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This is a reprint (in the link) from Haghigat, the central organ of the Union of Iranian Communists (Sarbedaran) which reappeared after a long lapse due to the severe repression of the reactionary Khomeini regime. The article is intended as a step towards a synthesis based on the advanced experiences of the proletariat and the summation of the serious weaknesses of the communist movement in Iran. — A World to Win

Further, this is a link to a page that documents the experience of various cohorts and tendencies of Iranian communist guerillas on the - Marxist Internet Archive.

Know the history.

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1. First and foremost, there is no comparison between the violence and oppression carried out by the United States and that carried out by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The U.S. is a far greater criminal and murderer.

2. Iran and North Korea have not attacked anyone and are surrounded by military threat.

3. The United States attacked Iran unprovoked, and Iran has the right to defend its sovereignty.

4. The Iranian people have the right and the responsibility to decide their own form of government.

5. The Iranian government is in fact repressive and oppressive toward its people.

6. The revolution that began in 1979 was carried out by a diversity of forces, including different communist and other left tendencies.

7. When the mullahs consolidated power many communists and leftists were imprisoned and executed.

8. Iran is not an anti-imperialist force but is in fact integrated into the world imperialist system.

9. Communists are fighting for a different world than the one the Islamic Republic of Iran envisions.

10. Communists, perhaps, should recognize this, and while supporting and defending Iran’s right to defend its national sovereignty against U.S. led imperialism.

11. When the people in Iran rise up against the mullahs, perhaps it is best that we analyze and look for forces within that rebellion that align with communist and egalitarian principles and are not compromised by collusion with U.S. led imperialism.

12. Perhaps communists and other egalitarians should align with those forces in Iranian society while supporting their overall right to defend national sovereignty as a more principled and independent form of anti-imperialism.

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French communist philosopher Louis Althusser developed a conception of the dialectic of Marx that he termed “overdetermined contradiction” that explained things and events as being made up of a fusion of an accumulation of contradictions. The term overdetermination was borrowed from psychologist Sigmund Freud. The meaning of this concept is that things and events could not simply be explained through one determinant factor.

This went against a popular determinist reading of Marx that saw the economic contradiction between the forces and relations of production as determinant over the political and cultural superstructure of society. In Althusser’s reading of Marx, and also partly based on Vladimir Lenin’s description of the historical accumulation of factors that made czarist Russia the weakest link in the capitalist chain during World War 1, there was not any economic determinant that was the causal factor of the revolution, but a multitude of factors some of which were economic and many of which were political and cultural. Thus, we get the statement quoted above by Althusser that the “last instance” never comes. The last instance being the supposedly determining role of the economy.

The idea of a dialectic based around overdetermined contradiction is non-linear and non-reductionist and is similar to the idea of the 10,000 things in the Yijing (Book of Changes), an ancient Taoist text that describes the correlation between oppositional pairings within situational context. When Marxist texts were translated into Chinese from Japanese at the turn of the 20th century, it is documented that a number of Chinese Marxists saw the idea of dialectical materialism through their conception of yin-yang theory found in Yijing.

At the time of Althusser writing about overdetermined contradiction he was also engaging with writings of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese revolution. The cosmological worldview around the correlation between things in specific contexts and the Chinese Marxist fusion of this culturally Chinese way of thinking with Marx’s dialectic had the effect of avoiding some of the problems of linear and dualistic thinking within western Marxism.

If we can accept the utility of concepts such as overdetermined contradiction and correlative thinking, we are better able to see complex phenomena from all sides and to not reduce things down to one simple determined factor.

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The following short musing is related to my recent thinking about pragmatism and after reading the book Chinese Dialectics: From Yijing to Marxism by Chenshan Tian.

The study of revolutionary and world history and contemporary events and social movements that you did not participate in is the direct experience of others and is a part of social practice.

For you it may not be direct experience but most knowledge we accumulate as individuals is indirect, even at the same time as it is direct experience for others.

The accumulation of everyone's direct experience historically and today makes up the totality of social practice for humans to collectively make summation of.

It's best we know history and the summations of other people's recent practice, if we truly want to understand what we're doing as new, or even to understand what has worked in the past and what has not, so as not to reinvent the wheel, or even to think about what might work under new social conditions.

The point here is that most of our knowledge from which we produce theory is based on indirect experience. To analyze imperialist rivalry, the effects of climate change, or national and international economic and political trends we must rely mainly on a collection of indirect knowledge. Our local practices do not even produce the bulk of our understanding or production of revolutionary strategy or theory. It is the combination of local experiences collected and summarized along with book research and research of data that make up the majority of the experience we use to conceptualize ideas about how to change the world.

Theory and practice are correlated, meaning they rely on one another, as opposed to being dualistic. Here Althusser’s concept of “the last instance” is appropriate to invoke. Circumstances and context determine when one aspect of an oppositional pairing is determinant over the other. That goes for theory and practice as well as it goes for economic base and political/cultural superstructure. In both instances these oppositional pairings effect and impact back on one another.

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I recently had the chance to read Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, narrated by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman. It is the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the work many of them carried on after that organization ended, told by the actual participants themselves. It is the story of perseverance and staying the revolutionary course. The following are 11 thoughts I wrote down after reading the book.

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2. The convergence between the ideas of Nelson Peery and the Build and Fight formula. A future of human disposability, mass unemployment, automation, AI, digital.

3. Jerome Scott talks about the need to focus on theory and political education in a time of revolutionary ebb.

4. Seems like there was a deeply uneven process of political education and lack of democracy in the organizational structure of League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), and yet there were many practical successes.

5. Once the leadership broke from the LRBW and the rank and file linked up with California Communist League, in the book, it seems that any mention of practice comes to a halt, and the sole focus seems to be political education.

6. What were the political practices other than collective study of CLP and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA)?

7. The combination of the more theory-oriented California Communist League (CCL) lacking a base, connecting with the LRBW cadre that had done a lot of practical work and had much success in their practical work made for a good collaboration. It says a lot that the LRBW actually went and sought that political education out.

8. One gets a sense from the book and the interviews that there is a real good social chemistry among the LRNA folks and they genuinely appreciated each other.

9. Question of winning reforms and integration in the UAW and the workplace and what comes next. There was a lot of talk about political education in the second half of the book. I would like to get a better sense of LRBW vision and also Black Workers Congress (BWC) and CLP vision of strategy. For LRBW, in particular, how did the gains in the factory and the union relate to the goal of revolutionary victory?

10. It was good to see Mike Tomlin who was on the other side of the split interviewed in this book. Also, Mike T’s observation about infiltration seems supported by the work of Aaron Leonard regarding when the BWC was part of a party building liaison committee with the Revolutionary Union and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Committee (PRRWC) in 1975 that seems to have been sabotaged based on Leonard’s research of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and the book he wrote called Heavy Radicals.

11. The analysis developed by Peery with CLP and LRNA seems to clearly be manifested currently and is a contribution of the collective study of the formation to world revolution. Respect and gratitude.

12. The Build and Fight formula seems to continue to be, in my thinking, a solid practical course of action based on the analysis of Peery and others.

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“The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary.” Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring

“One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard about the “withering away” of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware, or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10, probably nine do not know the meaning of a “free people’s state” or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people’s heads in the shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and “forgotten”!” -Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution

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During the first several decades of the modern international communist movement, starting in the mid-19th century up until the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was popular for communists and anarchists alike to envision communism as a stage of human society where both classes and the state ceased to exist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all wrote about communism reaching a stage where the state would wither away. This would happen after the capitalist class would be thoroughly repressed and classes would no longer exist, making the state unnecessary. The goal of communism, then, without precise predictions about how long it would take for this stage of communism to emerge was a stateless and classless society where resources and human knowledge were shared in common and distributed in society with the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to need.

It is significant that in his famous work State and Revolution, written in between the period of the Russian revolution when the czar is overthrown and the Bolsheviks seize state power in, September of 1917, that Lenin is envisioning a post-revolutionary society that almost immediately will have abolished the special armed force of the police and a standing army and will feature a state of the “armed people” in order to repress the overthrown capitalist class and begin to develop the first stage of communism, commonly known as socialism.

Lenin emphasizes in State and Revolution that the proletariat is a class that will be working toward going out of existence itself and that in the second stage of communism that there will no longer be any need for the state.

Of course, we know this is not what ended up happening. The Russian Revolution went through a period of civil war in which the revolutionaries did in fact build a standing army. As the prospects for other revolutions to emerge internationally ebbed, under the leadership of Stalin, the Bolsheviks set about a project to build socialism in one country.

Defending the Soviet state, forgetting the communist goal

As the Soviet Union became the only revolutionary project to consolidate its power in the name of socialism and set out on building the first attempted socialist society lasting past the 72 days that the Paris Commune lasted - the vision of a future society articulated by international communists began to change rhetorically.

Particularly as the Soviets were surrounded by hostile foreign powers and threatened with war and as capitalist societies were affected by the Great Depression, while the Soviets had gained some success in rapid industrialization of their society - the rhetoric and vision of communists became less about a classless society and the withering away of the state and became more about defending and replicating the Soviet model of society. This is evidenced by works such as Toward Soviet America by the Communist Party U.S.A. leader William Z. Foster. (1932). This pattern wasn’t helped by the fact that in the Soviet Union itself, Stalin and the chief Soviet economist Leontiev were making arguments that full communism had essentially been achieved.

It is possible to argue that specifically for communists and even Marxist anti-colonialists, the vision of a future society was dominated and expressed through establishing socialist states. Even Trotskyists saw the states being established that were in alliance with Russia or China as imperfect bureaucratic workers states to be supported against imperialism and the idea of stateless, classless communism by both Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists was put off until some distant future. Thus, communists became statists and it was mostly anarchists who were arguing for a stateless and classless future to be achieved after revolution.

Of course there are objective reasons for this. The first communist and Marxist-inspired anti-colonial struggles happened in a world where the dominant governing and foreign diplomacy mechanism was the nation-state. Revolutions usually emerged one or only a few at a time and the international balance of forces mostly favored the imperialists and comprador-bourgeois led states. In order to establish trade and foreign diplomacy it seemed necessary to adapt to the nation-state model and international law that was negotiated for the most part by the imperialist powers with the exception perhaps of the Yalta Conference in which the Soviet Union seems to have a cut a deal with the U.S. creating spheres of influence that each side hypothetically would not cross in order to avoid another great power war.

Potential for recommitment to a stateless, classless communism

It can be argued that since the end of the Bolshevik Revolution, that revolutionary Marxists (Communists and Revolutionary Nationalists) have, in effect, lowered their sights. But a lot has changed to give us the impetus to raise our sights back up and to dream big. For one, communication and transportation technology has made the world much smaller and more interdependent. When movements emerge in one part of the world, it reverberates around the world much faster than it did in years past. Think about the Arab Spring and the square movements that all emerged around the same time in the early 2010s. We can also look at the global effects of the war between Iran and the U.S. and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. The potential for social conflagration and revolutionary movement to succeed in larger parts of the globe in shorter timeframes, may expedite the possibilities for moving beyond the need for a nation state model to exercise international relations.

It is already the case, as analyzed by scholars such as William Robinson, that a transnational capitalist class operates outside of a nation-state framework. The Build and Fight formula calls for a confederated model of global relations where working people both begin their own institutional models of production and dual power such as people’s assemblies and link up with each other regionally and more broadly. There have been expressions of this type of model in Rojava and Sudan as well as movements to develop community wealth building in areas of Scotland, the U.S., Ireland, and other areas.

To the extent that these are combined with a plurality of forms of resistance, some familiar, some entirely new - as communication and travel become faster and the world stays more interdependent, new possibilities for the forceful abolition of the bourgeois state and a transition to the classless and stateless society based on egalitarian principles and the end of all oppression and exploitation - the world we want and that humanity deserves begin to emerge.

In our own revolutionary and communist communication about how we envision a future society, let’s again begin to promote a world without states and without classes. Let’s talk about and promote full communism.

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I’ve often heard the call for revolutionaries to be pragmatic, but what I really think they mean is that we need practical solutions, long-term vision, and strategy.

Here is the difference.

Philosophical pragmatism is quintessentially from the U.S. Its major theorists are John Dewey and William James. The main feature of philosophical pragmatism is that it favors immediate utility and outcomes over values. It is short-sighted. Philosophical pragmatism is the reason that capitalists can go on destroying the planet, and neglecting public safety and healthcare as long as in the short term it produces major profits for shareholders of large corporations. Because immediate outcomes are favored, long-term thinking is an afterthought.

This philosophical pragmatism is a capitalist value that has its resonance in progressive and revolutionary movements. It looks like trying to organize larger amounts of people by watering down political messaging with the thought that sometime in the future the organizers will bring their full political vision to light. This is a thought that gets put off again and again and that future usually never arrives.

Philosophical pragmatism in social movements can also look like trying to find quick paths to victory in a political campaign or organizing effort without thinking too much past the immediate campaign and the long term effects of getting politically rich quick schemes.

To be clear, practical politics that organize millions of people around actionable and definable goals are highly necessary. That takes critical thinking and strategy, but also long term vision, something that philosophical pragmatism does not value.

A quick online search will reveal that many philosophers have made this criticism of philosophical pragmatism. It is nothing new. My intention is to write a little about how this capitalist philosophy infiltrates our working class and revolutionary movements and to suggest that we always value having a long-term vision and strategic thinking.

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Reading Murray Bookchin’s philosophical essays on dialectical naturalism, I came across a description of social convergent evolution. Particularly Bookchin wrote about patterns of cooperative behavior as part of the way in which different species or disparate groups of humans survived and thrived.

For instance, in three distinct areas of the planet - in China, the West Asian Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica; humans developed similar agriculturally based societies based on three distinct staples (rice, grain, and maize). Similar pastoral ways of living also developed in the Eurasian steppe and in East Africa. In both examples these societies had little to no contact with each other but developed similar patterns or ways of survival.

Bookchin breaks these cooperative patterns down in other animal species and living things down to the way that cells must work cooperatively to form living organisms.

While Bookchin asserts that these patterns may actually be less aleatory and I tend to lean toward the idea that there is much more contingency in the world than western cosmological apriorism's allow for, still, Bookchin’s analysis leaves me with a lot to think about.

Contemporary patterns

A comrade recently pointed out to me that in thinking of this idea of social convergent theory (my understanding is that when applied to human societies this would be called “cultural convergent evolution.), more recent examples of the emergence of the Arab Spring and Square movements in the 2010s would apply.

It is also the case that from Ireland and Scotland to the United States to Sudan, mutual aid and forms of cooperative economy such as community wealth building are emerging and growing in popularity. I’ve come to understand that these recent cooperative patterns in human survival strategies in order to respond to climate disaster, rising fascism, rising food costs and malnutrition, rising housing costs, and wars; are patterns that inform Cooperation Jackson’s Build and Fight formula when it comes to suggestions and arguments about the types of organizing that are needed for the current historical conjuncture and the way events and crisis are tending.

How patterns inform organizing

Those who are familiar with the Build and Fight formula know that mutual aid, worker and consumer owned cooperatives, food sovereignty, and decommodification of housing are key features in a war of maneuver in order to develop self-sufficiency and dual power to challenge capitalism as a way of human social relations and economy.

The patterns suggested above mean that millions of people have already started these types of projects and that these projects can potentially be coordinated politically into a direct challenge, a war of position in the Gramscian sense against the capitalist system itself. In other words, our organizing as revolutionaries can itself be modeled around tendencies and forms of resistance and survival that are already existing in society.

This time around

So, in this sense there are cultural evolutionary patterns that are already emerging in different parts of the world. Organizers can build around these patterns and because of things like modern technology and dramatically enhanced global communication capabilities on a global level, such patterns can be intentionally coordinated and organized to challenge capitalism and develop more cooperative societies.

This time around, in other words, our societies can communicate with one another and the societies we create on a global level can be much more in contact and inspire innovation and creative capacity in each other to develop a more cooperative society. Perhaps one can say that the patterns that emerged through cultural evolution can be traced to the causality of capitalist social relations and crisis and have created an opportunity for revolutionary agency and those wanting to build towards an egalitarian world.

The Build and Fight formula then is a modern argument for “what is to be done” a practical call to action that can be implemented by all types of revolutionaries and through which we can develop methods for summation as this strategy is implemented and develops, creating alliances of different social groups and varying types of ruling class and reactionary opposition as well.

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I recently had the opportunity to read Murray Bookchin’s Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism. Bookchin of course is a founder of such concepts as dialectical naturalism and municipalism. I found Bookchin’s writings on dialectical naturalism to be thought provoking - at times enlightening, and at other times frustrating. Below are some numbered thoughts and notes about what I read and how I interpreted what I read.

1. Conventional differentiation between the conventional reason of Descartes and Kant and dialectical reason of Hegel. Fixity of a thing (the thing in itself, non-changing) versus the thing that is always becoming, developing, changing).

2. Self-actualization (Hegel’s Spirit) May or not be realized. The acorn on the path to becoming an oak tree. Many things can happen in between. The toddler becomes an infant, youth, and adult.

3. The idea that social self-actualization never really happens. Bookchin upholds the negation of the negation but if there is no self-actualization, if history never ends, if communism or left libertarianism is not an end of history, then is there really a negation of the negation? (Mao’s point)

4. Solid critique of many strains of thought in the 1990s from systems theory to reductionism to relativism, deep ecology, and post modernism (broadly speaking).

5. While recognizing the mysticism in Hegel’s conception of spirit, and generally upholding Hegel as a nonetheless great thinker; Bookchin is very dismissive of eastern philosophy that he refers to as mysticism. This is perhaps understandable given the uses of Eastern religions in “New Age mysticism” in the West at the time. It seems to ignore the idea that a rational philosophy or theory can extract rational kernels out of Taoism in the same way that a Marx or a Bookchin can draw a rational kernel from someone like Hegel. This is what Mao does in writing about dialectics in his essay’s “On Practice” and “On Contradiction” where he draws from Marx and Hegel but also on the Eastern dialectics that derive from Taoism and Buddhism. It should also be noted that the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser draws from both Mao’s writings on dialectics and from Freud to develop his ideas about overdetermination, that seem relevant to Bookchin’s thoughts about particularity and universality, but who Bookchin chooses not to engage in these essays.

6. Bookchin makes some important points in regard to the tendency of Marx and Engels to pose the dialectic between freedom and necessity as a struggle between humans and nature and to thus separate humans from being a part of a nature and to understand the importance of nature and ecological balance to human socialization and survival as such.

7. As opposed to freedom being seen as the ability to conquer or control nature, Bookchin poses freedom as the opposite of domination, through self-consciousness and progress toward a more rational and libertarian state of society which is what he defines as history. While I think the more oppressive and dominating things in history, what Bookchin characterizes as events and not included in history (although events according to Bookchin may move ahead of history), also play a role in the unfolding of development and society in ways that help us as humans develop notions of good and bad or right and wrong, this maybe a more semantic point and generally I see the the addition of looking at freedom in relation to domination as a welcome addition to Marx and Engels’ point. In other words, while I see the critique by Bookchin of Marx and Engels positing freedom as the human control of nature, I also see freedom in relation to the constraints of the natural world and cosmos as such. Probably the need for humans to be in the right relation with the rest of nature and the cosmos is a more correct formulation.

8. Comparisons of Stalin to Hitler always make me cringe. I disagree with Bookchin’s whole characterization of Stalin and actually existing socialism in general. To either wholly reject or wholly accept Stalin are both mistakes. It should be clear to anyone who studies the Soviet experience that communists should not desire a return to the 1930s Soviet Union as a social model. That period was closed and suffocating and would not and should not be very inspiring to those attempting to get to a better world. At the same time, this was the first attempt that lasted past a few months such as the Paris Commune, at setting put to build socialism. Within that experiment there were the first attempts at a planned economy, collectivization, nationalization of key industries; all the while under threat of war by surrounding imperialist powers and culminating in the defeat of Nazism. These are all accomplishments, if imperfect and flawed, of the first socialist experiment in world history under the leadership of Stalin. If Bookchin is staying dialectical when he speaks about what socialism is, then doesn’t socialist society exist in a state of becoming and development, including from experiences that we may consider dark to more rational and freer and democratic?

9. On the whole, Bookchin is a skilled dialectical thinker. In this work he is dealing with vital questions. What is history? What is progress? And what is freedom? He gives concrete answers to all these questions from his perspective and posits these questions in his notion of what is objective and rational. While I agree that theory and philosophy should be speculative and deal with the question “what should be” as opposed to just “what is”, I might question whether objectivity can do more than help humanity to democratically determine “what should be”, what is good and bad or right and wrong. These seem like questions we can ask, but that get decided through politics and struggle, and hopefully humanity can arrive at a state where these politics and struggle are non-antagonistic. Again, on this, I wonder of this more of a semantic question or something more.

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Historically my closest comrades and I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion both publicly and privately over what it means to do “communist work” and how is communist work different from the work of left-wing activist organizing.

I do consider myself both a revolutionary and a communist and thus my political objectives and the objectives of those with whom I have historically and still to this day engage are the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” as quoted from the last paragraph of the Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, and the building of a socialist society as a transition to a classless communist society where resources and knowledge are shared in common for the good of all humanity.

So, the question of how self-identified communists, who are consciously working toward this goal over a very protracted historical period engage in practical theoretical and organizational work to move toward this communist objective, I think, is a very important question to be grappling with.

What is left wing activist organizing?

First, there is a need for the clarification that all left-wing activist organizing is not carried out with this objective in mind. Some left-wing organizing is done with the objective of working within the current capitalist system to make it more progressive and to ameliorate its worst features. Other organizers think that reforms can eventually lead to the withering away of capitalism and imperialism and that socialism can thus be achieved through electoral victories and policy changes that move us gradually toward the end of this system. Still other organizers want to make concrete changes within their local communities without too much concern for the broader political landscape.

All these objectives, while fine and oriented toward the improvement of people’s lives in a good way, are different from specifically communist or revolutionary objectives that aim for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Thus, it would hold that the work of communists and revolutionaries is not the same as the work of left-wing activist organizing. The two types of work may overlap, but they differ in objective and thus they differ in what is practically to be done.

So, what then would specifically communist work or the work of revolutionaries be? How is it different from activist organizing and why is this important?

What is communist work?

I would offer that a huge amount of our work as communists and revolutionaries involves shaping public opinion in a way that makes communist politics and the communist vision for the future more amenable to broader sections of society.

Through polemics, art, film, music, debate, agitation, propaganda and whatever other popular means at our disposal communist ideas need to be fused with a section of the people that creates a popular base for communist politics and organizing projects to emerge.

We need to connect with broad sections of the people, but there is a question of what sections of the people we decide strategically to connect with. Left wing organizers may naturally assume that all workers or all immigrants or all oppressed national groups can be organized around similar political ideas and organizational forms. Communists, historically, have broken down sections of the people into three sections. These sections have been defined as 1) the advanced, 2) the intermediate, 3) the backward.

Now this may seem a bit pretentious and mechanical, however, I will make an argument for why it works well.

Common thinking is to pitch our politics to what we would call the intermediate. These are folks who may be progressive in their thinking, but are not too political, more concerned with the day to day and meeting the needs of their families and making it through life in a way that is secure and peaceful. There is of course, nothing wrong with this in the least. The problem though with pitching our politics to this section of the people, this being the largest section of people quantitatively, is that we often speak to the lowest common denominator in order to unite as many people as possible around bread-and-butter issues. In doing this, we often water down our messaging and we end up winning people over to a politics of bread-and-butter reforms, that fall short of our revolutionary objectives.

The so-called advanced in society are fewer in number. They are, however, more inclined to a more revolutionary position, even if that position is not fully developed and articulated. They are more willing to sacrifice for the greater good. In general, their concerns are less with bread-and-butter issues per se and more concerned with the betterment of others outside of their immediate circles, those who may be strangers to them, and they are already connecting how the wellbeing of strangers is good for the world in general.

Communists have spoken of the need to unite the advanced in society as a cohesive social force, to then win over the intermediate section, the larger section, to more advanced ideas and actions, and to in effect isolate some of the more reactionary or backward thinking that influences the popular classes.

In conclusion

One can see how a lot of this work of fusing a communist vision and practice with a certain section of society is different then just joining in and perhaps trying to lead certain areas of the day-to-day struggles of the working class or the oppressed national groups. Of course, it is true that communists should be involved in mass organizing, developing infrastructure, and building collective strength for the forcible overthrow that will become necessary at a critical point, however, it must be clear to the people what our communist vision is, both for how we obtain power and for the society we want to build to replace the current horror that is capitalism and imperialism.

We cannot pitch our politics to the broader (intermediate) sections of society in order to get a mass following, as this will only confuse people about our objectives and lead to a more reformist type of politics. It is necessary to agitate for a communist vision, to unite those who can be united for this vision as a social force that can then win over a section of the broader people and create a movement that is openly for revolution and not for reform. There is obviously so much to figure out about how to best articulate and carry out this work, but this is an attempt to describe how we can look at the difference between communist work and left-wing activist organizing.

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What are the ways that we as revolutionary minded cohorts are engaging with people in our neighborhoods and the broader public at large?

Are our methods didactic, as if we are delivering knowledge or preaching without receiving valuable knowledge at the same time?

How much are we “preaching to the choir” or engaging mostly in circles where there is already general agreement versus seeking to get our ideas out to new audiences of the curious, those beginning to ask questions about the status quo, and even those in deep disagreement?

What are the ways that we can reach out to and connect with the latter audience?

Is it more important to unite the most active forces or to work to create public opinion more broadly in society and seek out the thinking and activities of the most forward looking elements and cohorts within society, cohorts or groups that we may as yet be unaware of, yet who might have more similarities in their worldviews and actions than the most active forces that we do know and engage with?

It seems to me that the most active elements in society are not necessarily the most radical. The broad actions that people are involved in, whether through mutual aid projects, protests, developing worker owned coops, or other forms of progressive activity are not viewed by all those engaged in such projects as a means to finally rid ourselves of this oppressive and despotic capitalist world system.

Some involved in this activity see it as a way to mitigate what they see as some of the excesses of this system. Some are in it for reform. Others have a vague notion of anti-capitalism but have not yet put together how their actions and activism lead to that goal.

The bigger question though, is how the progressive activism of a relatively small section of society engages with a broader mass of people who may be less active politically, but still deeply resent the oppressive nature of this system and yearn for a pole to emerge in society that speaks to their needs and the more egalitarian and just world that they want to see.

I think that the mutual aid projects and beginning to meet people’s needs are a part of that. And developing our own infrastructure through worker owned coops, community land trusts, public banking and credit unions; will all help us to meet people’s needs in a more viable way.

At the same time, there are other forces with many times more resources than we have that can meet people’s needs in ways that mitigate some features of capitalism just enough and coopt a broad section of the people. I’m thinking for instance of the way in which the free breakfast programs of the Black Panther Party were coopted by the state and rendered non-radical.

Political agitation, exposure, and education need to be combined with our efforts to more viably meet people’s everyday needs as a movement. But the political agitation, exposure, and education must not be done in a didactic preachy way. Like we have the answer and are giving them to everyone else. Education must truly reflect the pedagogical approaches developed by people like Paulo Freire, where we all learn from each other in the process of study and exchanging ideas. Through a spirit of investigation and a process of mutual transformation, we as revolutionary minded cohorts have much to learn from the mass of people themselves, who may not be as active, and in turn we may have something to express to the mass about how we can get to a more egalitarian and just society. In the process of learning from each other, both the mass of people (the working class and its friends) and the revolutionary minded cohorts are mutually transformed, there is a fusion between the revolutionaries and the most forward-thinking elements of the mass, and new organization and strategy are formed.

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This excerpt is from a larger article entitled Orthodoxies of Comintern Years: An old-time religion. It addresses the codification of Marxism in the mid 1920s in the Soviet Union during the Bolshevization campaign.

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by Mike Ely (2010)

Nah. Everyone knows there is a religious quality to major strains of communist doctrine.

And a big part of the change that happened with the codification of Marxism (after the first great socialist revolution in Russia) was that it got confined in a doctrinal way — and had the qualities of a state religion.

Now perhaps these terms are confusing…. so let me be clearer.

Cleaning out our Augean stables

I am not saying that these doctrines are literally religious — in the sense that they posit a god, and they are about divine intervention.

but there is a way where major themes of religious thinking are adopted (aufgehoben) within the new forms of Marxism invented after the mid 1920s.

Political works are treated the way religion treats sacred texts. Marxist analysis becomes “classics.” Partial and relative truths are treated as universal truths (that suddenly are treated as if they apply everywhere). Key figures in party and state have a “final word” on doctrine — in ways that chill debate.

There is an assumption that Marxism is relatively complete — that its key precepts are known and proven — and that all that is left is to “apply it.” This is very unlike science, and very like religion.

IN religion, God has spoken on many matters, and once the divine is known, our job is to learn, accept and apply — and to focus on understanding what has already been said.

This is very alien to scientific thinking.

Let me make my point by pointing to an anomaly — a science that is relatively complete:

In the scientific world, there is a saying “anatomy is a dead science.” This meant that most of what there is to know about this very specific topic (how the human body, muscles and skeleton are connected) is known. There is not a lot of research going on in anatomy. It is (for all intents and purposes) a dead science. The only thing left is to “apply” anatomy to particular problems (your broken bone, your sore muscle).

Well, in many ways, those who turn Marxism into an orthodoxy are treating it like a dead science — as if mainly what is left is to apply what is known, make some local adaptations, and fix a few occasional “errors.”

In fact, communist theory is far from complete. It is very open ended. It is riddled with nagging questions and unexplored problems. And it has always been like that.

And (in fact) anatomy is not as dead as they used to say (either): because the arrival of acupuncture and Asian body practices have suddenly given a whole new arena of controversy and exploration to anatomy.

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The following article is taken from the Kasama Project blog. It is being reposted here to provoke some threads of engagement over how a revolutionary movement may begin and the meaning of “all-around communist work.”

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Intro (October 2012)

We need a communist beginning — including both new regroupment among communists and a process of fusion with a potentially partisan section of the people.

And for that, we need the kinds of discussions that have been going on: of where to begin and what to do when we get there.

What is communist political work? What does it look like? How is it different from other familiar forms of trade unionist or left activism?

Whenever such moments have arisen, in the history of modern politics, there has been a view that we go to the workers and assist them in the struggles they are already waging, and that out of that we would help sum up the lessons of that struggle (which, presumably, will lead to revolutionary conclusions). The arguments for this are often unarticulated and assumed. But when they come out there are often common themes:

• That struggle at the point of production inherently and naturally raises questions about exploitation and surplus value,

• That communist ideas are inherently present (in embryo) whenever people rise in struggle,

• That people themselves can spontaneously develop the ideas they need for self-liberation, or that they will relatively easily recognize those ideas when offered them in an accessible popular format.

And in contrast to this, is a set of contrary ideas:

• That political struggle (over social power, racism, equality, war, macro-policy in society) is a better arena for the development of revolutionary consciousness than the economic struggle of workers in the workplace.

• That there are a significant body of ideas that must be made available to oppressed people “from without” — i.e. from outside their own experiences and struggles, meaning: from the study of history, politics, military affairs, economics, and from the world experience of communist movements.

• That economic struggle is often an important and necessary arena of working-class struggle. And that upsurges (like the 1960s farmworkers, or the 1970s coalminers, or the more recent breakouts of immigrant meatpackers) are an important site for communist work and solidarity. But that economic struggle is not automatically the arena best suited for developing class consciousness (i.e. the consciousness of the need for a new society and the potential working-class role in that). In great upsurges of the past (say 1905 in Russia), the political struggle (over power) has often given rise to political consciousness, while mass economic struggle around collective self-interest has often been a way of drawing in the unawakened and intermediate sections of the workers.

• That there needs to be all-round communist work, which is not limited to organizing existing struggles or making such struggles larger and more militant. That all-round work includes participating in key struggles of the people but also leading — by putting forward specific programmatic (and tactical) approaches based on a revolutionary perspective. And it involves the work of developing historical summations, lively media projects, news analysis from revolutionary point of view, art, theoretical explorations, schools of cadre, durable structures of revolutionary organization, cores of trained accountable leaders and much more.

The model of a communist cannot be confined to the organizer-activist “fanning the flames” of struggle. Nor simply the Promethean image of the bringer of light– extrapolating “lessons” from struggles spontaneously initiated by the oppressed themselves.

The following essay was written in the summer of 2007 — before there was a Kasama Project, as we were circulating an early draft of the “9 Letters to Our Comrades.”

It deals with the recurring historical question of how to connect with active sections of the people (and the working class).

It discusses how this question was raised among early Bolsheviks, and in the early New Communist Movement of the 1970s, and how it has come up more recently.

What triggered this essay originally: In 2007, a circle of communists, named Single Spark, said the following as Point 14 of their “What We Believe” statement:

“The basic approach we promote toward the masses of people is to join up with them in their existing struggles for their own collective interests and, in the course of that, to bring the light of revolution to them. As an important part of this, in all our work we try to promote the mass line, the leadership method of ‘from the masses, to the masses.’”

The following essay is a critique of that approach — and an early suggestion of what else communist work should include.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Strategic Problems of “Bringing the Light into Existing Struggles”

By Mike Ely, 2007 (minor edits for clarity)

B1: Lenin’s first response to working class strike wave

This idea of “bringing the light of revolution into existing struggles” repeats a formulation communists once called “B1.”

In the fall of 1972, as we were living out of sight, waiting to move down to West Virginia, my partner Gina and I were instructed (by our organization, the Revolutionary Union) to study the notes on B1, from Lenin’s 1895 outline notes for a early Russian Social-Democratic Party program . At that time those notes concentrated how sections of the communists of the early Revolutionary Union imagined we should develop communist work among working people.

V.I. Lenin (central leader of the underground Russian communists) wrote from prison:

“The Party’s activity must consist in promoting the workers’ class struggle. The Party’s task is not to concoct some fashionable means of helping the workers, but to join up with the workers’ movement, to bring light into it, to assist the workers in the struggle they themselves have already begun to wage. The Party’s task is to uphold the interests of the workers and to represent those of the entire working class movement…The program says that this assistance must consist, firstly, in developing the workers’ class-consciousness. We have already spoken of how the workers’ struggle against the employers becomes the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie…The workers’ class-consciousness means the workers’ understanding that the only way to improve their conditions and to achieve their emancipation is to conduct a struggle against the capitalist and factory-owner class created by the big factories.

“Further, the workers’ class-consciousness means their understanding that the interests of all the workers of any particular country are identical, that they all constitute one class, separate from all the other classes in society. Finally, the class-consciousness of the workers means the workers’ understanding that to achieve their aims they have to work to influence affairs of state, just as the landlords and the capitalists did, and are continuing to do now.

“Every strike concentrates all the attention and all the efforts of the workers on some particular aspect of the conditions under which the working class lives. Every strike gives rise to discussions about these conditions, helps the workers to appraise them, to understand what capitalist oppression consists in the particular case, and what means can be employed to combat this oppression. Every strike enriches the experience of the entire working class. If the strike is successful it shows them what a strong force working-class unity is, and impels others to make use of their comrades’ success. If it is not successful, it gives rise to discussions about the causes of the failure and to the search for better methods of struggle. This transition of the workers to the steadfast struggle for their vital needs, the fight for concessions, for improved living conditions, wages and working hours, now begun all over Russia, means that the Russian workers are making tremendous progress, and that is why the attention of the Social-Democratic Party and all class-conscious workers should be concentrated mainly on this struggle, on its promotion.”

Though this was written by Lenin (the early 1895 Lenin), what stands out about it (to me now) is that it is sharply opposed to the views Lenin put forward just a few years later in his major work What is to be Done? – on the nature of communist work and the nature of class consciousness.

The problem with B1’s notes

It is no surprise by now that I have number of differences both with the Point 14 formulation and with that B1 we once took as guidance.

Here are a few:

1) I think that to lead a revolution you have to be leading people all along… you can’t just have struggles (that they spontaneously initiate) and a communist work (that involves “bringing the light”). How does a revolutionary movement develop the muscles for revolution without leading? And leading in the course of struggle, in complex relationship with other programs and forces (and not just “working with them in a friendly way”).

2) I think the formulation “join up with the masses of people in their existing struggles for their own collective interests” is double restrictive: It posits as a “basic approach” focusing on “existing struggles” (as opposed to possibly initiating struggles no one else has thought about before) and focusing on specifically THOSE “existing struggles” that are around their “own collective interests.”

3) Why would we confine ourselves to joining with the masses in “their existing struggles”? Historically the assumptions have been:

1. That is where the advanced are

2. In those situations (and within those movements) people are most open to “talking socialism”

3. By participating we can prove our motives and our worth, and so make people more open to our larger ideas.

In other words, the assumption is that in struggles over “their own collective interests,” people are most open to communist ideas. This is sometimes true, and often not. But as a schema (as a “basic approach”) it falls far short.

4) I don’t think that struggles we might initiate and lead (as communists) are inherently sterile, stillborn or sectarian.

And I don’t think that any basic approach should be adopted that rules out initiating struggles over key faultlines and contradictions. I think there are times when we need to consciously initiate struggle, and then win over sections of the masses to participate. The national movement against police brutality was initiated that way – and the experience shows the potential to create, lead, shape and wage struggles of this kind.

5) And if we do that correctly, there can be on a basis and framework that attracts the more politically advanced – and help forge them as a leading and active core (the existence and maturation of which is a prerequisite for any hope of revolution). And such initiative can creates a political context and struggle that is particularly amenable to leaps in consciousness (including among the masses broadly).

6) It may make sense for the revolutionary communists outside the RCP to focus on initiating a campaign to popularize and support revolutionary movements internationally (which may take important leaps, and which could potentially also be an excellent framework for attracting and regrouping communists). I am not proposing this, nor am I secretly convinced this is the course to take. But I am against a formulation for a “basic approach” that essentially RULES OUT the possibility of focusing on such a project (outside “existing struggles”).

7) I think some of the important focus of struggle should be precisely not around people’s “own collective interest” – but around the suffering and resistance of others.

When Black youth were shot down in NYC, it would have been important to mobilize enlightened, progressive and revolutionary white people (including of course poor and working people) to take up fierce and public resistance to this (in a multinational way). Such action would be especially powerful exactly because it would not be struggle around their “own collective interest” in any narrow sense. I think that the interests of others often motivates the more advanced –in fact, I think a defining feature of the relatively advanced is that they are less concerned with self, and more with others. (This is opposed to the more economist view that the advanced are those more willing to “fight,” militantly – often from a politically complex stand of “collective self.”)

8) I think we should look at the larger political faultlines in society (when deciding where to dig in) rather than deliberately confining ourselves to what some (relatively small) sections of the masses see as important and are willing to struggle over at any given point. Rising fascism and police state, police brutality, the criminalization of immigrant workers, the intense discontent over U.S. aggressions and occupations – these are important, whether or not there is “existing struggle” around them.

9) Not all “existing struggles” are the same.

When I make a list of “existing struggles” among the masses, these are movements that are rather diverse — and vary in their value and political potential. Black nationalists (including revolutionaries) have maintained a low-level “existing struggle” over reparations. Many people are engaged in existing struggle over their right to bear arms. Ranchers are fighting for their “own collective interests” by upholding property rights against “tree huggers.” Immigrant workers are engaging in an existing struggle for legalization. The “existing struggle” over the war in Iraq continues to be heavily subsumed and channeled into the electoral arena.

Some of these “existing struggles” may be excellent arenas for communist work – some may not. You have to do a concrete analysis and not naively assume that if the masses are into it, then it must be conducive.

10) I have mentioned that the active forces in “existing struggles” are not always the politically advanced forces. I gave the example of the coalfields (where discovering this was a shellshock revelation – and took years and sharp two-line struggle to even see.) And there were other struggles that attracted the advanced (for example the resistance to the religious rights’ text book protest, and the work around the Deng demo of 1979).

11) I think we should be very wary about having a mechanical and stereotypical view of what a “struggle” is – a view that tends to assume “struggle” necessarily involves leaflets, rallies, picket lines and bigger demos. Artists often wage important resistance through their art and music. Scientists write books and polemics, and conduct sharply pointed research. There are alternative cultural movements of many kinds that respond to the outrages of this society. We don’t want to conceptually confine either the masses or the revolutionary movement to a treadmill of a few well-worn tactics.

The 1895 Lenin makes an argument against “fashionable” means of connecting with the people — but there should be a diversity of means, for a diversity of radical forces to make their contributions, and to connect with the oppressed. He was writing in the middle of an economic upsurge — and saying “let’s get into the thick of things.” Which is certainly justified. But certainly, when the level of economic struggle is low as it is now, it becomes important to develop well-considered and creative means of connecting.

We may see upsurges of economic struggle (I have always expected them among undocumented, lower-tier immigrant workers in a way that combines a civil rights struggle for equality with an economic struggle over conditions ) — and we should be deeply in the thick of that. But the question remains (even then) of what we, as communists, do there, and what we are building out of such moments for a revolutionary movement.

12) We should not assume that our approach is always to subsume our efforts within the existing organizational and coalition frameworks. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. It would be short-sighted to decide (on principle?) that our approach is always to “join” or “participate” in whatever the pre-existing framework of struggle is. This is the question of explicit communist presence with its own voice. Mao argued “not everything through the united front.” Communists need to maintain independence and initiative, even when in alliance (as we almost always will be). We need to develop an independent and partisan base of support. That will require having some form of independent voice as often as possible.

13) I think it is mistaken to believe/assume that “existing struggles” are somehow a thing “initiated” by the masses. Struggles launched spontaneously (by which I mean outside the influence of communists) are rarely, simply “initiated” by “the masses.” There are other classes, class forces, other programs and views. If something is not waged on one program and line it is waged on another.

Let me give one recent example: The Mexican and Guatemalan workers in southeastern North Carolina broke into some powerful struggle on May Day 2006, when 30,000 stayed away from work, and 8,000 marched through the startled town of Lumberton demanding legalization.

That is certainly an “existing struggle” but like most large struggles it was hardly “initiated by the masses” in some simple way. It was led by the local Catholic priest (whose Mother Church played a MAJOR role in initiating and then shaping this movement around the country). Organizers came from a local trade union workers center (whose leaders are very ambivalent about pressing hard for legalization – fearing that making this central might divides Latino workers from Black workers and from white people in surrounding communities). It was financed (believe it or not!) in part by the Smithfield pork processing corporation (the major imperialist employer) who funded the busses that transported the Latino workers that May Day. So you had this major (ground-pounding and important) May First event – where the workers were called into political life by the actions of the Bush regime and the counteractions of a complex of other class forces, and where they started to act (with energy, enthusiasm and some initiative) on the political stage IN THAT CONTEXT and still largely under those leaderships.

On one hand, this was and still is an example of the masses of people acting (and coming into political life). It is an important flash of struggle to uphold and to connect with in some real and creative ways.

14) The whole schema of situating ourselves within “existing struggles” and then “bringing light” – negates the degree to which people learn from their larger political experience and from larger political events. It still rests on a mechanical and simplistic idea of “telling” that is not far from “preaching” – and that in reality assumes more simple receptivity than is the case.

15) In the 1970s, we often told ourselves in the RU that “taking ML to the working class is bringing it home.” However, in fact, that “home” is stocked with other ideologies, and often the workers are quite content with them (religion, bourgeois democracy, trade unionism, black nationalism, white racism, patriotism, and more etc.) And it is not true (as we later thought) that it is merely difficult among the more stable workers, and that bringing it to “lower and deeper” is actually where you bring it “home.”

It’s not like we get “situated” deeply among the masses, and then they just see our words and ideas as “light” illuminating their darkness. “Oh gee, thanks for bringing your light into my world.”

To put it sharply: Part of the problem of “bringing light” is that it can treat us as the sole active element (adopting the image of Prometheus), and it often treats the people as passive recipients.

But another part of it makes an opposite error that people easily develop (or adopt) new and radical ideas — and that they spontaneously know or recognize or develop the ideas and politics they desperately need.

Life just isn’t that simple or easy. It will be a protracted struggle to gain a foothold (and then an expanding partisan base) for revolutionary politics — even among those sections of people most desperate and discontent.

And that underscores the need for a politics that identifies those who are already especially inclined toward revolutionary politics, and help them organize themselves as a distinct, organized active force more broadly among the people.

[And the very use of the word “light” in this way has deep roots in simplistic European 19th century views of truth and progress — in the very idea of revolution as “enlightenment.” Among the Bolsheviks this became an acute struggle in the early 1900s, when a section of them turned this into a whole way of thinking — which is on display, for example, in the language and politics of Maxim Gorky‘s Mother — an early and wonderful communist novel written 1906.]

16) We should not view (or treat) people as a blank slate.

There is a material basis for the holding of INCORRECT ideas among the masses. And they hold wrong ideas for real reasons – based on real experiences and needs. (Marx’s insights into the existence and grip of religion are relevant here.)

17) Now, I believe our politics and ideology (at its best) truly are objectively and potentially “light” in a dark world – but even when we are deep among the masses, fighting shoulder to shoulder alongside them over things some sections of them truly value, it is not like they casually or easily “fire their ideas and hire ours.”

Don’t be naïve – or you will reproduce the 1970s unnecessarily!

We attract those inclined toward revolution, internationalism, secularism, analysis, generous view toward humanity etc. (i.e. the advanced) – but the existence and growth of that “inclined” section” involves the macro-experiences of political life that “light the sky” and influence the collective thinking of millions (like the OJ trial, or the killing of antiwar students at Kent State, or the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the LA rebellion, or the invasion of Iraq, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and whatever comes now in our future, etc.)

Conjuncture

18) The leap from civil rights to Black liberation took place through an explosive interaction of macro-political events with subjective transformations in the minds of many people (Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle, the killing of MLK, the open manifestations of racism in the North, the failures of non-violence, the use of integrated organizations to impose liberal politics, the subjective study of revolutionary nationalist politics from around the world etc.)

It was not some cardboard scenario where “the people initiate struggle, and then someone brings them the truth that they accept.” [In other words, radicalization takes leaps in a conjuctural way not linearly.]

19) For that reason, and because of the real impact of opposing programs and class forces (seeking to keep everything “under the wing of the bourgeoisie”) – the question of communists LEADING on (and within) various frontlines of anti-system struggle is very important (and is missing from the whole vibe around Single Spark). That means taking responsibility on several levels, actually seeking to identify correct frontlines, forms of struggle and even tactics – and that means identifying them (not from the self-contained logic of “this struggle,” but from the larger strategic goals of the revolutionary proletariat.) It means taking responsibility for the future within the present, but it also means thinking through (in the present) how to beat back the enemy and organize the people (in ways that serve our larger goals).

Winning, not merely fighting and talking

20) Something omitted in Point 14: It is important to fight to win key struggles – and not mainly for the ideological reason that people are demoralized and dispersed by defeat.

I don’t agree that the point of connecting with struggles is mainly as an effective method of raising consciousness. There are many important struggles that we actually want to win and need to win (because the future of the class struggle demands that the enemy be DRIVEN BACK, and our movement needs a tenacious, hardened, determined culture focused on winning).

When the rev movement rallied people to defend the Black Panthers facing prison or murder, this was not mainly done to create conditions for “bringing light” – but because if the Panthers were crushed the revolution would suffer a great setback. We are not just in a “battle of ideas” and the struggles of the people are not mainly or solely an “arena” for that battle of ideas. We aimed to “Free Huey” — actually win, and free him.

Communist base

21) Point 14 does not appreciate the dialectics of “prepare minds and organize forces for revolution.”

And, in general, the writings of Single Spark do not appreciate nearly enough the need to “organize forces for revolution” – actually organizing a REVOLUTIONARY movement, with its own banners, slogans, symbols, leaders, etc. Even the assumptions of “an anti-imperialist student movement” (in connection with today’s new SDS) is something I’d like to explore critically. What about a “revolutionary youth movement”?

22) I need to repeat my belief from the protracted experience of the 1970s: “B1” (carried out today as Point 14) would represent a left form of economism – where we would seek to inject “light” about revolution, socialism, communism as a veneer onto spontaneous struggles (that by their nature, program, forms, dynamics are inherently leading people under the wing of the bourgeoisie.)

This has been tried. One can sometimes “find the crown is in the gutter” (if you are very lucky, as we were in the coalfields) – i.e. clever, organized forces can take tactical leadership of mass struggles, but that at the end of the day there remains a knotty and difficult problem of winning a section of the people to communist and revolutionary partisanship. (And it is a problem for which B1 is not a magical solution.)

Representing the future within the present

AAA writes:

“I think what’s important in the B-1 formulation is that it recognizes a connection between the revolution as a discrete event in the future and the masses who exist today. The link between the masses of today and the revolution of the future made by some large portion of those masses has to be forged. B-1 recognizes that masses are impelled by capitalism to ‘fight back’ in some form or another. We somehow need to channel/divert/enlighten those struggles into a process that leads to that future revolution.”

Well, it is important to make that connection between revolution (not just as a discrete event, but as a process that goes on from there) and the masses who exist today.

But part of the problem with Point 14 is its schematic simplicity.

It posits the wrong connection. Any “basic approach” to the masses of people needs to encompass many more things. And the relationship between spontaneous “fight back” and revolution is not that one gets diverted into the other. The process is considerably more complex and involves a great many other contradictions that act on the people and society, and from which the ultimate revolution arises.

[Note from 2012: This is the problem with those who thought Occupy needed to “become” a revolutionary movement, or that Occupy needed to take on all the burdens and features of the revolutionary movement we need. Assuming that, and attempting that, underestimated both the actual potential of Occupy and the actual tasks of developing a revolutionary movement.]

Sketch of what we need:

I think we need some combination of:

1. Connecting the revolutionary movement with the most important spontaneous outbreaks of resistance

2. Conducting communist “agitation and propaganda” [i.e. media projects] along a modernized version of WITBD-ism [i.e. What is to be Done-ism, or Iskra/Pravda projects]. Including: we need a quick means of communist commentary on burning events.

3. A serious and unapologetic defense of communism, and a dialectical upholding of the profound experiences of socialist revolution to date (from the Paris Commune to Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution).

4. Creatively focusing on leading (and possibly initiating) struggle around key faultlines in society in ways that bring growing numbers of people into organized conflict with this system and its crimes.

5. Perseverance around a carefully considered path, rather than succumb to the jerky pull of “get rich quick schemes.”

6. A less risk-averse approach to “lighting the sky” with our movement and its line (learn from the Panthers, early SDS, Abby Hoffman etc. at their best)

7. Some real luck in having things roll our way (i.e. that while we hasten, the things we are “awaiting” finally arrive in ways we can use!)

We need to be part of a process (which may turn out to be long or hopefully relatively telescoped) through which large numbers of people rupture with old politics and create new loyalties and affiliations. And our involvement has to function on different levels, and be very clever, flexible, creative, attractive, and freshly rooted in THESE times (not in the dogmas and assumptions and cultural forms of past decades).

And it is worth thinking through what the impact would be of adopting it:

I believe it would be to waste precious time and energy on false promises of an easy solution. It would cause us to disperse our forces into struggles that are often most conducive to bourgeois politics – and lead us to refrain from initiating struggles where we could develop important breakthroughs. It would bring a deserved dismissal from veteran communist forces who know well where this formulation leads. It would be settling for an easy, schematic strawman, when we need to actually do some fresh, creative communist thinking on the basis of what has gone before.

Another direction…

I am wary of just whipping together some glib new formulation.

I really am trying to think outside the channels we have all been operating in. But I did gather some of my current thoughts here (if we can agree this is rough, very provisional, and written mainly to have something to bounce off of.) And I have to say, their affinity with the approaches embodied in the RCP’s draft programme are real. (And I think it is worth exploring how the RCP has taken distance from these approaches.)

Revolutionary communists seek to prepare minds and organize forces for revolution. This is a protracted process that involves bringing large numbers of people into more and more conscious opposition to this system, as the system commits great crimes and especially as it plunges toward possible crises of legitimacy. This involves training a growing core of people to be conscious partisans of revolutionary communist politics, and as communists.

Revolutionary communists need to support, to the extent possible, every justified outbreak of struggle and resistance among the masses. They need to find creative ways to connect with people awakening to political life, especially with lively communist agitation and propaganda exposing the crimes and nature of this system and the necessity of a new and liberated communist society. And we need to help working people see the potential among many different groupings and strata in society to be part of a powerful movement that sweeps this system away. And as an important component of this work, we need to energetically wield the truth about both history and class society — push back those poisonous anti-communist verdicts that now suppress so many people’s vision of what is possible.

At the same time, revolutionary communists also need to directly help lead in particularly important arenas of class struggle – especially those involving key faultlines of society that have a special potential for bringing large numbers of people into opposition to the criminal policies and workings of this system, helping bring growing numbers out from “under the wing of the bourgeoisie,” and bringing forward and training waves of politically awakened people who have the potential to become fighters consciously struggling for the final goal of communism.

And revolutionary communists need to lead in all this, with the perspective of being prepared both politically and organizationally, when the time is right, for the difficult transition of going over (with those forces painstakingly accumulated and the new raw forces gathering rapidly amid extreme crisis) to radically different forms of mass struggle.

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by Mike Ely

There are (at least) two concepts of mass line in contention:

One mass line is focused on tactics and drawing lessons out of the most immediate struggles. It is not engaged with the final goals of communism. (They are assigned to a void.) And it assumes that the active are inherently advanced, and that people relatively easily learn whatever they need to learn from experience (to which social practice is reduced). I.e. that the future takes care of itself, and that our job is to generate the mass motion from which experience will arise.

In the memorable phrase from our history (though not from the FRSO document):

“It is easier to steer a truck once it’s moving.”

“Our job is really just to get the truck (i.e. some mass movement) rolling by whatever means prove most effective, and worry about the steering (i.e. the radical politics) some time later. And, since it is hard (even impossible) for communists to wish a mass movement into being (by will or hyper-organizing or by lowering the political level of organized unity) — those radical politics typically get postponed later and later, especially in the absence of a galvanizing crisis. Leadership runs the danger of becoming a blend of pedagogical “drawing lessons out of what just happened” and the bureaucratic administration of institutionalized “mass movements.”

The other, opposing concept of mass line is a theory of communist leadership (meaning: it is communist, and it involves actually leading). It is about connecting communists with the people. But more: it is about connecting sections of the people to the cause of radical transformation. It is about doing this in a living way.

It is about doing, not just about talking. The people have to carry out their own liberation, not have it “done for them” by an advanced core, or someone acting (even heroically) in their name. And to do it (“it” being revolutionary change) themselves, they have to become conscious about politics in some unusual ways.

It necessarily involves both bringing some key consciousness in “from without” the immediate struggles. (I.e. you simply can’t learn many necessary things about revolution from “day to day struggles” — those struggles are generally not the most favorable arena for radical politics). And it requires both leading struggle and transforming consciousness in the course of protracted struggle. It is about fusion — in which both the people and the revolutionary movement are transformed, and fused in the course of making advances toward a different world.

Here “from the masses, to the masses” is not a simple process of mirror reflection or in-and-out. We are not “taking a poll” and feeding the people what they already know or want. The process of “from the masses, to the masses” necessarily requires a synthesizing and a leap — a synthesizing of popular mood and insights with communist theory and insight, and a leap that generates communist policies, slogans, campaigns, and methods of work.

And this mass line involves a serious discussion of which struggles (and which social faultlines) are most amenable to both mass mobilization AND communist preparation — because (as has come up in the previous thread) not all struggles are equally able to help generate radical politics, and it is particularly problematic to privilege the “day to day struggles” and the even more narrow subset of “workplace struggles’ (even gripes about foremen) without acknowledging that you have made a major rightward leap of assumptions.”

“There is a whole enveloping ethic of hyper-activism in today’s rather shrunken left… and a denigration of both theory and consciousness. This is tied to many things (including a general lowering of sights, and a pessimism of actually achieving radical change). There is a reason that some activists read this FRSO mass line document and don’t notice that it disappears (or quarantines) communism, revolution and consciousness.

It is often assumed that the main task is to “just do it,” the main goal is to just connect and get bigger, and the main responsibility is to create and then administer “mass movements.” It is often assumed that “we know what we need to do, and we need to just get on with it,” and the functioning model of a communist becomes an otherwise generic activist who has some rarely-expressed socialist opinions roaming around in the heads.

And these things are assumed — therefore unstated — and therefore often unchallenged.”

There is a view that immediate concerns is the necessary “glue” of the “mass movements” — and that Marxism should be deployed as a private language for motivating activists “for the long haul.” At the heart of this is a theory of NON-fusion. NOT fusing communist politics with the people — NOT fusing the preparations for revolution with the advanced or with the life of those in struggle.

(Five minutes after you assume that “the active = the advanced,” you will discover that those active forces are very uneven in their interest in radical politics, and “drawing lessons from experience” you will conclude that your ties to “the active” always and forever need to be “much deeper” before starting any serious, systematic or public radical political work.)

And the mass line formulations that emerge from that view are a stack of Marxist-sounding concepts that justify such NON-fusion. Communism becomes nothing more than a fading in-groupy “ideal.” The word communism is typically replaced by a “revolutionary socialism” that fights militantly for (essentially) a welfare state. And, as Red Flags said — this explains and justifies the tendency to subordinate socialist organizations at key junctures to capitalist hegemony, to its ruling parties and necessities.

If you wanted to capture the essence of this rightist “mass line” in a famous quote, it would not be from Mao. It would be the famous anti-Maoist phrase from Deng Xiaoping:

“Black cat, white cat? Who cares as long as it catches mice.”

I don’t think we can resolve these matters by seeking to uncover some “dispute settling” orthodoxy — some pristine quote from Mao that mustn’t be revised. There is no such dispute-settling canon. I don’t even think we will resolve the contradiction by tracing competing formulations back in time — to uncover which words were emerging from the side of the angels and which were not.

I think our method has to be to examine the line questions in a sophisticated way from our present, with a fresh and respectful engagement. Anew. But not just from a naive first read (“gee, becoming one with the people….that sounds good. We certainly need that.”)

We need substantive debate rooted in a serious “second read” that sees these different formulations in the context of a new look at epistemology, in the context of a radical reconsideration of communist history, and especially in the context of our own emerging challenges.

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On the one hand, revolutionaries must prove themselves to the people over and over again, 24/7.

On the other hand, if you think you have some ideas or contributions to make to revolutionary struggle, by all means speak up and express yourself.

Don't be stifled by identity, guilt, or how much work you've put in, period. Be conscious of such things, but don't let anyone convince you this is a reason for your contributions not having value.

Ideas must be judged on the basis of their substance. Another position is not revolutionary or communist. Silencing people who want to contribute to human liberation and revolutionary projects is harmful and drives people away and isolates sincere revolutionary movements.

Be down like John Brown. Speak up. Give your all to the struggle for revolution and human emancipation.

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I've heard some individuals and groups use the term eclecticism to discredit the fusion of ideas coming from different tendencies to develop revolutionary strategy.

I've heard the Black Panther Party criticized as ideologically naive due its eclecticism. I've seen revolutionary forces that otherwise could work together, stay divided due to ideological purity and refusal to engage outside a given set of presuppositions.

One error, I think that flows through these critiques is that when communist revolutionaries made critiques of eclecticism, whether Plekhanov or Lenin, they were not talking about rejecting or negating ideas outside of a "correct" Marxist political line. They were specifically speaking to the combination of reformist ideas and strategies with revolutionary ones.

To equate eclectics with a monolithic political line and refusal to engage with and incorporate ideas into strategy and theory that are outside of one's immediate ideological tendency and political framework, I think, lead to sectarianism and dogmatism, that isolates groups from the people.

This idea of eclectics is different from a hybrid fusion that can incorporate different ideas into a coherent strategic and theoretical framework. This idea of a hybrid fusion of revolutionary thinking to develop coherent political strategy is best represented by the Build and Fight Formula developed by Cooperation Jackson. That's not to say that this is the only example of solid, coherent revolutionary strategy. It is, however, a rare example.

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Intro by Nat Winn

This is an idea on what the author, Mike Ely, calls fusion between communists and what Maoists have historically called the “advanced” among the masses. Ely was grappling with the question of how can revolutionaries begin building a social base for our politics? This is connected to the idea of “mutual transformation” where through developing relations with cohorts in society engaged in experimental projects to shape ideas and organization for social change both the revolutionaries and the non-communist cohorts are both transformed and new strategy, theory, culture, and organization begin to form.

From Sites of a communist beginning, Part 2, Nodules of the advanced, by Mike Ely

Let me sketch a mining metaphor: Coal is a sedimentary layer of fossilized wood — so it is concentrated in a seam that spreads over a large area. You can dig straight down in southern West Virginia — and any hole has to pass through the major horizontal coal seams sooner or later. But rock mineral mining is very different: diamonds, gold and silver exist in nuggets that are embedded along the fissure lines in the hard rock in the crust — in oc casional and irregular cracks where lava once forced its way upward. You can go to Nevada and randomly dig a hole straight down and are very unlikely to hit a pocket of gold or silver. You have to find those old fissure lines, and follow the veins of quartz along those fissures, and explore them until you find the nuggets and nodules. I’m saying that the most advanced forces in society are not simply a “layer.” Of course, in any situation, anywhere, you can find relatively advanced and relatively backward — but that is a different matter. Those people advanced enough to (1) connect with a revolutionary movement, and also (2) help connect that movement to sections of the people are rare in the U.S. — and are dispersed in cohorts along social fissure lines where they have experienced special pressures and heat. And if you just go “dig a hole” where life has placed you — looking to connect the revolutionary movement to people there randomly — you are unlikely to trigger a process of fusing socialism with the people, because the necessary ingredients for initiating that fusing are not evenly distributed everywhere.

The location of such cohorts of people is not nec essarily geographic. In 1994 the anti-immigrant Prop osition 1898 gave rise to a radicalized section of Lati no high school and college students scattered across the state, part of a larger radicalization that has gone on among second generation immigrant youth. In the 1960s, something was happening among Black students and workers that made it possible for the Black Panther Party to suddenly “go national” and gather thousands of members (seemingly overnight)—Black students had been forming “black power” organizations everywhere and developing training as militants and organizers. Returning Vietnam vets were such a force in the 1970s—as many returned embittered and conscious, and in networks of co-thinkers.

Connecting well with such networks before they disperse takes very active work, creative fusion, communist training… and a bit of luck.

To be clear: I talk about cohorts — using the old Roman word for bonded co-fighters, a brother/sisterhood that emerges (including generationally).

In political work, we often run across very advanced and communist people as individuals — whose special life experiences have brought them a particular consciousness. And that is a good thing. But often the few recruited by previous communist organizations have been the relatively rootless — who are able to adapt themselves into a rigid pre-existing structure, and who were generally not able bring that structure into deep connection with broader sections of people or help transform that structure in needed ways. The RCP summed up that when it trained occasional communists from “among the masses” they often went back “home” to have great difficulty hooking back up or communicating what they now understood. The RCP’s hope of developing them as levers shows that this process will hardly be easy. The point remains, however, the advanced who emerge in important cohorts, and who in their interactions — with each other and the communist movement that some of them may join — can (potentially) help creatively press forward the process of fusion.

We have to seriously talk about how that can happen. Since we don’t yet know how to make that work — and since the actual details of that need to be worked out in practice, in the concrete, in the act.”

https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/Kasama/Pamphlets/Kasama-M.Ely-SitesOfACommunistBeginning-2013.pdf

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Based on observations working within and in discourse with comrades in the Build and Fight framework and also based on my direct experience and reading of history in general, I am leaning toward the following conclusions, while always open to change my mind through a summation of more shared knowledge and experience.

For me, nothing is an either/or proposition, but it is important to understand the utility of the given resources and ideas in question in their own right and how they can best be part of implementing an intentional plan.

I personally tend to be skeptical of an overemphasis on hyper-localism and think that localities need to be able to link up regionally, nationally, and globally in order to be sustainable. This does not negate the importance of local organizing; it only puts the local into its larger context and acknowledges how local projects must rely on broader linkages and networks.

If a base is isolated in its local setting with no broader linkages, it won’t last too long. This goes for both local social movements and individual socialist countries.

So, I think the municipalism idea of confederation in practice is still based on a typical motion of initial participatory practices that eventually must become more representational through said confederation as a movement spreads and covers larger amounts of geographical space and includes many more people.

Basically, I don’t see any of the following frameworks as either/or, but they are all in relation to each other. Top down/bottom up; centralized/decentralized and local/global. The same goes for in person and online communication. Both sides of each contradiction can serve movements in different contexts.

With regard to in person and online communication, my experience is that I’ve seen negative dynamics of both sides not listening to each other and being unable to get past ideological blinders in both types of settings. I’ve seen relations that started online blossom into long term meaningful relationships that traversed in person and online spaces. I’ve seen local, mostly in person political relationships fall apart because of ego and refusal to seek common ground due to ideological impasses.

I think that this is part of a larger U.S. culture of political communication, rather than being pronounced in a given social space, and I hold that online communication is a type of social space that produces emotional affects and can often lead to positive relationships outside of online origins. This is my experience and I would guess that it is the experience of others as well, when evaluated more closely.

At different times each aspect of the dual relationships mentioned will have its utility, and to say one aspect is dominant over the other is only true in the particular circumstance, not in the overall scope of things. True in the “final instance” as the French communist philosopher Althusser would have put it. This is also my understanding of what it means when people say that form always follows function.

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Whereas, in my opinion, and I think this is of value to social movements, it is important to study the history of anti-revisionist communism and the history of revolutionary movements more broadly, and where my own politics generally derive out of that anti-revisionist tendency that started roughly between the end of World War 2 and the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and the denunciation of Stalin, generally I don’t like to put labels on things but to work to understand actual ideas and political practice to articulate a collective vision of the world I want to live in and to understand and explain critically those political ideas, strategies, and political practices that do not reflect the world I want to live in. Struggle over ideas rather than labeling people.

I work with others to forge new communist or egalitarian strategies, organizations and politics rooted in a process of critical problematizing, experimentation and assessment of political practice based on democratic decision making, political resistance, and self-sustaining production processes and drawing from a hybrid of different historical tendencies working toward a cohesive strategy and program for revolution in the 21st century. This is mostly notably embodied in the collaboration between People’s Network for Land and Liberation, The Democracy Collaborative and some others.

Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno has consistently and publicly called for revolutionary nationalists, socialists, communists, and anarchists to take up implementation of the well-articulated Build and Fight Formula. There are few laid out strategic documents and programs like it. I have done my best to answer this call coming in as a communist rooted in an anti-revisionist and Maoist frame of thinking, while open to a process of mutual transformation and theoretical and strategic synthesis.

I am fortunate for the comrades I have made in the process and would encourage others enthusiastically to study the Build and Fight Formula and take part in its pluralistic yet cohering implementation or to use it in developing their own strategies and programs that can work in tandem with Build and Fight supporters. Let’s develop as broad a practice of creating revolutionary theory, strategy, and organization through a coherent and intentional plan of action as can be collectively implemented locally, and let’s share our local plans and assessments of their implementation in an ongoing loop of practice to theory and back to practice, refining theory.

This is my own encouragement to you, the reader, based on my own enthusiasm for having the opportunity to begin and continue to modestly contribute to this project over the course of the last couple years. In revolutionary struggle.

Peace and justice.

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I’ve seen a lot of talk about how in South America, the right has regained power. Close elections in Peru and Colombia seem to have been won by pro-U.S. politicians, narrowly defeating left wing candidates. Some are analyzing this as a regression for popular people’s social movements in South America.

I see it a bit differently and I see the mass uprising in Bolivia as a case in point of what I want to convey.

To understand the balance of forces in a country or region, or even globally, perhaps elections is one tool that can be used in order to assess this. It is not the only or even the best tool. One also has to count the number of people organized in the street, their level of organization, and what is their willingness to make sacrifices for the world they collectively want to bring into being.

Again, the sustained uprising in Bolivia is evidence of this. In Bolivia there is currently a pro-U.S. politician in power. Still many, many Bolivians have taken to the street, demanding his resignation and these Bolivians are a viable social force that, outside of the realm of elections, by going to the street have become a viable political force. There were also large protests following the election results in Peru.

Taking this into account, the people in motion and the level of political activity, will, and organization; one could argue that the social movements in South America are as strong as ever. We cannot predict what the end result will be of these uprisings and protests, however, it is clear that political action has moved beyond the electoral process and that elections alone do not determine the balance of forces between the pro-imperialist forces and the popular social movements.

When looked at in this way, we can think beyond strategies based primarily around elections and begin to calculate the size and power of our movements based on the size of the people engaged in popular participation, that are organized, and by the general mood or political will of the people to challenge the ruling classes.

This assessment involves both quantitative and qualitative assessment. It involves counting the number of people who are partisan, friendly, or neutral in regard to the social movements. It involves being in the street, having conversations, and getting a pulse on the general mood.

Elections are a tool, they don’t have to be the primary aspect of social movements for change. The uprisings in Bolivia are evidence of this lesson and seemingly close losses in Peru and Columbia don’t mean the power of the people has significantly lessened, if we can assess that the street power is still there.

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