Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran)
Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran lit. the head-on-gallow mass) (UIC(S); Persian: اتحادیه کمونیستهای ایران) was a Maoist organization in Iran. The UIC(S) was formed in 1976 after the alliance of a number of Maoist groups carrying out military actions within Iran. The group prepared an insurrection starting in 1981, but it was dismantled by 1982.
Group of Sarbedaran guerrillas in forest, during the Amol Uprising 1982
Maoism, also known as Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realize a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. A difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that a united front of progressive forces in class society would lead the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than communist revolutionaries alone. This theory, in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.
Mao Zedong, for whom the ideology is named.
Strategic Issues of Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War (1938)
Strategic Issues in the Chinese Revolutionary War (1947)
Beijing, 1978. The billboard reads, "Long Live Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought!"