Good question. um, probably.

Among my (mostly boring) keyword searches just now, there is this:

"what is maoist self-criticism"


An answer:

A. Question of authority

There is no authority in Maoist self-criticism. Criticism and self-criticism are not correct because the party mandated them or someone you admire did so. Self- criticism is correct or not correct for ideological and scientific reasons, scientific reasons having precedence.

The belief in authority including the party is only an approximation, a helpful starting place. Going beyond advanced capitalism requires that increasing portions of society are able to function self-critically without authority.

If you "don't have time," you may want to consider the likelihood that the party or someone else would be right and you should follow what they are saying to save time and still advance together with the international proletariat.

There are also people "with time" but without sufficient drive to function very well apart from a hard-driving vanguard party. These sorts of people are apt to innovate toward the petty-bourgeois definition of "sectarianism." It also stands to reason that a party is going to do a better job, based on more investigation, concerning questions of sorting out friends and enemies.

None of this means there is no authority in society or one's party. Believing that we can leap from self-criticism to life as a whole is connected to the questions of sub-reformism and pornography--questions at the center of the rejection of Lenin's contributions to scientific communism. We Maoists do not believe that just because there is no role for authority in self-criticism and criticism except dictated by narrow needs, that that means there is no authority in proletarian organizations or society. Our criticism and self-criticism do not eliminate authority in society at large. See below...

..Maoist self-criticism often gathers analogies to "political correctness" culture as understood today. Again, as with Catholic confession, there is overlap. The problem is that while some of the agenda of issues covered may be the same, pc is a schematization, while self-criticism is part of a scientific production process that pc does not care about.

The cauldron of self-criticism should be boiling hot at all times until the day the species faces no mortal threats. This has many implications for pc. For example, people have varying levels of self-criticalness in their persynality. The Maoist should be at the high end. For this, we CAN take a common "Dianetics" cult test on the street to see how self-critical we are; although the Hubbard cult will tell us that self-criticism is a flaw!

The trouble occurs in relations where others may not share the self-critical assumption. For example, someone may be a 10 on the self-critical scale and a 7 on the critical scale, but the 7 may still be too much for someone used to a 3. So we Maoists can come across the wrong way. We may seem to be "revolutionizing others and not ourselves" when in fact we just have boiling cauldrons all the time that would be too hot for many other people to touch in any fashion. This is another reason that if we can go to a system of non-public self-criticism that would be better and then not criticize others except in regard to political leaders.

Inevitably, that is the ideal that we fail to meet. For example, at some point there has to be purges. Rotten wood accumulates and has to be purged. Sometimes we have to make judgments regarding people who are not necessarily the greatest political obstacles unfortunately.

So anyway, someone who is a 10 in self-criticism and a 7 in criticism will still come across as "aggressive toward wimmin" that the pc wants to protect from criticism. In fact, the pc culture has invented a whole ideology of "self- esteem" for wimmin that Maoists do not agree with...

All clear?