The main ideologue for modern ultra-Stalinist is one Professor Grover Furr, see the endnote for the adulation poured on him by the Stalin Society of North America. [6] In contrast the Kasama Project [7] and Mike Ely in particular, coming from a Maoist tradition, have made some efforts to reassess the legacy of Stalin. There is little to disagree with in the Kasama general statement adopted in March 2015. [8] Back in 2010 in Socialist Fight No. 11 we noted that Mike Ely had taken Grover Furr sternly to task for the abysmal academic standard of his bogus ‘proofs’ of Trotsky’s collaboration with the Germany and Japan before and at the start of WWII. [9] Unfortunately, the Kasama project is no more. Mike Ely’s last posting was November 2015 and in June 2016 Louis Proyect posted Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project. [10] This let us know that it had gone but no political explanations are forthcoming as yet, apart from the speculation that Mike Ely is ill. If so could not someone else take on the burden?

A similar project of honest political opponents is the publication Maoism or Trotskyism by Joshua Moufawad-Paul (JMP). We will critique this pamphlet and the ideology on which it is based, particularly the document by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) in 1993, Long Live Marxism- Leninism-Maoism! This, we are told, was inspired “first with the people’s war carried out by the Communist Party of Peru (PCP, Shining Path), whose experiences led to the foundation of the RIM in 1984. One of the other central founders of the RIM was the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA) led by the redoubtable Bob Avakian. [11]

Image result for Bob Avakian images

The 1993 statement led to a split in the forces of international Maoism, or rather a division based on some political considerations as they had never been really united in the first place. The split was between the adherents of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) and the adherents of what might be loosely called Mao Tse Tung Thought who gathered in the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations. MLM was a “new, third and higher stage of Marxism” they affirmed. They saw the first stage as that of Marx and Engels culminating in the Commune of 1871; the second as that led by Lenin and culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the third as the ideology of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese revolution of 1949 in its modern context.