Exactly what Maoism was during Mao Zedong's tenure in China (1949-1976) is not quite clear in hindsight, nor was it clear during that period. Theoretically, it was a form of Marxism, but there are so many things wrong with this proposition that one is tempted to think that Mao himself never read Marx. In fact, he probably never did or if he did it must have been in some breviary-like version. Marxist doctrine was incompatible with every social condition that prevailed in China when Mao took power from the mouth of the barrel of a gun, itself as un-Marxist a principle as any one can imagine. Nonetheless, the living Marx was not anti-violence and Marxism-Leninism was the contrived interpretation of Marxism that was used to justify Bolshevik power.

Let's assume then that Maoism was not a form of Marxism but of Marxism-Leninism. But here again we crash against innumerable incompatibilities. Backward Russia was still a semi-industrialized economy with a large proletariat population. The Russian communists only very reluctantly gave up on the truly Marxist expectation that industrialized Europe would arise against capitalism and join hands with its Soviet comrades. Mao's China's was over 90% agrarian and the only support it could expect was from fellow communist USSR, and even this alliance was spurned by Mao himself. Mao experimented with the preposterous idea that the Marxist revolution was really a kind of third-worldism, or the revolutionary confrontation between rich countries and poor countries, at whose head China, probably being the poorest of all, deserved to be. This was carrying dialectical materialism to an absurd extreme. And basically Mao's Marxism or Marxism-Leninism was an ideological fig-leaf for a successful struggle for power. Even so, Maoism is still alive here and there, so perhaps one could work one's way back from second-hand Maoism to the essence of Chinese Maoism.

The most legitimate followers of Mao, even though they did not call themselves Maoists, were the Khmer Rouge. There are at least two powerful reasons with which to uphold this claim. One is that the Cambodian communists were as agrarian, or more agrarian, as the Chinese communists. This means that Cambodian Marxism was as upside down as Mao's Marxism and that the two movements coincided in being so divorced from reality yet being so convergent in their ideological cant. The other reason is that when Vietnam, exasperated with Cambodia's intrusions along the Mekong river basin (which the Khmer Rouge claimed), struck back and overthrew the Cambodian communists, China attacked Vietnam, and incidentally got at least one nostril bloodied.

The one apparently originality of the Khmer Rouge was that its revolution was carried out by seemingly brain-dead, murderous boy-soldiers. In China, Mao's armies were recruited among fully-grown peasants and they never behaved as atrociously as did the Cambodian fighters and killers. The Cambodian example, and this is another big difference with Maoism, was taken up not by other "Marxist" revolutionaries but by unscrupulous and sanguinary African warlords in Liberia and Sierra Leone and apparently now in the Ivory Coast. We could reason in a seemingly wayward way that Maoism was the original instigator of thoughtless, youthful mayhem.

A movement that did call itself Maoist without ifs or buts was the Sendero Luminoso in Perú, where for a time starting in the late 1980s it terrorized parts of the interior of the country as no Latin American revolutionary movement had ever done before. The Sendero Luminoso made no bones about its intention of turning Peruvian society inside out and sparing no one from the ruling classes. These Peruvians extremists could be said to be another bridge between the also extremely anti-social Khmer Rouge to a mode of thinking and a political strategy that can be called Maoist. From the evidence outside of China, Maoism then is an ideology that calls for the complete social overhaul of society and that has no qualms about the methods it employs.

Another movement that calls itself Maoist is that of the radical communists in Nepal. Apparently the Nepalese Maoists are not as barbaric in their methods as the Cambodians and the Peruvians, but they have in common with them the avowed intention of re-building society from the bottom up--although the Nepalese appear not to as closed to conventional politics as the others--and specifically they share with the Cambodians the practice of requisitioning peasant children to brainwash them and train them as combatants.

From the evidence we have presented, Maoism outside of China evinces a picture of inflexible social extremism intended to create a society different from all past models and to do so by indoctrinating young people and using them as instruments of struggle. China today, which still reveres Mao's corpse, is certainly nowhere near these objectives. It is if anything going at the speed of light in the opposite direction.

But hang on a second! Isn't what we have superficially described in Cambodia, Africa, Perú, and Nepal something that is related directly or indirectly to Maoism? And aren't the features of external Maoism similar to something that actually took place in China and about which there is no question of its direct and deliberate Maoist inspiration and direction? It was of course the Cultural Revolution, during which Mao ordered that China break with its past, however brutally, and that youth should be the instruments of that break. In other words, the most pure historical incarnation of Maoism is the Cultural Revolution and Maoism is not a coherently ideology but an irrational, megalomaniacal destructive impulse. Carrying things to their logical and inevitable conclusion, Mao could eventually be considered by history as, among other things (not all bad, let's be honest), the original inspiration for boy-soldier armies.