Maoists Without Mao: The Misnomer of Indian ‘Maoism’
Maoists Without Mao: The Misnomer of Indian ‘Maoism’ Posted on 18th September, 2026 (GMT 19:45 hrs) ABSTRACT India’s so-called Naxalite–CPI (Maoist) “insurgency”, declared “effectively finished” around 2026, is called “Maoist” by the state, the press, and the movement itself; this article treats that name as a misnomer that does ideological work. It reconstructs Mao’s actual method — concrete analysis in On Practice and On Contradiction, the gun-and-pen doctrine of Yan’an, sinification rather than imported catechism, self-reliant base areas, a restless Confucian–classical substratum, and the brief Hundred Flowers opening toward a plural field of standpoints later formalised, in another idiom, as overdetermination by Althusser — and shows that the Indian movement kept the words and dropped the grammar: iconolatry (“China’s Chairman is India’s Chairman”), MLM as a frozen universal system, Gutian-condemned annihilationist militarism, and a parasitic levy-and-loot economy on a minera...