Reading Mao

Dear comrades, both those signed up as authors of this blog and fellow travelers on other blogs,

Our reading group's been slow lately. I'd like to get the ball rolling again. I don't know Mao's writing well enough to really defend this, but my sense is that it divides roughly into three parts:

- organizational matters (say, the shape of the party)
- political analysis (say, the composition of the peasantry)
- philosophical work (say, work on dialectics)

I'm interested in all three, primarily the first, and I am of course happy to have this typology corrected or complicated. I'm also interested in the history of Mao(ism). I've been reading a book on Maoism and Trotskyism in the US and France, mainly because I was keen to know more about the French Maoists of the 60s and 70s.

Who is still interested in this project? What are others interested in reading? I would also be happy to expand the circle of who is in on this conversation, via adding people to this blog and/or by extending the conversation to other blogs, as long as we can keep the discussion comradely across our differences.

Please respond as to your interest and feel free to suggest a list of pieces we could read. I'd like to use the above typology (or any other) to generate a list of readings, so when we finish one we don't have to have a lag as to what to read next. (A lag because people need a break is fine as it's deliberate, an accidental lag is less acceptable.)

Best wishes,
Nate