM) is a term used by some communist groups to emphasize the significance of Maoism as a new stage in Marxist theory and practice.

Adherents of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism claim it to be a unified, coherent higher stage of Marxism, saying that it was not synthesized until the 1980s through the experience of the people's war waged by the Partido Comunista del Perú (better known as Shining Path).

In developed countries (the "imperial core", in Marxist parlance), MLM has been promoted by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) in the 1990s, and more recently by smaller groups such as the American Red Guards and Norway's Tjen Folket (Serve the People).

In particular, the Canadian Maoist philosopher J. Moufawad-Paul identifies Charu Mazumdar, Joma Sison, and Ibrahim Kaypakkaya (and their associated revolutionary organizations, all of which were involved in "people's wars") as forebears of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

[4] However, Moufawad-Paul argues that prior to 1988 organizations that were called "Maoist" subscribed to "Mao Zedong Thought" or versions of anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninism that privileged China over the USSR, rather than "Maoism-qua-Maoism.

"[10] The anarchist author Elliott Liu similarly writes of "the 'Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' synthesis put forward by the Shining Path and the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement in the early 1990s.

It holds that the national-bourgeois in the New Democratic stage must always be firmly under the command of the proletariat and they must be firmly dispensed with as soon as the national situation allows (in other words, when the contradiction between feudalism and the masses is no longer the primary contradiction of the nation, or when the bourgeois-democratic revolution is at a sufficiently advanced stage) for an outright dictatorship of the proletariat.

[12] In contrast, Tjen Folket[10] and others have argued that people's war is "universally applicable" and represents "the only military strategy of the Proletariat."

[18][19][20] In the 1980s and 1990s Shining Path, which claimed Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its ideology, fought an insurgency against the Peruvian state that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.

In the merger, a provisional central committee was constituted, with the erstwhile people's war leader Muppala Lakshmana Rao (alias Ganapathi) as the general secretary.