Atlas / Claim checks / Is Maoism the same as Marxism
Is Maoism the same as Marxism? The claim, measured
“Maoism is just Marxism applied.”
Measured against Maoism and Classical Marxism
Strongest case for the claim
Both abolish private ownership of the means of production, both analyse history through class struggle, and Mao's writings present themselves as an application of Marxism-Leninism to a peasant society. The economic coordinate is identical at −10.
Strongest case against
Classical Marxism is internationalist, treats the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class, and theorises the state withering away. Maoism made the peasantry the revolutionary class, treated class struggle as continuing indefinitely after the seizure of power, and used mass mobilisation to attack the party's own institutions — which no Marxist text anticipates.
What the coordinates show. Identical on economics, ten points apart on membership, eight on authority. Distance 15.6. The doctrine scores +02 on authority because its stated endpoint is a stateless society; the regime built in its name scores +10. That gap between a doctrine's endpoint and the regimes founded on it is one of the most important discontinuities in this dataset.
The six measurements
| Axis | Mao Zedong Thought | Scientific socialism | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC · Economic organisation | −10 | −10 | 0 |
| CU · Social and cultural order | −02 | −06 | 4 |
| AU · Organisation of power | +10 | +02 | 8 |
| SC · Scale of decision | +09 | +04 | 5 |
| ID · Rule of membership | +04 | −09 | 13 |
| CH · Method and tempo | +10 | +08 | 2 |
Both cases are stated because the atlas does not settle arguments by assertion. Where the underlying dispute is conceptual rather than factual, that is said plainly rather than resolved.
Full comparisonCheck it yourself
The interactive atlas holds 319 organisations on six independent axes with the evidence for every score. Paste any claim that equates two political things and it will find them and report the measurement.