Mao-Spontex

The term Mao-Spontex refers to a political movement in the Marxist and libertarian movements in Western Europe from 1960 to 1970. The neologism is composed of "Maoist " and "spontaneist". The complete and accurate writing of this term would be mao-spontaneity. The word "Spontex" can also be understood as a pejorative reference in reference to the sponge scraper brand Spontex.

The movement was born in France in the wake of the events from May to June 1968. In June, violent clashes changed students environments to large concentrations of workers. In June 10, near the Renault factory in Flins, Gilles Tautin, a schoolboy, drowned in the Seine, trying to escape a charge of riot police. The violence of the clashes mark the further evolution of this political current.

Mao-Spontex came to represent an ideology promoting the ideas of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism but rejecting the total idea of Marxism-Leninism. Even though it is a Leninist school of thought, Lenin's work What Is To Be Done? is criticized as dated and Lenin's critique of spontaneity is rejected. Lenin's idea of democratic centralism is supported as a way to organize a party, but a party must also have constant conflict inside of it to remain revolutionary. The revolutionary party discussed must also always be from a mass worker's movement.

The concept of "Mao-Spontex" combines Maoist rhetoric, anti-intellectual workerism, along with libertarianism and anarcho-syndicalism. As stated by Serge July in the journal Esprit , it is both authoritarian and libertarian.

It builds its specific political identity of the youth, such as anti-authoritarianism and anti-hierarchical claims (through struggles against the "little chefs" and mastering).

The Maoists-Spontex emphasize the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a spontaneous revolt of young Red Guards against the state apparatus and the Communist Party presented as corrupted by the bureaucracy. In his autobiographical narrative, Claire Brière-Blanchet speaks in these terms: "We were not far from us imagine a lone rebel Mao in symbiosis with the people of China, Mao almost anarchist!." It was not until 1971 and the book New Clothes Chairman Mao Belgian sinologist Simon Leys for the appearance, including in European militant ranks, shows the true nature of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" as a struggle for checking of power between rival state factions, initiated by Mao himself against the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.

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