Disarming the Magic Bullet

Renato Flores responds to Cam W’s argument for Maoism and the mass line.

Global warming is progressing. Millions are going hungry and do not know whether they can make the next rent payment. The houseless crisis is intensifying. We know we cannot just stand by, and we have to do something. But how do we do something, how do we slay the monster? How do we become free? It is not going to be easy. Everyone has ideas, some more or less thought out than others. What is clear is that we need a plan, and we need one fast, or the monster will devour us all.

In Cosmonaut, we wish to have an open forum for debate, where these ideas can be shared and discussed. Three contributions have been published, with responses, counter-responses and synthesis. This piece is meant as a (short) reply to Cam’s intervention on the debates around the party form started by Taylor B’s piece “Beginnings of Politics” and Donald Parkinson’s piece “Without a party we have nothing”. Cam’s intervention is heavily influenced by, and largely follows Joshua Moufawad-Paul’s (JMP) ideas on how Maoism has been historically defined, what problems it is responding to, and how it must be applied today. Cam’s main thesis is that Maoism, being the only ideology that has correctly absorbed the knowledge produced by the learning process of the Paris Commune and the Russian and Chinese revolutions is uniquely poised to provide an answer to the problem of the party. And that answer comes in the shape of the mass line, which is “a mechanism to transform the nature of the party into a revolutionary mass organization which can resist the neutralizing force of the party-form”.

I take issue with this last statement, and that is what I will try to elaborate on in this article. I start by agreeing with Cam that we must emphasize the points of both continuity and rupture of our revolutionary process. But I diverge from him in seeing the evolution of Marxism as something much more complicated than the picture drawn by JMP. Indeed, in 2020, the experiences of revolutionaries both in overthrowing the old state and in running a new revolutionary state can fill entire libraries. We know much more about what to do, and especially what not to do, than we did in Marx’s time. However, the process through which knowledge has been accumulated and synthesized cannot be reduced to a single path of advancement of the “science of revolution”. By doing this, we risk ossifying slogans, and allowing spontaneity to fill in the gaps, harming our organizing. The picture painted by Cam, which is inherited from JMP, suffers from the same problems Donald is replying to in his piece: a simple periodization is being imposed into a complex process of knowledge production. This periodization is then used to make a dubious point, namely that through an event a lesson was learned that marks the death of a paradigm and the birth of a new one. Everyone stuck in the previous paradigm is at best naive and at worst, unscientific. This is an extremely loaded word that produces a hierarchy of power: my theory is more powerful than yours because it is scientific. No burden of proof is necessary, because I am being scientific and you are not. I have successfully absorbed the lessons of history while you haven’t.

To begin to deconstruct the claim that Maoism is the highest paradigm of revolutionary science, we have to understand that one of the axioms on which it stands is flawed, namely that progress is linear and happens through a single path. Biology and evolution provide a practical counter-example. In a very simplified manner¹, organisms face a problem, the environment, and try to find a solution through adaptation. Faced with similar environments, organisms will find similar solutions, even when they are in geographic isolation.² This is called convergent evolution, and there are many examples in Nature. Bats and whales both evolved the ability to locate prey by echos as an adaptation to finding food in dark environments. Wings have been evolved by pterosauruses, birds and mammals separately. Silk production appeared separately in spiders, silkworms and silk moths. In a similar manner, some characteristics can be devolved. For example, some species of birds have lost the ability to fly after having gained it. It is not correct to view organisms as more evolved, as if evolution was something that accumulates.

In the same manner, progress in all branches of science is far from neat and linear. Geniuses have been forgotten or dismissed for centuries just to be rediscovered. Dead ends are often reached which require looking back into the past to reinvigorate theories that were previously thought dead. More importantly, co-discoveries happen, and happen often. Wallace and Darwin both came to the theory of evolution. Newton and Leibniz both developed calculus. In both of these cases, the co-inventors were resting on similar theoretical knowledge and facing similar questions. It is therefore unsurprising that they would come to the same solution. Even more, scientists working within very different paradigms, say like Mach and Boltzmann, were both able to contribute immensely to the field of physics despite working from vastly distinct starting points.

Going back to the revolutionary movement, our theory and our practice have been developed to surpass obstacles in our liberation. Even if these obstacles are not identical, they have been very similar. In the same manner as biological evolution, the science of revolution develops very similar solutions to address the problems revolutionaries face. We should expect that similar ideas will arise from similar contexts, a convergent evolution of tactics. From experience, the more scientists independently arrive at the same conclusion, the more likely that this conclusion is correct. In this context, Donald is correct to emphasize Lenin’s unoriginality. Like scientists, practitioners of revolutionary politics are faced with questions that they must answer, both before, during, and after seizing power. They learn from each other, and try to apply the common mindset to their local conditions.

If one revolutionary movement progresses and breaks new ground in the process to establish socialism, changes in the environment give rise to new problems that were previously not recognized. They might have seized power, but what now? As the Bolsheviks repeatedly pointed out, they thought building socialism was going to be easier than it actually was. Before the Russian revolution, Hilferding had stated that it would be enough to seize the ten largest banks to get to socialism. Hilferding, among others, believed that this was the great mistake of the Paris Commune, and if revolutionaries had just seized these banks, they would have been able to build a socialist system. But as we know, that was far from enough for the Bolsheviks. They did this, and much more. They were forced to continuously experiment, finding ways that could lead to socialism without losing the support of the peasants and workers. The lessons from Leninism cannot be simply reduced to the necessity of smashing the state: they are much more extensive and valuable than this.

In the same vein, the Chinese Revolution was a gigantic experiment in emancipation that involved old and new questions, with old and new methods to answer them. And Mao diverged from Lenin in many aspects. Mao’s theory of change outlined in “On Contradiction” is quite different from Lenin’s understanding of dialectics. The Maoist theory of New Democracy also diverges from Lenin’s ideas of how a revolution should proceed. It is hard to answer if they are improvements or regressions. It is probably better to say that the Marxist canon was enriched by both thinkers.

Another example of returning to the Marxist canon and reevaluating or rediscovering old hypotheses can be seen in Kautsky, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah’s theories of Imperialism. In his celebrated Imperialism, Lenin (rightfully) told Kautsky that the world was not heading towards an ultra-imperialist system where different imperial powers share the world peacefully—instead he argued that imperialist conflict was on the table. Indeed, Lenin was correct in that conjecture. World War I and World War II were both driven mainly by inter-imperial conflict.³ But after WW2, their differences would be sublated. A single capitalist superpower was able to set the rules on how the spoils would be divided. Nkrumah captured this in his Neo-Colonialism, basically rediscovering parts of Kautsky’s thesis and adapting them to the present. In this case, an exhausted paradigm was resurrected after significant adaptations were made.

You can see where I am going: it is impossible to lay out a simple evolution of knowledge for Marxism, with clean breaks from one another where knowledge only really had three leaps. Mao was correct in saying that socialism or communism was not permanent in the USSR and that a reversion to capitalism could happen, but he was surely not the only one to note the problems of socialist construction in the USSR. Revolutionary experience has been accumulated, and it has, for better or worse, been synthesized by revolutionaries. There are points where synthesizers like Lenin or Mao have made key contributions that have left a permanent imprint. Lenin was able to stabilize a revolutionary state, which allowed further problems of socialist construction to be posed. Mao was able to mobilize the masses against a stagnating party, which opened the problem of how to deal with class interests inside the party, and how to open a public sphere in a socialist state. Rather than having done science, it is probably better to think of them as having set up the stage for the further development of scientific socialism.

Whether Lenin and Mao were scientists or whether they set the stage for new science is a pedantic point— the important point is that periodizations of revolutionary science are not just meant to convey this, they are often used as discourses of power. When Stalin wrote “Foundations of Leninism”, “Trotskyism or Leninism”, or even the Short Course, he was not only trying to synthesize the knowledge gained from the construction of socialism in the USSR and set a roadmap for the future. It was an operation through which he declared himself to be the one true heir of Lenin and excluded others such as Trotsky or Bukharin. When the Indian Maoist Ajith wrote “Against Avakianism”, he was attempting to exclude Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party from the mantle of Maoism. In the same way, JMP’s periodization is an attempt to claim for Maoism the mantle of the one science of revolution and exclude other Marxists from possibly contributing to this. But his claim ignores the complexity of knowledge development, something we have been addressing in this piece. Furthermore, even if one takes this periodization at its word, and we take Maoism to be a third synthesis, JMP’s periodization is not the only one in attempting to explain Mao’s epistemological breaks. Marxist-Leninists-Maoists—principally Maoists—who claim the legacy of the relatively successful Peruvian Shining Path, center Gonzalo’s theoretical contributions around People’s War in defining Maoism, rather than recognizing the Revolutionary International Movement (of which SP was a [critical] part) as the principal synthesizer of Maoism.⁴

More importantly, why is Maoism the only ideology that can claim to have absorbed the knowledge from revolutionary history? In terms of seizing power, or battling the state to a standstill, what have the Indian Naxalites achieved that has not been achieved by others, as for example by the Zapatistas who started from different premises⁵ yet face similar material conditions of indigenous dispossession? Are the Zapatistas somehow less scientific than the Naxalites? Or are they responding to different pressures of dependent capitalism in countries with backgrounds of settler-colonialism and casteism?⁶ Is there really nothing the titanic struggle of the African National Congress against apartheid can teach us, when the pitiful state of the ANC reminds us of how the Maoist revolution in Nepal has become increasingly coopted? What about the many other names of the long list of Latin American or African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral or Paulo Freire, that are written out of this evolution? The successes and failures of the Arusha Declaration and Ujamaa or the Yugoslav experiment in self-management provide way more data points that enrich our knowledge, going way beyond the MLM straight line periodization that only really joins three points and attempts to exclude everyone else. In this spirit, it is worth noting that geographically diverse groups such as Matzpen in Israel and Race Traitor in the United States independently developed very similar ideas on what it means to be a race traitor, and how settler-colonialism and white privilege work to stabilize society.

Two-line struggles and “bourgeois” ideology

A periodization of history must be accompanied with explanations for the choices taken to divide one epoch from another. These divisions are usually used to give primacy to a political event or concept, after which one theory was proven absolutely correct and the other false. In the case of Taylor’s piece, he follows Badiou by stating that the Cultural Revolution showed that the party-form was an exhausted concept and brought forward the idea that new forms of organization must supplant it. In the case of Cam, who follows JMP’s periodization of MLM, the cultural revolution brings to the forefront the importance of the ‘two-line’ struggle and the mass line. Essentially, Mao reached a breakthrough realization: the ideological struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie continued in socialism, and (a part of it) happened within the Communist party in the shape of a line-struggle. Stalin was wrong to declare that the USSR had achieved communism, and that this process could not be reversed. Indeed, capitalist roaders inside the party could reverse it and we have to struggle against them, and with the masses. A party which is properly embedded in the masses can successfully struggle against those who would reverse the revolution. And this is why Mao called for the Cultural Revolution: to rebuild those links between party and masses, and to battle the propagation of capitalist ideas in the party.

This framework is very appealing. It explains the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and China: the bourgeois wing of the party gained power because it was never defeated, despite the Cultural Revolution. It offers a simple and comforting answer to the question of socialist construction: just struggle hard enough against the capitalist roaders. It sounds a lot like a Manichean struggle for the world, and is especially well suited to an American mindset which is based on binaries. But while there definitely are undesirable elements within all Communist parties (just think of Yeltsin or Milosevic) the two-line struggle is a gross simplification that collapses all of the problems of revolutionary science into something that looks a lot like a magic trick: the masses will redeem us if we struggle with them. The whole problem of societal management, both politically and economically (which usually go together) is not a struggle between good and evil. It is the problem of how to control a totality, which risks becoming dysfunctional at places where faults happen, be it either improperly balanced alliances between classes such as the peasantry and the proletarians, existing monopolies on resources like technical skills, or sites of power which reproduce antisocial ideology. Mao was correct to identify some problems as originating from capitalist values and beliefs, which originate and are replicated from the existing conditions and require a cultural revolution to solve. But all of these problems cannot be all cast as bourgeois or capitalist, even if their sources come from constructing socialism on top of a capitalist society.⁷ By taking this simplification we risk allowing spontaneity to creep in in all places and hoping that high spirits will solve things for us.

There is an in-jest comment that asks: tell me which year you think the Russian Revolution was defeated and I will tell you which tendency you belong to. Was it with War Communism? Kronstadt? The disempowering of the Soviets? The retreats of NEP? Rapid and often brutal collectivization? The purges that destroyed the Old Bolsheviks? Kruschev’s or Kosygin’s reforms? Were Gorbachov’s efforts doomed already or did he make serious blunders along the way? Worse even, did he sell the USSR out for a slice of Pizza? The bitter truth is there is no simple answer to when the USSR was defeated. There was a long list of decisions that strengthened some groups while weakening others, eroded the revolution’s mass base of support, slowly created alienated groups of people who felt displaced from power, and eventually created a stagnated, even ossified, society. No longer able to progress toward socialism, it disintegrated under pressure. Until we digest that tough conclusion we risk searching for magic bullets to solve all our problems.

Seeking redemption through the masses is just one more illusion from a suitcase of quixotic tricks meant to bring us to socialism. Even if it is pointing at a real problem⁸, the solution is little more than a slogan. The careful and difficult balancing act of institutional design meant to construct a system that would, among many things, grant political freedom as to everyone, abolish permanent managerial roles by ensuring that “every cook can govern”, and eliminate existing oppressive systems carried over from capitalism, is reduced to making sure the proletarian line is upheld by “going to the masses”. This confuses tactic and strategy, and allows ossification and spontaneity to creep into all the missing spaces. Think about it for a minute. Some problems are easier to solve than others: if a local administrator is behaving badly and abusing their powers, we should discipline them through re-education or even removal. But what if they’re the only one in town that can actually run the irrigation systems? If they’re removed agricultural output will underperform or fail. If this administrator is reinstated, the masses, who are our ultimate allies, will feel betrayed. They didn’t fight a revolution for this. The administrator could feel justified in their privileges and try to go even further in their pursuit of even more privileges and power. But if they aren’t reinstated, the masses might go hungry due to crop failures, or freeze in the winter. Either way, they will be frustrated with the party.

These sorts of dilemmas around specialists and local administrators were a repeated problem in many societies attempting socialist construction, including the USSR and Maoist China. Mao sought a solution through the mass mobilization of the Cultural Revolution. The first stage dispersed the agglomeration of specialists in the city by sending them to the countryside. This was meant to break their privileges and urban strongholds, and (re)rally the support of the peasants for the revolution. The declassed specialists would then participate in the second and protracted struggle of breaking the monopolies on knowledge by educating the peasantry and opening rural schools. By ensuring that the peasants were able to administer their own affairs as a collective, they would not be beholden to a single, and potentially corrupt, expert. Mao’s solution was implemented at a scale never seen before, especially in a country of China’s size and its deep city-countryside divide., But Mao wasn’t the only one to come up with this sort of solution to the specialist problem: Che Guevara tried to enforce a smaller-scale cultural revolution in Cuba to persuade managers and specialists to throw in their lot with the revolution. Other revolutions came up with their own solutions: the Yugoslavs had a persistent problem with managers monopolizing knowledge and tried to solve it through factory schools and deepening education—without forcing existing specialists to undergo a cultural revolution. This did not end well.

Another more complicated problem was faced by the USSR repeatedly during its history: what happens when the lack of proper food procurement to the cities forces the party to choose between extracting food by force from the peasantry or making significant concessions to it, either through paying higher prices or devoting higher investments. Which of these solutions is ‘proletarian’? The USSR was forced to constantly oscillate between disciplining the peasants by force and granting them concessions because it could not solely rely on the stick or the carrot. Neither of these can be labeled more ‘proletarian’ than the other. Especially when contrasted with alternatives not taken, which can be regarded as capitalist, such as the full liberalization of rural China in the Deng era.

With this short digression, I hope to have laid out an important point: the working of a society is the working of a complex totality, where relations can become dysfunctional, threatening the whole. It is not (just) a matter of conducting line-struggles between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” lines. It is a matter of sitting down and diagnosing the system, understanding where the dysfunctions are, what groups they are serving or harming, and how the socialist construction can proceed by removing these dysfunctions. Politics is not a Manichean struggle. It is somewhere between a science and an art of organization. Compromises must be made, and we must constantly be asking how the power relationships in society will change if we are to undergo these changes.

The successive educational policies of the USSR in the 1920s, meant to both democratize knowledge and improve production, ended up empowering a new class of “red specialists” who would control the party 30 years later. The Yugoslav experiment tried to disempower the federal state and empower factory councils to devolve power to the workers, but ended up empowering factory managers and creating a comprador class that would trigger a Civil War. The agricultural reforms enacted by the Great Leap Forward meant to increase food production but ended up causing a food crisis. The type of historical analysis we need is a tough one, but being honest results in a better framing of things which goes beyond simply good and bad lines, and higher or lower scientific tendencies, or who betrayed what revolution.

Beyond the mass line: deciding how and where to struggle

The same framework, with some caveats, can be applied to formulate the principles of a revolutionary party. The party inserts itself in a capitalist society while simultaneously attempting to destabilize the capitalist totality and replace it with a new totality.

How do we begin to construct such an organism? Cam’s suggested plan of action is taken from JMP’s book Continuity and Rupture:

The participants in a revolutionary movement begin with a revolutionary theory, taken from the history of Marxism, that they plan to take to the masses. If they succeed in taking this theory to the masses, then they emerge from these masses transformed, pulling in their wake new cadre that will teach both them and their movement something more about revolution, and demonstrating that the moment of from is far more significant than the moment of to because it is the mechanism that permits the recognition of a revolutionary politics.

This poses several questions and problems, but the main thing is that we begin with participants in a revolutionary movement who are armed with theory that they take to the masses.

The first critique of this position is that the party is seen as some sort of external agent, formed by intellectuals, who have acquired knowledge and will bring it to the masses. It sets the party aside, as the unique interpreter of Marxism, and the object through which the people’s demands are translated to communist ones. It hopes that with the bringing of theory to the masses, the party will transform itself. We can contrast this approach to the merger theory. In 1903, Kautsky wrote:

In addition to this antagonism between the intellectual and the proletarian in sentiment, there is yet another antagonism. The intellectual, armed with the general education of our time, conceives himself as very superior to the proletarian. Even Engels writes of the scholarly mystification with which he approached workers in his youth. The intellectual finds it very easy to overlook in the proletarian his equal as a fellow fighter, at whose side in the combat he must take his place. Instead he sees in the proletarian the latter’s low level of intellectual development, which it is the intellectual’s task to raise. He sees in the worker not a comrade but a pupil. The intellectual clings to Lassalle’s aphorism on the bond between science and the proletariat, a bond which will raise society to a higher plane. As advocate of science, the intellectuals come to the workers not in order to co-operate with them as comrades, but as an especially friendly external force in society, offering them aid.

The difference between these two conceptions is that the first pays little to no attention to the self-organization of the masses and the ways they are already resisting capitalism. It asks us to go to the masses, without specifying which masses and how to talk to them. The second conception is that of the merger, where the intellectuals come to co-operate with the workers and see them as comrades, inserting themselves into existing struggles and amplifying them.

This difference is especially critical because it explains the way in which Maoists in the United States fill in their lack of clear tactics and strategy with spontaneity, leaving them lacking a clear plan, something they are slowly coming to realize. “Go to the masses” is left as a magic bullet. This raises the second problem: the identification of the “masses”. Cam suggests we start by “serving and interacting with the people”. A detailed study of the conditions of the people is a prerequisite of any revolutionary movement; just ask Lenin or Mao, but as with JMP, Cam grazes over the question of who the masses are that we are supposed to be interacting with in the United States. This is a question worth some reflecting on: the US is a unique creature in the history of the world. It is an advanced imperialist country, which leads to comparisons with Western Europe, but is also a settler-colonial society scaffolded by whiteness. It has a significant labor aristocracy who have much more to lose than their chains, and also has a significant surplus population that is easily replaceable and has little power to stop the monster.

Which groups are going to lead the revolution and which groups are expected to follow? How will hegemony over these groups be won? Essentially, who is the revolutionary subject in the United States? Who will bell the cat? Without making this explicit we run the risk of fetishizing the most oppressed subjects who unfortunately do not have the power to change the system.

It is important to remember that Marx located the revolutionary subject in the proletariat because (1) he studied the workers’ self-organization, how they had the power to stop accumulation if they wanted to, and what they were capable of achieving under adequate leadership and structure, and (2) the proletariat had less to lose from overthrowing the system because it possessed nothing. It could only lose their chains. But as we well know, the proletariat in the centers of capitalism failed to revolt. The Paris Commune, which so enthralled Marx, would move East, and the working class of the capitalist centers was pacified at best, or at worst enlisted in imperial or fascistic projects.

The cat would not be belled because some mice were getting good spoils. Starting with Lenin, there have been plenty of attempts to rationalize why there were no more large-scale revolts, like the Paris Commune, in the centers of capitalism. The labor aristocracy, understood as those who have more to lose than their chains, did not live up to Marx’s tasks. And if they are not willing to revolt and pick up the sword, who will then finish the job? This question is especially pressing in the United States, where capitalism is strongly racialized and where poor whites have been used to stabilize settler-colonialism for centuries. This is where the question of “who are the revolutionary masses” appears. Spontaneity fills in when the prescriptions are vague, which is why so many “mass line” organizations fall into a pattern of providing service aid, in the form of food or legal means, to the most oppressed in hope of activating them for the struggle. I do not wish to repeat a full critique of mutual aid that was already done in an excellent manner by Gus Breslauer. The two basic points are: people do mutual aid because it’s easy and makes us feel good, but in the end what we are doing is redistributing the labor fund and not threatening the state or the bosses in the process. Even if mutual aid can sometimes create useful auxiliaries, such as unemployed committees, they often cannot substitute for the main event. They also require massive amounts of energy and fund expenditures to keep alive, energy which could be spent more efficiently in amplifying existing struggles. We run the risk of burning resources and ourselves in doing something that does not center class struggle and is of minor use in fighting against the capitalist system.

It is important to locate this new fetish with mutual aid not only in the realization that people are suffering immensely but also in the failure of locating a revolutionary subject willing to fight to the bitter end. Mutual aid attempts to activate the most oppressed layers in the United States, but Marx’s other principle still holds: look for subjects that have the power to change society, rather than just the most oppressed. We should be looking at the sites of class struggle that are actually happening in today’s world and how these can be amplified to throw the capitalist totality into disarray. For this, we could start by reading studies of material conditions, such as Hunsinger & Eisenberg’s Mask Off, in great detail. An important place of struggle in the US right now are the struggles around social reproduction, specifically those around housing, childcare, and healthcare. Teachers’ and nurses’ unions, as well as the tenants movement, are in the front lines of struggle, and they are hurting capitalists because they are breaking into the capitalist totality in a way food distribution among the houseless is not.⁹

For some people, the natural starting place might be their union, especially if it is an active and fighting one. But for those who do not have that option, focusing on the tenants union movement allows us to connect to pre-existing struggles in the masses, amplify them, and understand their conditions in a very different way than food distribution does. Tenant unionism also provides us with targets that are actually defeatable, such as a local slumlord, which motivates our members, gives us publicity, and allows our organization to grow while further embedding it in the struggle. Other and larger targets can be tempting, but these are often heroic feats. The fight against Amazon, led by Amazonians United and other unions, is fighting an enemy at a scale much larger than what the proletariat is capable of organizing against right now. Their fight will be an extremely tough one, as the working class in the US (or even internationally) is still in a state of learning. Victories can be quickly stolen from us. For example, German workers defeated Amazon in Germany, so Amazon simply moved across the border to the Czech Republic, continuing distribution in Germany while avoiding their laws.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the introduction, we are in a seriously demoralizing moment. There is a rapidly changing conjuncture, where the pandemic and climate change fill us with urgency but make organizing hard due to increasingly scarce resources. We want to do something that is effective and brings liberation fast, but we are faced with the weight of the failures of the socialist movement, be it revolutionary or reformist. We want answers on how to do this and are attracted to things that do not sound that dissimilar to what we already know, or the ways in which our brains are programmed.

JMP’s style of Maoism is particularly well suited to the American mind. It provides relatively easy answers and provides enough silences that we can choose to interpret in ways that are not dissonant with our previous mindset. JMP also borrows plenty of epistemological concepts from American Pragmatist philosophy¹⁰, such as how truth is evaluated through practice, which makes it even more amenable to the underlying concept of science already present in US society. JMP writes well and clearly and is very articulate in his interviews. Because of this, it is not strange to see him becoming increasingly popular for a younger generation searching for these quick answers on what to do. This Maoism can also claim the mantle of the few revolutionary movements which are still vibrant today: the Philippines and India, which gives us something hopeful to root for internationally— something not as stale as defending an increasingly capitalist China.

However, to develop a proper science of revolution for the United States, whatever doctrine we decide to base ourselves, has to be heavily enriched with anti-colonial thought. One of the referents of Maoism, the Naxalites in India. have not properly dealt with Adivasi culture, and have sometimes misunderstood the way it operates, facing local resentment and resistance.¹¹ This should raise a warning flag on the operating methods of the “mass line”, where the party is left as an interpreter because of its knowledge of Marxism. Furthermore, Naxalites have not successfully linked their struggle with the struggles in Indian cities. A strategy that bases itself on the most oppressed in the US would surely face similar problems. In this respect, the Phillipino Communists do this linking much better, through the use of broad quasi-popular fronts. However, they also went as far as endorsing support for Biden in the last US presidential election. How to adequately interface with the labor aristocracy and win hegemony over them is going to be a gigantic tactical and strategic problem here.

So to end, I am proposing we do not rely on slogans that can be ossified and filled in with spontaneity. We do not have a Yunnan to build a red base in the US, geography is not as favorable here. Our fight is a long one that will not be solved with tricks but will require years and decades of changing tactics and reevaluating strategies. In this spirit, Cosmonaut is an open forum where revolutionaries can talk to each other and propose ways forward. I know this contribution raises more questions than gives answers, but I hope it serves as a starting point for asking better questions.

2021.01.152021.01.16

The Mass Line as an Emancipatory Politics

Cam W responds to the recent debate between Taylor B and Donald Parkinson, outlining a Maoist approach to politics based on the mass line as an alternative to their positions.

A century and a half ago, Marx closed the Communist Manifesto with what has become one of the most popular slogans in recent political history. He declared that, in order to overthrow the fledgling capitalist system, “workers of the world [must] unite.”¹ And yet here we are, in 2020, still stuck in capitalism’s deathly grip and not even close to achieving the unity needed to break free from its grasp.

However, this doesn’t mean that no progress has been made. The time between the Manifesto and now has been marked by intense struggles all over the world. We’ve seen the radical experiment of the Paris Commune, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Revolution, revolutions throughout the Global South, and plenty of revolutionary activity in the imperial core. And yet, none of those revolutions have come even close to shifting their political terrain towards communism, and any of the surviving projects have either drifted towards capitalism or are held hostage by the imperialists. In the US, we now find ourselves in the same position as millions of communists before us. How can we finally overthrow capitalism and move towards the communist terrain? We may answer this question by looking towards the past, but the problem is that history, a site of class struggle itself, hangs over us like a dark cloud. It muddles our perceptions and moves us away from a sober analysis of our concrete situation. With the added influence of the internet, it makes people adopt political positions, accompanied by various signifiers and aesthetics, that have no real concrete bearing on the class struggle.

We are hurtling towards a future marked by intense crises that will expose the deep cracks that exist within the capitalist system. The capitalist system cannot continue without dragging mass death along with it, whether through disease, war, or environmental displacement, and the only solution is revolution.

In Beginnings of Politics, Taylor B argues that the growth of DSA, coupled with the immense uprisings that took place over the summer, are both beginnings of a new form of emancipatory politics.² Taylor argues that Marxist theory contains a gap, which is the absence of a method for achieving emancipatory politics. While Marxism, “gives us critical tools to understand the capitalist mode of production, the insight that emancipation is immanent to the system through class struggle, and a concept of the transition to communism formulated by Marx as the dictatorship of the proletariat,” it does not tell us the concrete organizational forms needed to achieve these politics. So how do we figure out the kinds of organizational forms we need to achieve our politics? One solution would be to look at prior revolutionary activity, both in the US and abroad, and follow their lead politically. However, and this is at the core of Marxism, the world is always changing. The social formations that comprise the global capitalist system are very different now compared to a century ago. Therefore, the way the class struggle unfolds in our time will necessarily be different from the experiences of our predecessors. In this context, it would be a mistake to dogmatically insist on old forms of organization: forms that were designed as specific interventions within specific struggles. Taylor says, “this is the Marxist problem of politics that must be theorized under the conditions of the current moment, or conjuncture.”

Taylor criticizes the tendency of those on the left to insist on old forms of organization in the current conjuncture. The current conjuncture was born out of the neutralization of emancipatory politics in the 1960s, which is dubbed as the ‘The Black Power Era’. This was the last significant sequence of emancipatory politics in the US. According to Taylor, there were three neutralizing forces of this movement:

1. The formation of a black middle-class created by an increase in social welfare from the government to appease the Civil Rights movement.
2. State repression of radicals, specifically members of the Black Panther Party via COINTELPRO.
3. The absorption of the movement by the mainstream, which neutered its radical content.

Taylor’s argument echoes Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States, who argues that every revolutionary sequence in the US is neutralized by a combination of purging radicals through incarceration or assassination and buying off the movement via minor reforms.³ Taylor concludes, following Sylvain Lazarus, that the 20th century marked the end of the party form as a legitimate form of emancipatory politics. This is not only because political parties, in this case, the Democrats, Republicans, and even the Black Panthers, played a primary role in neutralizing our last emancipatory sequence, but also because the experiences of socialist construction in other parts of the world demonstrated that the vanguard becomes intertwined with the state, which also neutralized emancipatory politics in those social formations. Instead of falling back on neutralized forms of politics, we must conduct a concrete analysis of our concrete situation, the basis of Marxist analysis I might add, in order to develop novel forms of emancipatory politics.

This new form of emancipatory politics will emerge out of the beginnings provided by the Bernie Sanders movement/growth of DSA and the anti-racist uprisings over the summer. Taylor argues that the rise of DSA and the Bernie Sanders movement demonstrate a common recognition that politics need to go beyond the two-party system. The uprisings, on the other hand, demonstrate a popular anti-racist sentiment throughout the US, which has been directed against the police and the state. While DSA is currently tending towards a couple of different dead-end paths,⁴ the uprisings represent the potential to resist the neutralization of emancipatory politics. While he does not offer any concrete political form that we ought to build, Taylor concludes that, “we must trust that appropriate emancipatory forms will emerge as we engage in the local, national, and international organizing that this moment makes possible.”

I am sympathetic to Taylor’s general argument that new historical conjunctures necessitate new analyses of the social formation, and, emerging out of this, new modes of politics. This, as I noted earlier, is the immediate task of every Marxist in every social formation. However, Taylor offers us no real solution to the limits of the party-form. He only offers us the vague notion that new forms of political organization will arise out of the current conjuncture through revolutionary practice. In, Without a Party, We Have Nothing, Donald P rightly criticizes him for falling back on a spontaneous conception of revolutionary practice, where it is implied that new emancipatory forms will emerge out of new practices of politics without any planning or strategic outlook developed by revolutionaries beforehand. Following Althusser and Lenin, Donald notes that the absence of an articulated revolutionary theory will be filled by bourgeois ideology, which will itself neutralize these new beginnings.

Donald particularly takes issue with the notion that every major Marxist ruptures from their predecessors. In his piece, Taylor says that, “Marx broke with the utopian socialists. Lenin broke with Marx. The Cultural Revolution can be read as Mao’s break with Marxism-Leninism to free politics from the party-state.” Donald rejects this, arguing that Marx himself had a specific conception of politics, even if it had to be formulated systematically by Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin. Specifically, Lenin’s notion of the party was imported from Kautsky’s merger formula,⁵ which was developed from the work of Marx and Engels themselves.⁶ The development of Marxist political practice is defined by continuity, rather than by ruptures, and in the absence of a party, spontaneity will reign.

While I roughly agree with Taylor’s argument on the limits of Marxism-Leninism and the party-form as a neutralization of emancipatory politics, the solution is not to abandon the party entirely. And by party, I mean the revolutionary organization required to harness and lead the revolution.⁷ For clarification, I am sure that Taylor is operating with a classical understanding of the ‘party’, while I am focusing more on the function of the party as the revolutionary organization which becomes the vanguard of the revolutionary process. Rather, the solution is to transform the nature of the party through the implementation of the mass line. In a word, we can say that while Taylor emphasizes rupture, Donald stresses continuity. But why not both?

The Limits of Marxism-Leninism

Before proceeding into the Maoist terrain on the question of the party, it is first necessary to understand the limits of Marxism-Leninism, and as an extension, the party-form. I believe it is also necessary to define the terms ‘Marxism’ and ‘Marxism-Leninism’, considering the historical baggage and plurality of understandings that each term carries. Following J Moufawad Paul’s (JMP) arguments in Continuity and Rupture, I believe that Marxism is the science of revolution.⁸ In classical theory, the formula is that Marxism = historical materialism (the science) + dialectical materialism (the philosophy). I believe that this dichotomy misunderstands the specificity of what makes Marxism a science. The crux of scientific practice is experimentation, which means that Marxism must be able to test its theories. The only way that Marxism can test its theories, which are produced by historical or dialectical materialist analyses of a social formation, is through political practice.⁹ So while they are not what makes Marxism scientific per se, historical and dialectical materialism are the scientific methods that make Marxist political practice possible. While I don’t have space here to articulate the specificity of the characteristics of science and Marxism’s claim to it, JMP makes two important claims on the subject.

The first claim is that a science can never be closed off to the future. If it is, it will no longer be capable of producing any knowledge, rendering it obsolete. A science must always be open to further theorization and development in order to be useful. This is compatible with dialectical materialism, which asserts that the world is always changing. In this view, science is a truth process, and not the content which is the end-result of that truth process. Or in other words, science is defined by its practice and not by its results. For Marxism, this means that its claim to science is determined by the practice of creating communism, and not by the particular lessons we learn during this process.¹⁰

The second claim is that every science is defined by the dialectic of continuity and rupture. Continuity because every science builds on the insights of its predecessors, and rupture because every science eventually encounters its own internal limits, which necessitates a rupture in the paradigm to overcome said limits. The unity of a revolutionary tradition comes from shared insights, premises, and methodologies. Every stage accepts the universal lessons produced by the previous stage. To summarize, JMP says,

In the unfolding narrative of any living science (what Simone De Beauvoir categorized as ambiguity or what Alain Badiou called a truth procedure) moments of rupture are simultaneously moments of continuity. The rupture preserves the continuity; simultaneously, the continuity informs the rupture. Sometimes, in order to declare fidelity to the core principles of a science, a rupture is required: on one level theory is rearticulated and revised, and all dogmatisms abandoned, in order to prevent the deeper revision (that is the abandonment) of the basis upon which this science is possible. If a set of problems within a given science cannot be solved then there are two options: an abandonment of this science’s trajectory and a rejection of its core premises (i.e. abandon physics for spiritualism in order to seek a solution in superstition), or an abandonment of a specific scientific paradigm in order to reboot the core premises within a new theoretical region.¹¹

In the case of Marxism, ruptures in science occur through the experiences of world revolutions. The three world-historical revolutions to have happened so far are the Paris Commune, The Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution.¹² We must also note, like Lazarus, that every revolutionary sequence eventually fails. However, Moufawad-Paul argues that not all failures are the same, and he distinguishes between four types of revolutionary failure. There are:

a) those possible failures that are encountered because they result from new questions the previous revolutions did not encounter; b) those possible failures that the most recent world-historical revolution encountered but did not solve. c) those possible failures that the most recent world-historical revolution encountered and did solve. d) those failures that were solved prior to the most recent world-historical revolution, by earlier revolutions in the sequence.¹³

The first two deal with failures that lurk beyond or at the horizon of revolutionary history, which makes them live failures. The last two deal with failures that are contained within or before revolutionary history, which makes them dead failures. Any dead failure of a revolution did not learn from the history preceding it.

To summarize so far, Marxism is the science of creating revolution, which depends on the methodology of historical and dialectical materialism, and it moves into new stages via the experience of world-historical revolutions. As Moufawad-Paul notes, the first world-historical revolution in the Marxist paradigm is the Paris Commune, where the workers of Paris controlled the city for two months before eventually being neutralized by imperialist forces. The Paris Commune failed because it was not able to defend itself from the French army, which massacred thousands of Communards in the streets of Paris. As Lenin argues in State and Revolution, it was Marx and Engels experience of the Paris Commune which led them to the conclusion that, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”¹⁴ Lenin clarifies, “Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the “’ready-made state machinery’, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.”¹⁵ The experience of the Paris Commune demonstrated that it was not enough to merely seize state power, and that the immediate goal of the revolution is to defend its own existence by repressing the bourgeoisie.

Marxism, in its form at the time, encountered significant problems in the experience of the Paris Commune. On the one hand, Marx argued that the conditions of capitalist production will create an organized working class that will overthrow the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, Marx’s political activity demonstrates that it is necessary for communists to intervene in the process of political organization. Since Marx argues that revolutions in a mode of production are the result of its own contradictions, interpreters imply that this process will be spontaneous. We can draw an analogy here with the problem of free will. If everything that happens in an individual’s life is determined by forces outside of their control, does this imply that the individual ought to do nothing? This problem, between a bird’s eye view of history where events ‘seem’ inevitable and the concrete question of how these events are produced by individuals, can be resolved if we make a distinction between different domains of knowledge.

Marx’s ‘prediction’ of global communist revolution was a product of his analysis of history and the capitalist system during his own lifetime. Or in other words, Marx was making a historical claim that every mode of society, no matter how strong it seems at the time, will be overthrown because of contradictions that exist within it. Marx did not argue that this process will occur spontaneously, rather, it is the duty of communists to impart to the working masses with the theory needed to consciously create a revolution. Returning to the point, the Paris Commune significantly challenged Marx and Engels’ own beliefs about the durability of the capitalist system,¹⁶ their sense of historical time,¹⁷ and the level of organization needed to overcome it. As Taylor argued, Marx, who was necessarily limited by his place in history, could not fully theorize the political forms needed to overthrow capitalism. It wasn’t until Lenin and the Bolsheviks that the problem of the revolutionary political form was coherently theorized.

If the Paris Commune failed primarily because it was not able to defend itself, then the immediate task of every revolutionary movement is to develop the means to defend itself immediately after the seizure of state power. Lenin’s insights tell us that, “it is only possible to establish socialism through a revolutionary party, [and] that a state commanded by the proletariat must be instituted to suppress the bourgeoisie so as to possibly establish communism (i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat).”¹⁸ While Marx had already argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat would immediately follow the revolution, Lenin took this a step further and argued that the DOtP will need to be realized by a vanguard party that actively leads the revolution. Or in other words, Marx believed that a communist revolution would be won by an organized group of workers created by the conditions of capitalism, but he did not know how this would unfold concretely. Lenin argued that the workers alone would not be able to successfully lead a revolution if they did not possess revolutionary theory. Therefore, it is the Communist Party’s duty to develop revolutionary theory and spread it to the workers. The Communist Party becomes the vanguard by harnessing and directing the revolutionary energy of the masses.

And Lenin was right: his concept of the DOtP and the vanguard party worked. The Bolsheviks not only seized state power in Russia with the broad support of the masses,¹⁹ but they were also able to hold on to it too despite a full-fledged imperialist onslaught. It was the success of the Bolshevik Revolution that opened up a new paradigm within the science of Marxism, which became codified as Marxism-Leninism. Of course, we must note that Leninism is a placeholder for the rupture provided by the Soviet experience, and wasn’t actually codified systematically until Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, where the specificity of Leninism was articulated for the first time. Likewise, JMP argues that Maoism itself didn’t become an actual concept until it was systematized by the Communist Party of Peru in the late ’80s.²⁰ Lenin was a Marxist, but it was his application of the methodology to the Russian conditions, and the success of the revolution, that transformed the paradigm and taught us new universal lessons in the process.²¹

However, we all know that the Sovet Union failed. The Communist Party, which became intertwined with the state, became more and more alienated from the masses. The weakening of the Soviets, which Lenin envisaged as the ideal form of proletarian democracy, coupled with the absence of mass organizations to hold the Communist Party accountable, played a major role in this breakdown. While the Soviet Union was a failure, it was a live failure because it encountered limits unknown to any previous socialist project. The USSR not only rocked the capitalist nations to their core (the Red Scare), but it also showed us that it is possible to build a world beyond the capitalist system. And even though the USSR did a lot of bad things, like the purges, the invasions, and unnecessary repression, it was a significantly better society than the liberal democracies. We don’t need to accept bourgeois historiography and bash the Soviet Union for not actually being communist. Rather, we need to learn why they failed, and find solutions to their failures.

The Maoist Rupture

One explanation for the failure of the USSR, and therefore of Marxism-Leninism, is argued In The State and Counter-Revolution. The author, Tom Clarke, argues that Marxism-Leninism is necessarily defined by the following contradiction:

On the one hand it is impossible for the proletariat to spontaneously develop a revolutionary party with a revolutionary ideology; on the other hand, it is impossible for a party that the workers cannot possibly develop, and thus is developed instead by the petty bourgeoisie, to carry a revolution to its completion. In essence: Marxism-Leninism is correct while, at the same time, Marxism-Leninism is incorrect.²²

Clark’s argument entails the view that the intellectuals who import revolutionary theory to the proletariat, i.e. the merger theory, are of petty-bourgeois origin. Clarke views this contradiction of Marxism-Leninism in the positivist sense, in which contradictions are irrational and undermine a theory. Moufawad-Paul disagrees and views this as a contradiction in the Marxist sense, i.e. as a problem that needs/must be overcome. We cannot simply dismiss this contradiction as non-existent, or even try to pick one side of the contradiction, where we would either declare that only the workers or the intelligentsia can lead us to revolution. One example of the former comes through Hal Draper, who tried to solve this problem with a theory of “socialism from below” where the working class spontaneously builds their own party. Moufawad-Paul argues that Clarke’s inability to solve the contradiction was because of his misunderstanding of Maoism as Mao Zedong-thought. Furthermore, the Cultural Revolution provides the seeds of the solution to the impasse of Marxism-Leninism (a struggle against petty-bourgeois ideology).

Before proceeding into the Cultural Revolution, it is necessary to provide a schematic overview of the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). If the Bolshevik Revolution built on the failures of the Paris Commune, then the Chinese Revolution built on the failures of the Bolsheviks. Although, we must add that the Chinese Revolution unfolded during a similar time period to the Soviet Union’s socialist construction, which meant that there wasn’t enough time in between for them to fully comprehend the USSR’s failures.²³

Mao and the Chinese Communists had seen the process of alienation between the party and the masses in the USSR. A major component of this process was the development of revisionism within the CPSU. Midway through the 1930s, the CPSU was already declaring that socialist construction was complete within the USSR. Walter Rodney says, “we ought to be skeptical of the Soviet claims of having fully achieved Socialism in 1937–8 and that they are now building Communism. That they can pin down a precise date is immediately suspicious.”²⁴ It is clear that at this point, even before Kruschev, the USSR was already drifting towards revisionism. While improving material conditions and developing a previously underdeveloped country is a good thing, this is not socialism. Mao was understandably worried that China could also slide down the revisionist road. Therefore in China, party officials didn’t attain the same privileges as Soviet officials. They only consumed what they needed, rode bicycles or took buses for transportation, and ate meals in workers’ canteens.²⁵

The Chinese Communists developed the mass line to counter the development of revisionism within the party and to ensure that the party always remained accountable to the people. So what is the mass line? JMP says,

The participants in a revolutionary movement begin with a revolutionary theory, taken from the history of Marxism, that they plan to take to the masses. If they succeed in taking this theory to the masses, then they emerge from these masses transformed, pulling in their wake new cadre that will teach both them and their movement something more about revolution, and demonstrating that the moment of from is far more significant than the moment of to because it is the mechanism that permits the recognition of a revolutionary politics.²⁶

The mass line ensures that the party is always held accountable by the people. If the masses reject a theory, then the party must too. One may object that this converts the masses into the sole arbiters of truth, which can be potentially problematic. If the masses are the sole arbiters of truth, then why does the party exist in the first place? However, this is not what the mass line implies. Rather, “if [a theory] is rejected by the most radical factions of this class then it should be rethought; if it pulls in new recruits, who will also transform the movement that brings this theory, then it is not some alien affectation imposed on the working classes.”²⁷ No class or organization is the sole arbiter of truth, and the only way to determine the truth is through testing theories. Knowledge is the result of experimentation and ideological struggles, not something that is revealed (empiricism) or discovered through thought alone (rationalism).

Unfortunately, the Maoists were too late to realize the development of revisionism within the party, which was manifesting in the alienation of the people from the party. By 1951, the party created a salary system for party officials, some received better pay and benefits, and it even opened schools specifically for party members’ children, despite Mao’s opposition. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao was ousted from power within the party. However, he wasn’t willing to give up just yet, which takes us back into the Cultural Revolution, which, Alain Badiou notes, “was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism.”²⁸

While this isn’t a space to analyze the immense complexity of the GPCR, which others are already doing, I can, again, provide a schematic overview. The Cultural Revolution was a revolution led primarily by young Maoists, who were emboldened by the support of Mao, against bourgeois elements in China and particularly against Party officials. The Revolution took the form of the Red Guards storming cities with military equipment and conducting public struggle sessions, power seizures by the Red Guards in cities like Shanghai where anti-Maoist public officials were purged and even publically humiliated, and the construction of various mass organizations that were external to the party. Another significant event to happen in the Cultural Revolution was that students were sent to the countryside to learn manual labor, and workers began to occupy the universities. In one particular incident, students responded to the occupation by shooting at and killing workers, which required an intervention from Mao himself to de-escalate the situation. The Cultural Revolution was one of the most significant, dramatic, and violent episodes of the 20th century, and I cannot even come close to giving it the justice it deserves here.

What matters here is not necessarily what happened in the Cultural Revolution, but why it happened in the first place. The 16 Points document, produced by the Maoists, provides the general motivation for the Revolution:

Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do the exact opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.²⁹

The Cultural Revolution can be understood as a revolution in the superstructure of the socialist social formation. While the initial Chinese Revolution seized state power, another revolution was necessary to defeat the persistence of bourgeois ideology, customs, and traditions. Furthermore, this revolution would have to remove power from revisionists within the party. This brings us to a key insight of Maoism, which is that after a revolution, the bourgeoisie re-constitutes within the party.

We must note that all developments in Marxist theory can be considered, on some level, to be ‘revisions’ of Marx. But to add on to, or to criticize Marx, does not make on a revisionist per se. Rather, revisionism occurs when one rejects the core premises of Marxism. The core premise of Marxism is the law of class struggle which leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviet Union became revisionist when they sought collaboration with the United States. If the Soviet Union represented the global communist movement, and if the US represents the global capitalist system as its strongest link, then pursuing peace for peace’s sake is a negation of the core of Marxism.

In The Cultural Revolution, Jean Daubier attempts to explain why revisionism necessarily develops within the party post-revolution. To start with, he notes that every revolution inherits contradictions from the social formation preceding it. In every society on Earth, since there are no communist societies, there is a division of labor between manual and intellectual labor. In capitalist societies, we treasure intellectual labor and treat manual labor with contempt. All of our lives, we’ve been told to look down upon menial labor, such as being a factory worker, working at McDonald’s, being a mailman, etc. The jobs that children aspire to are usually doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.³⁰ In other words, jobs that mainly consist of intellectual labor and are occupied by trained intellectuals. Daubier argues that this division of labor, and further, the perceptions associated with each form of labor, necessarily carry into a socialist society. He argues the university is a prime site of the division of labor. Of course, a socialist society still needs universities to train people in the sciences, technology, etc., but unless they’re dramatically overhauled they’ll reproduce the capitalist division of labor. This is the, “opposition between the bearers of knowledge on the one hand and the mass of workers, deprived of science, on the other.”³¹ Thus, even though capitalism has been abolished, some of the contradictions inherent in it will remain under socialism.

Furthermore, Daubier argues that, by force of habit, it is more likely than not that the lionization of intellectual labor will remain in a socialist social formation, and a division between an elite class of scientists, technicians, and administrators will form at one pole while the workers will remain at the other. The state, which always maintains and reconciles class antagonisms, even after the revolution, still exists under socialism and can perpetuate inequality between party officials and the masses. Those in power have the opportunity to attain certain privileges for themselves, and Daubier argues that this happened in the Chinese CCP. The struggle against individualism and egoism in the party can turn into a major struggle on its own. This is the context of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which seems like a perfectly “logical Marxist endeavor.”³² Daubier concludes, “at the heart of the Cultural Revolution was the relationship between those in power and the people.”³³

So what lessons can we draw from the Cultural Revolution? Let’s return to Badiou’s analysis in The Communist Hypothesis, where he argues that the Cultural Revolution:

bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-state that imprisons it. It marks an irreplaceable experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path, to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of the workers’ struggle under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.³⁴

Returning back to Taylor’s piece, his debt to Badiou becomes clear. While Badiou praises the project of the GPCR for being the first proletarian revolution within a socialist society, he makes the wrong conclusion. Badiou understands the limits of Marxism-Leninism and the party-form, which becomes divorced from the people and facilitates the development of revisionism and capitalist restoration, but does not believe these limits can be overcome, at least within the framework of the communist party. The only problem was that the necessity of the Cultural Revolution was realized too late, which meant it couldn’t override the drift towards the capitalist road. Moufawad-Paul argues that Badiou draws these hasty conclusions because not enough time had passed for him to realize that the Cultural Revolution spawned the development of new revolutionary movements in Peru, Nepal, Afghanistan, etc, where Maoism was formulated coherently for the first time.³⁵

This brings us back to Tom Clarke and his critique of Marxism-Leninism. Clarke seems to argue that revisionism is inevitable due to the petty-bourgeois essence of Marxism-Leninism. However, according to JMP, “Clark ignores that one moment in history [The GPCR] where the petty bourgeoisie was ‘sent down to the countryside’ in droves, where once-privileged Marxist intellectuals were placed under the authority of the masses, and where the authority of the party itself was briefly called into question.”³⁶ The Chinese Revolution encountered Clarke’s contradiction where the petty-bourgeois re-formulates into the party because after a revolution, petty-bourgeois ideology still permeates society. However, the Cultural Revolution proposed a way to transgress this limit of Marxism-Leninism.

To clarify, both the Soviet Union and China demonstrate the limits of Marxism-Leninism. Revolutionary China was a Marxist-Leninist project and came up against the same limits as the USSR. The difference was that China offered solutions to overcome these limits, even if they failed (in the live sense), which opened a new paradigm in the science of Marxism: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The Mass Line offers a mechanism to transform the nature of the party into a revolutionary mass organization which can resist the neutralizing force of the party-form.

Maoism in the Current Conjuncture

Returning back to where we started, how can we apply the insights of Maoism to the current conjuncture? To start with, we need to apply the mass line, criticism and self-criticism within our organizations and begin the process of cultural revolution. JMP believes that any revolutionary organization should be posing these questions:

Is an organization building itself according to the will of the revolutionary masses while, at the same time, organizing this will and providing theoretical guidance; is this organization critical of itself and willing to accept that it is wrong; are the movement’s cadre serving the people and capable of self-criticism in a way that parallels the “checking of privilege” common in identity politics circles but, unlike these circles, tied to a coherent political line; does this movement see itself as capable of transcending the ruling ideas of the ruling class, grasping how certain ideological moments distort and over/under-determine the economic base (as Mao pointed out in On Contradiction), and constantly reforming itself through the long march of cultural revolution? Failure to answer these questions might in fact be a failure to concretely apply those theoretical insights that are supposed to make the name of Maoism into a concept.³⁷

I also believe it is important to determine, right now, which organizations have the capacity to be revolutionary. The biggest socialist organization in the US right now, as we are constantly reminded of, is DSA. Is DSA capable of becoming a revolutionary organization that implements the mass line?

This question can be answered with a firm no, as DSA is a dead end. One reason is that sexual harassment and assault run rampant within the organization and are even covered up by leadership on occasions.³⁸ Although as we have seen recently with PSL, this is not unique to DSA alone. We cannot build a truly revolutionary organization without taking instances of harm seriously. Nevermind the personal trauma that sexual harassment and assault inflict, but if communist organizations demonstrate that they are incapable of standing alongside survivors this will create intense disillusionment and distrust within the communist movement. I have plenty of comrades that have become disillusioned with revolutionary politics because of their experiences within DSA.

DSA is also a dead-end for political reasons because their success is built on a bourgeois understanding of socialism. I have met so many individuals, both in DSA and in YDSA, that believe socialism revolves around the struggle for social welfare like universal healthcare and education. This is not a problem per se, considering the core of any communist movement’s activity will revolve around political education and inheriting individuals with petty-bourgeois beliefs. But the problem is that DSA actively facilitates the recruitment of these individuals through their political practice, which revolves around electing ‘socialist’ politicians into the repressive state apparatus, or fighting for legislation. DSA actively vulgarizes the common perception of socialism, and embodies opportunism. I would be more sympathetic to the argument that revolutionaries ought to stay in DSA if the organization did not actively harm the communist movement by vulgarizing socialism and inflicting harm on individuals.

This piece doesn’t have the scope to present a full argument for what kinds of organizations we ought to be building or participating in right now, but I can say that communists should be building explicitly revolutionary organizations and following the mass line in their practice. It doesn’t matter if these organizations are already existing, like the Maoist Communist Party chapters that have been forming recently, or if they are being constructed now on a smaller scale. As Lenin says,

It is not so much a question of the size of an organisation, as of the real, objective significance of its policy: does its policy represent the masses, does it serve them, i.e., does it aim at their liberation from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, the minority’s reconciliation with capitalism? And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists, to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism.

This idea, of serving and interacting with the masses, is at the basis of the mass line. Only by actually building relationships with the people most intensely exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system, the primary revolutionary agents, can we begin to form a revolutionary politics. The uprisings present a clear opening for the implementation of the mass line. It is clear that the masses are being unjustly imprisoned and killed by the bourgeois state. It is clear that the masses are being left like sheep to the wolves in this pandemic, where working class people are being ravaged by Covid without any help from the state. It is clear that the masses are still being forced to work despite a deadly pandemic. If we want to build a revolutionary movement, we need to start by supporting the masses where they are right now, figure out their needs, and demonstrate our solidarity.

This process cannot stop and end at service.³⁹ Rather, this is the beginning of the process of building a revolutionary communist organization, guided by the mass line, which can overcome the neutralizing forces of the bourgeois state and their lackeys.