Steve Owens posted the following
A couple of things. You really want to hitch your wagon to this guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPfWThToClo
Coal is stone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
New ideas can be hard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkEdyzEFHPs
A bit more junk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-06/dutch-close-europe-s-biggest-gas-field-despite-energy-crisis
More diversionary junk from the Iran post.
Steve Owens
February 23, 2026 at 12:56 pm Edit
You say learn from Mao and I agree there is lots to learn from Mao. 170 years ago Marx said you cant have a socialist revolution in a feudal country. Trotsky was the first to fall into error when he said you could have a workers revolution in a semi feudal country. He got it wrong and the regimen that he and Lenin created regressed virtually from day one always going backwards just to keep afloat. Then Mao comes along and says you can have a socialist revolution in a feudal country it is just a matter of will. Well Marx was right and Trotsky and Mao were wrong because the real world has limits and no amount of will can defeat the limits that’s the ideology of idealism. In the end Trotsky got an ice pick in the brain because the regimen he declared was some sort of workers state was a murderous state. In the end Mao was reduced to placing the number one Capitalist roader into the number 3 slot in the party. Admittedly when Zhou died Mao refused to make Deng number 2 but instead put Hua Guofeng as number 2.
Steve Owens February 24, 2026 at 2:04 pm Edit
Just answer one question. How do you run a cultural revolution with Deng as the main target and end up with Deng as number 3 in the party?
Steve Owens February 26, 2026 at 2:42 pm Edit
Any chance of answering the question? In 1969 Mao declares Deng to be a counter revolutionary. In 1974 Mao made Deng First Vice Premier. As Zhou Enlai was quite ill at the time Deng became de facto Premier and as such Head of State. How on earth does a counter revolutionary become de facto Head of state?
I was just hoping to get an answer but I guess you don’t have any.
What’s that old saying? Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution and Mao wants a counter revolutionary lathe operator at a tractor factory to be Vice Premier.
This is why Maoism went no where. People were attracted to dynamic radicalism but once they did a bit of study and realised the giant had clay feet Maoism became a relic of history. People are much more educated today and wont accept fudging over difficult issues. World wide there is a rise in interest about Socialism we can see this with that Anti Israel protests a man claiming to be a socialist being elected mayor of New York the left shift in the UK Greens and the magnificent electoral victories in France stopping the far right from taking government. The future is bright but the old Stalinists will play no positive part.
Feb 24 I ask a simple question. That question being if you run a cultural revolution with Deng as the target how does Deng go from a lathe operator in a tractor factory to Vice Premier the number 3 in the hierarchy.
Now you could just answer the question but you don’t. My suspicion is that you can’t.
Here’s my view. Mao became leader because Zhao Enlai tipped the voting balance in his favour. So Mao always had an immense debt of gratitude to Zhao That’s why even when Zhao was clearly the leader of the Capitalist roaders Mao gave him a pass. This pass extended to Deng as he and Zhao were very close dating back to their time together in France. You can see Mao go easy on Deng as compared to Lui Shaoqi. Lui was arrested stripped of his party membership tortured and died in custody. Deng didn’t even lose his party membership. The cultural revolution started with the left winning but Mao gradually clipped their wings first at Wuhan where he sent the PLA in to disarm them then he disbanded the Red Guards. Then after the death of Lin Biao he purged the leftists from the PLA. The Cultural revolution had run it’s course and all the leftists were impotent so at Zhao’s request Mao brought Deng back in to run things as he had done after the Great Leap. Deng tried to keep his head down but evens went the other way. Zhao died and Mao had to chose a successor. He could have chosen Deng or Zhang Chunqiao (gang of four member) but he plucked Hua Guofeng.
It’s hard to gauge who had popular support but I think the Tiananmen incident gives us an idea. Tiananmen square became the location to honour Zhao after he died. The number attending would indicate public approval of Zhao and his political line. It shocked the leftists when an estimated 2 million people turned up many leaving floral tributes to the Premier. Someone thought that it would be a good idea for militia to remove the tributes overnight but this just enraged people and riots followed. Deng got the blame and was purged again but tellingly Mao again did not strip him of his party membership. The reality was that Deng had a huge amount of popular support both within and outside the party and it was this support that saw him triumph a couple of years latter.
It is a strange world. I’m on a Maoist website and I want to talk about China but all I get is silence. I have come across this before. I had some friends who were in the CPA(ML) and they were always happy to talk about China right up until the arrest of the Gang of Four. The they didn’t want to talk about China. The most they would say was China is “problematic” and that would be it. I guess once again China has become “problematic”