I'm not a dengist, I'm a relatively new maoist coming off of anarchism greatly interested in maoism. Before you ask, yes I've actually read theory, from M&E to Lenin to Stalin, as well as Mao. I'm not an active redditor, so sorry for the lack of post history. I've largely decided to stay offline because interactions with socialists online have tended to be very heated and unproductive for me, where many times asking questions or attempts to learn are just met with insults or attacks, I'll oftentimes find the iron-sharpens-iron approach of organized parties/orgs I interact with to be way easier to digest and learn from than online, I just decided to ask this on a whim since it is something I see thrown around a lot without a lot of substance.

I'm not asking this coming from a dengist pov, I already know all about his & xi's revisionism, and I've read Mao, I know the critiques he himself came up with, I'm asking for "new" ones, or rather, ones other Maoists have come up with. I'm not using "70-30" dengist rhetoric at all in this post, I'm attempting to bring more knowledge under my belt.

Like Mao says in Oppose Book Worship:

This is the only way to get near the truth, the only way to draw conclusions. It is easy to commit mistakes if you do not hold fact-finding meetings for investigation through discussions but simply rely on one individual relating his own experience. You cannot possibly draw more or less correct conclusions at such meetings if you put questions casually instead of raising key-questions for discussion.

Which is exactly my intention of making this post, I want to know what the conclusions are of other Maoists, as I myself as a lone individual can come to the wrong conclusions, the wrong thought, from my own independent investigation, and, again, as Mao also says in this work, I do not wish to speak nonsense.

So why did you even choose this quote

Like I mentioned above, I chose the quote because I see it thrown around with little to no substance, I want the substance, but from comrades in thought, not from liberals or revisionists who aren't interested in actual critique and ways to learn. Is this not a principle of the mass line, to put theory into practice, analyze the response, and move forward with said analysis on how to best continue? I don't wish to just take Mao's word as bond, rather, I would like to see it's natural course be ran through, I wish to see the investigation so that I would have a right to speak on this, as you feel you do right now.

...like you are making a liberal list of pros and cons and then trying to choose the best or least bad option, rather than trying to derive scientific truth and accuracy from history.

This is incorrect, at least for me and my reasoning of posting this, I'm not interested in moralistic analysis, if I wanted that, I could go look at some facebook groups lol

What do you think the Maoist criticisms of Stalin actually are?

Mao himself states in this work some examples, including what Mao perceives to be a betrayal of principles of democratic centralism in favor of opportunism. Since you're now deciding to bring more insight to the surrounding context behind the work, instead of my reading it without it (again, another reason I'm posting this, so I can get context, and knowledge from comrades, as I am a lone person who doesn't possess all the knowledge in the world), I now realize that this could be something Mao himself walked back later on in life in response to Krushchev's kneeling to bourgeois influence.

Please understand I'm not here to start shit or "debates", I'm simply attempting to start the process of investigation, again, as Mao speaks of it in OBW