In my view, the recent article Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy, by Theryn Arnold, is not a Marxist analysis of the political-economic situation in contemporary China, and serves to justify and apologize for capitalist-imperialist exploitation, so long as this exploitation is not carried out at the hands of the US ruling class or other Western imperialists. The question of how to evaluate the political character of China today is extremely contentious in the US left, so any treatment of it demands a rigorous analysis of the class contradictions, production and social relations, and dominant ideological trends in Chinese society. This letter is not the place to carry that out (I would recommend N.B. Turner’s Is China an Imperialist Country? as a starting point for those looking to learn more), but I do want to highlight some of the obvious discrepancies between Arnold’s positions and the basic tenets of the Marxist theory of the state.

Any “Marxist state theory” necessarily has to start from Lenin’s State and Revolution, which remains the canonical Marxist text on this topic, and where, in addition to reiterating the essential and decisive points from the historical writings of Marx and Engels about the state, Lenin also builds on their theories to describe the features of the state in the era of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. As such, the general principles Lenin lays out in this book about the historical existence and development of the state remain essential for us to understand today as communists in the US.

Just as Lenin sought to apply Marx and Engels’ theories to a new historical context while preserving their revolutionary content, so should we use Lenin’s works to understand modern-day capitalist society, so as to be better equipped to overturn it. However, as Lenin remarks in State and Revolution, we must at the same time guard against petit-bourgeois and bourgeois intellectuals who:

… hallow [the names of past revolutionary thinkers and leaders] to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter” while at the same time they “omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul … push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

It is striking that out of three recent pieces published on the topic of how to evaluate the contemporary Chinese state (Arnold’s article, “Letter: The Meaning of China Debates” by Kieran Morgan, and “Heat and Light: A Critique of “Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy”” by Ewan Ben), none of them contains a single reference to State and Revolution. This speaks to the extent to which the US left has largely lost touch with fundamentals of Marxist theory. Steeped for decades in the dominant ruling class ideology of US imperial omnipotence (the “end of history” narrative promoted after the fall of the USSR, and so on), the left and the working class movement broadly in this country have turned away from Marxism and towards all manner of bourgeois philosophical trends, whose real effect, regardless of the intention of the individuals to follow these trends, is to keep us weak, dispersed, and subservient to this cruel and oppressive society. If communists today wish to take advantage of the opportunities that are certain to arise from the rupture in the previous order of US imperialist hegemony, it is absolutely imperative that we take up study of the foundational lessons of Marxism.

In that spirit, let us turn to the basics of what Lenin wrote in State and Revolution:

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

Notably, Lenin defines the state in negative terms: it arises because – and only because – of the fact that class antagonisms cannot be reconciled. Its function, which it cannot ever carry out in totality, is to impose order over a situation whose very existence is conditional upon precisely that which makes its stability impossible – namely, class antagonisms. As Alain Badiou writes in his book Being and Event: “the State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding, which it prohibits.”

Arnold characterizes the so-called “socialist market economy” in China as: “as a specific contradictory configuration in which socialist state form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension.” This outlook is not compatible in any way with Lenin’s description. It is rather an expression of the bourgeois revision of Marxism which attempts to cast the state as “an organ for the reconciliation of classes” (one of the viewpoints Lenin polemicizes against in State and Revolution); in other words, as a positive expression of the “social bond” between classes.

Even under socialism, the character of the struggle to remain on the socialist road and reject the capitalist road is not one of containing and managing “tension,” but of confronting and combating the irreconcilable class antagonism that persists between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and actually intensifies in new ways after the proletariat has seized political power. To be clear, I think China today is capitalist, but even putting aside that major difference in views, we can see that Arnold’s entire analytical framework is based on a patently non-Marxist understanding of the state.

Now, what does Lenin say about the state in the era of imperialism?

“In analyzing Marxist teachings on the state, the criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme, sent by Engels to Kautsky … cannot be ignored; for it is with the opportunist views of the Social-Democrats on questions of state organization that this criticism is mainly concerned.

We shall note in passing that Engels also makes an exceedingly valuable observation on economic questions, which shows how attentively and thoughtfully he watched the various changes occurring in modern capitalism, and how for this reason he was able to foresee to a certain extent the tasks of our present, the imperialist, epoch. Here is that observation: referring to the word “planlessness,” used in the draft programme, as characteristic of capitalism, Engels wrote:

“When we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts which assume control over, and monopolize, whole industries, it is not only private production that ceases, but also planlessness.”

Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter must be emphasized because the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called “state socialism” and so on, is very common. The trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot provide complete planning. But however much they do plan, however much the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism—at its new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt.”

This excerpt immediately exposes the fictive foil Arnold presents between the “liberal market economy” and “socialist market economy.” In fact, all the traits he claims are characteristic of the latter and antithetical to the former (“real institutional constraint on market relations, a genuine concentration of planning capacity and political insulation from domestic capital;” “governance of state-owned enterprises, development finance insulated from profitability requirements, five-year planning, sectoral coordination”) are perfectly compatible with what Lenin describes vis-a-vis the capitalist state in its highest stage of development. Supporting examples abound even in the supposed “free market” period of neoliberal policy in the US, from the Consolidated Rail Corporation of 1976-99, to extensive government subsidies that have propped up major monopoly corporations like Amazon, SpaceX, and Tesla throughout the 2000s.

The crux of most of the arguments in Arnold’s article can be found in his statement that “state direction of markets can produce qualitatively different outcomes from market self-regulation.” Lenin’s writings from over a century ago make it exceedingly clear that such “qualitatively different outcomes” can still lie entirely within the regime of the capitalist mode of production. Arnold avoids dealing with this crucial point in any capacity, and concludes that the correct stance for leftists to take towards the Chinese state is one of “critical solidarity without illusions” – which is to say, solidarity (since real solidarity neither precludes criticism nor requires the maintenance of illusions). Bearing in mind that the state “is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class” (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State), Arnold is putting forward that we should stand in solidarity with the ruling class of China, who are capitalists.

In his response, Ewan Ben disagrees with Arnold’s stance, though timidly: “The [Chinese] party-state’s strategic selectivities … point toward a state whose reproduction is structurally entangled with the accumulation regime it manages, whose institutional capacities serve specific class interests, and whose relationship to the Chinese working class is not one of structural favouring.” Tilley also distorts the elementary lessons in State and Revolution, writing that “the state condenses class forces. The condensation thesis is not a description of an abstract structural relationship between the state and capital-in-general. It is a claim about what specific class forces, with what specific organisational capacities, are present in the condensation at a given historical moment.” While somewhat better than Arnold’s framework (which papers over class contradictions altogether), this still misses the central point made by Engles, that the economically dominant class inevitably becomes the politically dominant class (i.e. controls the state apparatus). Tilley thereby leaves the question of the state in a partial shroud of fundamental unknowability, in the style of the “Neo-Kantian agnostics [who] say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself” (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

Evidently, part of why Tilley is so shy in his assertions is because he believes that China, while capitalist, is still a progressive anti-imperialist force on the international stage (“Where the structural determination is refused, the geopolitical frame fills the practical political gap, not as a crude assertion that China’s anti-imperialism settles its socialist character, but as the only available basis for orientation once the class determination has been suspended”). The political-economic analysis and anecdotal accounts in Turner’s book (cited above) of Chinese mining enterprises in Africa and South America help to show why this position is fundamentally misguided. Another recent example, not covered in that text, is the Chinese state’s material support for the Sri Lankan military in its genocidal massacre against the Tamil population there in 2009.

Lastly, Kieran Morgan’s letter evades the responsibility to come to any conclusion whatsoever on the class character of the Chinese state today by invoking the maximally fatalist position that: “even if Chinese workers would organize themselves to topple the state (and that’s a big if), I would think that they would soon be organizationally overpowered by forces organized and financed by the West.” Morgan would do well to study the history of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were able to lead the USSR to victory in the post-revolution civil war – even though their bourgeois opponents were “organized and financed” by all the major imperialist world powers at the time combined – precisely because of the organization and dedication to the revolutionary cause of the overwhelming majority of the Russian workers and peasants. As communists, if we want to avoid falling into the type of dead-end thinking exhibited in Morgan’s letter, we must uphold, in the face of the most daunting obstacles, the same non-naive confidence in the infinite creativity of the masses as the Bolsheviks did.

The central thesis of Ray F.’s letter “In Defense of Conspiracy Theory” offers both a compelling argument for why communists should seriously investigate and engage with popular conspiracy theories, and an objective assessment of the mood of the masses in the United States at present:

The people are yearning for truth. They want to know why things are the way they are. They’re open to reexamining American history to understand how we got here. More people are beginning to correctly conclude that American “Democracy” is a lie, the corporate press and parties only serve the interests of the rich, and oftentimes, that the perpetrators of some of America’s foremost high crimes are from the imperial state itself. If socialists do not offer a political indictment of these high crimes, or find a way to connect these actors, organizations, events, to our theories of political economy then we leave that counter-history space open.

It’s worth noting that the space for historical and social analysis is not fully open, even if there are relatively greater openings for communists to seize upon right now. Tucker Carlson claims ten times more views per episode across all his platforms than Fox News reports for its average prime time viewership. Candace Owens quit the Daily Wire two years ago, and has brought most of its audience (and then some) with her by now. Both of these pundits have been extremely adept at seizing on mass outrage about Epstein, Israel, the Iran War, and the overall economic situation, in order to advance their political careers and inculcate their viewers with right-wing Christian ideology.

On the other hand, the cadre organization I am a part of, Maoist Communist Union, has recently achieved a considerable following on social media by putting out reels analyzing these same topics from a Marxist perspective, spelling out our political views in a way that is clear and engaging for a broad audience. One video we posted about the Samson Option (Israel’s military strategy of last resort to threaten the world with nuclear Armageddon if it is under existential threat), garnered over a million views and thousands of comments, including from many working class people who, by all appearances, are not regular followers of online leftist discourse. These steps forward in our work of political agitation, while still quite modest, clearly support the general points Ray F. makes in his letter.

While I agree with Ray F.’s main argument, a major shortcoming I see in his treatment of this topic is that he tends to paint conspiracy theories as social phenomena that arise solely from amongst the people; for example, in his statement that “conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation are treated [by the state] as a danger, emanating from a political extreme or radical position.” I think this is an incomplete picture.

Since JFK’s assassination in 1963, the US state has encouraged the proliferation of the very term “conspiracy theory” in order to obscure the distinction between, on the one hand, the masses having some generally accurate (if imprecise) sense that the establishment narrative doesn’t add up, and trying to hypothesize why that is; and on the other, the bourgeoisie deliberately crafting elaborate counter-narratives to purposefully channel people away from a correct understanding, and then using their extensive available networks and channels for disseminating those counter-narratives. Many popular conspiracy theories actually fall under the latter category. This doesn’t mean the masses are being totally fooled by the ruling class (since such counter-narratives always build on some aspects of reality), but it does mean that people need to gain greater clarity to discern when the bourgeoisie is working intentionally and consciously to confuse us.

The Epstein files shed further light on this subject. We now know that Jeffery Epstein was personally connected with Chris Poole, founder and former CEO of 4chan, around exactly the same time that the infamous /pol/ forum launched on that website. Also in this period, one of Epstein’s confidants, Boris Nikolic, emailed him a Washington Post article about the rise of 4chan among young men, along with the comment, “This article describes why I find [Poole] interesting. The potential for manipulation is huge.” Epstein and his coterie probably had a hand in developing and disseminating various reactionary and conspiratorial ideas that were pedaled on 4chan – including antisemetic tropes (which of course hinged on some kernels of truth about Zionist influence in US politics and finance), and even the QAnon movement, which implicated Epstein himself.

Why would Epstein want to promote conspiracy theories about himself, much less ones that touched on the sick schemes of child trafficking, pornography, and rape that he was centrally involved with? Actually, t

his is perfectly consistent with known tactics and strategies of social control that the bourgeoisie in the US has been developing and perfecting for decades, especially in reaction to the progressive political movements of the 1960s and 70s. These include “limited hangouts,” in which intelligence officials purposefully leak partial information about a scandal so as to placate the agitated masses, and still be able to conceal the most damning aspects of the situation in question. It is well-documented that the Nixon administration deployed this strategy in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

There is decent evidence now too that “Pizzagate” (which originated from /pol/ on 4chan in 2016) was also a limited hangout. As the story went, the private emails of Anthony Weiner and John Podesta proved that DNC officials and politicians were involved in a pedophilic sex trafficking ring, supposedly operating out of local pizza parlors. As these rumors circulated online, liberal establishment papers like the New York Times were quick to build on the hysteria by casting Pizzagate as a wholly false conspiracy with no basis in reality whatsoever, which was planted by Russian agents to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and so on.

A decade later, it’s clear that some of the claims from the Pizzagate narrative were not so far from the truth: Epstein’s emails are littered with the same bizarre references to “pizza” as Podesta’s were when WikiLeaks published them in 2016. However, the specific framing presented on 4chan (that pedophilia and child rape was a phenomenon confined to a cabal in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, that the NYPD was heroically attempting to uncover the plot, etc.) led people further away from an objective understanding of the situation (in reality, the CIA and other intelligence agencies worked with Epstein, and prominent politicians from both parties were closely affiliated with him), while the liberal reaction, which basically amounted to telling people to shut up and trust authority, was equally misleading.

Based on all of this, we can see that the statement in Ray F.’s letter that “the bourgeoisie have always viewed so-called “conspiracy theorists” as a threat to the institutional legitimacy of the state itself” is somewhat oversimplified. Someconspiracy theories are a threat to them insofar as they deal with reality and therefore become popular, but others definitely aid the bourgeoisie by deflecting attention and reinforcing their own ideologies among the people.

The real theoretical threat to the capitalist ruling class is and, since its conception, always has been, Marxism. Marxism provides an all-sided and consistent explanation of the manifold outrages people are experiencing and grappling with, and, even more importantly, shows us what we need to do to combat them and eventually stamp them out: the working class has to organize to overthrow the capitalist state and establish, as Marx wrote in The Class Struggles in France, “the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.” (MCU will soon be publishing an article, “The Political Struggle of the Proletariat,” that covers more about this important topic. Curious readers can look for that to drop soon!)

In my opinion, the two letters published in response to Ray F. are both so far at odds with Marxism that they pose even less of a threat to capitalist society than the average conspiracy theory on Twitter.

In “Investigate, but Verify,” C. Derick Varn attempts to discredit the basic premise of the first letter by asserting that it “relies on the sociological idea of the “open field,” which suggests the human need for explanation is so strong that people will not accept “we don’t know” or “random coincidence” as an answer to major events.” It was news to me to find out that the basic communist tenet that the people have an unlimited curiosity and hunger for knowledge had been elevated to the status of a proper “sociological idea.” But regardless what it’s called, the fact is that people have a correct distrust of authority and government based on their knowledge (even partial) of the many sinister ways the ruling class tries to control us, and they look for ways to explain why and how this occurs. Varn’s blithe dismissal of this reality betrays a condescending attitude towards the masses.

Over Mao’s affirmation of the boundless potential of human knowledge (“We will come to know everything that we did not know before,” Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the CCP), Varn prefers Kant’s framework of resignation to human finitude (“Quid juris?” Critique of Pure Reason), as well as the contemporary dogma of post-modernism: “it is vital that we do not provide pseudo-answers just to fill a narrative gap when we do not—and often cannot—know the specific reasons for the events at hand.”

What Varn is really saying here is that it is wrong to apply our general knowledge to understand particular situations. This positivst ideology exclusively serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. If we concede that there are some (even quite significant and outrageous!) aspects of capitalist society that we fundamentally can’t understand, then what basis is there for the working class to take action against them? None, and that is how the ruling class wants it to be. That is why Lenin struggled so fiercely against the positivst tendencies that gained currency within the Russian Marxist movement after the defeat of the 1905 revolution:

Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society … The objective, class role of empirio-criticism consists entirely in rendering faithful service to the fideists in their struggle against materialism in general and historical materialism in particular. (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)

Lastly, whereas C. Derick Varn at least addresses the content of Ray F.’s arguments, Andie Stewart’s letter “Conspiratorial Thought in the Left” neglects to deal with it entirely, beyond making the minimal necessary connection to the topic of conspiracy theories. However, any reader with an interest in supporting the development of a communist movement in the US should summarily reject such absurd positions as Stewart’s defense of Chomsky’s “anti-conspiracy” line on the JFK assassination. It seems she did not pick up on Ray F.’s allusion to Chomsky’s now-incontrovertible ties with Epstein and the rest of the US imperialist class, viz.“we continue to see extended debate and discussion about how relevant it is that certain prominent theoreticians and academics were funded by the CIA in the Cold War.”

I think this exchange has been very fruitful in drawing out not only the differing opinions among Cosmonaut’s readership on conspiracy theories and how communists and leftists should engage with them, but also on some more general philosophical questions about the fundamental nature of knowledge and truth. It will be very helpful to have further debate on these latter foundational questions as they apply to all manner of specific topics in economics, politics, and culture!

Introduction

After launching the rectification campaign we’ve started to get at some deeper issues in our organization overall and with individual comrades. We now have more insight, in particular, into the dearth of deep understanding of MLM within our organization, and there is an urgent need for a big push across the organization and from each individual member to deepen and improve our understanding. Reforming our methods of study will be key for doing this. Each individual comrade has a responsibility to ensure that they get the most they can out of group studies by preparing notes, reading carefully, discussing the reading with comrades before the meeting, consulting outside resources, etc. Additionally, each individual comrade has a responsibility to carry on a lively and engaged independent study to address their own individual weaknesses and blind spots. Adopting a proletarian approach to these two tasks, group and individual study, will require us all to engage in a long-term struggle to transform our habits and our approach, to challenge deeply held ideas about our own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and to develop study skills that we currently lack. Here we present a breakdown of how this series of struggles should be approached as well as a curated reading list of material for comrades’ independent study.

The Problem

MCU is an MLM organization, meaning that it affirms and upholds MLM as its guiding ideology. Our overall organizational grasp of MLM is apparent in our documents and statements, in our relations with other groups in the ICM, and so on, but the actual grasp of MLM by individual comrades in our ranks is very uneven. This problem has become obvious given how comrades have at times struggled not even with just analyzing new phenomena and applying Marxism to new questions, but with internalizing, explaining, and then defending the positions that we already hold. In other words, some comrades’ grasp of MLM is tenuous enough that they are not able to understand our line to the degree necessary to creatively explain or argue for it.1

All of this shows that there is a clear and obvious need for more comrades to work hard to improve their theoretical level, their grasp of MLM. Comrades must also develop, in dialectical relation to deepening their understanding, their ability to apply Marxism in a living fashion to the world around them and to themselves.

What do we mean by “applying Marxism?” Does it mean pointing over here and saying “this is concrete labor” and pointing over there and saying “that’s imperialism?” Well, no. As Lenin put it:

That which constitutes the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism—[is] a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.2

Comrades would do well to reflect on the meaning of this quote. Lenin speaks of the living soul of Marxism, i.e. the thing which, if removed, turns Marxism from a living tool wielded by the proletariat to carry on the class struggle into something stultified and dead. Lenin speaks not of a particular political point or idea (the need for the DoP, Bolshevism, etc) but rather of the approach taken, which is actively and boldly analyzing the objective world around us. Mao expressed this well when he said:

The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable. We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action. Studying it is not merely a matter of learning terms and phrases but of learning Marxism-Leninism as the science of revolution. It is not just a matter of understanding the general laws derived by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from their extensive study of real life and revolutionary experience, but of studying their standpoint and method in examining and solving problems.3

To take up the approach that Mao discusses, to make concrete analyses of the concrete situations we’re in, we’ll need both deep knowledge of revolutionary history and theory and a determination to apply it actively to analyze the world. Can we possibly have any hope of understanding our tasks with respect to the trade unions if we’re ignorant not only of the debates that have taken place historically between Communists on the topic, but even of the most basic elements of history of how Communist parties have handled this question? If we don’t know this history, and beyond just knowing it if we’re not able to actively apply it here and now, we will obviously be groping in the dark and repeating errors. It would be too simple to think that if we just understand, in general, the approach that Mao speaks of we’ll be able to analyze situations in front of us—we also must have a profound understanding of the key lessons of the class struggle in order to do so. So for these reasons we all must take up the struggle to improve our methods of study.

All that said, before addressing how to improve our study we need to oppose numerous possible deviations that can arise.

Scattershot, enthusiasm-driven and manic study: Comrades who study in this way are driven along by enthusiasm alone, and might pick up books but never finish them, accumulate dozens and dozens of tabs “to read later” on their computers, and in short become interested in a new thing every day but fail to follow through on anything long enough to develop serious and deep knowledge. They may have somewhat deep knowledge on one or two topics, but very surface level knowledge on most things. This approach to study is encouraged in some sections of academia, where surface-level knowledge is encouraged, and posturing, rather than deep study, is the norm.

Pragmatic, anti-intellectual attitudes: Comrades who take up this attitude see study as a box to check off, but when they are doing it they are itching to get back to what they view as the “real work.” In group studies they make one or two comments, but they don’t actively participate or push the conversation forward, and don’t air their confusions to achieve collective clarity. Their attitude seeps into all other political work. They view their activity on signal as sufficient political activity, they study what they’re told and often lack enthusiasm derived from their own genuine interest in Marxism. They repeatedly shy away from theoretical and higher order political questions, and instead busy themselves with practical work and logistical questions. This type of comrade is lead by ideas of capitalist productivity. They conflate the execution of work with the political necessity of work, they are driven to complete and not to ensure correctness, and they confuse their protestant work ethic, their spirit to “do work” with the spirit of Marxism. This attitude is particularly prominent in the U.S. because of American pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, and it should be firmly opposed within our ranks. To comrades taking up this approach we must emphasize that importance of study for carrying out our key political tasks and for keeping our organization on the revolutionary path.

Study for individual gratification: We have had comrades in our ranks who were motivated to carry out individual study, and although they perhaps fell into something of the manic approach outlined above, they did gather up materials, read them, dive into questions raised by those materials, and generally studied a lot about topics they felt interested in. But however in depth this study was, it was untethered from organizational questions or the input of other comrades, and so although in form it could be understood as just ‘learning more about Marxism’ in essence it was an individualist and self-centered exercise in intellectual gratification. This approach is obviously influenced by academia, where one studies in isolation most of the time and then occasionally meets up with others to, with great pomp and circumstance, reveal the amazing new insights that one has come to, and where it is entirely possible to entertain interesting intellectual questions which are of no importance at all. Comrades taking up this approach don’t need to entirely give up their interest in history or theoretical questions, but they need to make a firm break with the individual approach and should instead think more about how to relate their individual study to organizational concerns.

There are more possible deviations here that we could outline, and some comrades will fall into one of these deviations only at times, or may fall into more than one of them. The point in outlining them is not to exhaustively describe all of the ways that comrades’ approach to study can be incorrect, but rather to provide some material to help comrades reflect critically on their own approach to study. How are you deciding what to read? How disciplined are you in your reading, and with maintaining your focus? Are you bringing up questions your interested in with other comrades, and relating your study to organizational problems and efforts? Are you actively addressing your weak spots and boldly trying to learn new things, or are you sticking with what’s comfortable? Comrades should be asking themselves these questions and actively working to improve their approach to study.

Improving our approach to study across the organization is essential because we cannot continue to rely on a few leading members to carry the entire organization theoretically. We will always have theoretical unevenness, and it is actually a really good thing to have leading members who are very solid theoretically. They can make big contributions in this area, and it is not inherently a problem to have some comrades who are more theoretically equipped than others, nor is the goal of reforming our study to make sure that everyone is equally theoretically advanced. Rather, at present we have a much lower level of understanding of theory than is required, we have too large of a gulf in theoretical ability between our leadership and the rank and file, and we urgently need to take steps to improve this.

A lot of problems result from our over-reliance on a few, theoretically equipped comrades. Without a strong theoretical background comrades will struggle able to act independently in a wide range of scenarios, since their low level of theoretical understanding impedes their ability to independently analyze the world around them. This hamstrings our ability as an organization to move forward, and means that senior comrades who are more theoretically equipped are constantly called in to fix issues. Without sharp junior comrades, the shortcomings and blindspots of leading comrades may be magnified, and mistakes they make can go unchecked for longer. If junior comrades aren’t theoretically developed the analysis and reporting they pass to senior comrades will be compromised, threatening our overall ability to chart a path forward, the health of our organization, and our ability to carry out DC.

There is accordingly a need to change this. We need redundancy in leadership. The leading comrades that we have at present are not immortal or infallible, so we must have an approach that brings forward new theoretically equipped comrades who can independently analyze the work around them and help chart a course forward. As Mao once put it:

In order to guarantee that our Party and country do not change their color, we must not only have a correct line and correct policies but must train and bring up millions of successors who will carry on the cause of proletarian revolution. In the final analysis, the question of training successors for the revolutionary cause of the proletariat is one of whether or not there will be people who can carry on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary cause started by the older generation of proletarian revolutionaries, whether or not the leadership of our Party and state will remain in the hands of proletarian revolutionaries, whether or not our descendants will continue to march along the correct road laid down by Marxism-Leninism, or, in other words, whether or not we can successfully prevent the emergence of Khrushchov’s revisionism in China. In short, it is an extremely important question, a matter of life and death for our Party and our country. It is a question of fundamental importance to the proletarian revolutionary cause for a hundred, a thousand, nay ten thousand years.4

Additionally, the basic work that we’re doing at present, such as carrying out studies, investigating the semi-Marxist milieu to win people over, etc, is greatly hampered by our present lack of theoretical development. How can comrades effectively explain and defend our political line if they don’t have sufficient background to fully understand it?5 How can they teach others about Marxism if they themselves are unsure on the basics? Obviously they will run into difficulties!

Addressing the Problem

In order to reform our study comrades will need to carry out a series of struggles and transformations at different levels. Making advances at a given level will then open up new problems and make it possible to advance more in terms of study skills, time spent studying, etc. But comrades should take care to not put the cart before the horse. They should think carefully about the actual problems that are in front of them right now with study, and they should work to solve those problems, while having an eye to other problems they’ll face in the future. They should also pay attention to the various possible deviations outlined above, and strive not to fall into unsystematic or scattered approaches to study.

First Struggle: to study or not to study?

Some comrades are simply not making time to study. This is the first and most basic struggle that needs to be waged: comrades need to choose to study and then wage a long-term struggle to change their basic habits concerning their schedule and approach to daily life to ensure that they have time to study regularly.

This is the most basic struggle to be waged because if comrades cannot win this struggle then all other questions with regard to study are pretty much irrelevant. No number of reading lists and no amount of identifying weak areas theoretically will help comrades advance if they don’t first decide to study regularly and the struggle to carry out that decision over the long term.

In waging this struggle it will be important for comrades who currently don’t make any or very much time for study to understand the underlying ideas and outlook behind their current attitude of neglect. Has the reason why it’s necessary not been made sufficiently clear? Are there underlying disagreements with the importance of study, such as an attitude rooted in American pragmatism and anti-intellectualism that disdains theory in favor of practical action? Are comrades just afflicted with petty-bourgeois laziness, and inured to nominal unity? Whatever the case may be, it will be necessary to discuss these underlying ideas with other comrades in order to come to greater clarity and thereby better guide the struggle to change ones habits and approach to study.

Comrades whose main struggle really is developing any habit of regularly reading should start by picking a key historical text and just force themselves to read through it. Red Star Over China and Fanshen are great options, but comrades could select anything from the included list of historical texts. At this point it’s not helpful to spend a lot of time worrying about what to read, instead spend your time struggling to read it. If you change your study habits you’ll be able to dramatically increase the amount of time you spend reading, at which point you can work more on where you should be reading.

Comrades who do not currently have a habit of studying or reading regularly should probably expect to spend somewhere between a few weeks and a few months changing their habits. It won’t be hard for some comrades, for others it may be pretty hard. A lot of us are busy and have a lot of demands on our time. Additionally, some of us are pretty solidified in our current habits of not studying that much. Others of us study occasionally, and just need to do a bit more.

Whatever the case, it’s important to carry this struggle through and see it as a struggle to change our habits, to consciously shape our inclination and the way we go about our days. Just as we can give up a harmful habit like smoking, or take up regular exercise, so too we can consciously develop a habit of studying that we eventually stick to automatically. If you go on long enough eventually a day where you don’t get any reading time will feel like a strange anomaly!

Second Struggle: identify areas of weakness

Following the “are we going to take study seriously and do it or not” struggle, comrades need to assess the particular areas of weakness that they have and orient their study towards these weaknesses in light of organizational needs.

This is realistically something some comrades who have some study habits can launch into right away, others should focus first on developing a habit of regularly doing independent reading. Included in this document is a reading list6 with suggested texts in a bunch of areas, these can provide a good starting point.

Comrades should read lots of books about key things. For instance, there are over 60 texts mentioned in this list about the Chinese revolution—cadre in MCU should have read and internalized the main points of a good deal of these books, they are really the basics in terms of key points of what happened in China. What exactly qualifies as a “key thing” to study will vary a bit from comrade to comrade, and should also be considered in light of current organizational needs. For instance, if a comrade it starting work in a union and also doesn’t know much about the history of the US labor movement then it would likely be a good idea to read first on that topic, even if that comrade also needs to learn more philosophy and political economy.

When we identify a weakness and want to improve in that area we should relentlessly strive to answer our questions, to seek out new books to read, ask comrades to talk it over, etc. We need to become obsessed with Marxism and in particular obsessed with learning more in areas that we’re currently weak.

Third Struggle: building critical reading comprehension

The third level which plays out in the longer term is the struggle to increase our reading comprehension and ability to grapple with dense theoretical material like philosophy. Closely related is the struggle to develop an ability to critically engage with texts, subjecting them to active scrutiny and sorting out what is correct and incorrect in a particular historical or theoretical text.

Some comrades have had more academic training than others, and some comrades’ academic training was in STEM fields like mathematics, physics, computer science, etc which are particularly helpful for dealing rigorously with theory. Other comrades became obsessed with reading at a young age and were voracious readers. These comrades will, generally speaking, have an easier time dealing with theoretical texts. Other comrades do not have significant academic training that helps to prepare them to deal with texts like Capital, and likewise some other comrades didn’t have a period when they were young when they read a huge amount. These are some of the aspects of comrades’ backgrounds which lead to some comrades having a stronger ability to deal with theory when they join MCU than others, and for these reasons there will necessarily be a significant amount of unevenness in comrades’ reading comprehension within our organization.

This is nothing to get discouraged about! It’s actually a result of the rotten way our society is set up where from a young age some of us are marked off for performing mental labor and given relevant training, and others of us are not. So if we struggle with reading comprehension we should not take it all upon ourselves as a personal failing, but rather we should direct our anger at this rotten economic system, rotten society, and the rotten education system we were all put through. However, we also should not rest complacent and think “well I wasn’t educated well when I was young, so I’ll never get this stuff.” That’s bullshit! We already know how to read, and all that we need to do in order to build up our reading comprehension is simply read harder books7 and struggle to understand them. All of our comrades will be able to do this and will be able to thereby increase their reading level over time, without exception.

Even for comrades who do have a lot more experience with reading difficult texts, it’s not a given that they can read those texts critically. There’s two components to this ability: 1)sufficient reading comprehension, focus, and a drive to understand8 that we can read a more difficult text like Capital and understand what Marx is saying without having to have all the main points explained by another comrade and 2) a critical approach where points in the text are actively linked up with, measured against, and assessed in relation to our pre-existing knowledge of the world and specifically of what we already understand of MLM theory and revolutionary history. If comrades merely read texts as gospel, it will be no good! Even if comrades are able to regurgitate key points it won’t be something they can actively apply and use to analyze the world around them, and instead those comrades will end up parroting points from the text dogmatically instead of making a living and vibrant analysis of the concrete situation in front of them.

The goods news is that we can do something about this, however, it is not going to be an instantaneous or overnight change. It’s going to be somewhat like exercise—we can choose to try hard and push ourselves in exercise, but we need to sustain that decision over time in order to get in better shape and develop athletically. So too with developing our ability to read critically—we must choose to work on this, but we’ll have to struggle over time to sustain that, to assess how we’re reading things, and to develop our ability to focus. For improving our reading comprehension, comrades should try some exercises to more objectively assess their level of comprehension, such as writing a summary of the main points from memory after reading a chapter, leaving the reading aside for a time, and then re-reading the chapter and assessing how accurate the summary was. This can make it obvious where our blindspots are and therefore where we need to struggle to pay more attention. Over time, by spending more and more time actively and critically reading, and especially reading difficult texts, comrades will be able to develop both their comprehension and their ability to read critically.

All of our comrades must actively take up the struggle to improve their study. This will be tremendously helpful for our work and for our organization overall, as historically we have always had too few comrades who are capable of independently grappling with and applying MLM. This makes it difficult for a consistent struggle against lackey-ism and deference to be carried out, and relatedly it is part of the basis for opportunists to use their supposed theoretical abilities to lord it over other comrades and undermine our political unity around MLM. All of us have a responsibility to the people to deepen our study habits and thereby help to eliminate these key problems from our work.

So let’s go comrades!

Let’s stop accepting that we can’t learn things, and boldly charge forward!

Let’s dare to read and dare to understand!

Let’s apply Marxism to the world around us, and refuse to let revolutionary theory, the knowledge millions of our class have struggled and sacrificed for, be turned into stale dogma!

Let’s consciously grasp our individual responsibility to take up this struggle!

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.

People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well—they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.

—Mao, Combat Liberalism

Comrades,

The rectification is in full swing and has been a great success so far. On the eve of the launch of the campaign, the small section of MCU which had politically degenerated to Menshevism jumped out and was quickly driven from the organization without major incident. This alone was a victory for proletarian politics. It allowed us to charge forward with the rectification campaign without direct and open interference from a section of our organization. With the small clique who opposed DC no longer in MCU, we have been able to get to the root of various organizational shortcomings and begin to develop a stronger proletarian culture in MCU.

This has required sharp struggle on various levels. First and foremost we have had to wage an open battle against opportunism in our ranks as well as petty-bourgeois laziness, empiricism, and dogmatism. This struggle has been particularly sharp as, in the months since the Conference, it has become clear that our level of ideological unity was lower than we had previously believed. This is not so surprising given the organizational issues which were endemic to our ranks in the lead up to the Conference. Addressing these issues head on has been incredibly fruitful and drastically improved our organization’s style of work in a very short period of time. This has been achieved partially through driving out of our ranks those people who were unwilling to apply Marxism to even the Marxist work they were supposed to be doing.

The improvement to our style of work has also been achieved through launching an open struggle against comrades’ liberalisms. There are many good comrades in our ranks who, despite their strengths, have significant weaknesses. These comrades are not consolidated to opportunism, and they do apply Marxism to some of the work that they do but not all of it.They have not yet deeply internalized the dialectical world outlook or the proletarian fighting spirit. Their work ethic is lacking, and they have some significant petty-bourgeois tendencies. Now that we have begun an open struggle against these liberalisms we are using the method of “cure the illness to save the patient” to help these comrades transform and thus overcome the internal obstacles to our growth and development as a pre-Party organization.

Second, to rectify, we have needed to deepen our understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, so that we can more readily apply it in all situations. Following the method developed by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, we prepared for the rectification campaign first issuing a call to for all comrades to study and deepen their knowledge of Marxism. As Mao noted in Reform Our Study, enthusiasm is but one necessary condition for a Marxist style of work. Alone, it cannot sustain itself. In order for comrades to consistently approach our work with enthusiasm, energy, and tireless dedication, they must understand Marxism-Leninism-Maoism on a deep level. Otherwise, the enthusiasm which they feel for our work—which is genuine and real—will turn into its opposite when they confront situations in which they cannot get their bearings because they lack sufficient understanding of MLM to carry out our political line. Therefore, to carry forward the rectification campaign, we must also deepen our collective and individual understanding of MLM through tireless study. Only thus can we unite theory with practice and advance our party building efforts.

Third, the rectification has required us to struggle to apply Marxism to all aspects of our lives.This last struggle requires us to fight against tendencies in our ranks to have Marxism but also liberalism. Some comrades have taken the approach of applying Marxism to the political work (but not fully) and to others (but with limitations) but not to themselves and their lives. Fred Engst has noted that Marxism is like a flashlight; it is easy to use it to illuminate the path in front of you, but harder—and even painful at times—to shine it on yourself. But we must illuminate ourselves, our shortcomings, and our backwards ideas. When comrades are instead liberal with themselves, they will inevitably be liberal with others and liberal in the broader political work that we are doing. Therefore, the struggle to consistently apply Marxism to ourselves is closely related to the struggle to consistently apply Marxism to the political work that we are doing. As Mao once said:

I am of the same mind as Lu Xun. I like that sort of frankness of his. He said he would dissect [and analyze] himself more severely than when dissecting others. After having taken several spills, I also tend to do as he did. But comrades generally don’t believe [in doing so]. I am confident, but also have a certain lack of confidence.

Comrades would do well to remember this and take up a similar attitude.

In order to carry forward the rectification campaign to completion, comrades must enthusiastically take up all three of these struggles each and every day. The first is the struggle against opportunism, petty-bourgeois laziness, empiricism, and dogmatism. The second is the struggle to deepen our understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The third is the struggle to apply MLM to all aspects of our lives. Only in waging a consistent and tireless struggle each and every day can we rectify our wrong styles of work, replace our liberalism with Marxism, and Bolshevize our ranks. All of this is essential to combating liberalism and opposing the non-proletarian tendencies which will inevitably arise within our ranks. As Mao noted:

As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades’ minds and our Party’s work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing. The proverb “Running water is never stale and a door-hinge is never worm-eaten” means that constant motion prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms.

Though the struggle is arduous, the path forward is clear. What’s more, we have already won a number of victories over own conservatism, indiscipline, and petty-bourgeois laziness. These victories are evident in the outpouring of creativity from comrades across MCU since the launch of the rectification campaign. These include artistic productions but also comrades across the board bringing to bear their creativity on the key political questions we face as a pre-Party organization. We have quickly addressed the lackadaisical approach to study in our ranks; we have launched a successful local study in NYC with a significant number of consistent participants; we have addressed long-standing issues in how the Miami branch and organized a local study there too; we have exposed, and partially overcome, numerous comrades’ petty-bourgeois laziness and indiscipline; we have addressed many of the issues in the Online Study; we now have a large group of people joining the next round of the CDC; and we have significantly strengthened our ideological unity. Overall we are finally in a strong position to carry out primary task of growing and developing as a pre-Party organization.

It is important to be square that our primary task is not “growth” but growing and developing as a pre-Party organization. We are not just looking for more numbers, but qualitative and quantitative growth and development. We need not only to gain more cadre, but also deepen our ideological unity, improve our style of work, and sharpen our understanding of MLM.

As we noted in Growing as a Pre-Party Organization and the Development of MCU’s Political Line:

The growth and development of MCU requires both quantitative expansion and qualitative improvement. Quantitative expansion means recruiting new cadre and developing new supporters. To recruit new cadre and develop supporters we need to propagate our line, popularize our work, debate various revisionist and opportunist trends, and educate and develop people so they can be ready to become cadre and supporters.

Qualitative improvement means becoming more disciplined internally, getting more organized, raising our theoretical and ideological level, and Bolshevizing ourselves in an all-around fashion. First and foremost, this has entailed refining our internal division of labor to allocate sufficient cadre to the tasks required for our growth and development; we discuss these tasks in greater detail below. It has also involved developing clear internal policies and guidelines for practices of Democratic Centralism, internal reporting, and more.

Reducing our primary task to “growth” frames things purely in quantitative terms. This reductive formulation leads to various errors. For example, problems with a contact will be overlooked because “we want to bring people in,” frantic and unfocused follow-up with vaguely promising contacts will be prioritized over study, and we will inevitable end up lowering our ideological standards to prioritize what appears to be political expedient. These opportunist errors will only lead to bigger organizational problems in our ranks.

Empiricism and Demoralization

Despite our recent victories, some comrades are struggling with low morale. Given their empiricist tendencies and mechanical thinking, they are primarily demoralized because we now have a few less cadre than before the launch of the rectification campaign. These comrades look only at the surface but not the inner workings of our organization. They examine only the quantity of cadre and not the quality of our work. They look at the form of appearance but do not examine the essence. These partially demoralized comrades who are struggling with empiricism are still Marxists,1 but we must help them see the errors of their analysis and overcome their demoralization.

Let us examine more closely the flawed empiricist thinking which has led some comrades to feel demoralized. As noted above, our principal task is not simply growth in numbers, but growth as a pre-Party organization. This requires us to deepen our ideological unity, improve our style of work, raise our collective and individual theoretical levels, and much more. Achieving this sort of qualitative growth and development is a necessary compliment to quantitative growth—and in our present conditions, it was a necessary prerequisite to further growth.2 Without this qualitative development, any quantitative growth would be a pyrrhic victory and quickly turn into its opposite. Growth which dilutes our ideological unity, weakens our organizational discipline, and undermines our ability to practice democratic centralism will impede our efforts to develop into a proletarian vanguard party.

It was for these reasons that we resolutely opposed the Menshevik line that advocated that we abandon democratic centralism. Comrades across MCU have seen the flawed and revisionist logic underpinning this line. However, our more empiricist comrades have been swayed by some similar reasoning. While not consolidated to revisionism, their empiricism leaves them vulnerable to its pernicious arguments.3 Namely, they worry that because lost a few cadre, that we are not achieving our aim of growing as a pre-Party organization.

This confusion is based the incorrect assumption that our quantitative growth—number of cadre—will proceed in a linear fashion.4 But the path to revolution is tortuous; it involves many twists and turns, many ups and downs. We advanced a few steps forward with our Conference, then we could not advance any further. We were unable to grow as we had planned and a small number of comrades refused to carry out the responsibilities that had been bestowed upon them by the membership of MCU when they were elected to positions of leadership at the Conference. Others, even in leadership, opposed putting into practice our basically correct political line.

In short, we had people in our ranks who actively and passively opposed proletarian politics. We drove out a few of these people last Fall. Then, an active Menshevik opposition jumped out. They created a fuss, claiming—in a roundabout fashion—“now is not the time to practice MLM principles like democratic centralism” and openly advocating that we weaken our ideological unity. They were swiftly exposed as Mensheviks and split from MCU.

This small and temporary decrease in our numbers is not a setback but an advance.5 In essence it is an advance, as we have driven from our ranks those who were opposed to our politics and our line, and who therefore impeded our ability to grow as a pre-Party organization. Through this we have grown stronger and more unified. In so doing, we have put ourselves in a much better position to grow as an organization, as indicated by the successes we are experiencing in our local studies and the number of participants who will be joining the next Cadre Development Course. What’s more, we have a more clear understanding of the issues faced by a number of cadre who are committed to our political work and line, but have secondary shortcomings which have impeded their ability to consistently carry out solid work in practice.

Other Sources of Demoralization

While empiricism is the primary underlying cause for some comrades feeling demoralized, it is not the only one. Some comrades are nervous about the rectification campaign. Motivated by an underlying conservatism, they fear their own issues coming to light. Sometimes this is simply due to shame about shortcomings they have and mistakes that they have made. Other times, it is motivated by a deeper nihilism about their ability to change, ultimately rooted in a metaphysical thinking (and often deep attachment to one’s issues).6 Finally, some comrades doubt that we can succeed in making revolution. All of these three reasons for demoralization are somewhat distinct, but they all share a common character, namely that they are rooted in fundamental disagreements with Marxism. In order to carry forward the rectification, all comrades must struggle against these forms of non-proletarian thinking in themselves and others.

It is necessary to analyze each of these three attitudes so as to better understand how each of them entail fundamental disagreements with Marxism. By better understanding these wrong tendencies and backwards attitudes, comrades will be better equipped to struggle against their existence in our ranks.

First is the fear of one’s own mistakes and shortcomings coming to light. This tendency, while it may seem somewhat innocent, is actually based on a deep distrust of comrades, oneself, and the people. It is ultimately motivated by a narrow self-interested perspective which is at odds with the long-term perspective of the proletariat. While the bourgeoisie encourages us to believe that humans are fundamentally self-interested creatures, incapable of acting except out of an animalistic self-interest—a self-interest which the bourgeoisie describes as natural, that is from nature, but which is, in fact socially determined by the prevailing relations of production and especially the system of private property, all of which is not given by nature—the reality is that the history of class struggles, especially since the development of Marxism, has shown that humans are capable of thinking and acting historically. That is to say, that we are capable of understanding our present situation as part of the larger struggle to abolish classes, and to align our doing with this understanding. We are therefore capable of fighting for a higher cause, a cause which is not an idealist fantasy but rather is based on a theoretically rigorous understanding of the development of human society and our ability to work together to consciously transform objective reality.7

Given this historical perspective, it should be clear how petty and self-centered is the idea of hiding one’s mistakes and shortcomings. It not only serves the bourgeoisie, it not only prevents the comrades who take this approach from whole-heartedly participating in our revolutionary efforts, but it also impedes our ability as a Pre-Party organization to advance towards our larger goals in the class struggle. This narrow and self-serving attitude must be uprooted in our ranks, as it represents a lack of full dedication to serving the people.

Our point of departure is to serve the people whole-heartedly and never for a moment divorce ourselves from the masses, to proceed in all cases from the interests of the people and not from one’s self-interest or from the interests of a small group, and to identify our responsibility to the people with our responsibility to the leading organs of the Party.8

All our cadres, whatever their rank, are servants of the people, and whatever we do is to serve the people. How then can we be reluctant to discard any of our bad traits?9

Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people’s interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected—that is what being responsible to the people means.10

As we Chinese Communists, who base all our actions on the highest interests of the broadest masses of the Chinese people and who are fully convinced of the justice of our cause, never baulk at any personal sacrifice and are ready at all times to give our lives for the cause, can we be reluctant to discard any idea, viewpoint, opinion or method which is not suited to the needs of the people? Can we be willing to allow political dust and germs to dirty our clean faces or eat into our healthy organisms? Countless revolutionary martyrs have laid down their lives in the interests of the people, and our hearts are filled with pain as we the living think of them—can there be any personal interest, then, that we would not sacrifice or any error that we would not discard?11

Is it any surprise that comrades who spend so much time worrying about their mistakes coming to light are feeling demoralized? Their orientation towards their own mistakes is narrow and self-centered. They lack a broader historical perspective. Their orientation towards their mistakes is not separate and isolated from their orientation towards the rest of the work. The more they try to hide their mistakes and shortcomings the more this narrow and self-centered orientation bleeds into other work. Mistakes add up and compound. Eventually, quantitative changes crosses a limited and passes over to qualitative change. Then the demoralization which was secondary can become primary as comrades consolidate to a self-centered approach. From there it is only a hop, skip, and a jump to outright hostility to Marxism.

Will comrades who hide their mistakes and shortcomings, who keep their comrades at arm’s length be able to approach our work with enthusiasm? No, of course they will not. Enthusiasm does not fall from the sky, it is based on a profound theoretical knowledge which, in turn, allows us to consistently align thinking and doing. Running away from problems and hiding them from others will only lead to demoralization and, eventually, capitulation to the enemy.

Closely related to this fear of one’s own mistakes coming to light is an underlying nihilism about themselves which some comrades harbor.12 They believe that, ultimately they are doomed to failure. These comrades are invested in a metaphysical view of themselves. They have internalized the ideology of the bourgeoisie and want to believe that they are unable to change—they have an active ideological investment in this view. Through this pernicious logic, they aim to absolve themselves of fault and blame for their mistakes.13 If they cannot change, who can blame them for continuing to make the same mistakes? This sort of reactionary sentiment leads, in a straight line, to resenting ones’ comrades, our organization, and ultimately, Marxism itself. From the initial axiom that they cannot change, it only follows logically that it is unfair for comrades to push them and struggle against their backwards ideas and bourgeois tendencies.14 This road leads directly to reneging on Marxism and capitulation to the bourgeoisie (even if it takes the form of revisionism).

Comrades who view themselves metaphysically and believe that they cannot change have deeply internalized the logic of bourgeois society. That said, the ubiquity of this nihilistic subjective disposition in our society is the result of certain particular historical circumstances. As an imperialist power in decline, the U.S. bourgeois has had trouble developing an ideology capable of inspiring the masses of people and securing their belief in some sort of higher social ideal and goal. Of course, their difficulties in crafting a captivating ideology presents significant openings for us as communists, and it is more challenging to develop a strong revolutionary movement in periods where the bourgeoisie is more able to secure the direct subjective buy in of large swaths of the masses.

Given their challenges in winning widespread popular support for a national narrative capable of inspiring the people (e.g. Manifest Destiny, the technocratic progress narratives of the 1950s, the War on Terror, etc.), the bourgeoisie promoted the idea of the “end of history” and related hallucinations of brazen individualist consumption as the highest ideal.15 As a complement to this, they promoted various forms of “enlightened” cynical nihilism from post-modernism16 to suburban mall kid culture.17 These cynical views critique aspects of the existing society, but at an ironic distance. The widespread adoption of cynicism has had profoundly deleterious social impacts, which can be seen in the fact that, in many leftist circles, it is considered naive and passé to be optimistic. Some comrades have internalized this logic.

Some, under the influence of bourgeois therapy narratives—which have been popularized, far beyond the confines of clinical settings, via social media and leftist circles—believe that they cannot change but instead just “cope” better or worse with their supposedly immutable issues. Others, attached to post-modern forms of Romanticism,18 cling to their sadness and issues like Gollum to the One Ring, muttering to themselves in perverse pleasure at their own suffering even as they allow their issues to twist and warp them.

To the comrades who think this way, we should ask: Are you an exception to dialectics? Don’t all things in this world move and develop? Why would you alone operate according to metaphysics? This sort of individualist exceptionalism19 should be understood for what it is, a decadent, narrow, and self-centered worldview, actively and consciously promoted by the capitalist class to keep the people in chains. Clearly, the comrades who still cling to these decadent views of themselves need to revisit the first rectification document and take up more seriously the study of dialectical materialism, so as to better combat their own metaphysical views.

What’s more, nihilism about one’s ability to change—which always requires active ideological investment, reproduced each day through one’s actions20—is interrelated with nihilism about our organization and the larger society. Comrades doubt about their own ability to transform is often tied to doubts that we can succeed in our goals of building a vanguard party and eventually leading a revolutionary movement.21 This view, still all too common in our ranks, inevitably leads to comrades taking a lackadaisical approach to our work. If you don’t believe that we can succeed, why try so hard? Why not slack off, go easy, fail to follow through on tasks, etc. After all, if we are doomed to failure, then what is the point of really trying so hard? It simply follows logically from the initial assumptions. From this, it should be obvious how corrosive this view is.

While our comrades are, thankfully, not totally nihilistic, some comrades still harbor deeper pessimism. This pessimism often comes to the fore in more difficult situations, when the external conditions are more challenging.

In Mao’s 1930 letter to Lin Biao—which was later turned into the document A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire—he criticized some of Lin’s shortcomings.22 He noted that Lin had not been won over by the two major deviations of the time—the lines of “purely military” approach the revolution and the “roving guerrilla bands” without regard to building up the base areas—but that because Lin lacked “an incisive concept for building political power” that Lin’s approach to mobilizing the masses would not succeed.23 The whole letter aims to show Lin that his pessimism about the situation in China (which Mao noted that Lin has partially, but not fully overcome) is tied to his lack of such an incisive concept. In short, he did not know how the revolution can succeed and so he fell into pessimism.

Comrades should closely consider this example. It is related to the above point that enthusiasm alone cannot sustain itself, but instead requires a deep knowledge of Marxism. Even the many victories that Lin experienced as a commander of the Red Army, real victories in the class struggle which had escalated to a civil war, were not sufficient to sustain his optimism. What was needed was his further development as a Marxist in general, and in particular his understanding of the CCP’s line and strategy at the time, of which he had a relatively weak grasp.

Comrades who are struggling with a similar sort of nihilism about our prospects for success should ask themselves how well they understand not only MLM general, but our line in particular.24 Do you have an incisive concept for building political power? If not, then it is necessary to study our line more closely and better understand how we plan to grow and develop as a pre-Party organization.25 What’s more, if comrades lack the basic historical knowledge of how organizations develop from small circles into vanguard parties, how can the they feel optimistic about our own prospects?

If comrades have a weak grasp of dialectical materialism (tending only to see the surface level of phenomenon), if comrades don’t know much Marxist history, and if comrades also don’t understand our line, what sort of optimism can they have? Only a quasi-religious faith that we will succeed, which is totally divorced from real revolutionary optimism.26 For the latter can never be a matter of faith, but instead is based on profound theoretical knowledge.

All these types of demoralization are extremely corrosive. They eat away at the revolutionary unity in our ranks and impede our ability to accomplish basic tasks. They must be resolutely struggled against, by the method of curing the disease to save the patient. Comrades must enthusiastically struggle against their own demoralization while also taking up the struggle against these same tendencies in others.

Conclusion

The intellectuals often tend to be subjective and individualistic, impractical in their thinking and irresolute in action until they have thrown themselves heart and soul into mass revolutionary struggles, or made up their minds to serve the interests of the masses and become one with them. Hence although the mass of revolutionary intellectuals in China can play a vanguard role or serve as a link with the masses, not all of them will remain revolutionaries to the end. Some will drop out of the revolutionary ranks at critical moments and become passive, while a few may even become enemies of the revolution. The intellectuals can overcome their shortcomings only in mass struggles over a long period.

—Mao, The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party

In the first rectification document, the Central Committee noted that it is not possible to develop the conditions necessary for a truly proletarian discipline all at once, but that we must take steps in this direction here and now. The launch of the rectification was an important step forward in this direction. However, it was a small step and we have many more to go in order to complete the rectification.

In the second chapter of “Leftwing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder—in a passage that was quoted in the first rectification document—Lenin explains how the discipline of the proletarian party is maintained, tested, and reinforced.27 Each of his conditions entails the Party having close ties to the masses. The first condition is a vanguard party with class consciousness, meaning that it contains the most advanced elements of the working class movement. The second requires the vanguard to merge with the broader masses. The third is to lead these masses and show them, through their own experience, that the Party’s line is correct.

So how can we, a small pre-Party organization with only very limited links to the fightingproletariat, let alone the broader masses, develop proletarian discipline? This is a challenge that all small circles face at the inception of reviving the Marxist movement in their country. It is particularly challenging for us because unlike the groups which founded in the 1960s and 70s, we do not have a strong working class movement, a broader mass movement akin to protests against the Vietnam War, or even larger revisionist parties from which we can split off more principled people.28

But there are examples of groups advancing toward the formation of proletarian parties in similar historical conditions of reaction and demobilization. In particular, the early Russian Marxist circles began in the 1880s, which was known as the “decade of small deeds” because of the lack of popular mobilization against Tsardom and the general conditions of reaction. We must study the lessons of this period and other similar periods in the history of the proletarian movement.

In particular, we must understand how the circles advanced towards the formation of the Party despite initially being composed primarily of members of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. In fact, the main issues that we face as an organization are closely connected to the fact that many cadre come from the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. As the above quote from Mao shows, intellectuals are a wavering bunch, they tend to lack firm conviction, are averse to discipline, and require a long period of involvement in mass struggles to remold themselves.

The Communist Party of the Philippines has also dealt with this issue:

The established system of schools, mass media and other cultural institutions and mechanisms is under the ideological, political, organizational and financial control of the US and the local reactionary forces. The US has been able to influence and shape the educational and cultural system through US agencies, foundations, media corporations engaged in the dissemination of news and opinions, TV programs, movies and pop music, the World Bank and other UN agencies. Unless they undergo progressive political education and revolutionary ideological remolding, the intelligentsia and the rest of the urban petty bourgeoisie tend to be the passive transmission belt of imperialist and reactionary ideas although they may easily complain against the degree of exploitation which they suffer.

If this is such a big issue in the Philippines, which is oppressed by U.S. imperialism, it is easy to deduce how much greater of a problem we face here, in the most powerful imperialist country in the world, with the intelligentsia and the rest of the urban petty bourgeoisie. But the solution to these problems is not beyond our comprehension. We need comrades to solidify their understanding of MLM in general and our line in particular. We need to fight against dogmatic sloganeering, which comrades use to cover the holes in their knowledge. We need to fight against the metaphysical worldview in our ranks and promote dialectical materialism. We need to combat liberalism in our ranks and apply Marxism to all aspects of our lives. We need to deepen our ties to the fighting proletariat.

All of these are essential to remolding comrades and continuing the rectification. While this document focuses on the most pressing issues around demoralization and its link to empiricism and metaphysical thinking, comrades cannot lose sight of the overall picture of the rectification campaign. We must see both the immediate principal task and the longer-term goal of remolding our ranks. This remolding is essential to create a truly Bolshevized organization.

Given this goal, it can be helpful to quote from the 1925 Theses on the Bolshevisation of the Parties of the Comintern:

A Bolshevik is not one who joins the Party when the revolutionary wave is at its height. A Bolshevik is he who participates in the work of building a Communist Party during long years and if need be, decades, in years of depression, and in years of slow development of the revolution. This does not mean that those comrades who join the Party when the revolutionary tide as rising are inferior to those who already joined the Party previously.

A Bolshevik Party does not spring up suddenly when the revolutionary wave has reached its climax. A Bolshevik Party participates in all struggles and is formed during the process of such struggles. Right Wing and wavering elements in the Comintern and amongst those sympathetic, are of the opinion that the slogan of Bolshevising the Party is inopportune, since revolutionary events are not developing rapidly. They fail to understand that if the tempo of revolutionary development flags, if in connection with this, vacillation among certain sections of the proletariat increases, and the tendency in favour of counter-revolutionary Social Democracy increases, then the necessity for the slogan of the Bolshevisation of the Party becomes all the more actual. It is precisely under these conditions that Communists must work with greater perseverance to create a bulwark against this wavering, to retain the best elements of the proletarian vanguard in our ranks, increase their number, hold aloft the banner of the proletarian revolution, and in this way be capable in very difficult circumstances to weld together a proletarian nucleus fitted to prepare for, and organise the proletarian revolution under all and any conditions.

This is the task before us as MCU. It is an exceeding difficult and complex task which we are carrying out under a period of extreme reaction and popular demoralization. In order to rise to the occasion, in order to be worthy of the heritage bequeathed to us by our revolutionary predecessors, we must develop within our ranks what Lenin referred to as a “granite foundation” in Marxist theory.

In order to do this we must work eagerly and tirelessly to understand and assimilate every last bit of revolutionary history and theory we can and to understand how to apply it in our current historical circumstances. This is a task which requires the active participation of all comrades. If comrades are unclear on the most basic aspects of MLM, how can they begin to work to apply this theory to our present conditions? And comrades would do well to remember that they are not blank slates, the holes in comrades’ knowledge of MLM are not empty, but filled with liberalism and bourgeois ideology. Without addressing this glaring issue which is nearly ubiquitous, it will be impossible to Bolshevize our ranks, and we will instead end up clowning.

But if we take up this rectification campaign with the courage necessary for the proletarian cause, then we will succeed in overcoming our present shortcomings, Bolshevizing our ranks, building a solid pre-Party organization, deepening our ties with the fighting proletariat, and laying the groundwork for a Vanguard Party. This is conclusion is neither a pipe dream nor an article of faith, but a basic materialist understanding which follows from a concrete (MLM) analysis of our concrete situation. But the courage necessary for this task demands much of us. We must unflinchingly look at our own shortcomings, those of our comrades (including leading comrades), and those of our organization. We must fight each and every day to align our thinking and doing with communist principles. We must fight narrow-minded and short-sighted selfishness and instead encourage the kind of historical thinking necessary to serve the people. Only thus can we carry forward the rectification to its successful conclusion.

Introduction

Since the Conference we have made numerous advances politically and consolidated our ranks in new and important ways. The last five months have been largely successful and full of advances, with some secondary mistakes and issues arising. At this juncture we need to take stock of our successes, assess our shortcomings, and make the necessary adjustments to continue to advance towards the formation of a Party. We need to pay particularly close attention to some emerging issues, which while not primary, need to be proactively addressed before they develop into more serious deviations. That said, before diving into these issues, it is important to reflect on the gains we have made.

Prior to the Conference, MCU had numerous very basic organizational issues. Outside of the NYC branch and the erstwhile National Committee (NC) our practice of criticism/self-criticism was extremely underdeveloped, and in some cases—such as the Boston branch—basically non-existent.1 Blatant consolidated opportunists in our ranks—such as ____ and ____—were able to operate without being exposed and driven out. Our work in the Teamsters had stagnated. The Labor Militant Study had been a disorganized mess that set for itself unattainable goals. We had no social media presence. We had no systematic approach for assessing promising supporters and developing them into cadre. We had no system of reporting. And the list goes on. We have come a long way from this disorganized state, which is the result of the collective efforts of comrades at every level of MCU leading up to, during, and after the Conference.

Over the past few months we have seen significant ideological consolidation of our ranks as comrades have developed a better understanding of MLM and our line and the CC has synthesized the lessons from the Conference into a series of important documents. We also physically consolidated with many comrades moving to NYC and Miami and solidifying the branches there. The final step of this post-Conference process was recently achieved with numerous comrades moving to NYC and Miami.

This physical consolidation of branches was an important concentration of forces which has, in turn, allowed us to refine our division of labor in the branches—a process which was already ongoing after the Conference—eliminate redundant work, and better concentrate correct ideas. The lessons from these experiences will be invaluable in developing new branches as we grow. The comrades in Miami have also led a rectificatio-n of AFTP, which addressed the damage caused by ____’s misleadership and puts the mass organization on solid footing going forward. This rectification was crucial not only for the health of the mass organization, but also for the future development of promising AFTP members into cadre and for the production of agitation going forward, as AFTP will serve as an important training ground for this crucial part of our work.

We have also started local studies in branches across the country, as well as in cities with at-large members. These local studies are a key ways for us to grow and develop as an organization. It is important to recall that just a year ago we were struggling to find more than one or two people to join local studies (via RMS) in each branch. This change, in conjunction with successes of the Open Study (which happened despite some significant shortcomings), speaks to how we have successfully increased our reach and influence among the semi-Marxists. The completion of the first round of the Cadre Development Course (CDC) likewise speaks to the successes we have had in carrying out much of the plan that we united around at the Conference. We now have a fairly systematic approach for assessing strong supporters and developing them into provisional members.2 This is a tremendous advance from our previous ad-hoc methods. It is an essential building block in the creation of a truly Bolshevized organization capable of maintaining an extremely high level of proletarian discipline.

We also carried out triage of our work in the Teamsters, have begun to address the theoretical shortcomings we have had on this front, and started to develop a clearer and more systematic line for our strategy in the working-class movement. While we still have more work to do on this front, these are significant advances towards the eventual fusion of Marxism and the working-class movement.3

All of these are major advances and significant gains. They were built off of the collective clarity and unity that we achieved at the Conference, and represent real steps forward for our fledgling movement. We should be proud of these successes and the hard work that we have put into achieving them. These gains, in turn, lay the foundation for future gains. However, we must be square that future gains will be made through the struggle to overcome new issues that arise, and new problems that we face in the process of making revolution. The revolution proceeds in a zig-zag pattern of advances and setbacks. Or, as Mao put it during the Chinese Revolution—and again at the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—the future is bright, but the road it tortuous.

Understanding this point is essential to maintaining revolutionary optimism. Without the larger perspective of the winding path in front of us, it will be all too easy for comrades to see every setback as indicative of an inevitable defeat. Likewise, during periods of advance, comrades will tend to develop a naive optimism and assume that the road to revolution is paved with victory after victory.4

The road to socialist revolution is long and winding. We have united around a shared ideology and we have revived communist organization in the United States after a half-century interregnum. This is a tremendous accomplishment. Given the catastrophic collapse that the communist movement faced at the end of the 1970s—not to mention the defeats in the 1930s and 40s—we have had to effectively start from scratch and learn basic lessons of Marxism. This was an unavoidable struggle which we had to go through in forming a pre-party organization. MCU came into being in a political situation defined by a profound discontinuity in revolutionary organization and a collective amnesia on the lessons of Marxism.5 This is still the prevailing situation in the U.S. today, and we are only beginning to have the organizational solidity and broader influence among the left which can allow us to clarify these lessons.

Therefore, it is unsurprising that we continue to make some mistakes and have some issues. Of the main issues that we face organizationally, a number of them are attributable, in part, to an overcorrection from previous errors.6 Therefore, we must not only rectify these errors, but also learn better how to address our issues, errors, and shortcomings without over-correcting and swinging too far in the other direction.

After a period of strong advances leading up to the Conference, during the Conference, and in its wake, we are now at an important crossroads. New issues are emerging in our ranks and they must be addressed head on. The emergence of new contradictions, the intensification of certain preexisting contradictions, and the shift in relations between different contradictions, all of these things are inevitable in the process of development of a complex thing. These developments, therefore, should not be a source of pessimism. The rise of new contradictions and issues is inevitable and part of the advancement of revolution.7

The Main Shortcomings

We face a few main shortcomings at present, all of which are the result of a petty-bourgeoise one-sided mode of thinking. The first is the lack of a deep understanding of dialectical materialism, which manifests in things like comrades’ unscientific use of terms like “internal contradiction.” This is tied to difficulties comrades have had in grasping the relationship between internal and external contradictions, and the tendency to see internal contradictions metaphysically.

The second—which stems from the first, but is by no means reducible to it—is an idealist notion of transformation. Many comrades have a tendency to reduce transformation to the first half of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge and ignore the second half of this circuit. This has contributed to widespread confusions over the nature of criticism/self-criticism, fantasies of achieving a sort of “moral purity” by purging oneself of all non-proletarian ideas, and the rise of a lifestyle-esque tendency in our ranks that focuses on imitating communist conduct. The later is an inevitable result of trying to hold comrades to a high level of proletarian discipline while the above idealist and metaphysical confusions exist.

The third shortcoming is an insular culture in our ranks. This issue predates the prior two shortcomings, and over the past few years we have made some significant progress in addressing it. This can be seen in how we have been able to develop a much wider orbit of semi-Marxists around MCU and how we have built our links to the organized working class over the past few years. However, the excessive focus first side of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge in conducting CSC and rectifying wrong tendencies in our ranks shows the deep issues we still have in this regard. The pervasiveness of sloganeering in our ranks also speaks to the insularity of our organizational culture at present.

These shortcomings are corrosive, they eat away at our discipline, undermine our unity, and weaken our ability to advance the proletarian cause. Their class nature must be firmly understood by all comrades so that we can address these issues head on and struggle against them unflinchingly. At the same time, we must understand that the ultimate source of these issues is the class society in which we exist, and that our particular circumstances—as small communist organization lacking deep links with the working class and existing in the most powerful imperialist country in the world—means that we are unable to completely eliminate all vestiges of these issues from our ranks. Rather, we must understand how to overcome the biggest shortcomings, improve our discipline and morale, and remain vigilant for future issues of a similar nature, so that they can be nipped in the bud before they grow and metastasize into full-blown deviations.

Lack of Understanding of Dialectical Materialism

The low-level of understanding of dialectical materialism in our ranks is a major problem. This is one of the three component parts of Marxism, and understanding it is fundamental to being a Marxist. At present, most comrades have a very low level of understanding of Marxist philosophy.8 In On Contradiction, Mao notes that materialist dialectics is “the Marxist world outlook” and that this is integral to how we see the development of things and their relations with one another. If we have not deeply studied Marxist philosophy and internalized a dialectical materialist world outlook, then we will be unable to consistently analyze situations in a Marxist manner. We will constantly tend to see things as static and isolated, fail to grasp the dynamic interrelation between internal and external contradictions, and muddle the complex relation between major and minor contradictions.

These sorts of confusions have been ubiquitous in our ranks and are the result of the low level of theoretical development of many comrades. We have recently taken steps in various branches to begin to systematically address these theoretical weaknesses through more rigorous study practices. However, various issues that have arisen show that many comrades still do not grasp the basic lessons of On Practice and On Contradiction. This has shown up most acutely in the repeated misuse of the term “internal contradiction” throughout the entirety of our organization, including—at times—on the Central Committee. This confused usage shows that many comrades are generally unclear on the basics of what a contradiction is.

Throughout MCU it has become ubiquitous for comrades to use the term “internal contradiction” to mean personal issue or shortcoming. This usage appears to lend an air of scientificity to discussions, but in reality, it is actually being used to cover over the fact that comrades are not thinking dialectically about their own issues and those of other comrades. For example, what is petty-bourgeois laziness in contradiction with? Proletarian discipline and initiative. Is it the case that the comrade in question is simply exhibiting petty-bourgeois laziness—which is itself a contradiction and a unity of opposites—or is it the case that one of their internal contradictions, in this example, would be more accurately described as the contradiction between petty-bourgeois laziness on the one hand and proletarian discipline and initiative on the other? The later framing provides much great clarity on the struggle between the unity of opposites which is driving forward the development of the comrade in question; it therefore also provides greater clarity on how to overcome the issue in question.9

In On Contradiction Mao notes:

Lenin defined the law of the unity of opposites as “the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society)”. Are these ideas correct? Yes, they are. The interdependence of the contradictory aspects present in all things and the struggle between these aspects determine the life of all things and push their development forward. There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist.

Speaking more specifically about internal contradictions, Mao states:

The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another. As a matter of fact, even mechanical motion under external force occurs through the internal contradictoriness of things. Simple growth in plants and animals, their quantitative development, is likewise chiefly the result of their internal contradictions. Similarly, social development is due chiefly not to external but to internal causes.

From these quotes we can see that Mao was quite rigorous about what a contradiction is, what the law of unity of opposites is, and how the struggle between the interdependent and contradictory aspects of contradictions drives forward the development of all things.Therefore, when discussing comrades issues, shortcomings, and non-proletarian tendencies, we also need to aspire to a much higher level of scientific rigor. We have fallen short in this regard. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that because we used the term “internal contradiction” that we are being scientific, especially if we are describing only one aspect of a larger contradiction that is driving forward a given comrades’ contradictory process of development. We need to raise the overall level at which we discuss these matters and combat petty-bourgeois sloganeering.10

Comrades’ poor grasp of dialectical materialism is also evident in the difficulties comrades have in understanding the relationship between internal contradictions and external contradictions. A tendency has arisen in our ranks to overly fixate on internal contradictions—while also not understanding the these contradictions as unities of opposites—and even go so far as to discount the influence of external contradictions on the issues and struggles that comrades have. This tendency has expressed itself unevenly (at times comrades are more dialectical) but it is widespread.

We can see it clearly when a given comrade is struggling to follow through on a task, or has made some mistakes, and other comrades fail to examine the conditions in which these issues have arisen. Whenever this occurs we need to examine not only the internal issues the comrade has but also the external conditions. Is the comrade dealing with some acute relationship or family issues? Did a comrade make a basic and easily avoidable mistake, but at a political event that we did not plan for well? Of course, even in difficult conditions a proletarian party must be capable of maintaining its discipline, upholding its line, and carrying out tremendous deeds. However, this sort of discipline and unity cannot be built all at once. Therefore, when comrades make mistakes or have struggles we need to understand not only the internal basis for these mistakes, but also the external conditions in which they occurred. External contradiction are themselves causes, though they can exert their causality only in relation to the internal contradictions of the thing which they are changing.11

Mao notes:

Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis. There is constant interaction between the peoples of different countries. In the era of capitalism, and especially in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the interaction and mutual impact of different countries in the political, economic and cultural spheres are extremely great. The October Socialist Revolution ushered in a new epoch in world history as well as in Russian history. It exerted influence on internal changes in the other countries in the world and, similarly and in a particularly profound way, on internal changes in China. These changes, however, were effected through the inner laws of development of these countries, China included.

To better understand this point, consider the example of the egg and temperature. The internal contradictions exist within a fertilized egg for the embryo to grow and develop. But if we want to understand why a given egg didn’t hatch, we cannot simply look internal to the egg (though there could be an infection, a catastrophic genetic mutation, etc. which caused it to fail to hatch), we also need to consider the external contradictions. It would be absurd to discount the impact of sub-zero temperatures on the development of the egg. So too is it absurd to consider the issues, struggles, and challenges that comrades are facing without examining the external conditions in which they occur.

Understanding relationship between external causes and internal causes is no simple matter. If we consider the other example that Mao gives—of how the October Revolution influenced China’s development—we can get a better sense of the complex relationship. On the one hand, there was strong internal basis in China for develop a Communist Party and for this party to lead a huge revolutionary movement. Not only were the domestic class contradictions already intense in China but also, since the Opium Wars China had been subjugated and vivisected by different imperialist powers. These conditions had also generated an intense class struggle, with the Chinese people rising up time and time again against domestic reaction and foreign domination. But despite these heroic efforts, they were unable to liberate the country.

As Mao put it in Reform Our Study:

For a hundred years, the finest sons and daughters of the disaster-ridden Chinese nation fought and sacrificed their lives, one stepping into the breach as another fell, in quest of the truth that would save the country and the people. This moves us to song and tears. But it was only after World War I and the October Revolution in Russia that we found Marxism-Leninism, the best of truths, the best of weapons for liberating our nation.

If we contrast, for example, the impact of the Russian Revolution on other countries—even on countries like India which had a strong internal basis for the emergence of a mass communist movement and many similar conditions to China—we can see how the same external conditions impacts the development of things differently depending on their internal contradictions.

This example also shows how important it is to look at internal contradictions in their particularity and not just at the general level. On the surface, India and China were quite similar countries at the time of the October Revolution. Both were semi-feudal countries which were under the domination of foreign imperialism (India under the British Raj, China under the first form of neocolonial rule). Both had seen large-scale rebellions against foreign domination (e.g. in India there was 1857, the Indigo Rebellion, Bhumkal, etc.). Both had a nascent working-class movement developing as well as a strong tradition of peasant struggles, and both were able to quickly form Communist Parties after the October Revolution. But the specific differences between India and China—which are beyond the scope of this piece—meant that the October Revolution impacted both fairly differently, despite the similarities of the countries. And thus no revolution succeeded in India—there was only Partition and transfer of power to the compradors—while China was liberated in 1949.

Without a more granular analysis of the specific differences in the internal contradictions of India and China, it would be impossible to understand the different histories of these countries and why the October Revolution had a different impact on them. To stop at the general level is a form of dogmatism whether we are analyzing countries or comrades. In many cases when examining comrades’ internal contradictions we fall into the trap of dogmatism. We need to rectify this wrong tendency in our ranks.

It can be helpful to refer to CPI (Maoist)’s 2009 Leadership Training Manual in which they explain how comrades’ insecurities and issues express themselves differently depending on the situation:

We say that we are communists, but are born and brought up with the values of the prevailing ruling classes. When we join the Party those ideas do not disappear by themselves. Besides, we live in society which such feudal and bourgeois values are rampant and quite naturally impact us. In such a situation, there is a need for consistent struggle to change ourselves. Some of our incorrect values are deep-rooted in our subconscious and built around a number of insecurities. […] Though we may suppress them under some conditions, they assert themselves in other conditions more aggressively.

It is incumbent upon us to understand the incorrect values that comrades have internalized, to see how the ultimate origin of these is the larger society, to understand the insecurities that comrades have which reinforce these wrong values, and to grasp the conditions in which these wrong values assert themselves. All of this is required so that we can develop rational knowledge of the issues that comrades have. This rational knowledge must then serve as a foundation on which to develop a plan for comrades to transform. This plan must, in turn, be realistic and feasible.12 We need comrades to make progress in overcoming their issues—not simply to improve themselves, but most fundamentally to advance the revolution—but we need to be clear that we are not striving for purity13 and that it will take comrades years to deeply uproot non-proletarian values which have reinforced over decades.

This is not to say that comrades should not or cannot make quick progress. We need comrades to rapidly improve their orientation and better themselves as communists. However, we cannot set standards that expect comrades to completely overcome the contradictions they face or make unrealistic progress. For example, if a comrade is acutely struggling with procrastination, short-term progress needs to be made so that they accomplish tasks on time and so that they don’t leave things to the last minute. But we should not expect that, after some basic CSC, they will be free from struggles with procrastination. This will take years of work, and they will likely backslide at times, especially when faced with acutely challenging external circumstances. The same is true for comrades with other shortcomings.

To better understand the relationship between external and internal contradictions and what sort of progress and transformation is realistic it can be helpful to consider the Long March. The Long March is one of most amazing accomplishments in human history. It was so incredible that when Chiang Kai-Shek’s American military advisors heard about it, they did not believe it was possible or true. The Chinese comrades had to pass through some of the most difficult terrain in all of China with little-to-no supplies, insufficient equipment, and ragged clothing. Throughout the March they constantly dealt with comrades who struggled with motivation and wanted to give up. Given these extremely challenging circumstances, this is not surprising.

In The Great Road, PLA troops recount the difficulties of the Long March:

Our most bitter trials came when we had to pass along narrow and dangerous mountain paths, through narrow passes, across narrow bridges, or swim icy streams. At such times our advance troops slowed down and the rear ones would take one step forward and stand for ten. We could not move forward and we could not sit down to rest. Some men fell asleep as they stood.

At other times we marched through storms with a fierce wind and rain whipping our bodies. Under such circumstances we would not use our torches and the paths were slippery and dangerous. Sometimes we covered only a few li a night, and, soaked through, had to bivouac in the open.

There was Laoshan (Old Mountain) on the Kwangsi border where we went up a mountain so steep that I could see the soles of the man ahead of me. Steps had been carved out of the stone face of the mountain, they were as high as a man’s waist. Political workers went up and down the columns encouraging our struggling men and helping the sick and wounded….News came down the line that our advance columns were facing a sheer cliff and that there was no way of getting the horses up. After a time came the order to sleep where we were and continue climbing at daybreak.

The path was no more than two feet wide at any point and even if one succeeded in lying down he could not turn over without rolling down the mountainside. There were great jutting boulders everywhere and even the path was covered with sharp stones.

Since there was nothing else to do, I folded my blanket, placed it beneath me, and tried to curl up on the path. I was so weary that I fell asleep. Sometime during the night the cold awoke me. I wrapped the blanket about me and tried to roll myself up in a little round ball, but I still could not sleep. I lay and watched the twinkling stars in the sky. They looked like jade stones on a black curtain. The black peaks towering around me were like menacing giants. We seemed to be at the bottom of a well.

Up and down the path I saw many small fires lit by men also awakened by the cold. They were sitting around and talking in low voices. Apart from their faint voices the silence was so great that I could hear it. It was sometimes near, sometimes far away, sometimes loud and sometimes faint, and at other times like spring silkworms eating mulberry leaves. I listened intently and it sounded like a complaining mountain spring, then like the distant murmur of the ocean…

Next morning my group finally reached the sheer cliff that had stopped us the night before. It was Leikungyai (Thunder God Rock), a solid cliff of stone jutting into the sky at about a ninety degree angle. Stone steps no more than a foot wide had been carved up its face, and up this we had to go without anything to hold onto. Horses with broken legs lay about the foot of the cliff.

Our medical units suffered the most because the sick and wounded had to get off the stretchers and either crawl or be pushed, dragged, or carried up. The women comrades of the Medical Corps ceaselessly comforted and helped the men in their care without once showing any sign of weariness….

Old Mountain was the most difficult mountain we had climbed so far….But after crossing the River of Golden Sands, the Ta Tu River, the Great Snow Mountains, and the Grass Lands, it seemed very small indeed.

Clearly, it would be absurd in these circumstances to consider a comrades’ wavering or struggles with motivation to be necessarily indicative of deep internal issues. Instead of conducting CSC with comrades who struggled, the CCP had political workers going up and down the lines, reminding comrades of the basic reasons for their struggle, of what they were fighting for and why they were undertaking the Long March. The CCP understood that they were not trying to make cadre into “perfect communists” free from division or backwards ideas. Rather they needed to provide the comrades with the support (including, when necessary, CSC) to help them continuously improve their abilities, stay resolute, and serve the people to advance the revolution.

This example, of the Long March, is meant to clarify that in very difficult circumstances even very strong communists will waver and struggle. If we do not understand this then we will not have realistic expectations for ourselves, our comrades, or the people. Instead, we will push comrades unrealistically and see their struggles as indicative of deep problems, instead of understanding the complex interplay between external circumstances and internal issues.

All of this said, there is a positive aspect to the one-sided focus on internal issues that has arisen in our ranks. Namely, that comrades have adopted an orientation of not making excuses for (or dismissing) mistakes that comrades make and issues that they have. We should carry forward this positive aspect of our orientation while simultaneously developing a more dialectical understanding of the relationship between internal contradictions and external contradictions. Only through significantly raising our whole organization’s level of understanding of dialectical materialism will we be able to right this wrong tendency and overcome to obstacle that it presents to our work.

Idealist Notions of Transformation

The rise, within our ranks, of idealist notions of transformation currently constitutes a major obstacle to developing an organizational culture of proletarian discipline. As noted above many comrades have a tendency to reduce transformation to the first half of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge and ignore the second half of this circuit. This, in turn, is tied to fantasies of “moral purity” and the rise of lifestyle politics trends in MCU, where comrades attempt to imitate communist conduct without sufficient theoretical or ideological clarity on MLM and our political line.

To put it bluntly, if comrades are not well-rounded communists with a solid grasp of all aspects of MLM, and if comrades therefore are not able to take independent initiative to think through different questions and situations independently, they will not be able to consistently conduct themselves as communists and any attempts at practicing proletarian discipline will lapse into clowning and lifestyle politics.

This is not a hyperbolic overstatement to get the point across; it is a basic analysis of a widespread problem that we face.

To clarify it is helpful to refer to what Lenin wrote in “Leftwing” Communism:

The experience of the victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia has clearly shown even to those who are incapable of thinking or have had no occasion to give thought to the matter that absolute centralisation and rigorous discipline of the proletariat are an essential condition of victory over the bourgeoisie.

This is often dwelt on. However, not nearly enough thought is given to what it means, and under what conditions it is possible. Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?

As a current of political thought and as a political party, Bolshevism has existed since 1903. Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the proletariat.

The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.

As a small pre-party organization with only limited connections to the working-class movement—a movement which is weak and embryonic right now in the U.S.—we cannot hope to achieve even the level of organizational discipline that the Bolsheviks had in 1903. Understanding this is an essential prerequisite for having realistic expectations for our comrades and our organization as a whole. If comrades expect that, at this stage of development, our organization will run largely without issues and that our comrades will be consistently acting with the heroism and determination which characterized the Bolshevik Party from its inception, then we will be sorely disappointed. We need to have a realistic understanding of where we are at as an organization and what sort of struggles we need to be waging now to improve our discipline and proletarian spirit. We can no more leap over a given stage of development than one can leap over their own shadow. As Lenin notes “these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience.”

We therefore need to be clear about what sort of struggles must be waged now to build up MCU. These struggles are by no means reducible to the CSC we conduct to combat backwards ideas and non-proletarian values in our ranks. Equally important (and at times more important) are the struggles to raise our theoretical level,14 the struggles to build our ties to and influence within the working-class movement, the struggles to develop a better understanding of our society, the struggles to develop better leadership, and the struggles to craft a correct political line and popularize this line among the masses of people.

We cannot conduct CSC—which, by the GPCR, Mao preferred to call struggle-criticism-transformation15—without clarity on these matters. Otherwise CSC will become—as it has at times in our ranks—clowning. This is not to say that things have been all bad, but the tendency to divorce CSC from our practical work, the tendency to see CSC simply as a form of self-improvement (therefore fail to grasp that its purpose is to improve ourselves to better serve the revolution),16 and the tendency to seek purity (often through fixating on excessively small mistakes) are corrosive petty-bourgeois deviations fundamentally at odds with a proletarian orientation to CSC.

First and foremost, struggle-criticism-transformation needs to be linked to our practical work. This does not just mean that comrades, after conducting CSC, must develop a plan for the comrade who made significant mistakes to transform, but also that the comrades must transform through carrying out the work of making revolution, not just through reflecting on their own issues and the root causes of their non-proletarian values. What’s more, the process of the comrades’ transformation must be understood in the context of the level of development of our organization as a whole. While we want to push comrades to improve as much as possible, this has to be grounded in a materialist understanding of the comrade in question, the depth of their issues, the amount of time it will take to transform, how their particular circumstances (including their political responsibilities) can aid or detract from their transformation, and the level of overall development of our organization.

We cannot expect that our comrades will all be Bolshevized at this stage of MCU’s existence. As noted above, we are a small pre-party organization. We have a few dozen members in a country of 350,000,000+ people. This country has been the dominant imperialist power in the world for the past 70 years or so. There is a weak working-class movement just beginning to wake up from decades of slumber. We have only limited and provisional ties with this movement. The continuity of revolutionary organizations was broken in the 1940s and again after the defeats of the 1970s. No real communist organization has existed in this country since that point. Among the petty-bourgeois (the class from which we have drawn the vast majority of our ranks) decadence and nihilism reign supreme. Most comrades who joined our ranks had some very basic issues aligning thinking and doing when they first got involved in our work. These are some of our basic material circumstances that we cannot forget or abstract away when considering the process of struggle-criticism-transformation.

It is only by understanding the specific social context in which we emerged and in which we are presently developing that we can have realistic expectations for ourselves, our organization, and our comrades. We have made tremendous progress in the past few years, but we have only a few years of experience under our belts. We have learned some basic lessons. We should be incredibly proud of this. It constitutes the most significant advance for the proletarian cause in this country in the last fifty years. However, we also must understand the scale of this step and just how far we have to go before we are a Party and before we can achieve real proletarian discipline in our ranks.

To be clear, this does not mean that we should not strive to improve ourselves and our organization. But unrealistic expectations are driven by a petty-bourgeois idealist impetuosity; they are the other side of the coin of nihilistic despondency. Just as there is no royal road to scientific understanding, so too are there no shortcuts to achieving proletarian discipline. This discipline can only emerge through a long period of struggle to build the Party.

Second, when assessing our comrades’ ability to transform and overcome their issues we need to take into account their overall development as a communist. It is great if a comrade, through the process of CSC, has come to some clarity about the nature of their shortcomings and the social conditioning which gave rise to them. However, if this comrade is still quite shaky in the basics of Marxism, we cannot expect them to carry through the process of struggle-criticism-transformation in all aspects of their life.

We should not set standards for comrades which are unrealistic for their present level of development as a Marxist. How can a comrade be expected to rigorously apply Marxism to all aspects of their life if they do not have a solid and well-rounded grasp of Marxism?17 Even if we discuss a comrades’ shortcomings with them and they develop a basic understanding of the nature of their issues, without a solid grasp of dialectical materialism specifically and Marxism more broadly, they will most likely fail to consistently comprehend how, why, and when these very same issues emerge in new social contexts.

We must therefore set realistic paths forward for our comrades when carrying out CSC. We must not only help them achieve clarity on the root of the issues the face, but also develop plans for addressing their issues which take into account their present level of political development and instill them with both the understanding that the struggle to transform is a prolonged one and the determination to take up this struggle with revolutionary optimism.

Insular Culture

Since the founding of Mass Proletariat we have struggled with an insular organizational culture. This is a challenge that all small communist groups with limited ties to the working class will face, but it is something on which we can make progress. Addressing this issue must proceed in a two-fold fashion. On the one hand we need to grow our ranks and deepen our ties to the working class. On the other hand, we need to clearly identify wrong tendencies in our ranks and shortcomings in our organizational culture which contribute to insularity. The first is something we are already working on as we grow and develop as an organization. However, we need a more conscious effort to address the second.

The insular culture that has developed in our ranks is, in many senses, a reflection of various petty-bourgeois social trends in the larger society. Unsurprisingly, our organization is not immune to the influence of these trends. Right now, the anti-social tendencies in the U.S. are quite intense even compared with a few decades ago. The atomization of society and the destruction of social fabrics, common spaces, and communities has proceeded rapidly.18 With the proliferation of cellphones and social media, people are increasing isolated and tend to self-isolate. Work-from-home trends since the start of Covid only intensified these already existing dynamics. We emerged in these social circumstances and they have impacted our organization. We cannot eliminate them once and for all from our ranks (as their complete overcoming requires, as Marx put it, “the abolition of class distinctions generally […] the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest […] the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production [and] the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations,” which is only possible after the revolution) but we can struggle against their pernicious and corrosive influence.

Another such tendency is caused by the Neopuritanical norms that are typical in the small-group left. This is tied to the trend of creating “safe spaces” in petty-bourgeois activist scenes and the related fixation on linguistic shibboleths to differentiate between outsiders and members of the in group.19

While we have thankfully avoided the most extreme manifestations of this tendency—such as ostracizing those who do not use the correct lingo—some real shortcomings have arisen in our ranks in how we talk about politics broadly, Marxism, and our line. In particular, there is a tendency to use key terms (e.g. “centrality of the industrial proletariat,” “internal contradictions,” “CSC,” etc.) without understanding them sufficiently and—even, at times, when there is sufficient understanding—to use them with contacts and supporters in a way that does not clarify the underlying ideas. This sort of insular jargon is a danger for any organization that collectively develops complex and detailed knowledge which requires highly technical terminology.20 However, the issue is not reducible to this; in fact, it is principally the result of the influence of petty-bourgeois small-group-left tendencies in our ranks. In other words, a form of sloganeering has developed in MCU.21

This sloganeering flows from a lack of understanding of Marxism and petty-bourgeois laziness. Instead of carrying out the hard work needed to understand the complexities of the current political situation and our line, many comrades have instead taken up repeating key terms and slogans to disguise—even from themselves—their lack of concrete understanding.22 This tendency speaks to deeper organizational issues, in particular the insularity of our culture, as such blatant sloganeering could not exist if comrades were rigorously and critically engaging with what other comrades put forward. Sloganeering as a widespread organizational tendency can only sustain itself in a climate of group-think and uncritical reflection. Otherwise, it would be extremely obvious when comrades are sloganeering and others would quickly disagree, or push them to be more precise and stop covering over their own lack of knowledge with slogans and technical terminology.

This tendency is extremely corrosive and has hamstrung our ability to grow and develop as an organization. If our comrades are saying incorrect things and hiding behind the use of slogans and technical terminology this should be criticized and corrected. If comrades not only do not criticize these errors, but actually do not even see them as errors because they themselves have fallen into similar tendencies, then our political unity and organizational discipline will slacken and falter. Not only will we be unable to convey the basics of our line to supporters, contacts, and the broader masses, but we ourselves will not be unified. We will not be able to concentrate correct ideas. We will not be able to achieve unity of thought or unity of action. We will instead experience a myriad of setbacks and difficulties.

The widespread adoption of sloganeering leads to a form of group-think, in which people convince themselves that they are on the same page because they are using the same terms and words. This is a dangerous phenomenon. It hamstrings our organizational ability to understand reality and solve problems. It instills passivity and conservatism where proactivity and courage are needed. It is fundamentally in line with the petty-bourgeois politics of the small-group left, which seeks not to change the world but to carve out, in a larger oppressive society, a social circle whose members can smugly reassure themselves of their moral and intellectual superiority to others. The fact that this tendency has significantly arisen in our ranks is cause for extreme concern and requires immediate action. We must work together to overcome this dangerous deviation.

Comrades should reflect deeply on the ways in which these issues of insular culture, sloganeering, and phrase-mongering have hurt our ability to grow as an organization. To what extent have comrades in local branches and the Open Study been looking for contacts not to have deep political unity and develop their understanding of Marxism, but rather for these contacts to parrot our sloganeering, profess nominal unity with our line, and use the same terminology we do? To what extent have comrades been mistaking form for content, only looking at appearance and not analyzing the essence?

Despite the concerning degree to which these errors and wrong tendencies have manifested in our ranks, we have a strong examples in our recent organizational history of overcoming aspects of our insular culture. For example, within the last three years we began to make ties with the working-class movement, abandoned our secrecy policy, and overcame a long-standing organizational allergy to serious engagement with semi-Marxist circles. We still have a long way to go to in this regard, but this recent history is a cause for optimism and speaks to the fact that once we come to unity of understanding on these sorts of issues, we can easily achieve unity of action to overcome them. So let us carry forward this struggle with the same energy and spirit of proletarian determination.

Conclusion

Over the past few years we have made tremendous progress as an organization. We now stand on the cusp of a major advance, as we have a political line that is basically correct, we have consolidated our branches, we have functioning transmission belts, we have a growing influence in semi-Marxist circles, we have promising ties to the working class movement, we have hundreds of people interested in our work, and we have a solid core of cadre. However, since the Conference some concerning tendencies and dangerous deviations have arisen in our ranks. We must face these head on and struggle against them. We have already begun this process through the first stage of the rectification campaign, but now we must deepen this campaign, and work to dig up the roots of the weeds of liberalism.

In order to overcome these wrong tendencies and rectify these deviations we need to not only understand the general trends here but also grasp the specific instances in which they have manifested over the past few months. This requires the initiative of comrades at all levels of the organization. Junior comrades cannot expect senior comrades to solve these problems from above, we need both strong leadership from above and dynamic initiative from below. Comrades must think creatively about how these issues have played out in their own particular areas of work, take steps to criticize shortcomings, and work with others to resolve these problems. Comrades should also see this rectification effort as a training grounds to prepare them to more proactively identify and struggle against wrong tendencies as they emerge in the future.

This being said, our fundamental starting point for this rectification effort must be the attitude of unity-struggle-unity. We must understand that this campaign aims not to drive comrades from our ranks or knock comrades down in one blow, but rather to carry out the process of struggle-criticism-transformation across the board. During the course of this campaign, we will realize that some comrades should step down from one position of leadership or another. This is normal and should not be surprising or a cause for demoralization.23 However, not all comrades who have made mistakes should step down from their leadership positions. Comrades need to work together to be discerning and assess when comrades are not fit for the positions of leadership that they presently hold, and when they can continue to carry out their responsibilities as a leader and—through some struggle, self-criticism, and work to transform—become a better leader.

Comrades should also recall that it is a disservice to our comrades and to the revolution to fail to critically assess our comrades and their actions. It is an extremely corrosive form of liberalism to “let things slide” for the sake of friendship or to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. We must constantly push each other to address our weaknesses and shortcomings so that we can better serve the people and build up the revolutionary movement. Therefore, we must not shy away from critically examining the mistakes our comrades have made, but must instead develop a proletarian culture of open discussion and airing of criticisms.

Only if we take up this attitude will this rectification campaign be successful. And only if we succeed in rectifying the petty-bourgeois deviations will be able to solidify our current ranks so that we can grow and develop into a Party. Our present core of cadre must develop rapidly into a granite cornerstone of the future proletarian vanguard party. What’s more, overcoming these petty-bourgeois deviations—which is different from eliminating all petty-bourgeois ideas from our ranks—is an essential prerequisite to laying the foundation for fusing Marxism with the working class movement.

The Central Committee therefore calls on comrades at all levels of MCU to carry forward this rectification campaign with a spirit of enthusiasm and proletarian determination. All working bodies should discuss this document and reflect on how these deviations have manifested in their work. Adopting the attitude of unity-struggle-unity, comrades should take up the struggle in their bodies and the organization as a whole to right these wrong tendencies and improve our overall style of work. Working bodies should summarize their conclusions and share them with the leading bodies overseeing their work, which should, in turn, synthesize key conclusions and help guide the rectification at lower bodies. At the same time, lower bodies should not shy away from criticizing higher bodies and ways that they have promoted and reinforced these tendencies.

If we take up this campaign with energy and enthusiasm we can quickly correct course, overcome these issues, and strengthen our ability to grow and develop as an organization. We have already begun to address some of these issues in a provisional fashion over the past month, and have seen promising results. In a short period we can address these deviations and thereby prepare ourselves for a period of rapid expansion.

Let us cast aside liberalism and combat the culture of petty-bourgeois laziness.

Let us build within our ranks a granite theoretical foundation of Marxism so that we can consistently apply Marxism to all aspects of our work and lives.

Let us rectify our style of work and combat petty-bourgeois ideology so that we can carry out our primary task of organizational expansion.

Onwards, with our Party building efforts!

“There are people who stand on the side of the bourgeois intellectuals, and oppose the remolding of the bourgeois intellectuals. Do they not need to remold? Everyone has to remold, including me, including you all. The working class has to unceasingly remold itself in the course of struggle, otherwise, some people will become bad.”

—Mao, 1976

In order to grasp what makes Maoism the Marxism of our time—and therefore what Maoism adds to Marxism-Leninism—it is necessary to not only study Mao’s contributions like the continuation of the class struggle under socialism, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the mass line, Mao’s writings on philosophy, and the strategy of Protracted People’s War (in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries), but also the Party rectification movements practiced by the CCP. The former are all essential aspects of Maoism, integral to MLM. However, the rectification movements are often overlooked. Even though both the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) have, in recent years, carried out extremely important rectification movements in their own ranks, many Maoists around the world do not grasp the importance of this key contribution of Mao’s, let alone put it into practice.

In contrast to Stalin’s view that “the theory of ‘defeating’ opportunist elements by the ideological struggle within the Party is a rotten and dangerous theory,”1 Mao constantly emphasized the importance of ideological struggle to correct mistaken ideas in the Party. Using the method of unity-struggle-unity,2 the CCP was able, in numerous instances, to win over significant sections of the Party who initially went against a correct line. This method prevented unnecessary splits. Sometimes, leading cadre, like Zhang Guotao, split off and betrayed the revolution, but by using the method of unity-struggle-unity and party rectification, it was possible to win over the vast majority of cadre who previously followed these misleaders.

Rectification movements generally came after these struggles (for example, the 1942 Rectification Campaign took place after the struggle against Zhang Guotao and after the struggle with the 28 ½ Bolsheviks) as well as after periods of growth and expansion. Inevitably, when the objective situation presents the basis for mass influxes into a communist party—during times when the revolutionary activity of the masses can, in part, make up for their lack of ideological consolidation and theoretical development3—various heterogeneous political and ideological trends will enter the ranks of the party. But this sort of growth and development is essential for a Party to take advantage of mass upsurges in revolutionary activity.4

Of course, participation in a mass revolutionary struggle, while it educates the masses rapidly, is no substitute for a thoroughgoing consolidation to proletarian ideology. The latter requires that one fanshen5 in light of communist principles and the lessons of the class struggle. This, in turn, requires significant theoretical development and a broader historical perspective, since the lessons of the proletarian class struggle concern several hundred years and are drawn from the global experiences of the class. Hence the difficulties the Bolsheviks had after their victory in the Russian Civil War. While the masses had shown tremendous enthusiasm and courage in the Revolution and in their life-and-death struggle against the counter-revolution, the vast majority were hardly consolidated to proletarian ideology. This was particularly true among the peasantry, but similar issues existed among the working class, and even in the ranks of the Party itself. Various non-proletarian trends—especially great Russian chauvinism but also syndicalism and bureaucratism—inevitably expressed themselves not only in the rank-and-file of the Party but also at its highest levels of leadership.6

Towards the end of his life Lenin advanced a series of novel proposals for addressing these issues in the Party and in Soviet society. Unfortunately, these proposals were, at best, only partially implemented. More often, they were misunderstood and, at times, even ignored. They included some expulsions from the Party, but also mass influxes of advanced workers in the Party leadership, broad discussion and debate among the Party, addressing the various forms of misleadership that existed in the Party and the state,7 the solicitation of feedback and especially criticism from the workers (through improving what Lenin called “the transmission belts” between the Party and the masses), and more. As Lenin had noted earlier in the debate arising at the end of the Civil War and in the aftermath of the 10th Party Congress, these questions concerned the fundamental “approach to the mass”:

What matters now is how to approach the mass, to establish contact with it and win it over, and how to get the intricate transmission system working (how to run the dictatorship of the proletariat). Note that when I speak of the intricate transmission system I do not mean the machinery of the Soviets. What it may have in the way of intricacy of transmission comes under a special head. I have only been considering, in principle and in the abstract, class relations in capitalist society, which consists of a proletariat, a non-proletarian mass of working people, a petty bourgeoisie and a bourgeoisie. This alone yields an extremely complicated transmission system owing to what has been created by capitalism, quite apart from any red-tape in the Soviet administrative machinery. And that is the main point to be considered in analysing the difficulties of the trade unions’ “task”. Let me say this again: the actual differences do not lie where Comrade Trotsky sees them but in the question of how to approach the mass, win it over, and keep in touch with it.8

This is not to say that Lenin had resolved the question of how to rectify the non-proletarian trends arising the Bolshevik Party, but rather that he was coming to some new conclusions at the end of his life which he did not have time to see through to their conclusion nor did he have time to struggle for their full implementation and which were never fully grasped by other leaders in the Bolshevik Party. And hence, Stalin’s formulation in opposition to ideological struggle against opportunism would later become the Party’s line (it should be noted that this was because Stalin’s conception aligned with the dominant conception of the majority of the Party’s leadership and expressed their views in the most clear and developed fashion).9 10

Thus, at the limits of Marxism-Leninism, there existed a question of how to wage the struggle against opportunism and ideological deviations; it was actually the lack of clarity on this problem, combined with various ideological issues and theoretical deficiencies that led the Bolshevik Party, under Stalin’s leadership, to resort to large scale problems in a futile attempt to resolve this problem. This question was solved by Mao and the CCP through the method of Rectification Campaign.11 In our own modest experience as a small pre-party organization in a powerful imperialist country, we have seen first hand the importance of this practice. Starting in January of 2025, after a year and half of significant growth, we launched an organizational rectification campaign aimed at Bolshevizing our ranks, raising our theoretical level, and addressing alien class tendencies in our ranks. However, before summarizing some of the lessons of our modest rectification campaign, it is necessary to clarify the general lessons of the CCP’s 1942 Rectification Campaign.

Brief Introductory Remarks on the 1942 Rectification Campaign

In the period of the tense struggle against the Japanese invaders, a Marxist-Leninist education campaign known as the Rectification Campaign was conducted throughout the whole Party under the leadership of the Central Committee and Comrade Mao Tse-Tung. The aim was to get rid of the non-proletarian ideas which had once obtained to quite a serious extent in the Party and were still hindering the implementation of the Party’s correct line and policies.
—Ho Kan-Chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, p. 375

After the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war, a large number of progressives of peasant or urban petty-bourgeois origin joined the Party. As the Party represented the interests of the whole nation as well as of the working class and enjoyed a very high prestige among the people it was both inevitable and reasonable that a large number of progressives of petty-bourgeois origin should join the party of the Chinese working class and constitute a majority of its membership. It was also inevitable that those members of petty-bourgeois origin who had not yet been sufficiently steeled ideologically and politically should attempt in various ways to influence the Party with their ideology and working style, and, in some cases, even to ‘reform’ the Party according to petty-bourgeois ideology and ways of thinking.
—ibid, pg. 376

Although the CCP officially began their Rectification movement in 1942, the plans for it were laid during the Long March, at the Tsunyi Conference. Given the wrong tendencies and ideological issues that led to the military defeat against Chiang Kai-Shek’s Fifth Extermination Campaign, it was necessary to not only win over the leadership of the CCP to a correct line (as well as the associated military strategy and tactics, all of which was done during the Tsunyi Conference), but also to address the various alien class tendencies present across all levels of the organization. This need only grew more acute after the formation of the Second United Front with the Guomindang and the associated growth of the CCP’s base areas and national influence. Growing from 40,000 Party members to 800,000 in a matter of five years (between 1937-1942) and having a base area of 44,000,000 people under their leadership presented new and unique challenges.

For example, the influxes of intellectuals and students into the base areas’ united front government,12 and into the CCP itself, greatly aided the Party’s capacity to organize the revolution and lead such a large population. However, it also led to the growth of the bureaucratic and bourgeois style of leadership (often also inflected with pre-bourgeois ideology, given strength and ubiquity of Confucian ideology in Chinese society and among the intelligentsia in particular). Given the base that the Party had developed among the workers in peasants earlier periods, various class contradictions in the Party and the united front work expressed themselves rather sharply. Mark Selden, in his book, The Yenan Way, explains broad contours of the two line struggle in the CCP between 1937-1942:

As we have observed, since 1937 two political impulses and leadership styles were joined in uneasy coexistence in the border region. One, revolutionary, emphasized struggle and broad political participation. The other, bureaucratic, stressed stable administration and the reform politics of the Second United Front. The proponents of the latter approach, the administrators, were primarily intellectuals and students drawn to Yenan from throughout the country on the one hand and local landlords and former officials on the other. Although differing sharply in perspective and political style, both were members of the educated elite. The students had been exposed to new and alien ideas; they were deeply imbued with the united front spirit which initially motivated their participation in communist-sponsored governments. The local elite, skilled in the politics and administration of the warlord era, cooperated on the basis of adherence to united front principles and the desire to preserve the remnants of their economic and political power. In Shen-Kan-Ning these groups formed the bulwark of the regional and county bureaucracy whose powers steadily increased from 1937 to 1941. On the other hand, most county magistrates and virtually all district and township cadres were local revolutionaries; for the most part they were illiterate peasant youths who had demonstrated leadership in the course of the armed struggle and land upheaval. Their primary commitment was to a social revolution which would eliminate oppression and bring equality and hope to the poor in the desolate villages of the border region.

There was little common ideological ground uniting cadres of varying background and experience beyond anti-Japanese nationalist ideals and a vision of a strong and free China. With the exception of the highest-level party cadres and intellectuals, there had been virtually no exposure to Marxist-Leninist thought or any other systematic educational training. Modern and reformist ideas prevalent among outside cadre administrators and intellectuals, most of them new to the party, were conceptions developed in China’s coastal cities during and after the May Fourth movement. Many local cadres on the other hand, with a commitment to land revolution rooted in their familiarity with peasant misery in the border area, remained deeply imbued with certain traditional values and were bound by complex social relationships and village loyalties.13

The three main ideological issues that the Party had to fight against were subjectivism in the approach to study, sectarianism in the style of political work, and formalism in writing (also known as “stereotyped Party writing”14). While none of these tendencies were dominant in the Party—given that the earlier line struggles had been won against Wang Ming, Li Lisan, and others—they all posed serious obstacles to the CCP’s ability to implement its political line, which was basically correct. In the extremely trying conditions that the Party faced in 1942—which went beyond just the Japanese offensive and the Guomindang blockade and also included serious inflation and other economic and administrative problems—various forms of non-proletarian ideology and leadership in the Party threatened the success of the revolution. It was thus necessary to overcome these issues to win the War of Resistance Against Japan, prepare for the future struggle against the Guomindang (and their American Imperialist sponsors), and steel the Party for eventual nationwide leadership after the revolution.

In three separate documents, Mao explains each of these tendencies. Reform Our Study for subjectivism in matters of theory and study, Rectify the Party’s Style of Work for sectarianism in the Party’s work, and Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing for the issues with formalism in writing. Each of these texts is extremely rich and contains many lessons, the complete summary of which is outside of the scope of this article. While some of the lessons in these texts (and of the 1942 Rectification Campaign more broadly) are particular to Chinese society at the time, many are universal. For example, in the fight against dogmatism, it was necessary to clarify a few fundamental points. As Ho Kan-Chih, in the Party’s official history, notes these included deceptively simple questions like: “What is a theory? What makes a theoretician? What is the essence of Marxism-Leninism and what is the proper attitude to studying Marxism-Leninism?”15

While these questions may seem trivial or simple, the lack of unity on them within the Party posed serious challenges. Lenin constantly emphasized that a communist Party must be guided by the most advanced revolutionary theory; however, this is impossible if, within the Party’s own ranks, confusion abounds on the very nature of theory itself. Therefore, it was necessary to wage a struggle to promote clarity on these and other foundational topics. Given the baggage that many members of the petty-bourgeoisie intelligentsia brought with them when they joined the Party, confusion on the nature of theory and knowledge was not an uncommon problem.16

It was also during this period that Mao put forward a fundamental thesis on the nature of knowledge—a thesis which he would later further refine during and after the philosophical debate during the Great Leap Forward on the relationship between thinking and being:17

What is knowledge? From ancient times to the present, there have been only two kinds of knowledge in the world: knowledge of the struggle for production and knowledge of the class struggle. (Knowledge of the national struggle is also included in the latter category.) What knowledge is there aside from this? There is none. Natural science and social science are the crystallization of these two kinds of knowledge, and philosophy is the generalization and summation of natural science and social science. Aside from these, there is no other knowledge.18

Clarification on the nature of knowledge and ultimate the source of revolutionary theory was essential to combat various idealist tendencies among the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia who had entered the Party’s ranks as well as to solidify the Party’s unity on the basis of proletarian ideology. Only thus could the problems that existed in the way the Party related to the masses and the way it handled questions internally be addressed in a systematic fashion. It was necessary to overcome these fundamental confusions—which could often hide behind nominal unity on one term or another—lest the dangerous trends of subjectivism, sectarianism, and formalism continue to impede the Party’s work. In the particular case of the confusion over the nature of knowledge and theory, a failure to address it would have deepened idealist trends in the Party’s ranks and reinforced the division of mental and manual labor not only between the Party and the masses but also within the Party itself.

For example, when a nominal unity exists on a few points (e.g. support for the War of Resistance Against Japan, overcoming feudal prejudices, etc.) it is easy to assume that there is a deep political unity. However, if, underlying this nominal unity, there are actually foundational disagreements on questions of principle (e.g. division of mental and manual labor, relations between leaders and the led, etc.) these will inevitably show up in one way or another in the Party’s practical work. In this particular case, disagreements about the nature of knowledge often led the intelligentsia to implicitly assume that the masses knew very little, given their lack of formal education or academic training. From this world view, a whole series of administrative and political style flowed. Mao understood that it was not sufficient to simply tell cadre “don’t act in x or y bad manner.” Rather, what was needed was ideological struggle to address the underlying political, theoretical, and ideological disagreements with proletarian politics, which were often implicit and hidden beneath nominal political unity.

In addition to key documents by Mao—and some less than helpful documents by Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi—comrades in the CCP were required to read some important documents from the CPSU(B) during the Rectification Campaign, especially the writing of Lenin, Stalin, and Dimitrov on Bolshevization, self-criticism, and Party discipline. Despite some shortcomings in Stalin and Dimitrov’s articulations, these helped to clarify the general theoretical lessons of the Soviet experience and to explain how it was possible to forge the proletarian discipline in the Bolshevik Party sufficient to the task of leading the October Revolution.

In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder—excerpts from which were required reading the CCP’s 1942 Rectification Campaign—Lenin provides an extremely clear analysis of how a Party develops proletarian discipline:

The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.

The fact that, in 1917–20, Bolshevism was able, under unprecedentedly difficult conditions, to build up and successfully maintain the strictest centralisation and iron discipline was due simply to a number of historical peculiarities of Russia.

On the one hand, Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a very firm foundation of Marxist theory. The correctness of this revolutionary theory, and of it alone, has been proved, not only by world experience throughout the nineteenth century, but especially by the experience of the seekings and vacillations, the errors and disappointments of revolutionary thought in Russia. For about half a century—approximately from the forties to the nineties of the last century—progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by a most brutal and reactionary tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory, and followed with the utmost diligence and thoroughness each and every “last word” in this sphere in Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism—the only correct revolutionary theory—through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment. verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.

On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903–17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate “last word” of American and European political experience.19

Drawing on these lessons, Mao and the leadership of the CCP were able to guide a rectification movement which both Bolshevized the Party and addressed, in a systematic fashion, the non-proletarian class tendencies which, at the time, prevailed in the CCP’s ranks. While other Parties in the Comintern (outside of the CPSU, of course) basically all failed to develop into Bolshevized Parties, the CCP, through their creative application of the lessons of the Russian Revolution were able to not only Bolshevize their ranks but also were able to further develop Marxism through systematizing the practice of Party rectification. This method would be repeated in 1947-1948 to improve the Party’s method of work in rural areas and in the army, again in 1950 (after the victory of the revolution) to “correct authoritarian methods of work, strengthen relations between the Party and the masses of people in the town and countryside, and consolidate the people’s democratic united front, so as to facilitate the carrying out of the agrarian reform work in the newly liberated rural areas and the work of readjusting industry and commerce in the cities.”20 The same method of rectification was also used in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. All of these campaigns contain invaluable lessons about how to carry on ideological struggle within the Party and address deviations like opportunism, dogmatism, and empiricism. Today, these lessons are being applied by leading Maoist parties like the Communist Party of the Philippines to address the pressing issues they face in their revolutionary movements.

The Experiences of MCU in Rectification

While, MCU is a small and young organization, and although the revolutionary movement in the U.S. is in a nascent stage, we have found the lessons from the CCP’s rectification campaigns to be invaluable to addressing wrong tendencies in our ranks, deepening our ideological unity, raising our theoretical level, and improving our practice of democratic centralism. In order to explain the basics of our own campaign—and so as to be able to accurately convey its successes and failures—it is important to explain some of the history of development of our organization to clarify why it became necessary to launch a rectification movement. This will also help to clarify how we applied the general lessons from the 1942 Rectification Campaign, which was carried out in Party of 800,000, to our present context as a small pre-party organization.

Factors Contributing to Our Growth and Development

As noted above, there is not presently a mass revolutionary movement in the United States, nor has MCU ever been in a position to lead such a movement—though we have provided leadership to various mass struggles. That said, we did grow significantly in 2023 and 2024. This growth was the results of a few different factors.

First, we had adopted a more correct line during our first National Conference in 2022. While we still had many confusions, the relatively clarity we developed in the debate leading up to and during the Conference constituted a significant qualitative advance. This new line involved our first systematic effort to go among the industrial proletariat,21 as well as a move away from our prior focus on organizing in housing. We also unified around some better practices in our public facing studies, then still confined largely to students.

Equally important to these shifts was the expulsion of one misleader in MCU, D, for his sexual impropriety and overall terrible bourgeois commandist leadership (which was related to, but not reducible to his patriarchal attitude). After D’s expulsion (on the second day of the Conference), we had a series of internal discussions on the overall problems in our organization that allowed him to operate in a position of leadership as well as the issues which resulted from his misleadership. D’s expulsion, and the subsequent changes in our organization help to facilitate the development of a number of junior comrades, especially some women comrades who would go on to lead our work in the unions.

What’s more, in the wake of this Conference, another leading comrade, A, jumped out and functionally promoted a line of commandism, seniority insulating leaders from criticism, opposition to doing any organizational work on social media (which is now the main form in which the masses consume agitation, despite all the issues with social media), and a narrow sectarianism which was functionally opposed to winning over semi-Marxists to MLM and our line.22 A’s opposition to things like comrades criticizing leadership was the result of the ongoing ideological transformation in MCU, in which many junior comrades had developed theoretically, practically, and ideologically. They were thus in a better position, in the wake of the Conference, to provide criticism of leading comrades. What’s more, our improved political line began to upend long standing backwards organizational practices and helped us correct some of our shortcomings.

The sharpening of these political differences was also accelerated by the expulsion of D at the Conference. A also promoted working with D, who had just been expelled, and tried repeatedly to have us reintegrate D into our work. A eventually rage quit after these lines were defeated and junior comrades began criticizing him for his lack of follow-through on basic tasks, his bourgeois commandist attitude, and his overall sloppiness on basic tasks.23

The victory of a correct line at the Conference, combined with overcoming of the leadership of two backwards cadre, opened the door to rapid advances in MCU.24 What’s more the struggle against these two misleaders was carried out in such a way that not a single other comrade in the organization was won over to their line or left with them. This was possible because of the all-around participation of junior comrades in the line struggle and criticism of these leading comrades. In the very process of struggling against this misleadership, junior comrades developed rapidly, as they confronted their own ideological obstacles to criticizing bourgeois methods of leadership and thus became more able to address wrong tendencies in our organization. All of this led to a tremendous creative outpouring from junior comrades and significantly increased our organizational abilities. It also helped to check future wrong tendencies and shortcomings of leading comrades, as junior comrades became much more willing to wage ideological struggle and criticize leadership.

The advances from these struggles and the adoption of a more correct line were most evident in our ability to play the leading role in the national Vote No campaign against the UPS contract, when just a year before, we had not even begun work among the industrial proletariat. It should be noted this campaign required not only the development of a correct overall strategy for work in the unions, but also careful united front work with other groups, the production of various forms of agitation and propaganda, and more. To concentrate the correct ideas of the masses and, on this basis, lead them, required a level of organizational dynamism that had not previously existed in MCU. It was forged in the struggle for a correct line against these misleaders.

Second, after beginning our work among the industrial proletariat in the Fall of 2022, we systematically developed our theoretical understanding of the role of communists in the working class movement. This began with a study of the CPUSA’s work among the industrial proletariat.25 These studies led to the rapid development of our organization as a whole, and junior comrades working on the union front in particular. Notably, a number of women comrades—who had previously worked under D’s misleadership—took huge steps forward at all levels. They led studies on the CPUSA’s work, helped to sum up the lessons of this work, struggled for a correct line,26 identified key groups to work with and join, developed into proletarian leaders, and ultimately helped to unite an advanced section of workers around voting no on the UPS contract. The latter was carried on via the communist method of leadership, combining economic and political agitation, such that, in a few short months of organizing with these workers, they united around a program of fighting for a worker-led country, a sharp shift from their previous basis of unity: Getting a greater share of UPS’s profits. All of this was a tremendous advance from our previous work in housing projects, were we were generally unable to sustain even a stable core of tenants willing to fight against evictions, privatization, and egregious living conditions, let alone begin to win these tenants over to proletarian ideology.

Our new line was summed up in a series of documents published in late 2023 and early 2024. These documents explained our views on communist work in the unions, the nature of the political and economic struggle of the proletariat, among other topics. We also included some self-critical reflections on our “go everywhere and do everything” line which had been in command of our work for some years. The theoretical clarity expressed in these documents was the result of both our improved study of MLM (especially the writings of Marx and Lenin on communist work in the unions, but also the experiences of CPUSA and the Comintern) and our summation of practical experiences in the UPS contract struggle. It was also the result of us breaking from certain vestiges of the RCP’s post-1978 line on economism.27

Third, we successfully intervened, as a result of this correct line, in the existing semi-Marxist milieu to win people over to MCU’s line. Initially our efforts were focused on smaller groups of people who were interested in MLM. These were relatively more advanced contacts compared to the broader U.S. left, and they were generally drawn to us because of the strength of our theoretical work.28

We quickly won some of these people over to our line and had them join our ranks. Most had tried for years to bring together study circles and build these into an organized force, but without much success. Despite some of their strengths, some also had weaknesses which we did not fully understand. While we quickly identified some their theoretical shortcomings and confusions on the fundamentals of MLM, we did not appreciate the severity of some of their ideological issues. For example, many had tried and failed for years to build a group of Maoists, and thus had a pessimistic outlook. Some had internalized bourgeois methods of developing contacts. Others were used to being leaders in their past tiny organizations and had individualist work styles. Over time we came to realize the depth of some of their ideological hangups. Despite these issues, the influx of new members greatly increased our organizational capacity and led to notable advances on a number of fronts.

As our work in the UPS contract struggle took on a national dimension—and as we were able to, through this work and our writing about it, clarify the correctness of our line—we began to engage a broader audience of semi-Marxists and win people over to supporting our line and joining MCU.

Fourth, the objective conditions were relatively favorable for our growth as an organization. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, many on the U.S. left were left looking for a way forward beyond the mass mobilizations and endless marching. There was also growing discontent with the Democrats in general and the Biden administration in particular. Biden’s decision to crush the railroad workers strike was a particularly important exposure of his hostility to the working class. All of this is tied to the general decline of the status of U.S. imperialism in its global competition with an ascendent Chinese imperialism, and the inherent instability in the social formation in the U.S. (especially ideologically), as the U.S. ruling class tries to adapt to this reality and preserve their global dominance. While we took advantage of some of these openings, we also failed to intervene well in the Palestine protests which began after October 7th, thus squandering further opportunities to grow and develop.

All of these factors contributed to our growth and development as an organization in 2023 and 2024, and put us in the strongest position we had ever been in. Despite some secondary issues and shortcomings noted above, it was correct grow as we did, and as a result of this growth, we were able to operate on a qualitatively higher level as a pre-Party organization. To solidify this growth, deepen our ideological unity, refine our line, and improve the overall quality of our work, we began to prepare for a Second National Conference.

MCU’s 2nd Conference and Problems Arising from Our Growth

In the process of growth and development that we underwent in 2023, various new internal issues emerged in our ranks. The most empirically obvious of these was the lack of experience systematically developing new cadre and ideologically consolidating them. In late 2023, we began to address this problem and other growth-related issues in our ranks. We developed a rough onboarding process, which we refined over the course of the next year, we started a national internal study to raise the overall theoretical level of the whole organization (previous studies had been exclusively run by the local branches, which tended to exacerbate some theoretical weaknesses in our ranks), and we began to prepare for our 2nd National Conference.

In preparation for this Conference, we developed an all-organization research plan. Groups of comrades were assigned a number of key topics on which we needed to develop greater organizational clarity. These included things like the Black Nation thesis, the labor party question, the nature of the U.S. Steel industry, and much more. While these were key topics to investigate further, our plan was too ambitious, both in the scope of topics covered and in terms of our estimation of our cadre’s theoretical abilities. Therefore, most of the research that was done, while helpful, was not sufficiently thorough or well grounded in MLM. In retrospect, a less ambitious research plan would have been more appropriate so that comrades had more time to study the foundational texts of MLM, summarize the lessons from our work, and debate key questions of line, strategy, and tactics. This mistake, which became more fully apparent shortly before our Conference, was an important indication that leading comrades had overestimated the level of theoretical development in our ranks as well as our ideological unity.

Despite some shortcomings in the preparation for the Conference, and insufficient debate over some key matters of line, our 2nd National Conference was a significant success. We emerged from it with strong unity around a new basic line, which was summarized by our Central Committee in Growing and Developing as a Pre-Party Organization. Based on this line we came up with various policies for developing contacts, building our united front work, running our studies, onboarding new members, and more. We also put a series of plans into place, and came up with a division of labor to carry all this out after reorganizing our internal committee structure. All of this was a major step forward for us and resulted from the energetic participation of many comrades at our Conference.

However, after the Conference, issues began to emerge in the implementation of the plans we had laid down. As we began to debate the nature of these issues and tried to rectify our mistakes, it became clear that there were deeper ideological issues at play. While our line was basically correct, we were struggling to put it into practice. Ultimately, it became clear that there were two main reasons for this.

The first was that a small section of people who joined MCU in 2023 were not, in fact, ideologically unified around MLM and the need to build a Bolshevized organization. The exact nature of this disagreement varied, but as some cadre failed to carry out their basic responsibilities and came under criticism for this, they came to justify their own lack of follow through on basic tasks, and even democratic centralism itself.29 Ultimately a small group of four cadre unified around an openly Menshevik line, which rejected democratic centralism, argued against basic organizational discipline, and said that anyone who nominally supports our line and work should be made cadre of MCU, even if they do not carry out basic work or abide by organizational discipline. Beyond recycling the exact arguments that the Mensheviks made at 2nd Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, they had little in the way of a political program to offer.30 This group split off rather than engage in discussion and debate with the rest of the organization over their line.

The second reason for our difficulties in carrying out organizational plans was that many junior comrades, despite agreeing with our line and being very dedicated to the work, had significant unresolved ideological issues which impeded their ability to consistently align thinking and doing and thereby put communist politics into practice. On a certain level, these issues reflected some disagreements with MLM, but overall these comrades were consolidated to MLM and committed to the revolution, they just had some significant shortcomings which needed to be rectified. These shortcomings, which ultimately result from the internalization of one or another aspect of the prevailing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology in the larger society, had often been exacerbated by our own organizational shortcomings. These shortcomings included the weaknesses of leading comrades, various ad-hoc styles of work prevailing in our ranks, our previous lack of systematic onboarding, and more.

Given that our assessment was that our line was basically correct and that these comrades were committed communists with some shortcomings, it thus became clear that, in the wake of the struggle with the small clique that split off, it was necessary to wage an all-organization struggle to rectify our style of work. We thus began investigating the 1942 Rectification Campaign, and launched our own campaign to address the non-proletarian ideological trends then prevailing in our ranks.

The Main Aims and Goals of Our Rectification Campaign

As noted above, the existence of non-proletarian ideology in a small pre-Party organization in a powerful imperialist country is to be expected. The period of relatively rapid growth in 2023, while it greatly developed our organization both qualitatively and quantitatively, also gave rise to alien-class tendencies in our ranks. In the wake of our 2nd Conference, we were set to make some significant advances on numerous fronts. However, this raised, for our organization, a series of new challenges which we were not ideologically equipped to consistently meet and resolve.

As noted in the document, Struggle Against Petty-Bourgeois Deviations, Deepen Proletarian Discipline, our Central Committee identified three main deviations in our ranks at the time; a lack of a developed understanding of dialectical materialism, an idealist notion of ideological transformation, and an insular organizational culture:

We face a few main shortcomings at present, all of which are the result of a petty-bourgeois one-sided mode of thinking. The first is the lack of a deep understanding of dialectical materialism, which manifests in things like comrades’ unscientific use of terms like “internal contradiction.” This is tied to difficulties comrades have had in grasping the relationship between internal and external contradictions, and the tendency to see internal contradictions metaphysically.

The second—which stems from the first, but is by no means reducible to it—is an idealist notion of transformation. Many comrades have a tendency to reduce transformation to the first half of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge and ignore the second half of this circuit. This has contributed to widespread confusions over the nature of criticism/self-criticism, fantasies of achieving a sort of “moral purity” by purging oneself of all non-proletarian ideas, and the rise of a lifestyle-esque tendency in our ranks that focuses on imitating communist conduct. The later is an inevitable result of trying to hold comrades to a high level of proletarian discipline while the above idealist and metaphysical confusions exist.

The third shortcoming is an insular culture in our ranks. This issue predates the prior two shortcomings, and over the past few years we have made some significant progress in addressing it. This can be seen in how we have been able to develop a much wider orbit of semi-Marxists around MCU and how we have built our links to the organized working class over the past few years. However, the excessive focus first side of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge in conducting CSC and rectifying wrong tendencies in our ranks shows the deep issues we still have in this regard. The pervasiveness of sloganeering in our ranks also speaks to the insularity of our organizational culture at present.

These shortcomings are corrosive, they eat away at our discipline, undermine our unity, and weaken our ability to advance the proletarian cause. Their class nature must be firmly understood by all comrades so that we can address these issues head on and struggle against them unflinchingly. At the same time, we must understand that the ultimate source of these issues is the class society in which we exist, and that our particular circumstances—as small communist organization lacking deep links with the working class and existing in the most powerful imperialist country in the world—means that we are unable to completely eliminate all vestiges of these issues from our ranks. Rather, we must understand how to overcome the biggest shortcomings, improve our discipline and morale, and remain vigilant for future issues of a similar nature, so that they can be nipped in the bud before they grow and metastasize into full-blown deviations.

With this understanding of our three main shortcomings, we were able to carry out an extensive campaign to address them. This began with discussion and debate in all committees over the issues they faced and past mistakes. In order to develop a unified policy for addressing our issues, it was necessary to first come to a unified understanding. Only once a unified understanding was reached could policy be made, plans be laid out, divisions of labor set, and unified action be taken.

This discussion and debate was fruitful, as cadre across the organization applied the general understanding of the issues laid out in Struggle Against Petty-Bourgeois Deviations, Deepen Proletarian Discipline to understand the particular issues that arose in their own front of work. While the document itself was a product of an investigation by our Central Committee into various issues in different committees, the initiative of rank-and-file comrades help to make develop our collective understanding of the problems we faced. As a result, we developed a much more concrete picture of the problems to be addressed in our ranks. We saw, in this period, a large creative outpouring from junior comrades as they showed tremendous initiative in rectifying wrong tendencies in our ranks. This took the form of criticisms of various leading comrades for promoting some petty-bourgeois tendencies, but also of poetry and songs about the rectification.

All of this also helped to spur on a hunger for theoretical development in our ranks which had previously been somewhat lacking. While comrades had studied MLM, and while our national study was helpful, it could not proceed at a sufficient pace, by itself, to provide comrades with an all-around understanding of MLM. While the first rectification document correctly noted the lack of a developed understanding of dialectical materialism in our ranks,31 this was far from the only issue on this front. In order to address the lack of all around theoretical development in our ranks, it was necessary to institute a more methodical approach to study.

After dealing with the most pressing and immediate problems in our ranks and summing up the lessons of the first phase of the rectification campaign, we began a second phase, aimed at deepening the rectification and addressing various issues which had come into focus during the first phase. Among these issues was comrades’ approach to study. A document, On Study, written by a Central Committee member, summed up some of these issues and provided guidance on how to address them:

After launching the rectification campaign we’ve started to get at some deeper issues in our organization overall and with individual comrades. We now have more insight, in particular, into the dearth of deep understanding of MLM within our organization, and there is an urgent need for a big push across the organization and from each individual member to deepen and improve our understanding. Reforming our methods of study will be key for doing this. Each individual comrade has a responsibility to ensure that they get the most they can out of group studies by preparing notes, reading carefully, discussing the reading with comrades before the meeting, consulting outside resources, etc. Additionally, each individual comrade has a responsibility to carry on a lively and engaged independent study to address their own individual weaknesses and blind spots. Adopting a proletarian approach to these two tasks, group and individual study, will require us all to engage in a long-term struggle to transform our habits and our approach, to challenge deeply held ideas about our own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and to develop study skills that we currently lack. Here we present a breakdown of how this series of struggles should be approached as well as a curated reading list of material for comrades’ independent study.

This document outline various deviations in our ranks, including a lack of seriousness about individual study, pragmatic approaches to study, manic orientations in work, and the “study for individual gratification” approach. The document was pivotal in helping comrades to better understand the issues in their study habits. As part of the organization-wide effort to address these issues, we adopted a requirement that all comrade read a book a week and share weekly reflections with their committee on their reading. This helped to develop a better theoretical culture in MCU and addressed some of the issues that we faced in winning over semi-Marxists to our line and MLM.

For example, to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the Chinese Revolution, it is necessary to read a few dozen books on the topic. If comrades only read a few books a year, it will take years to develop well-rounded knowledge on this single topic. In order to have a sufficiently developed understanding of MLM to navigate a diverse series of situations and creatively apply Marxism in the U.S., it is necessary to have profound knowledge of not only the Chinese Revolution, but all the MLM classics, as well as a series of other important topics (e.g. the history of the CPUSA, developments in this country since the 1970s, how the unions have changed since the Second World War, etc.). While enthusiastic participation in revolutionary activity can partially make up for lack of theoretical development and ideological consolidation to MLM, any organization which is serious about leading a revolution needs a huge number of theoretically developed cadre with an extremely solid understanding of Marxism. The experiences of the Bolshevik Party clearly demonstrate this.

By significantly increasing the pace at which comrades studied (which necessarily involved a struggle against the ideological hangups comrades had around study), we were also able to improve our ability to win over semi-Marxists of various stripes. In order to provide sharp and coherent rebuttals, from an MLM perspective, to various revisionist, radical liberal, and social democratic theories it has been necessary to, first of all, ensure comrades have a sufficiently developed grasp of MLM, and second, have comrades study the key theorists popular among the semi-Marxists so as to be better able to criticize them.

Given the victories in first phase of the rectification, it was necessary to provide guidance not only on study habits, but on how to continue the rectification across the board. This was summed up in the document Continue the Rectification, Fight Demoralization, Apply Marxism Consistently:

In order to carry forward the rectification campaign to completion, comrades must enthusiastically take up all three of these struggles each and every day. The first is the struggle against opportunism, petty-bourgeois laziness, empiricism, and dogmatism. The second is the struggle to deepen our understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The third is the struggle to apply MLM to all aspects of our lives. Only in waging a consistent and tireless struggle each and every day can we rectify our wrong styles of work, replace our liberalism with Marxism, and Bolshevize our ranks. All of this is essential to combating liberalism and opposing the non-proletarian tendencies which will inevitably arise within our ranks. As Mao noted:

“As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades’ minds and our Party’s work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing. The proverb “Running water is never stale and a door-hinge is never worm-eaten” means that constant motion prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms.”

Though the struggle is arduous, the path forward is clear. What’s more, we have already won a number of victories over own conservatism, indiscipline, and petty-bourgeois laziness. […] Overall we are finally in a strong position to carry out primary task of growing as a pre-Party organization.

After the initial phase of rectification, we had addressed the most glaring problems in our ranks, adjusted our leadership structure, and ignited the initiative of junior comrades to not only address various ideological shortcomings in our ranks, but also to raise our work overall to a new level. All of this was promising, and put us in a better position to carry out the line we had unified around at our 2nd Conference. However, this did not mean that the rectification was complete. In reality, it had just begun, and various new struggles had to be taken up so as to carry it forward and further develop proletarian discipline our ranks. This is to say, in the first phase of the rectification, we mainly dealt with the ideological issues that were preventing us from carrying out the basic work in our committees. Once these issues were resolved, we were able to carry out the work, but then had to resolve the issues that inevitably arose in the work itself.

While the conditions for a truly proletarian discipline cannot emerge all at once, it was essential, at this stage of the rectification, that we address head on various secondary shortcomings, especially those which most significantly impeded our ability to improve our collective discipline and practice of democratic centralism. This was the necessary precondition to Bolshevizing our ranks. Continue the Rectification, Fight Demoralization, Apply Marxism Consistently concludes by setting this as our key task in the second phase of rectification:

[Bolshevizing our ranks is] an exceeding difficult and complex task which we are carrying out under a period of extreme reaction and popular demoralization. In order to rise to the occasion, in order to be worthy of the heritage bequeathed to us by our revolutionary predecessors, we must develop within our ranks what Lenin referred to as a “granite foundation” in Marxist theory.

In order to do this we must work eagerly and tirelessly to understand and assimilate every last bit of revolutionary history and theory we can and to understand how to apply it in our current historical circumstances. This is a task which requires the active participation of all comrades. If comrades are unclear on the most basic aspects of MLM, how can they begin to work to apply this theory to our present conditions? And comrades would do well to remember that they are not blank slates, the holes in comrades’ knowledge of MLM are not empty, but filled with liberalism and bourgeois ideology. Without addressing this glaring issue which is nearly ubiquitous, it will be impossible to Bolshevize our ranks, and we will instead end up clowning.

But if we take up this rectification campaign with the courage necessary for the proletarian cause, then we will succeed in overcoming our present shortcomings, Bolshevizing our ranks, building a solid pre-Party organization, deepening our ties with the fighting proletariat, and laying the groundwork for a Vanguard Party. This is conclusion is neither a pipe dream nor an article of faith, but a basic materialist understanding which follows from a concrete (MLM) analysis of our concrete situation. But the courage necessary for this task demands much of us. We must unflinchingly look at our own shortcomings, those of our comrades (including leading comrades), and those of our organization. We must fight each and every day to align our thinking and doing with communist principles. We must fight narrow-minded and short-sighted selfishness and instead encourage the kind of historical thinking necessary to serve the people. Only thus can we carry forward the rectification to its successful conclusion.

In the months since this document was written we have carried out this struggle to a significant degree and addressed many of our most glaring shortcomings. First and foremost we have deepened our level of ideological unity and improved our proletarian discipline. This has meant that comrades are much more capable of operating independently and are more apt at creatively applying Marxism in a wide array of situations, in line with general guidance from leadership. Second, we have seen a massive improvement in the theoretical culture in our ranks, as comrades have been rapidly reading a wide array of Marxist texts and have learned a good deal revolutionary history, political economy, and dialectical materialism in a relatively short time. Third, as a result of our improved organizational study habits, the level of theoretical discussion and debate in MCU is much higher, allowing us to more dynamically refine our line. Fourth, we have vastly improved our public studies, which serve as a key means by which to win people over to MLM. Fifth, we have grown our influence in the working class movement, and now operate in militant workers’ organizations in a number of different unions. Sixth, we have finally begun to regularly produce a large amount of high quality agitation and propaganda in a regular fashion.

All of this constitutes a major advance for our organization, and has laid a proper foundation for us to properly carry out our line and prepare for the coming turmoil in this country, as the impacts of the looming U.S. defeat in its war on Iran destabilize both the global economy and the domestic situation. We hope that our modest reflections on our rectification campaign can be of use to other MLM organizations around the world as they work to Bolshevize their ranks and prepare for the coming years of global instability.

Introduction

In the prevailing period of reaction, which seems to be coming to an end as the U.S. empire is collapsing in West Asia, there is great confusion, at least in U.S. Marxist circles, on the fundamental distinction between economic and political struggles of the proletariat. In the post-1970s reaction, as part of the U.S. bourgeoisie’s efforts to co-opt mass outrage and funnel it into individualist consumerism and dead-end liberal politics, the slogan “the personal is political” became a widely accepted truism.1 The petty-bourgeoisie, which as Lenin noted, in periods of reaction retreats into mysticism and pornography,2 is particularly amenable to this slogan, seeing in it both a message of individual liberty but also a latent Christian (even Puritanical) moralism, so ubiquitous in American society.3

And thus, in this period of reaction, the progressive mass revolts of the 1960s and 70s—which struggled against everything from the Vietnam War to the oppression of women and Black people—were transformed into their opposite, a bourgeois culture of sumptuary laws which placed the responsibility for social change on the individual’s consumer and interpersonal decisions. In this way, class politics were replaced with identity politics and social movementism, with their twin pillars of support, professional (NGO) activism and academia. With all this, confusion on the nature of politics, class politics, became typical in the U.S. left, as each and every social issue and movement struggle was treated as a “political struggle” of a special interest group despite very few U.S. movements over the past half-century presenting even a minor challenge to the continued supremacy of bourgeois rule in the U.S. This culminated in the “stakeholder” politics of DEI.

This is the social morass in which many U.S. Marxists grew up and in which they were socialized. While some have broken with the most crass and vulgar forms of these bourgeois politics, many vestiges of this ideology remain. As a result, most struggle to grasp the essence of proletarian political struggles, and still implicitly have a bourgeois reformist (or petty bourgeois radical) understanding of the fundamental essence of political struggles. Thus, in line with the dominant state-approved “leftist” politics, they tend to label as political any social movement, protest, or struggle for a partial demand (reform) that is not immediately about wages, hours, conditions, or unionization. Unless these confusions are dispelled, it is impossible to grasp the essential nature of proletarian politics.

Class Politics

For Marxism, a political struggle is one of class against class. Rigorously speaking, class conflict—e.g. the economic struggles of the proletariat for better wages, hours, conditions, etc.—is not yet a form of class struggle, since, in it, the proletariat does not exist as a class-for-itself; regardless of the heroism it may show in a given struggle, it still remains ideologically dominated by the bourgeoisie. It is only once the proletariat is able to organizationally and ideologically wrest itself from the domination of the bourgeoisie and exert its class independence that it, properly speaking, wages political struggles.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx, in 1847, explains how the working class movement in England had developed from its early economic struggles to the point of waging political struggles with rise of the Chartist movement:

The first attempt of workers to associate among themselves always takes place in the form of combinations.

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favor of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favor of wages. In this struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.4

Thus, it is only once the proletariat organizes itself into a class-for-itself, at least to some degree, that political struggle becomes possible. These political struggles vary in degrees and intensity, from major political strikes, to the revolutionary overthrow of the class, the smashing of the capitalist state, and the total revolutionization of society which follows the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.5

However, there are many steps between the most basic of political struggles of proletariat and the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. And, Marx makes clear in the above quote, the economic struggles of the proletariat (and related organizations for these struggles, especially unions, the most basic organizations of the class) must develop to a certain point before the proletariat is ideologically and practically capable of waging political struggles. All of this is necessary but not a sufficient condition for the leap to be made from economic to political struggle, a leap which requires, as Lenin explains in What is to Be Done?, that the proletariat purge itself of bourgeois ideology by coming to understand the issues is society—affecting all classes, groups, and strata—from a distinctly proletarian perspective. For this, a vanguard party is needed. More on this later.

Despite the extreme clarity and precision which with Marx writes on this topic, there remains a good deal of confusion on the matter in U.S. Marxist circles. This can, in part, be attributed to the prevailing philosophical pragmatism and the related lack of familiarity with the most basic aspects of dialectics.6 The closely related tendency to take quotes out of context and treat them as abstract definitions also contributes to the widespread confusion on the basic distinction between economic and political struggles.

For example, some point to Marx’s statements about how the struggle to pass a law on the eight-hour days is a political movement and incorrectly conclude that every struggle to pass an important legal reform is therefore a political struggle. Generally those who promote this confusion draw on only a sentence or two of Marx’s 1871 letter to Friedrich Bolte. It is therefore helpful, in working to dissipate this rightist confusion, to quote the letter in full:

The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.7

From this quote, it is evident that Marx continued, even after 1848, to define political struggle in the same way, as class against class. The point is not that any struggle for a legislative reform is a political struggle, but rather once the proletariat, as a class, has organization it to a sufficient degree that it can independently fight on the scale necessary to force the bourgeoisie to pass legislative reforms, then the proletariat is capable of political struggles. That said, given the prevailing confusions surrounding this quote and the nature of political struggles more broadly, it can be helpful to elaborate on a few fundamental points in greater detail.

First, not all struggles around legislation constitute political struggles of the class, even if workers are involved in those struggles. Marx is exceedingly clear in all of his writing that the working class must make a decisive break with the bourgeoisie ideologically, so that it does not “remain a plaything in their [the bourgeoisie’] hands,” in order to constitute itself into a class-for-itself (not a class-in-itself, and therefore for-the-bourgeoisie), hence his emphasis on the need for “continual agitation and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes.” Therefore, when workers participate, even through the involvement of their unions, in movements led by bourgeois reformists, NGOs, and politicians—even if these movements are for some legislative reform—these are not yet political struggles of class against class.Actually, the capitalists have, since Marx’s time, developed incredibly sophisticated methods of social control to misdirect the masses opposition to bourgeois class dictatorship into one end or another.8 Hence the need for communists to continuously develop and refine their agitational work in light of the objective situation, and not be caught, as it were, flatfooted on the ever shifting sands of the media landscape of bourgeois society.

As Lenin never tired of emphasizing, it is only through all-around and topical exposures of all the outrages and injustices in society affecting all classes, groups, and strata that communists can raise the proletariat to true class consciousness. This is because the very essence of the proletariat’s class interest is to lead all these sections of society in the struggle against bourgeois society. It is only thus, in the era of capitalist-imperialism, that the existence of proletariat’s antagonism with bourgeois society—which is distinct from its being—can be developed and sustained all the way to the point of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and beyond.9

Therefore, it should be evident that there is a tremendous difference between the proletariat, organized as an independent class force, leading a national struggle for an eight-hour day, and the proletariat participating, even if occasionally through their unions, in a defanged Democratic Party led movement like the “Fight for $15” or the No Kings protests.

Second, to reinforce this point, it can be helpful to look at the actual history of the struggle for the shortening of the working day in Marx’s own time. This was during the heroic era of unionization, when, in most countries, the proletariat had yet to wrest from the bourgeoisie even the legal recognition of its unions. In the U.S. the strike struggles of the day were pitched battles, and often involving major violent clashes with the state forces, as the bourgeoisie had not yet developed its form of class rule in such a way so as to be able to co-opt and misdirect with relative ease (at least in periods of stability) the economic struggle of the working class.10 11

For example the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in the U.S., which was an integral part of the fight for an eight-hour day, involved over 100,000 workers and spread rapidly across the country. At the time, workers were not organized into unions in the U.S., and while some sections of the 1st International played a role in the strike, it was largely a spontaneous affair. Despite this spontaneity, it was a properly political strike, and workers fought strikebreakers, the police, the National Guard, and eventually, after driving back the National Guard, federal troops.

In St. Louis, under the leadership of the 1st International, a commune was founded—inspired by the Paris Commune—and while it lasted only a few short days, this was the highest expression of the proletarian politics at the heart of this great strike, and the only place in the country where things developed into a proper general strike, the first of its kind in the U.S.12 It was in St. Louis that the demand for the eight-hour day was taken up most clearly, though the Railway Strike was defeated, this demand for an eight-hour day would go on to be rallying cry of the U.S. strike movement in the late-nineteenth century.

However, the bourgeoisie did not simply role over and accept defeat; rather, they reacted and adapted their society so as to prevent the future becoming-antagonistic of the form of proletarian struggle. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn describes some of these changes:

The railroads made some concessions, withdrew some wage cuts, but also strengthened their “Coal and Iron Police.” In a number of large cities, National Guard armories were built, with loopholes for guns. Robert Bruce believes the strikes taught many people of the hardships of others, and that they led to congressional railroad regulation. They may have stimulated the business unionism of the American Federation of Labor as well as the national unity of labor proposed by the Knights of Labor, and the independent labor-farmer parties of the next two decades.

And:

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

Thus U.S. bourgeois society was transformed, as the old order developed new ways of resisting the new forms of proletarian organization and unity that had sprung up during the 1877 strike wave that rocked the country. This is a topic that deserved further analysis, and the reactionary developments in bourgeois society, reactions of the ruling class to popular movements, are little understood in U.S. Marxist circles. However, it is not possible to discuss these changes—or the subsequent ones which followed in the wake of the Great Depression with the New Deal—in this paper.

For the purposes of clarifying the nature of political struggles of the proletariat, these examples serve to show the intensity of the struggles around the eight-hour day and other key demands of the proletariat, and to clarify that despite the scale, scope, and militancy of these struggles, Marx and Engels thought that they would only lay the foundation for a proper workers’ party in the U.S. Thus we can see that even the massive railway strike was just the very beginnings of political struggle of the working class, actually its first properly political struggle in the history of the U.S.

From this, it should be clear that it is an utter mockery and debasement of the Marxist concept of political struggle, and of Marxism in general, to refer to some workers joining Democratic-Party led protests—or those, like the No Kings protests, which are led by their front-organizations—as a “political struggles.” It is only when the working class constitutes itself into a political force and ceases to be a political appendage of bourgeois-led movements that it can wage political struggle.

Any ability to sustain political struggles requires not only favorable objective conditions (e.g. the rapid period of industrialization in the wake of the Civil War and the Long Depression that prevailed in 1877, etc.), but also an organized proletarian party capable of taking advantage of these conditions to guide the struggles of the proletariat (both economic and political) towards the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie. While Marx and Engels did not live to see this development in their lifetimes, it was Lenin who not only saw this but developed it firsthand.

1905 and the Mass Political Strike Movement

The Russian workers were the first in the world to develop the strike struggle on the mass scale that we witnessed in 1905–07. Now it is the British workers who have lent a new great impetus to the strike movement with regard to economic strikes. The Russian workers owe their leading role, not to greater strength, better organisation or higher development compared with the workers in Western Europe, but to the fact that so far Europe has not gone through great national crises with the proletarian masses taking an independent part in them.
—Lenin, Economic and Political Strikes

It was in Russia during the 1905 Revolution that the proletariat, for the first time in history, engaged in a mass political strike movement. In the crisis that rocked Russian society in the wake of the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the massacre of Bloody Sunday, the working class emerged as an independent political force on a nation-wide scale. Decades of work by Russian Marxists to educate the workers—first through study circles, then through economic agitation, and then through political agitation and propaganda—had equipped the advanced section of the Russian proletariat with a communist understanding of the major issues in Russian society. Their knowledge extended far beyond just their immediate “shop floor” issues or even the issues prevailing in their particular industry. The advanced workers in Russia understood the major issues and outrages affecting all oppressed classes, groups, and strata in Russian society. What’s more, roughly a decade of economic strikes under Marxist leadership had prepared the class for a hard and bitter struggle against the Russia Autocracy and the capitalists.

During the 1905 Revolution the Russian proletariat did not play the role of one class among the others (i.e. it did not exist as a class-in-itself) but rather played the leading role in the revolutionary struggle. The proletariat rallied all other progressive classes to its banner and guided, to the extent that it was capable of at the time, their struggle against the Russian autocracy and the ruling classes. In this sense, in the struggle of class against class, the other classes progressive classes were for-the-proletariat.

In a political strike, the working class comes forward as the advanced class of the whole people. In such cases, the proletariat plays not merely the role of one of the classes of bourgeois society, but the role of guide, vanguard, leader. The political ideas manifested in the movement involve the whole people, i.e., they concern the basic, most profound conditions of the political life of the whole country. This character of the political strike, as has been noted by all scientific investigators of the period 1905–07, brought into the movement all the classes, and particularly, of course, the widest, most numerous and most democratic sections of the population, the peasantry, and so forth.13

The Russian proletariat was only able to play this leading role because of the existence of the Bolshevik Party and the work it had done to educate the workers on the nature of Russian society as a whole. As Lenin noted in his 1897 pamphlet, Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, by teaching the advanced workers the nature of the problems other classes face, in particular the peasantry—and by teaching them to understand these problems from a proletarian perspective, and not the perspective of the petty proprietor—the workers were able to then spread, to some degree, Marxist ideas among the peasantry and help lead their struggles (spontaneous and disconnected as they were) into part of a unified revolutionary movement against Tsardom. While this was only partially successful in 1905, as the Revolution was eventually defeated, the Russian proletariat would experience much greater success in leading the peasantry during the October Revolution.14

From the experiences of the 1905 Revolution, it is clear that, when the proletariat wages a political struggle, it leads the other classes and oppressed groups in the society in their struggles against the ruling classes. It is not enough for a small minority of the proletariat to take a firm stand on a given issue (e.g. police brutality, abortion, ICE, etc.). Rather, as Lenin notes, the proletariat must play “not merely the role of one of the classes of bourgeois society”—which is to say it cannot be one of the many classes for-the-other that is the bourgeoisie—it must instead emerge as the political, organizational, and ideological leader of the other classes, groups, and strata in the society. Otherwise, the proletariat will exist merely as an appendage of bourgeois society, it will fail to develop into the antagonistic other of the bourgeoisie, and thus, at best, the proletarian forces will exist as opposition groups, unable to ever meaningfully challenge the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

It must be recognized that ultimately, the development of revisionism in Parties is tied to their subjective weakness, their unwillingness and inability to guide the proletariat’s struggle in such a way that it can become a truly antagonistic other to bourgeois society. Lenin, in his struggles against various forms of revisionism (e.g. the economists, the Mensheviks, etc.) constantly emphasized that in order to actually be a Marxist, and thus to actually take seriously the task of developing the class consciousness of the proletariat, it was totally insufficient to focus the workers’ attention primarily on their own issues. This is because, in order to lead the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed, the proletariat must have concrete knowledge of their issues, ideas, and aspirations and be able to respond to them from a proletarian perspective and no other. Only thus can these forces be won over to support proletarian leadership in the eventual revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin explains this very clearly and precisely in What is to Be Done?:

In reality, it is possible to “raise the activity of the working masses” only when this activity is not restricted to “political agitation on an economic basis.” A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure. In no way except by means of such exposures can the masses be trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity. Hence, activity of this kind is one of the most important functions of international Social-Democracy as a whole, for even political freedom does not in any way eliminate exposures; it merely shifts somewhat their sphere of direction. Thus, the German party is especially strengthening its positions and spreading its influence, thanks particularly to the untiring energy with which it is conducting its campaign of political exposure. Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding—or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding—of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. In order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings;” he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. But this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.15

In “peaceful” times, the various oppressed groups and classes in society still conceive of their struggles in dominantly bourgeois terms, or “at best” in terms of petty-bourgeois radicalism. Without proletarian leadership, and in particular, without training the advanced elements of the proletariat through means of all-around topical political exposures, it is totally and completely impossible to rally the progressive forces in society around communist politics and to break them from their ideological subordination to the bourgeoisie.16 A brief survey of recent protests movements in the U.S. helps to drive this point home.

During the George Floyd protests, the main demands included calls for defunding the police (a reform under capitalism, which the U.S. bourgeoisie were not willing to grant) or abolishing the police (an impossibility without overthrowing the bourgeoisie and then eliminating classes, thus a petty-bourgeois utopian fantasy). A common slogan around to which anti-war protestors have marched for decades is “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation.” This slogan accurately expresses the views of many in the protests, namely that the U.S. should spend less on foreign wars and more on domestic concerns. This demand is essentially compatible with U.S. imperialism, as it simply advocates some budgetary adjustments, and does not challenge the class domination of the bourgeoisie.

Even the brave student occupations of university campuses in protest of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians raised three demands largely compatible with capitalism: “disclose, divest, and decolonize.” The first two demands are well within the scope of possibilities for universities and do not in any way challenge the basic function of higher education under capitalism. The third, depending on how it is understood and interpreted, could be a revolutionary demand (e.g. real and thoroughgoing decolonization of Palestine, etc.) but it can also be understood in a typical liberal academic manner (e.g. more funding for “post-colonial” studies on campus, “decolonize your mind,” etc.).

To be clear, the criticism of these slogans is not meant to disparage the courage the masses have shown in these struggles. Actually, despite the political and ideological limitations critiqued above, in all of these struggles the masses showed tremendous and inspiring heroism and self-sacrifice. However, insofar as their very conceptions of their struggles remained under the dominant influence of bourgeoise ideology, they were unable to exercise real political independence from the bourgeoisie. And thus we saw, for example, the mass rebellions of the George Floyd protests quickly dissipate, only to be replaced with a Biden presidency, DEI initiatives, and increased funding for various Democratic-Party-aligned NGOs.

It is only by equipping the working class with the revolutionary theory of Marxism that it is possible for there to be a revolutionary movement. This is the only Marxist understanding of Lenin’s statement that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Workers must be trained to understand, via the creative application of Marxism, the whole society with all of its different social forces, from a distinctly proletarian perspective. They must, through the leadership of the Party and based on the mass line, gain a concrete understanding—meaning the unity of general and particular—of the society and the forces therein so as to be able to win the progressive classes, groups, and strata over to revolutionary struggle and provide proletarian leadership to their various struggles for partial demands.

Every other interpretation lapses into narrow dogmatism (e.g. believing that its is sufficient to simply study or teach the basics of Marxist theory without a concrete application) or an intellectual elitism (e.g. that it is the intellectuals alone who must be equipped with Marxist theory so they can lead the workers) which reproduces the capitalist division of mental and manual labor.

Conclusion

Since Marx and Lenin’s time the bourgeoisie has accumulated an immense amount of experience and knowledge about how to maintain their class dictatorship and how to co-opt social movements and even mass rebellions. The bourgeoisie has organized their society in such a way that they attempt to preemptively misdirect potential struggles and even mass rebellions into one dead end or another. They promote controlled opposition figures (e.g. Bernie and AOC, but also Tucker and Joe Kent) and work ceaselessly through their media to keep public opinion within the acceptable spectrum of the present Overton Window and to discredit or marginalize any views outside of it.

These forms of control coupled with a massive NGO-apparatus to contain popular discontent and funnel it into electoral politics have proven extremely effective in maintaining domestic stability for the U.S. empire. For each and every social issue there is a ready-made organization prepared to astro-turf a milquetoast “movement” which proposes only bourgeois solutions to the problems created by bourgeois society. This apparatus, despite losing its grip somewhat in recent years, present a major challenge to communists. In order to counter its continued ideological vice-grip on the masses of people, and the working class in particular, it is necessary, among other things, to carry out the systematic political exposures of which Lenin wrote in What is to Be Done? Only thus can the U.S. proletariat be ideologically prepared for the monumental tasks that lay before it, only thus can it become ready to lead all progressive elements in society in the revolutionary struggle against the monopoly capitalist class that runs the U.S.

The experiences of the Bolshevik Party proved the correctness of Lenin’s theses on the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat by means of systematic political exposures. The experiences of 1905 and October 1917 showed that, by means of years of training, the proletariat was ready and able to lead not just their own shop-floor struggles, but much more importantly, all the social forces in the revolutionary overthrow of Tsardom and then the Provisional Government. While we are still a long ways from a revolutionary situation in the U.S., communists here must redouble our efforts to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat so that it can meet the monumental tasks that lay before it. Otherwise, we will miss the once in a century opportunity afforded to us by the strategic decline of the U.S. empire. Otherwise, we will fail in our duty not only the people of this country, but the people of the world.

0) Introduction

It is of central importance for all communists to understand the nature of the proletariat as a class. However, this is more complicated than it may appear at first glance. The present naiveté around dialectics and the prevailing pragmatism of the U.S. left—trends which are quite strong, it must be admitted, even among those who call themselves Marxists—mean that significant confusion abounds on this fundamental question. The costs of this confusion—which has plagued the U.S. Marxist movement, in various ways and with varying intensity, all the way back to its inception—can be seen in the last half century of political stagnation and reaction in this country. The favorable conditions of the 1960s and 70s were squandered, and in the long half-century of reaction since, barely a step has been taken towards bringing about the fusion of Marxism and the working-class movement, a fusion which has as its result the creation of a Communist party, provided that we understand that this Party is itself divided by the class struggle and that its creation is but a starting point for further development, especially the winning over of larger and larger sections of the working class movement to communism.

However, in order to make a Communist Party, a party of the proletariat, Marxists must to be clear on some basics. First, that any such Party, in order to be worthy of the name Communist, must concentrate in its ranks a sufficient number of proletarians,¹ and that these proletarians must be sufficiently ideologically and theoretically developed so as to understand not only that their class interest lies in the emancipation of labor from capital, but also how to practice Marxism in the concrete conditions of their specific country.² Second, that the formation of such a party is but a starting point for future developments and by no means means that the majority of the proletariat has been won over to Marxism. It took the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (more specifically the Bolsheviks) twenty years, two revolutionary situations (1905 and 1917), and a world war to win over the majority of the proletariat in Russia to their line and to the cause of revolution. Even with this long period of growth, things proceeded rapidly in 1917, with Party membership growing from 12,000 in January of 1917 to over 300,000 by October.³

The creation of a Communist Party, a party of the proletariat which fights for its actual class interests, requires a clear understanding of not only the existence of the proletariat at the present time (and therefore its role in bourgeois society), but also the being of the proletariat, especially its class interest in overcoming class society as such. The fact that the U.S. proletariat does not exist, at present, as an openly revolutionary class sustaining itself in flagrant antagonism with the bourgeoisie leads many would-be Marxists to despair. From this, they generally make one of two mistakes:

1) They confuse the present existence of the proletariat with its being (or at least posit a simple and mechanical relationship between the two).⁴ From this initial confusion two main deviations follow. Either the class interest of the proletariat is reduced to reform of the bourgeois republic (social democracy). Or, it is concluded that the task of Marxists is incremental growth of the proletarian movement (e.g. more strikes, more Marxists, etc.), until, through repetition of the same, quantity magically makes the leap to quality, the limit of the proletariat as a class among others in bourgeois society is reached, and it, leaping across this chasm, lands on the scene as a fully-formed revolutionary class. This mechanical (aka metaphysical) view, can broadly be classified as economism, insofar as it posits a linear accumulation of forces through simple repetition which supposedly automatically leads to the qualitative development of the class struggle to open antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This framework thus restricts the tasks of communists to advancing on this monotonous path.⁵

At best, this approach endlessly delays the open promotion of proletarian ideology among the working class, in favor of tailing progressive bourgeois liberalism, with the vain hope that workers will eventually see the limitations of bourgeois society’s ability to realize the promises of liberté, égalité, fraternité.⁶ In the meantime, the bourgeoisie’s ideological machinery, behind the backs of these would be Marxists (but right in front of all of our eyes) ceaselessly creates endless scapegoats for its failure to realize the dream of an indivisible republic.⁷ It matters little for the efficacy of bourgeois ideology if these scapegoats are immigrants or the rural poor, provided that they are not understood as and do not understand themselves as proletarians.⁸

These would be Marxists fail to see that, from the very outset, communists must educate the proletariat on its being and “what, because of its being, it will be compelled to do.” In other words, Communists cannot, for one second, conflate the existence of the proletariat in bourgeois society—especially in times of reaction when there are few political struggles of the class—with its being, and instead must do all they can to educate the proletariat on its class interest. To fail to do this is to fail in our most basic responsibility as communists.

2) The second mistake—which, as Lenin noted over a century ago, is complementary of the first—is to long for the supposed purity of the proletarian revolt. This amounts to the fantasy of an existent pure proletariat, not contaminated by its existence (being-there) in the bourgeois world. To sustain such fantasies, some harken back to the supposed purity of the Revolutions of 1848, the Great Railway Strike of 1877, or even the syndicalist revolts led by the IWW. These fantasies span the gamut from abstract slogans of “class independence”⁹ to the empty signifier of the “self-activity” of the proletariat.¹⁰

These fantasies of “proletarian” purity—a logically inconsistent concept—fail to grasp the need for the conscious action of communists to constitute the proletariat as a class-for-itself; as Marx and Engels noted in The Manifesto, the immediate aim of Communists is the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” This statement does not at all imply that the proletariat is not (or was not yet at the time of the writing of The Manifesto) a social class, but rather that it had not formed into a political class, a class-for-itself.

The “left” deviation, while less popular in peaceful times, rears it head more aggressively with every political upsurge and mass movement. It draws succor from the impetuosity of disgruntled intellectuals as well as their propensity for debasing politics into metaphysical moralizing. While exalting itself as the most radical break with the established order, this approach to politics always leads to relapse back into the status-quo insofar as it is fundamentally incapable of developing or sustaining the proletariat’s antagonism with the bourgeoisie.

Deviations to both the “left” and the right fail to grasp the lessons of the proletarian struggles of the twentieth century, as well as how the bourgeoisie has learned from and developed their class dictatorship in response to these past struggles. Bourgeois society has changed and so must Marxists, not through revising our fundamental principles, but through creatively applying Marxism in our present context. Ours is a context which is defined not only by the successes and failures of past revolutions but also by the bourgeoisie’s reactions to them and adaptations of their class dictatorship, which Marx referred to as the “perfection” of the bourgeois state machinery. Those who fail to grasp this, also fail to grasp the essence of the bourgeoisie as a reactionary class. They likewise fail to grasp that we must understand, in great detail, the proletariat’s present existence in bourgeois society if we are to succeed in our efforts at the “formation of the proletariat into a class.” As Lenin noted in What is to Be Done? in order for the proletariat to attain class consciousness it must come to understand not only its own conditions and class interests but also those of all the other classes, strata, and groups in society.¹¹

All of this then brings us full circle to the question of the proletariat as a class, and how it develops and sustains itself as an antagonistic class to the bourgeoisie. Lest anyone be fooled and think that this is simply a matter of sustaining the antagonism up to the point of revolution, after which everything will be automatic, or at least easier (provided that we find the “right form” for socialism),¹² it can be helpful to recall what Marx wrote in Class Struggles in France:

While the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another – the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

These are the four destructive-constructive¹³ tasks—referred to during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China as “The Four Alls”—that the proletariat must carry out, so as to abolish itself and class society as a whole, and thus create communism, a society in which nothing like an exploited class can come to exist. I shall have occasion to return to all of this at the end of this paper, but for now suffice it to note, as Mao did, that communism is neither a state of pacification nor a heavenly harmony devoid of contradictions. Rather, it is the beginning of a new social existence for humans, in which society will, at long last, be able to develop under the conscious collective direction of humanity as opposed to the brutal and impersonal tyranny of the market.¹⁴

1) The Main Question

We now arrive at our main question, in all of its deceptive simplicity: What is the proletariat? And an answer—equally simple and therefore great in its capacity to be misunderstood—is that the proletariat is the class which is both determined by bourgeois society and which exceeds, in a unique way, its determination by bourgeois society. An astute student of dialectics will retort that any being is always in excess over its determination by the “there” in which it exists.¹⁵ True enough, but the proletariat should be understood not simply as exceeding its determination,¹⁶ but exceeding its determination, that is, as being capable of existing in bourgeois society in flagrant antagonism to that society. All of this sounds complicated and confusing, but can be simply understood, provided one has patience and an interest in dialectical materialism. In developing an understanding of these points, one can learn more about dialectics as well as the nature of the proletariat. The whole question hinges on the contradiction between the proletariat as a class-in-itself (which is always for-an-other, in this case the bourgeois world) and as a class-for-itself.¹⁷

2) Class-in-itself (which is for-the-other)

The proletariat is determined by bourgeois society. The proletariat, as a class, is shaped by all the ways that production, and the society as a whole, is organized to serve the bourgeoisie. This is evident in that it is the class that literally does the vast majority of the work to reproduce capitalism, while itself receiving but a pittance, often not even enough to reproduce itself and the next generation of workers. In order to understand the proletariat’s determination by bourgeois society it is necessary have at least a basic understanding of the relations of production, while not reducing this determination to the relations of production alone.

The relations of production are divided into three parts:

1) The ownership pattern of the means of the production

2) People’s roles in production and their mutual relations

3) The pattern of product distribution

Of these three parts, the ownership pattern of the means of production is the most fundamental and determines, to a large degree, the other two parts. This is evident in that, in the specific context of class society, the ruling class which owns the means of production has a functional monopoly of decision making power over the way in which production is organized (e.g. where factories are built, the relationship between workers and managers, etc.) as well as how the products are distributed.

By understanding these three parts of the relations of production, we can better see how the proletariat is determined by the bourgeois world. First, as a class, the proletariat owns no means of production (in contradiction to the capitalists who monopolize the lions share of the means of production), and instead is forced to sell its labor-power on the market to those who do own means of production. Second, the proletariat generally carries out manual labor, or more simple mental labor, under the supervision of the agents of capital (managers, bosses, foreman, etc.). Even in cases where the proletariat does more mental labor, they do not have a significant say over the overall organization of production, which is set up to serve the interests of capital and not those of labor. And yet, the proletariat is thrown into highly socialized labor processes. This should be understood to mean both in large-scale industry, where huge numbers of workers work together at the same factory or warehouse, but also in the sense of globalized supply chains which bind together the workers of the world in unified international production chains. Third, the proletariat, as wage laborers, receive but a pittance of the value they produce. Generally, it is barely enough to reproduce themselves and the next generation of workers. For workers of oppressed groups and in oppressed countries, it is often far less than even this. In contrast, the capitalists reap the lion’s share of the surplus value produced, while giving a small share to the petty-bourgeoisie.

All of this could be said to be a description of how the proletariat is determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society; the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private nature of appropriation.¹⁸ As a class that performs wage labor, the proletariat is free to sell its labor-power for wages or starve. In bourgeois society, the proletariat thus generally has formal freedom and formal equality, which both mask its economic and political inequality as well as its material deprivation.¹⁹ Wage labor and the class distinctions on which it rests are the fundamental source of this inequality. However, wage labor is the most general form of exploitation and there is thus no particular emancipation for the proletariat.²⁰

What’s more, the proletariat is divided by the bourgeois world. It is no secret that the bourgeoisie tries to keep the workers isolated and atomized, even as it is forced, by needs of the highly socialized production required for capitalism in general and large-scale industry in particular, have them cooperate with each other in the course of the productive process and concentratethem in large factories, warehouses, and cities. The bourgeoisie thus also openly promotes reactionary nationalism, racism, nativism, and more, to keep the proletariat divided and un-unified.

The proletariat is also politically subordinate to the bourgeoisie and as far bourgeois society is concerned, the proletariat is just one social class among the many. The workers are citizens of the bourgeois republic, voters, immigrants, criminals, etc. At best the workers can, at times, secure for themselves, through struggle, some official representation and some place in bourgeois society, e.g. a labor party (or a social-democratic party), provided it doesn’t challenge the rule of capital (and therefore does not actually fight for the full emancipation of labor).²¹ Some regulations on the proper relations between labor and capital, which therefore presupposes the necessity of the continued existence of capital. Etcetera.

Concessions, which the workers have wrested from the bourgeoisie’s hands by means of organized force, provide an officially recognized place for the proletariat in bourgeois society. However, this place is not the proletariat’s place; it is the bourgeoisie’s place for the proletariat in their society. In our situation in the U.S. today, determined as it is by the victories and defeats of past class struggles, the bourgeoisie is more than happy to tell the proletariat: “Stay in your place!” We can translate this injunction of theirs: “Remain as a class-for-the-other!” Or, to put it another way: “Remain subordinate to capital and don’t you dare to dream of the emancipation of labor.”

Of course, as Mao noted, where there is oppression there is resistance, and the proletariat is nothing if not oppressed by bourgeois society. But this resistance, especially during long years of reaction, often takes the form of simple economic struggles, if it is organized at all. Struggles over wages, hours, and conditions, as well as the right to unionize. These struggles are important, and communists must participate in them, but, they are not yet struggles in which the proletariat asserts itself as a class.²²

Put another way, these struggles are still reactive, and the workers in them have generally not become class conscious. Anyone who has participated in the economic struggles of the proletariat in this country over the past few decades should be well aware of the subjective weaknesses of the working-class movement, which still remains almost entirely ideologically subordinate to the bourgeoisie.²³ As noted above, it is an urgent task and immediate aim of communists to change this situation.

However, in order to change this situation, we must help the proletariat come into being as a class-for-itself, to exceed its determination by bourgeois society.

3) Class-for-itself (in open antagonism with the bourgeoisie)

In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels clearly differentiate between the being of the proletariat and its existence as a class in bourgeois society. They do so in a way that clarifies why it is the case that the proletariat, while being one class among many in bourgeois society, is the only consistently revolutionary class, which has as its class interest the overcoming of all oppression and exploitation:

Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.

The difficulty in understanding the revolutionary nature of the proletariat lies in the fact it must be understood not just according to its being but also according to its existence (being-there) in bourgeois society. As noted above, given the prevailing empiricism and pragmatism in the U.S. left, it is all too easy to conflate the present existence of the proletariat under the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (and the whims, ideas, and even majority opinions of the proletariat at a given moment are part of this existence) with the being of the proletariat as a class.

Instead of focusing on the present opinions of a section of the proletariat or even the majority—of which any revolutionary must, of course, take stock—Marx and Engels emphasized that these opinions did not determine the being of the proletariat as a classand therefore the proletariat could (and under the prevailing conditions of bourgeois society often does) have views and opinions that contradict its class interest. This is simply a result of the ideological domination of the bourgeoisie through their class dictatorship, and therefore it is the task of communists to raise the class consciousness of the working class, to teach them of the true nature of their class interests and the historic aim of their class to emancipate labor from capital and abolish class society.

The proletariat can exist in flagrant antagonism with the bourgeoisie—once it constitutes itself into a class-for-itself—only because of its class interest, which is evident of its conditions of life. As Marx and Engels note, the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up “all the conditions of life of society in their most inhuman form.” This is not, as Althusser incorrectly asserted, an instance of the supposed humanist errors of Marx and Engels’ early work. Rather, it is a materialist articulation of the dialectic between the proletariat’s being and its existence in bourgeois society. And since, as Marx and Engels note, there is no particular emancipation possible for the proletariat as a class, and therefore because there can be no political place for the proletariat as a class-for-itself in bourgeois society—since its political interest as a class-for-itself lies in the overcoming of all oppression and exploitation and these are both constitutive of bourgeois society—the proletariat’s class interest is the universal emancipation of all the oppressed and exploited masses. Put otherwise, its class interest lies in exceeding the limits placed on it by bourgeois society and in doing, exceeding the limits of bourgeois society itself.

This is what is expressed in the famous lines of The Internationale: “We have been naught; we shall be all.” These lines do not assert that the proletariat has no being, but that it has no political existence in bourgeois society, no place for itself as a class (“we have been naught”). In other words, it exists in a state of internal-exclusion to bourgeois society as such. But, insofar as it occupies this peculiar place, doing the vast majority of the labor to reproduce bourgeois society, but being denied any place for its proper political existence, it is capable of becoming all, capable of leading the oppressed and exploited masses in the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie.²⁴ Therefore, the particular type of organization, the proletarian party, must be capable of leading all such struggles from a proletariat perspective. All of this quite literally means that the proletariat constitutes itself as an organized forced capable of consciously guiding its own development, and ultimately the development of society as a whole, provided that it understands the objective circumstances in which it finds itself.²⁵ This is the corrective Mao made to Hegel when the former noted that, “Freedom is knowledge of necessity, and transformation of necessity.”²⁶

However, there is still a big leap (or series of leaps) to go from becoming a class-for-itself—a state which we can reasonably say the proletarian movement reaches once there are hundreds or thousands of class conscious workers organized into a communist party²⁷—and leading the revolution. Therefore, we should be clear that once the proletariat constitutes itself as a class-for-itself, it has to go through a long and complicated process of sustaining itself in open antagonism with the bourgeoisie up to the point of revolution, and beyond. The proletariat thus must not only exceed its determination by the bourgeois world, but also come to determine the determination, to transform reality once it has formed itself into a class conscious collective subject.

What’s more, even once the proletariat constitutes itself as a class-for-itself, it is still impacted by its continued existence in the bourgeois world. The problem of influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the proletariat is not resolved simply by the formation of a communist party. On the contrary, at every step of the way there exists the internal basis within such a party for both “left” and right deviations, and thus setbacks and defeats. Thus a communist party must wage an unceasing internal struggle against bourgeois ideology in its own ranks so as to deepen its proletarian ideology, discipline, and overall character. These struggles are less about expelling opportunists from the party—although expulsions are, at times, necessary—and more about, as Lenin put it, fighting “for the sake of the fundamental principles of Marxism, and in order to purge Social-Democracy [Marxism] of the taint of liberalism and anarchism.”²⁸

All of this is fairly simple, insofar as the proletarian party draws into its ranks not “pure” proletarians, but those who exist in bourgeois society. This issue was succinctly summed up by the South Western Regional Bureau of CPI (Maoist) in their Leadership Training Programme:

We say that we are communists, but are born and brought up with the values of the prevailing ruling classes. When we join the Party those ideas do not disappear by themselves. Besides, we live in society which such feudal and bourgeois values are rampant and quite naturally impact us. In such a situation, there is a need for consistent struggle to change ourselves. Some of our incorrect values are deep-rooted in our subconscious and built around a number of insecurities. […] Though we may suppress them under some conditions, they assert themselves in other conditions more aggressively.²⁹

In short, even after the constitution of the proletariat into a class-for-itself, it still must wage not only an external struggle against the bourgeoisie, but also an internal struggle against its continued determination by bourgeois society. This is a question of how the proletarian party can sustain itself, as the organized bearer of proletarian politics, and therefore, as a class-for-itself in a society which is under the class dictatorship of a bourgeoisie, which is also operating as a class-for-itself.

This concerns the question class antagonism and the internal basis within the proletariat’s ranks to sustain it (and not capitulate or degenerate politically). Of course, this question is not reducible to the struggle of individuals to internalize proletarian ideology and combat oppressive ideas. Rather, it concerns the ability of the proletarian party to continuously develop itself by both drawing advanced proletarian elements into its ranks,³⁰ and to purify itself of bourgeois and other non-proletarian elements and ideologies.³¹ An essential part of this is the party’s ability to learn not only from Marxist theory but also from its successes and failures at various levels. History has shown that party which loses its capacity for self-critical reflection (which is not reducible to its internal resources, but also is dependent on its ability to solicit feedback from the masses outside of its ranks), quickly degenerates.

4) The Proletarian Party

In order to grasp how the proletariat can constitute itself into a class-for-itself and sustain an existence in open antagonism with the bourgeoisie (thereby exceeding its determination by the bourgeois world), it can be helpful to refer to the history of the Russian Marxist movement. Lenin wrote What is to Be Done? at a time when the movement had around 20 years of experience under its belt. However, despite a rich history and despite leading some important strikes, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party hardly existed or functioned as a Party. After its first Congress, the majority of its delegates were arrested. There was no stable organizational center, no proper central organ (until Lenin and others founded Iskra and Zarya, and even then, those were not the Party’s official organs at the time), and no ability to operate as a unified organization, especially given the ideological divisions within its ranks.

In reading What is to Be Done? one can’t help but be struck by the objective challenges that the movement faced at the time. The difficulties with publishing, the challenges with open protests, the constant danger of arrest, etc. It was in these circumstances that Lenin worked to weld together the relatively disparate circles in Russia into a proper proletarian party. However, this was not simply a matter of combining what already existed, and thereby creating a party. Nor was the key task to overcome the objective challenges of organizing a proletarian party under the conditions of absolutism. Rather, what was required was a series of sharp and intense struggles on fundamental questions of Marxism, which would eventually come to divide the Iskra camp itself, and lead to the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of the Second Congress.

That is to say, while it was necessary to organizationally unify the existing circles in Russia, this had to be done on the basis of real ideological unity around Marxism. Forging this unity required division (through ideological struggle) internal to the ranks of those who called themselves Marxist. First, between the economist and Iskra trends, but then, with the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, internal to the Iskra camp itself.³² All of this was the necessary precondition not to unify what already was (disparate circles with some ties to the workers), but rather to forge something new: A proletarian party of a new type.

While Lenin’s writings in the lead up to the Second Congress concerned the particular situation in Russia—a particular situation which is quite different from our own in the U.S. in numerous respects—they contain invaluable general lessons that help to clarify the nature of the proletariat and how it can constitute itself into a class-for-itself through the formation of a Bolshevized Party. In his writings from this period, one can see how there was a need to sort out the political, ideological, and organizational questions surrounding the functioning of the party of the proletariat. What was at stake was not principally matters of form but of the being of the proletariat as a class, and how based on this being, the Party should should be organized given the antagonism the proletariat had with the Tsarist state. In short, Lenin’s concern was what Marxists must do to bring the proletariat into existence as a class-for-itself in open antagonism with the ruling class and then to develop and sustain this antagonism up to the point of revolution.

The genius of What is to Be Done? lies in Lenin’s ability therein to concisely clarify the way that the RSDLP should be organized—in the challenging objective circumstances in Russia (absolutism, nearly omnipresent secret-police, deportations of revolutionaries, etc.)—so that it would be capable of developing the class consciousness of the proletariat. Against the prevailing trends of bowing to spontaneity (in both their economist and terroristic forms), he showed that a key task of the Party was to clarify to the workers, in the concrete, the true nature of their class interests and thereby facilitate their collective action as a class to advance towards revolution. It is for this reason that he emphasized that “socialist consciousness of the working masses” is “the only basis that can guarantee our victory.”

From this, Lenin noted that it follows that what is needed is not an organization simply capable of leading the “drab every day struggle”—though certainly the Party needed to be capable of leading the economic struggles of the workers—but one which is capable of responding, from a distinctly proletarian perspective to all the outrages in society, all instances of oppression and injustice. And insofar as we are talking about a party of the proletariat, a central task is the educating of workers to understand all the issues in the society from a distinctly working class perspective:

The question arises, what should political education consist in? Can it be confined to the propaganda of working-class hostility to the autocracy? Of course not. It is not enough to explain to the workers that they are politically oppressed (any more than it is to explain to them that their interests are antagonistic to the interests of the employers). Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example ofthis oppression (as we have begun to carry on agitation round concrete examples of economic oppression). Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity — vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc. — is it not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of developing the political consciousness of the workers if we do not undertake the organisation of the political exposure of the autocracy in all its aspects? In order to carry on agitation round concrete instances of oppression, these instances must be exposed (as it is necessary to expose factory abuses in order to carry on economic agitation).

As Lenin emphasized over and over again, in order to raise class consciousness, it is totally insufficient to reduce the scope of the Party’s work to leading the economic struggle or educating the workers on the outrages they face at the workplaces. As he put it “those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats [Marxists].” This statement, in its simple profundity, clarifies that the working class, in order to be class conscious, must concern itself with the revolutionary transformation of all of bourgeois society, not just its own immediate conditions of exploitation and oppression. And it is for this reason that the proletariat is the advanced class and that the proletarian revolution is, strictly speaking, something of universal significance, concerning as it does the whole of society.³³

Therefore, the workers must be educated by their Party—hence the central importance of its organs of propaganda—to understand all that occurs in society and to do so from a distinctly proletarian perspective. As Kautsky noted (which Lenin quoted in What is to Be Done?), “modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge.”³⁴Kautsky correctly notes that this means that communist ideas do not arise directly from the class struggle itself, but must be introduced from the outside. This introduction from without is an essential part of the fusion of Marxism and the working class movement, which is required for the founding of a communist party. Lenin took Kautsky’s idea a step further and emphasizes that, while the proletariat is the most receptive to communist ideas (because of its being as a class and because of its particular existence under bourgeois class rule), class conscious workers are prepared by the Party not only to win over and lead other workers but also all the other oppressed classes and strata in society in the revolutionary struggle.³⁵ However, the proletariat, in order to lead the other progressive elements in society, must lead as the advanced class, that is to say, it must lead from a distinctly proletarian perspective, and not tail the other classes ideologically. It must understand their distinct ways of life as well as their issues, concerns, hopes, aspirations, and illusions. And based on this concrete understanding, it must be able to form alliances and win over, section by section, other elements in the society to support the proletarian revolution.

This is particularly important as the non-proletarian masses are particularly susceptible to bourgeois ideology and compromises for the partial resolution of their particular issues within the scope of bourgeois society. We can see this today in how many of the progressive and even radical movements of various strata of the society largely remain ideologically subordinate to the bourgeoisie, proposing, as they do, partial demands that remain within the framework of the bourgeois world (or at “best” take on a radical petty-bourgeois utopian character). And while the proletarian party must form united fronts with various organizations and strata of the society which do not have unity with communist politics—the politics which have as their aim the emancipation of labor from capital—these united fronts must be struggle fronts which aim to win over various groups, strata, and ultimately even other progressive classes to follow the ideological and political leadership of the proletariat in the socialist revolution.

5) We Only Want the Earth

The fact that the proletariat exceeds its determination by bourgeois society and is capable of sustaining itself in flagrant antagonism to the bourgeois world does not simply mean that the proletariat is the advanced class that will lead the revolution. As noted in The Communist Manifesto, “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat” are but the immediate aims of communists. The ultimate aim of the proletariat is the emancipation of labor from capital. As Marx put it in the preamble to the Rules of the First International: “the economic emancipation of the working classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means.”³⁶ Therefore, after the revolution, the proletariat, in order to continue on the long and difficult road to communism, must set itself to nothing less than the total revolutionization of the whole of society.

This helps to further clarify why the proletariat must concern itself with all aspects of society, with all forms of oppression and exploitation in the society, not merely its own at the hands of the capitalists and their government. Hence, why, in the above quote from The Holy Family, Marx and Engels noted that the proletariat “cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life” but that in order to do this it must also abolish “all the inhuman conditions of life of society today.”

This brings us back to the above quote from Class Struggles in France:

While the struggle of the different socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against another – the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations.

As noted in the introduction, these were referred to as “The Four Alls” in socialist China. Before Deng Xiaoping’s 1976 coup—which brought about the creation of both billionaires and hundreds of millions of migrant laborers in China—The Four Alls were openly acknowledged as the tasks of the tasks of the proletariat under socialism so as to effect the transition to communism: A stateless, classless society, which marks the beginning of a new chapter in human history, a chapter in which humans consciously work together to collectively decide the direction of development of society to meet the needs of all.

Needless to say, such a total transformation of society requires a methodical effort at all levels. And, as noted above, it involves both creation of the new and destruction of the old. New relations of production come into existence and old ones are destroyed. Old ideas, like racism, cease to exist and are replaced by communist ideas of internationalist solidarity. But all of this requires conscious struggle and is far from automatic. The defeats of the revolutions of the 20^th Century speak to the fact that our victory is by no means inevitable. Just like prior to the revolution, deviations and setbacks are constant dangers.

Therefore, it is incumbent, as Lenin noted in A Great Beginning, for the party of the proletariat to pay the closest attention to, and support with great effort, the new emerging from within the old. Speaking of the communist subbotniks (the voluntary free labor on their days off that workers began during the Russian Civil War to aid the revolution), he stated:

We are not utopians, however, and we know the real value of bourgeois “arguments”; we also know that for some time after the revolution traces of the old ethics will inevitably predominate over the young shoots of the new. When the new has just been born the old always remains stronger than it for some time; this is always the case in nature and in social life. Jeering at the feebleness of the young shoots of the new order, cheap scepticism of the intellectuals and the like—these are, essentially, methods of bourgeois class struggle against the proletariat, a defence of capitalism against socialism. We must carefully study the feeble new shoots, we must devote the greatest attention to them, do everything to promote their growth and “nurse” them. Some of them will inevitably perish. We cannot vouch that precisely the “communist subbotniks” will play a particularly important role. But that is not the point. The point is to foster each and every shoot of the new; and life will select the most viable. If the Japanese scientist, in order to help mankind vanquish syphilis, had the patience to test six hundred and five preparations before he developed a six hundred and sixth which met definite requirements, then those who want to solve a more difficult problem, namely, to vanquish capitalism, must have the perseverance to try hundreds and thousands of new methods, means and weapons of struggle in order to elaborate the most suitable of them.³⁷

During the socialist period in Russia and China countless of these socialist new things as they were called in China, were created. They included everything from the communist subbotniks, to new production techniques, new forms of solidarity between working people of different nationalities, collective childcare to start to free women from the dual oppression of patriarchy, and much more. These were the steps made towards communism, after the victory of the successful proletarian revolutions in Russia and China. They were modest steps, compared to those that will come, but they constitute a rich legacy that must be studied and popularized by communists today.

The socialist new things, while they no longer exist today, show people some of what the proletariat was able to do when it became the ruling class, and thus serve as a great inspiration for the working class today. All this continues to testify to what the proletariat is capable of, and what it will be compelled to do again, because of its being. This is a powerful weapon against both the nihilism of open bourgeois ideologues, who argue, in an Ecclesiastical fashion, that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and those misleaders of labor, who tell us that the aim of the proletariat is to get its “fair share.”

In closing, it can be helpful to quote from James Connolly’s famous song We Only Want the Earth:

The “labour fakir” full of guile,
Base doctrine ever preaches,
And whilst he bleeds the rank and file
Tame moderation teaches.
Yet, in despite, we’ll see the day
When, with sword in its girth,
Labour shall march in war array
To realize its own, the earth.

1 Lenin repeatedly emphasized to the International Communist Movement that what is sufficient in this regard is determined by the specific situation in the country in question:

“I have been speaking too long as it is; hence I wish to say only a few words about the concept of ‘masses’. It is one that changes in accordance with the changes in the nature of the struggle. At the beginning of the struggle it took only a few thousand genuinely revolutionary workers to warrant talk of the masses. If the party succeeds in drawing into the struggle not only its own members, if it also succeeds in arousing non-party people, it is well on the way to winning the masses. During our revolutions there were instances when several thousand workers represented the masses. In the history of our movement, and of our struggle against the Mensheviks, you will find many examples where several thousand workers in a town were enough to give a clearly mass character to the movement. You have a mass when several thousand non-party workers, who usually live a philistine life and drag out a miserable existence, and who have never heard anything about politics, begin to act in a revolutionary way. If the movement spreads and intensifies, it gradually develops into a real revolution. We saw this in 1905 and 1917 during three revolutions, and you too will have to go through all this. When the revolution has been sufficiently prepared, the concept ‘masses’ becomes different: several thousand workers no longer constitute the masses. This word begins to denote something else. The concept of ‘masses’ undergoes a change so that it implies the majority, and not simply a majority of the workers alone, but the majority of all the exploited. Any other kind of interpretation is impermissible for a revolutionary, and any other sense of the word becomes incomprehensible.” V.I. Lenin, “Speech in Defense of the Tactics of the Communist International,” July 1, 1921. Lenin Collected Works, Volume 32, p. 476. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/jun/12.htm What’s more, a Proletarian Party will inevitably bring into its ranks a number of members from non-proletarian classes. However, as Marx and Engels noted, those from the educated classes must be really educated instead of just educated in the prevailing dogma and biases of the universities. What’s more, they emphasized that “when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint.”https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/17.htm

2 Provided one has an elementary understanding of the dialectic of being and existence, it is clear that Marxism has no existence apart from practice, the name for which is creative application in the class struggle. To divorce the theory from its practice is to make the mistake of all previous philosophersagainst which Marx warned in Theses on Feuerbach. No amount of jawboning about “theoretical practice” or “rebel cities” can make it otherwise.

To better understand the dialectic of being and existence, it is helpful to read some Marx. For example, in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he notes “The being-for-itself of public affairs as empirical universal must have an existence [ein Dasein]. Hegel does not search for an adequate actualisation of the being-for-itself of public affairs, but contents himself with finding an empirical existent which can be dissolved into this logical category.” For Hegel this empirical existent is, of course, the state.

For another example of this dialectic in Marx’s writing, c.f. his discussion of use-value and value, especially in Part One of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It should be noted that, at this stage of his work, Marx had not rigorously differentiated between value and exchange value as he later would in Capital.

3 A similar pattern played out in the soviets in 1917, with the Bolshevik’s influence growing rapidly between the first All-Russia Congress of the Soviets at the end of March to the October Revolution. c.f. Charles Bettelheim’s analysis in Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, p.73-79. Of particular importance is his note that “During the months between February and October 1917, the soviet movement was essentially proletarian. It was so first of all in its social basis, and then, increasingly, because the workers’ soviets took up revolutionary proletarian positions. While the SRs and Mensheviks lost credit through their collaboration with the bourgeoisie and their support for the continuance of the imperialist war, the influence of the Bolsheviks grew in the workers’ soviets.”

4 Dialectical materialism holds that while particular things exist in a complex relation with other things in a given situation, these things are not reducible to their existence in the given situation. A particular thing is not reducible to how it appears or exists (the two amount to the same thing, once we discard the idealist axiom that makes the transcendental subject the condition of possibility of appearing as such). It is possible, through the power of abstraction to grasp the being of a thing, apart from the particular circumstance in which it exists. As Lenin noted in his Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic: “The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short, all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely.” V.I. Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s The Science of Logic”, Lenin Collected Works, Volume 38.

All of this is discussed in greater detail below.

5 It should be noted that, in order to grasp the true nature of the economist deviation, it must not treated in a caricatured fashion. Lenin warned against this over and over again in What is to Be Done? In fact, some of the most insidious forms of economism are often the most dangerous. These do advocate total abandonment of political propaganda among the working class, but rather promote a mechanical conception of how the proletarian struggle willdevelop. This mechanical conception leads these economists, at every turn and despite their professed intentions to the contrary, to subordinate the proletarian struggle to bourgeois ideology. We must guard against these subtle deviations today and hold fast to the fundamental lesson of Lenin: The proletariat can only develop as a class-for-itself through increasingly becoming conscious of its fundamental antagonism with bourgeois society as such,which can never occur simply through economic or even political struggles, but requires the methodical work of communists to train the proletariat to understand all aspects of bourgeois society from a distinctly proletarian perspective.

6 Those who take this approach fail to grasp the meaning of the Internationale’s lyrics: “We want no condescending saviors.” It must also be noted, a significant section of those who call themselves Marxists in the U.S. do not even aspire to go beyond the ideals of the bourgeois revolution and have not grasped, in any meaningful sense, the qualitative difference between the ideals of the proletarian revolution and bourgeois humanism.

7 A dream, it must be admitted, that has as little being as the square-circle or the set of all sets. Put another way for those who share the cultural prejudice (as ridiculous as it is ubiquitous) against learning basic mathematics, it is just as nonsensical as the “free people’s state” of the Gotha Programme.

8 This is why in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels emphasized that proletarians have no country. This was not to deny the national character of certain movements, or the need for a country specific revolution. Indeed, the subsequent lines point specifically to this need: “Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” This is an essential lessons of Marxism: In its being the proletariat is an international class, and therefore its class interests concern the whole world, and not merely a particular struggle for revolution in a given country.

9 It is imperative for the working class to constitute itself as a class-for-itself and thus achieve class independence from the bourgeoisie. This criticism, therefore, should not be understood as a denial of the need for this, but rather as a critique of those who reduce this need to an abstract generality devoid of concrete content, as well as those who attempt to fill this generality with content which does not accurately appraise the lessons of the past two centuries of proletarian class struggle. This rich experience has taught us Marxists that it is no simple matter to sustain the proletariat as a class-for-itself, in open antagonism with the bourgeoisie. It requires a great deal of organization, coordination, and creativity. The bourgeoisie has learned from the past two centuries of class struggle; it has ceaselessly adjusted the form of its class dictatorship accordingly. It should go without saying that we can hardly call ourselves Marxists unless, with great diligence, we study history so as to apply the lessons of the class struggle in our present situation.

10 In their most egregious forms, these amount to hallucinatory daydreams of a proletariat which is already a revolutionary force in open antagonism with the bourgeoisie. To support this thesis in spite of all empirical evidence, some fetishize the violent activities of the lumpen-proletariat, seeing in their petty criminality a supposedly revolutionary opposition to the bourgeois world. Never mind that the lumpen’s social existence is predicated on preying on the people and that their criminality is both supported by the bourgeoisie and repressed by them (after all, the bourgeoisie uses the lumpen to control the popular masses and also to justify more policing and repression). This deviation particularly evident, for example, in the work of J. Sakai, which he mistakenly labels as Maoism.

11 “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding—or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding—of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. In order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings”; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. But this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.” V.I. Lenin, “What is to Be Done?,” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm

12 That the fixation on form, devoid of content, has preoccupied a large section of the U.S. Marxist circles simply speaks to the ubiquity of anti-communist ideology in this country. The basic principle, which governs this whole dialectic, of the primacy of content over form has been forgotten or at least left languishing on the back shelf, to be conveniently quoted when needed, but never applied in actual analysis. While form has an impact on content, it flows from it. Therefore, any attempt to guarantee the success of socialism by form alone (e.g. “stateless socialism,” getting the “right structure” of workers councils, etc.) fails to grasp that form of socialism must be dictated by the contents of the class struggle which is exceedingly complex, as socialist society spontaneously generates new bourgeois elements. Needless to say, this same fixation of form over (and often even against) content similarly impairs organizing under capitalism. It is important to remember Lenin’s remarks on the forms of the state in State and Revolution: “Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

13 This is, in the most general sense, the contradiction between the old and the new that plays out under socialism under the conscious direction of the proletariat. It involves the methodical destruction of bourgeois society and its replacement bit by bit by communist society. As Lenin noted in A Great Beginning, this task of the proletariat “cannot possibly be fulfilled by single acts of heroic fervour; it requires the most prolonged, most persistent and most difficult mass heroism in plain, everyday work.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/19.htm

14 “Communism will last for thousands and thousands of years. I don’t believe that there will be no qualitative changes under communism, that it will not be divided into stages by qualitative changes! I don’t believe it! Quantity changes into quality, and quality changes into quantity. I don’t believe that it can remain qualitatively exactly the same, unchanging for millions of years! This is unthinkable in the light of dialectics. Then there is the principle, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Do you believe they can carry on for a million years with the same economics? Have you thought about it? If that were so, we wouldn’t need economists, or in any case we could get along with just one textbook, and dialectics would be dead.” Mao, “Talk On Questions Of Philosophy,” August 18, 1964. Mao Selected Works, Volume 9. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_27.htm

15 The particularly astute reader will already have a sense that the riposte to this rebuke lays in the hint given in footnote 2.

16 In this broader sense, any particular thing is always more than what it exists as at a given moment. This is less about its potential to be something else, than about the way in which each particular thing has different properties which express themselves to a greater or lesser degree in different situations. This is a mundane and everyday experience for all people. As we move through different social settings, different parts of us are more or less visible, appear/exist to a greater or lesser degree. Hence, why some of our shortcomings come out more around certain people, and our strengths around others. It is a fantasy of bourgeois individualism which has no ontological or phenomenological basis to assume that an individual can appear the same way in every situation (e.g. “the true self”). It is quite a dangerous thing to consider this the standard by which to measure “authenticity.”

To further clarify the point, take an example from the world of art. Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal that he signed “R. Mutt 1917” and submitted to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. What made this urinal into an art object? The signature, itself a play on the name of the company that made the urinal? The placing the urinal upside down? Duchamp’s intentions as an artist? The piece’s placement in the exhibit? The situation specific intervention that Duchamp was hoping to carry out in the art world?

Duchamp located the transformation of ordinary objects into works of art in “the artist’s act of choice,” but from a materialist (not subjective idealist) point of view, it is both the being of the piece and its being-there (existence) in the art world at the time of its creation which transforms the urinal into an art object. In short, the very nature of what constitutes art is a complex dialectical process of development (struggle) of giving form to what, in the world of art, was previously formless.

Regardless of how one evaluates the artistic and political merit of Duchamp, Dada, or Surrealism, it is clear that this piece sought to elucidate, even if from a somewhat idealist perspective, the dialectic of being and existence. The prevailing trends in the post-modern art world seek to obliterate this dialectic, deny any possible knowledge of being-in-itself and thereby reduce art to simply its existence in a given structure of appearance (e.g. a museum, someone’s perspective, etc.). This moralizing attempt of post-modernism to wall off being-in-itself from access to knowledge should come as no surprise, given its—sometimes latent, sometimes blatant—Kantianism.

17 Hegel discusses the contradiction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself all very clearly, provided one can divide him as Marx did. In The Science of Logic, towards the end of Book One, Section One (shortly before he makes the passage from quality to quantity):

“This mutual repulsion is the posited determinate being of the many ones; it is not their being-for-self, for according to this they would be differentiated as many only in a third, but it is their own differentiating which preserves them. They negate one another reciprocally, posit one another as being only for-one. But at the same time they equally negate this being only for-one; they repel this their ideality and are. Thus the moments which in ideality are absolutely united are separated. The one is, in its being-for-self, also for-one, but this one for which it is is its own self; its differentiation of itself is immediately sublated. But in plurality the differentiated one has a being; the being-for-one as determined in exclusion is, consequently, a being-for-other. Each is thus repelled by an other, is sublated and made into that which is not for itself but for-one, and that another one.” Hegel, The Science of Logic, § 351

18 It should be noted that while the fundamental contradiction is at the level of the economic base, insofar as it is fundamental, it determines the development of all other contradictions in the society, including those in the superstructure.

19 This is the essence of bourgeois right—formal equality masking real inequality—which as Marx noted cannot be eliminated immediately after the socialist revolution but instead must be progressively restricted and overcome in the long struggle to achieve communism. Bourgeois right and its progressive restriction under socialism was a major topic of discussion and struggle in the Cultural Revolution in China. Swedish Marxist Jan Myrdal reported on some of these discussions during his 1975 visit to Liu Lin village in China:

“The purpose of the economic policies in China has always been one expressed by Mao’s words ‘serve the people.’ The discussion has never been between those who want people ‘to have it good’ and those who want people ‘to do without.’ The great debates about investments and emphasis on installation work in Liu Lin seven or eight years back had led to the decisions which brought about schools and health services as well as new homes and, for that matter, private bicycles.

“Under this kind of situation, a new nationwide discussion was initiated in China. One which in its own way was as pervasive as the great discussions during the Cultural Revolution. It was Mao Tsetung who initiated it; and he took up the issues which are at the core of these policies. What’s really happening with equality under socialism?

“For sure, it is a theoretical question. Marx wrote about it, as did Lenin. For this reason, the question of what equality means under socialism is not an abstract one. It is indeed so that there is not, nor can there be, equality under socialism. Under it, everyone is paid according to work and not need. China is a socialist country, a socialistically-developing country of the third world, and it may well be a long time before China’s economy makes it materially possible to satisfy all the needs of its citizens. So, for a long time to come, inequality will remain. This is a dangerous and very serious situation. For under these circumstances, individuals and groups are born every day who see themselves receiving material advantage from this shortage of equality, and who therefore will seek to safeguard them, who will make them into privileges.

“We can see how in the Soviet Union such privileged group gradually formed a new class and ultimately set up a new class rule, based on total control over the means of production and protected by a strongly expanded police force.

“This is why the fifth work team in Liu Lin’s production brigade is staying up until late at night on July 2, discussing bourgeois right under socialism.” Jan Myrdal, “On Equality,” July 30, 1975, China Notebook: 1975-1978. p. 19-20.

20 Put otherwise, the proletariat cannot free themselves as a class without also breaking all chains and liberating all oppressed peoples. This point is explored further in the next subsection.

21 This, of course, does not mean that communists should oppose the formation of a labor party. Nor does it mean that communist should avoid involvement in one in circumstances where one is formed. Rather, it speaks to the inherent ideological and political limitations of such a party under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and therefore, the need for a different kind of party in order for the proletariat to sustain itself in flagrant antagonism with the bourgeoisie.

22 “Every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion…Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes.” Karl Marx. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm

23 This can be seen not only in the absence of proletarian political struggles in the U.S., but also in the fact that the economic struggles involve almost no organized sections of workers (even groups within the unions) openly fighting for the emancipation of labor from capital.

24 In this sense, when the proletariat constitutes itself as a class-for-itself, it is capable of wresting away the other classes in society from the ideological and political subordination to the bourgeoisie. Thus, it is possible to have a united front, under proletarian leadership, in which the various progressive classes and strata in the society are no longer “for-the-other” of the bourgeoisie (and thus no longer frame their progressive demands in dominantly bourgeois terms), but are rather “for-the-other” of the proletariat. This is the materialist kernel of what Hegel refers as “the unity of repulsion and attraction in general” when he discusses what he calls “the one One,” which is a new “One” that emerges within the old One and is capable of organizing the many around itself while repelling (purifying) from itself determination by the other-one. Provided we hold fast to the materialist axiom that there is no one that does not divide into two, it is easy enough to divide Hegel here as well. c.f The Science of Logic, § 358-360

25 This should not be understood in a subjective idealist fashion. Even when organized into a class conscious party, the proletariat does not make history as it pleases. As Charles Bettelheim put it:

“The revolutionary party’s participation in the movement of history enables it, in certain definite circumstances, to affect the course of this movement by ensuring that the changes with which the movement is potentially pregnant do in fact take place. This is the meaning of the revolutionary party’s intervention in the historical process in which it participates, an intervention which can take a variety of forms, but which is effectual (that is, produces the effects aimed at) only insofar as the revolutionary party finds its bearings correctly amid the contradictions, and helps the masses to act upon the latter through a sufficiently correct line based on the real movement and taking account of its potentialities.

“The conditions for an effectual intervention by the revolutionary party in the historical process are extremely variable, but it is only when they have been appreciated that the party really plays a leading role is the objective process that determines the changes, although the dominant factor in this process is the party’s intervention.

“The leading role of the Bolshevik Party resulted from the way it was inserted in the movement of history, its relations with the social forces whose actions were decisive, and its capacity to guide them on the basis of a Marxist analysis of the contradictions. This role was shown in striking fashion at the moment of the revolutionary upheaval brought about by the October days of 1917, and also, even if in a less immediately obvious way, in the party’s day-to-day work. This is the fundamental work of a revolutionary party, which consists in helping the masses to organize themselves and to transform, through their own practice, their consciousness of their capacity for action, and also to discover the forms this action needs to take.” Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, p. 61-62.

26 It is interesting to note that Mao also critiques Stalin for similar mistakes. For example in Critique of Stalin’s “Economic Problems Of Socialism In The USSR,” Mao quotes Stalin’s statement that “Leaving aside astronomical, geological, and other similar processes, which man really is powerless to influence, even if he has come to know the laws of their development…” and rebukes him, stating “This argument is wrong. Human knowledge and the capability to transform nature have no limit. Stalin did not consider these matters developmentally. What cannot now be done, may be done in the future.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-8/mswv8_66.htm

27 As the above quote from Lenin on the question of the definition of the masses shows, this is something of a situation specific question. However, it should also be noted that in What is to Be Done? Lenin argued that even when the Russian Marxists led the 40,000 person strike in St. Petersburg in 1896, the struggle was still not yet properly class conscious. Therefore, we should not confuse Marxist leadership of workers struggles, even large strike movements, with the sort of fusion necessary for the proletariat to exist and sustain itself as a class-for-itself. This is but one important pre-condition.

28 Lenin, “The State of Affairs in the Party,” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 17. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1910/dec/15b.htm. In this and other texts, Lenin uses the term social democracy interchangeably with Marxism. However, later he would come to oppose this. For example, inState and Revolution, he quoted Engels’ writing from 1894, in which the later notes that the term “social-democrat” may “pass muster” for the party, but it was “inexact.” In The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (the April Theses), Lenin noted: “Instead of “Social-Democracy”, whose official leaders throughout the world have betrayed socialism and deserted to the bourgeoisie (the “defencists” and the vacillating “Kautskyites”), we must call ourselves the Communist Party.” V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution.” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 24. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm.

29 South Western Regional Bureau of CPI (Maoist), Leadership Training Programme, cited in Jan Myrdal, Red Star Over India: As the Wretched of the Earth Are Rising. Impressions, Reflections and Preliminary Inferences (Delhi: Archana Das and Subrata Das, 2012), pp. 115-116.

30 The question is even more complex when one considers Mao’s points in Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, namely that at all levels, the Party must draw into leading bodies of the class struggle the advanced elements from the masses, and these leading bodies must be continuously renewed, as some elements (include party cadre) who participate well in one struggle (or sequence of the struggle) will inevitably struggle to play a similar role in a future struggle: “A leading group that is genuinely united and linked with the masses can be formed only gradually in the process of mass struggle, and not in isolation from it. In the process of a great struggle, the composition of the leading group in most cases should not and cannot remain entirely unchanged throughout the initial, middle and final stages; the activists who come forward in the course of the struggle must constantly be promoted to replace those original members of the leading group who are inferior by comparison or who have degenerated. One fundamental reason why the work in many places and many organizations cannot be pushed ahead is the lack of a leading group which is united, linked with the masses and kept constantly healthy.” Mao, “Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership,” Mao Selected Works, Volume 3. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_13.htm

31 It is striking to note that, provided that we can divide Hegel, he is remarkably clear on the dialectics underpinning the development of antagonism. For example, § 369 of The Science of Logic, he writes:

“Further, this self-presupposing of the two determinations each for itself, means that each contains the other as a moment within it. The self-presupposing as such is the one’s positing of itself in a one as the negative of itself-repulsion; and what is therein presupposed is the same as that which presupposes-attraction. That each is in itself only a moment, is the transition of each out of itself into the other, the self-negating of each in itself and the self-positing of each as its own other. The one as such, then, is a coming-out-of-itself, is only the positing of itself as its own other, as many; and the many, similarly, is only this, to collapse within itself and to posit itself as its other, as one, and in this very act to be related only to its own self, each continuing itself in its other. Thus there is already present in principle (an sich) the undividedness of the coming-out-of-itself (repulsion) and the self-positing as one (attraction). But in the relative repulsion and attraction, which presuppose immediate, determinates existent ones, it is posited that each is in its own self this negation of itself and is thus also the continuity of itself in its other. The repulsion of the determinately existent ones is the self-preservation of the one through the mutual repulsion of the others, so that (1) the other ones are negated in it-this is the side of its determinate being or of its being-for-other; but this is thus attraction as the ideality of the ones; and (2) the one is in itself, without relation to the others; but not only has being-in-itself as such long since passed over into being-for-self, but the one in itself, by its determination, is the aforesaid becoming of many ones. The attraction of the determinately existent ones is their ideality and the positing of the one, in which, accordingly, attraction as a negating and a generating of the one sublates itself, and as a positing of the one is in its own self the negative of itself, repulsion.”

Of course, Hegel always ultimately subordinates his local materialism to the idealism of his global machinery.

32 Those familiar with the history of the formation of Iskra, will know that fundamental differences divided Lenin and Plekhanov from the beginning. c.f. Lenin, “How the ‘Spark’ Was Nearly Extinguished,” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1900/sep/spark.htm

33 As Lenin noted, he was simply elaborating on the lessons he learned from Marx. “The fundamental task of proletarian tactics was defined by Marx in strict conformity with the general principles of his materialist-dialectical outlook. Nothing but an objective account of the sum total of all the mutual relationships of all the classes of a given society without exception, and consequently an account of the objective stage of the development of this society as well as an account of the mutual relationships between it and other societies, can serve as the basis for the correct tactics of the class that forms the vanguard.” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. XX, Part I. “Teachings of Karl Marx,” pp. 42-3.

34 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

35 This was a theme that Lenin consistently emphasized even before What is to Be Done?, for example in his 1897 pamphlet, The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, in which he states:

“Our work is primarily and mainly directed to the factory, urban workers. Russian Social-Democracy must not dissipate its forces; it must concentrate its activities on the industrial proletariat, who are most susceptible to Social-Democratic ideas, most developed intellectually and politically, and most important by virtue of their numbers and concentration in the country’s large political centres. The creation of a durable revolutionary organisation among the factory, urban workers is therefore the first and most urgent task confronting Social-Democracy, one from which it would be highly unwise to let ourselves be diverted at the present time. But, while recognising the necessity of concentrating our forces on the factory workers and opposing the dissipation of our forces, we do not in the least wish to suggest that the Russian Social-Democrats should ignore other strata of the Russian proletariat and working class. Nothing of the kind. The very conditions of life of the Russian factory workers very often compel them to enter into the closest relations with the handicraftsmen, the industrial proletariat scattered outside the factory in towns and villages, and whose conditions are infinitely worse. The Russian factory worker also comes into direct contact with the rural population (very often the factory worker’s family live in the country) and, consequently, he cannot but come into close contact with the rural proletariat, with the many millions of regular farm workers and day labourers, and also with those ruined peasants who, while clinging to their miserable plots of land, have to work off their debts and take on all sorts of “casual jobs,” i.e., are also wage-labourers. The Russian Social-Democrats think it inopportune to send their forces among. the handicraftsmen and rural labourers, but they do not in the least intend to ignore them; they will try to enlighten the advanced workers also on questions affecting the lives of the handicraftsmen and rural labourers, so that when these workers come into contact with the more backward strata of the proletariat, they will imbue them with the ideas of the class struggle, socialism and the political tasks of Russian democracy in general and of the Russian proletariat in particular. It is impractical to send agitators among the handicraftsmen and rural labourers when there is still so much work to be done among the factory, urban workers, but in numerous cases the socialist worker comes willy-nilly into contact with these people and must be able to take advantage of these opportunities and understand the general tasks of Social-Democracy in Russia. Hence, those who accuse the Russian Social-Democrats of being narrow-minded, of trying to ignore the mass of the labouring population for the sake of the factory workers, are profoundly mistaken. On the contrary, agitation among the advanced sections of the proletariat is the surest and the only way to rouse (as the movement expands) the entire Russian proletariat. The dissemination of socialism and of the idea of the class struggle among the urban workers will inevitably cause these ideas to flow in the smaller and more scattered channels. This requires that these ideas take deeper root among the better prepared elements and spread throughout the vanguard of the Russian working-class movement and of the Russian revolution.” Lenin, “The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats,” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm

36 https://www.international-communist-party.org/BasicTexts/English/IWMA.htm In the preamble, Marx also notes that this is ultimately an international task: “the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists.”

37 Vladimir Lenin, “A Great Beginning: Heroism of the Workers in the Rear,” Lenin Collected Works, Volume 29, pp. 408-34. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jun/19.htm

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