On the scandal mongering and police-work of a few traitors and renegades attacking Maoism
Scandal mongering is a fact of daily life. It is a particular form of sensationalism, generally rooted in the embellishment of contradictions between individuals. It exists all around us and is found in most bourgeois news sources, where the intellectual prostitutes of the ruling class sell public opinion. It is also prevalent online and among social media platforms. Individuals who seek to view the world only though their own individual lens avoid class perspectives. The individualization of everything rises to the surface in the age of imperialism, where bourgeois liberalism has decomposed and turned on itself in a form of false and anti-Marxist critique—we sometimes refer to this as postmodern criteria. When this becomes political, as it often does, those who utilize such criteria attempt to sink their venom into the masses, appealing to their basic decency and inventing all manner of gossip, half-truths, lies and sensationalism. This has become the path that has led to some recent reactionary attacks of an anti-communist character in the USA by those we will call the liquidationists.
The liquidationists, scandal mongers par excellence, really say nothing new. They openly conduct police work against the revolutionary left, invent false documents with no effort at authentication, release mug shots and photos of those they do not like (released before this by the state and by fascists), talk to the most miserable anti-communist and yellow ‘journalists’ and ultimately regurgitate the old bile of reaction and revisionism that has long been leveled against communists. While it is hard to think of a communist who trust these types as a source, they remain harmful to the proletariat, acting as counter-revolutionaries; addressing their demagoguery, which seeks to mislead and betray everyone they can, is long overdue.
While the liquidationists have launched attacks on revolutionaries in the US for some time, and wasted no time in attempting to defame The Worker, they have begun efforts to add an international scope to their snitch campaign and this must be condemned outright. The liquidationist website is a gutter for all sorts of distorted or contrived “testimony,” but its common basis is to assert that proletarian discipline, proletarian organization, proletarian regulation, and especially the ideology of the international proletariat are hallmarks of a “cult,” and with their postmodern criteria they classify anything and everything as “abuse” which is a method of exacerbating contradictions among the people rather than overcoming them. In this gutter, like all gutters, trash sinks down, accumulates, and rots.
Anyone active in communist politics centered on the process of party reconstitution has been called a number of things used pejoratively against them for the past decade; “red guard,” “gonzaloite,” “cultist,” sometimes these have been sarcastically worn with pride along with the more out-of-date “red” or “pinko-commie.” There is a word for this, it is called red-baiting and its a tactic used to defame communists, communist sympathizers and any radical at all among the masses. Since “cult” stories are all the rage today in the bourgeois entertainment industry, it is no coincidence that this fad has affected our darling liquidators. Let us deal thoroughly with this dubious claim.
The liquidators are unable to think outside of the anti-communist academic straight jacket they have applied to themselves. In a recent podcast hosted by a revisionist blog [cosmonaut] the main individual behind the liquidationist website [maoistcultexposed] indicated that any Leninist model of organization which expects a degree of discipline and subordinates the individual to the organization qualifies as a cult.
The accusation of “cult” appears like the accusation of “terrorist,” terms utterly defined by the motives of those using them and who they are being used against. There exists cults, and their exists terrorists, but these things take on a certain meaning when taken up by imperialism, revisionism, or other anti-communists. When taken rationally, the word “cult” refers to spiritualist groups who attempt to be closed off from the broader church or society, and has a neutral judgment as a term. What cannot qualify as a cult in this sense is anything materialist which takes social integration as its starting point. Bu there, instead of rational definitions, the definition is altered to suit the individuals’ objective, their personal truth etc, as in all postmodern criteria. Since spiritualism and seclusion are out, communists and proletarian revolutionaries can be beaten with the old stick “the cult of personality”—the charges leveled by the modern revisionists against comrade Stalin after his death, and Chairman Mao during his lifetime. The charge of “millennarian cult” has been leveled against the Communist Party of Peru by the bourgeois imperialist lackeys called senderologists. Within these two contexts the liquidators pass off their attack—on the one hand they are idealists who perceive the truth as an individual’s interpretation of their personal experience—they self-identify as “cult-survivors” and their object of ridicule must therefore be a cult, while on the other hand they have to bend the definitions of their terms and have a long tradition of reaction from which they can borrow.
The liquidators pass an attack on Communism generally and Maoism specifically by way of attacking their political opponents with demagoguery and sensationalism. Make no mistake: it is the ideology of the international proletariat that they are really attacking, whomever they have used as a stand-in. This is most evident in the glaring fact of their opportunism. Opportunism exist whenever short term goals are placed above political principles. The liquidators have no qualms about opportunism nor do they possess any proletarian morality. They see no problem at all talking to reactionary and bourgeois media, even in articles which contain naked slanders against Chairman Mao and Chairman Gonzalo [The Daily Beast]. The liquidators do not deign to conceal their anti-communism; they see defaming Chairman Gonzalo as ‘self-empowerment’ in the act of altering his image into that of a clown, feeling conflicted about this alteration was nothing more than their brainwashing offering a last protest on their way to being really “free.” Elsewhere, they claim to be ‘triggered’ by the use of the color red, and whine and cry on social media when revolutionary students hoist the red flag or raise the images of the great leadership of the proletariat [on X formerly Twitter]. By examining their interviews we will spell it out for anyone who is possibly disoriented by all the sensationalism and scandal mongering.
The first article in question, the one appearing on a bourgeois scandal site, makes no attempt at authenticating documents and instead cites documents found only on the websites run by the very people they interview, in what is patently a one-sided hit piece falling below even the bourgeois standard of ‘objectivity’ in journalism. The ruling class waits like vultures for those rejected or those deserting communist movements, eager to give them pulpits in the church of anti-communism. We have all seen this with the imperialists handling of Trotsky, or the way the imperialists cry at the treatment of Liu Shao Chi, etc. and we have all heard about the poor anarchists persecuted by the Soviets, yet in any other circumstance these very same people are terrorists in the eyes of bourgeois history. A favorite narrative of reaction is that innocent people are brainwashed and manipulated by evil communists, and once reformed back into the ideology of the ruling class they give the best testimony; thus, the traitors absolve themselves of their own mistakes and collective deviations and, soiled with the filth of imperialism, they cross over to the enemy camp. What lurks behind the veil of anti-communism in this particular article are attempts by the bourgeois yellow journalist to promote revisionism, both the tailism of the Democratic Socialists of America’s political candidates and the yellow traitorous union bureaucrats are portrayed as the legitimate ‘left,’ the so-called victims of Maoist extremism. We see a spontaneous united front between yellow journalists, liquidators, the FBI, social democrats, and labor aristocrats.
One of the two liquidationists appearing in the bourgeois scandal article repeats the same story on a podcast run by revisionists and social-democrats. Although the naked anti-communism is slightly muted for the desired audience of the podcast, it is still there and offers even better evidence of the attacks on Maoism.
In the podcast interview hosted on the revisionist website, the liquidator gives the first definition of “cult-like behavior” as “abusive or harmful organizations on the left,” a definition relying on postmodernist demagoguery instead of Marxist criteria, with no basis of class understanding. Here, concepts like “abuse” take on specters of their own without being qualified or defined. In the eyes of the liquidators, even the most basic level of communist discipline constitutes abuse. Postmodernism from its start has had an interest in conflating all forms of discipline with coercion. The liquidator being interviewed showcases being a depressed intellectual—so privileged that politics never had to cross the mind—tossed out of its privileged class and into the workforce. Unless they transform into Marxists, these types tend to go in for adventurism and destructive tendencies—left in form but right in essence, exactly the character of postmodernism. Indeed, the liquidator admits to being motivated on an emotional rather that a rational basis.
Upon entering activism the liquidator “while still critically thinking about stuff” thought that a tenants rights/housing organization “might be a terrorist organization” because of their direct action tactics against landlords and corporations. Some wonderful critical thinking there! Critical thinking for our darling liquidators means accepting the criteria of the ruling class and of course its cynicism. The liquidator claims to have wanted to “not be all about myself anymore” when entering activism, and now promotes an “activism” (snitching) centered on self.
And what where the “abuses” suffered by this poor liquidator? This politically degenerate ignoramus claims to have been “put to work in an amazon warehouse”; to have attended “tons of study groups”; “meetings [and] training.” Poor thing! The need to sell one’s labor power in order to survive is an abuse of capitalism, not of the communists. The rest of it is par for the course for any organization, proletarian or not. Why is this liquidator crying about the reality of any revolutionary activist? Why not keep applying what Chairman Mao suggested if it worked at getting rid of your shitty manager as you say? Here is what Mao says: “What is work? Work is struggle. There are difficulties and problems in those places for us to overcome and solve. We go there to work and struggle to overcome these difficulties. A good comrade is one who is more eager to go where difficulties are greater.”
Even the revisionist hosts seems at a loss as to how any of the information provided by the liquidator amounted to the foisted “cult” label, and at times even highlights the fact that the issues expressed are commonplace in left-wing activism. The hosts ask the liquidator “what are some signs that there was a cult-like dynamic?” and the pitiful liquidator expressed that joining such a group “removes that existential dread of being responsible for yourself.” When thrust into our class, the petty bourgeoisie certainly have existential dread—they are filled with a dread for being proletarianized and losing their relative privileges as small exploiters or intellectuals. But what about communist organizing makes one no longer responsible for oneself? Nothing. Communists insist on finding one’s bearings, showing initiative, and self-criticizing on work. There is no escaping responsibility, though this liquidator will keep trying to escape as long as its miserable existence allows.
The proof for this liquidator and all liquidators that a group has a “cult-like dynamic” is the group’s approach to the question of clandestine work—if an organization or movement cannot be liquidated by opening itself to the old-state, then it must be liquidated from within. Both the opposition to the potential of clandestine and illegal work as well as the claims that these are cult-like dynamics serve the same end—liquidation! Drive the organization completely above-ground and liquidate it into liberalism, or slander it as a cult to liquidate it from the outside. These are the political tactics and theories of the class enemy inside workers movements.
This is summed up nicely in the liquidator’s ideas about the hopeful outcome of their red-baiting police work: “The best thing I can hope for is people walk away and live better lives.” How much clearer can one be? In opposition to this, communists insist that no matter one’s position regarding errors, mistakes, and deviations, what is important is maintaining one’s connection to the masses and carrying out class struggle and two-line struggle in the interests of accomplishing unity. Walking away and “leading better lives” is sheer avoidance of proletarian reality. It is surrender and liquidation. The masses clamor for organized rebellion and the revolutionaries tirelessly struggle for the realization of the Communist Party. What is a “better” life under exploitation and oppression? In what reality does turning into an informant, paid or volunteering for it, actually provide anyone a “better life”? Demoralized former revolutionaries turned rats can enjoy their 30 pieces of silver, but we cannot pretend that is “a better life” than one spent serving the people wholeheartedly.
The existence of a “charismatic leader” is put forward to justify the “cult” allegations. This is a miserably false criteria. Any leader can be charismatic and any recognized leader at all can be accused of being charismatic and seen as such whether or not it is a reflection of reality. The attacks from the liquidators in this respect are attacks on leadership generally and communist leadership specifically. It is denial that the class struggle produces leaders and the different types of leaders which are forged in it. In open sympathy with the liquidators, the revisionist hosts attribute the “charisma” to the fact that those they hold up as charismatic leaders in their attack on Maoism were “very rigorous, disciplined, and nice,” and they say “how genuine” they come across. What is described here is only what is expected of leaders and indeed any communist in formation—it is the professional self-conduct of any genuine revolutionary that is being twisted into this vulgar theory of “charismatic leaders.”
The liquidators complain of “collapsing from exhaustion and mental and physical illness because of the work load.” We can only ask: is it leaders demanding this workload or the conditions in which revolutionaries in the US find themselves? And what is the solution to this problem? Liquidators tailing the bourgeois postmodernists advocate “self-care,” “walking away” etc. When faced with moving mountains, communists have a different attitude—they know that it is only through establishing better links to the masses and mobilizing them that even the most basic “work load” can be carried out. A failure to do this causes exhaustion. That is what must be criticized in the entire movement. This is not just the fault of the liquidators, but the fault of leaders and every revolutionary in the US today. No one has sufficient connections to the masses of proletarians and all will continue to struggle in this manner; there is more that needs doing than there are capable people to do it. This is a matter of fact. But what is the communist attitude and what is the liberal attitude? Chairman Mao instructs that we should fight many battles without fear of fatigue; he demonstrated this in the Long March.
Communists have always opposed indulgent rest and advocated for well organized and orderly work, understanding the dialectic between action and rest with action as the principal aspect. Liberals on the other hand remain indifferent toward the masses, they see the entire world through their personal lives, do not conduct struggles among the masses, and are content with ignoring the situation until it is time for them to stifle the masses in it. Anyone thinking revolutionary activism and communist life will be easy going and not exhausting is mired in fantasy and cut out only for becoming bureaucrats. “We must thoroughly clear away all ideas among our cadres,” Chairman Mao wrote, “of winning easy victories through good luck, without hard and bitter struggle, without sweat and blood” and “We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these two mountains [feudalism and imperialism] be cleared away?”
The task of mobilizing others in revolutionary work is immediately undermined by opposition to professional revolutionary standards of conduct and the correct method of work. In short, if one refuses the theory of professional revolutionaries, clandestinity, and arduous struggle, then one has already shut off real access to the masses and diminished the links needed to mobilize them to participate in revolutionary programs and revolutionary work. This approach will inevitably over-extend limited forces. It is liberalism which causes “overwork” and liberals who feel that even the most light work causes them burn out. The petty bourgeois opposition to becoming proletarian is endemic in the narratives of the liquidation.
A sub-point which nevertheless concerns us greatly is the liquidationist opposition to newspapers. This too is tied in with the opposition to clandestine work. The liquidators oppose newspapers and cite new conditions to justify this opposition. In the interview with the revisionist podcast, the liquidator suggests that revolutionaries should tail the masses into the corporate social media platforms—not in addition to a revolutionary newspaper (which can exist in print as well as maintain a website) but in replacement of it. How does this relate to the opposition to secrecy? The liquidators want everything to exist before the eyes of the state and the criminal courts, this is part and parcel of their program. Social media offers this in spades. Should a newspaper act as a central organ, a central organizer, and an ideological school of war, as Lenin insisted revolutionary papers must, and this was wholesale transitioned to Instagram (per the liquidator’s recommendation), then the whole organ is delivered to the class enemy; all the contacts which the newspaper achieves are right there for cataloging. We are not interested in publishing our subscribers lists so that they can be monitored. Networks, contacts and individuals who are embarking upon or seeking to embark upon revolutionary organizing are thrust into plain sight, and a scaffolding is created indeed, but not in the interests of revolution—a violent and illegal act of one class overthrowing another—but as a scaffolding from which the state agencies can hang the revolutionaries. The liquidators knit the rope and hope to tie the knot. Finally, the masses do indeed read; the liquidators are content to ignore the modest successes of the newspaper they claimed to have worked for, and they live in denial of how many people read it.
Instagram, whatever its use value to propaganda might be, is wholly owned by the class enemy; it does not even offer the basic word count or organization needed to conduct propaganda work. Apparently, when liquidating an entire news organization into an Instagram failed, the liquidators were successful in liquidating the entire news organization, without even making their damned Instagram to replace it. For all its faults, the newspaper in question was undoubtedly more useful to progressive causes than a snitch factory run by liquidators.
The hosts of the revisionist podcast are the most agreeable sorts of bourgeoisie; still, they fail to see how the complaints of the liquidator demarcate this so-called cult from any other left-wing organization. One of them says “this is not unique to your organization; this is a problem in a lot of different left groups not as extreme I would say” and calls for more “real open debate.” We revolutionaries are not so agreeable; we believe in organizations participating in open as well as internal and closed debates. Should revolutionaries be open about certain debates, they would sign their own arrest warrants. Liquidators and revisionists on the other hand do not need to worry too much about state repression because they peacefully co-exist with it, and in fact are the “left” wing mask of it. Public matters should be debated openly, while secret work specifically should not. Debate policy must extend from an analysis of concrete conditions, but nothing of the sort is offered by our liquidators and their revisionist pals. Opposition to the use of correct channels and organizational two-line struggle are what lurks behind the moralizing of the enemy.
During the interview, the shared concept of what was the newspaper Iskra is also indicative of utter bankrupt right opportunism. The liquidationist thinks “having workers write in on their daily life, it dose not even have to be revolutionary” is the main thing that Iskra under Lenin was doing, as if the workers who read Iskra did not already know that their lives are hard, and sought nothing more than commiseration.
On the contrary, such testimonials were made in Iskra as support for the theoretical and editorial content of the paper, to support the political role of the paper as collective organizer. The “best attack on capitalism we have” is not “the voice of the worker” because of the material reality that capitalism does not fall before voices. Lenin warned that the workers on their own will only attain trade union consciousness, which is the consciousness of the bourgeoisie reflected by the working class. He teaches that to develop revolutionary proletarian consciousness, i.e. communist class consciousness, the workers must be intervened upon by their best sons and daughters, schooled in Marxism, who return to their struggles. Marxism is the best weapon we have against capitalism, and it utterly tails the masses to think otherwise. “Teach us not only where to begin, but how to live and how to die,” demand workers writing to the editorial board of Iskra, referencing Lenin’s pamphlet “Where to Begin.”
Not content with polluting, wrecking, and liquidating movements in their own country, our darling liquidationists, as real agents of imperialism, talk out of the side of their heads on matters about which they know nothing and set their sights on comrades internationally. They press their international attacks via the old ruse of “Gonzaloism.” No one has ever theorized such a thing as Gonzaloism. Those who study Chairman Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) know that the “-ism” is very important; we say Maoism for shorthand to indicate the stage that has been reached, universally, meaning that Mao developed all three component parts of Marxism to a third and superior stage. None of those who the liquidationists attack have ever issued this claim, let alone theoretical justification for it. That we hold Chairman Gonzalo to have developed a fourth stage is false. Instead, the liquidationists, who have dropped all pretense of being Maoists, now seek to increase division among Maoists who still struggle for greater unity under Maoism. This is the international line of the liquidators; it must be denounced and repudiated by all genuine comrades, even those who have real and substantial disagreements among themselves.
Establishing their anti-communism would not be enough without a falsified historical account of their made up “Gonzaloism.” A “really bizarre history,” the liquidator claims, “a specific branch of Maoism which I call Gonzaloism,” our liquidator assures us that “our ideology did not come from the Communist Party of Peru.” We agree it did not. Our ideology comes from 15 billion years of matter in motion and the entire synthesis of class struggle to date, emerging in 1848 with the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party; it was founded by Marx who took into account the best humans had accomplished, then it passing through Lenin and Mao who developed it, ultimately being defined as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism by Chairman Gonzalo leading the Communist Party of Peru. That is where our ideology comes from, not the mind of just the Chairman, but from all the human experience leading up to that moment of clarity of understanding in the definition he provided. Our ideology is the same one as the Communist Party of Peru, with only a difference of what aspect is to be applied principally to our different conditions.
In alignment with Right Opportunism internationally, the liquidator presents a centrist position on the so-called peace letters, attributed to Chairman Gonzalo by the genocidal fascist Fujimori-CIA-Montisenos regime of Peru, and later hocked by the revisionist Avakian and the Right Opportunist Line of MOVADEF in Peru for their own interests. Sure, whatever you say, “both sides” make “good arguments.” But only one side contains the truth and is arguing for peoples war, for Maoism and for Communism!
It would not be a good liquidationist yarn without weaving in some conspiracy theory. In what is news to us, according to our ever factual liquidator, the international “Gonzaloist movement today” is led by a few individuals in “Hamburg.” And where does this liquidationist get its information? From the rats of the ROL, and just as bad, from “a Peruvian non-profit that tries to run a terrorist watch list.” In other words, it gets its information from imperialism so that it can confirm it and send it back to the arsenal of imperialism in its attack against the Communists. As always, it is the revisionists who are complicit in this process.
Propelling a myth that the Peru People’s Movement (MPP) is a puppet master operating satellite movements around the world is an attack on the left within the International Communist Movement. The liquidator claims not only that the US movement received its leadership from “a niche group in Hamburg” but that both portray Gonzalo Thought as universal, yet the liquidator makes no attempts to substantiate these or any of its other claims. Even the unauthenticated documents on the liquidator’s own website do not contain any evidence to support these claims. Here bias confirmation takes the place of credible analysis.
Of course, the liquidator and its revisionist friends zero in on the question of the militarization of communist parties. Maoists adherent to the theory of party militarization, following the exposition given of it by the PCP, do not place it in Gonzalo Thought, but in Maoism, just as the PCP did in their fundamental documents and general political line. If the theory of militarization of the communist party, as put forward as universal to all countries by the PCP, is the criteria for a “cult dynamic” as this liquidator claims, then we are in very good company and supporting the correct political line. The liquidator’s offense on militarization is just a masked opposition to Bolshevism, because it sees in this theory the essence of Bolshevisation.
It turns out that Bolshevism is the real recipe for becoming a “cult.” The theory of Great Leadership predates all but the Bolsheviks, it was them who created the so-called “personality cults” of Lenin and Stalin. Here the views of the liquidation come into contact not only with anti-communism in the naked form but with those in the concealed form of the modern revisionists like Khrushchev and Althusser. “This idea [of great leadership] should be considered revisionist, even as a Maoist” [our emphasis] says the liquidator; it claims that the idea equates to a “messiah figure.” Of course, this becomes in the rotten minds of liquidators, a kind of contradiction with the masses making history. From its ever correct and deep grasp of Marxism, an ideology the liquidator has admittedly abandoned, comes the claim that “collective leadership is the general Marxist principle” and that it is “a cult principle having a great leader.” Of course, “anything can become a cult” it claims, but Maoism “makes it easier.” There is a lot of manure to shovel here. Let’s get to it.
What did Chairman Mao, as leader of the Communist Party of China, respond to Khrushchev’s and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s attack on the so-called “personality cult” of Comrade Stalin?:
“The Communist Party of China has always held that when... Khrushchev completely negated Stalin on the pretext of ‘combating the personality cult,’ he was quite wrong and had ulterior motives.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out in its letter of June 14 that the ‘struggle against the personality cult’ violates Lenin’s integral teachings on the interrelationship of leaders, party, class, and masses, and undermined the communist principle of democratic centralism.”
Elsewhere Chairman Mao said that “There are two kinds of cult of the individual. One is correct, such as that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the correct side of Stalin. These we ought to revere and continue to revere for ever. It would not do not to revere them. As they held truth in their hands, why should we not revere them? We believe in truth; truth is the reflection of objective existence. A squad should revere its squad leader; it would be quite wrong not to. Then there is the incorrect kind of cult of the individual in which there is no analysis, simply blind obedience. This is not right. Opposition to the cult of the individual may also have one of two aims: one is opposition to an incorrect cult, and the other is opposition to reverence for others and desire for reverence for oneself. The question at issue is not whether or not there should be a cult of the individual, but rather whether or not the individual concerned represents the truth. If he does, then he should be revered. If truth is not present, even collective leadership will be no good. Throughout its history, our Party has stressed the combination of the role of the individual with collective leadership. When Stalin was demolished some people applauded for their own personal reasons, that is to say because they wanted others to revere them.” [Our emphasis]
In our viewpoint, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and yes, Chairman Gonzalo represent the truth; it is right to revere them. In our viewpoint, affirming Chairman Mao, Marxism relies on both collective and individual leadership and the combination of their roles. As for the theory of Marxism contradicting itself, that is to say great leadership contradicting the masses making history, this is a creation of revisionism. The masses make history, but not as they please; they make history within the laws of class struggle. This is the motor of the process. In this class struggle, according to its laws, the masses generate leaders; leaders emerge among them and are forged in the struggle. The best leaders, those who creatively solve the actual problems of the revolution, have historically emerged as great leaders, who of course are connected to and combined with collective leadership. There is no such thing as absolute horizontal relations in revolution—there will always be top leaders and there will be ones who most accurately embody the entire struggle and come to represent it. It is recognition of this which does not allow for every great leader to be regarded the same; there is Engels on one level and on another level there is Marx!
No Marxist theory of leadership professes that men are infallible; this claim is one foisted upon Marxism by its enemies. Ironically, the idea that errors in practical work require total liquidation is the same thing as believing in infallibility. When real life errors happen, the liquidationists cannot handle it and the whole thing must be thrown out; they panic when those they have imagined as infallible make mistakes. Inversely, the great leaders of Marxism have recognized their own mistakes, self-criticized, and corrected them; this demonstrates a model for all leaders.
Pertaining to the US Communist movement, no leaders have been produced who are or have been qualified to be considered great leaders, not ever before and certainly not now. This has to do with uneven development of the revolutionary situation, and with the level of class struggle taking place in such conditions. We are all amateurs in the US, still struggling hard to learn and develop. In the US Maoist movement, accusations of a “cult of personality” then amount to nothing but desperate grasping at straws.
Nonetheless, we are in good company here, as the above-quoted principle espoused by Mao, quoted above is “a cult principle” according to the anti-communists and liquidators. In this context, the contradictions of the liquidator camp come into better focus—they raise phantoms and chimeras to scare people, they promote their own falsified identities to seek the lime light, they boast and brag, they make feeble attempts to conceal who they are and reveal the personal information of those they oppose. Today it is so-called “red guards” and tomorrow it will be any student, youth, or workers organization which runs afoul of them by being too “cult-like,” i.e. by adhering to actual communist principles. In the name of saving young people from “cults,” they bring reaction, division, paranoia, and police work. These miserable rats only traffic in the interests of the people to give cover to their reactionary practice.
“We did not have a lot of political education” the liquidator claims, ignorant of how this contradicts claims made before about being forced to attend study groups, conduct workplace and community organizing, etc. This, you wretched liquidators, is political education. Even this rebuttal of your nonsense serves as your continued political education! Practice is the thing that makes studying books into actual political education, and this is precisely what they encourage walking away from to “lead better lives.” In the revolutionary point of view, it takes many, many years of practice combined with political work and activism among the masses to have even a sufficient basis of knowledge and this is attained by repeated study of the doctrine of Marxism. No one is going to learn much in a few years, a few lectures, or a few study groups.
Having accomplished its political education free of evil “Maoist Cults,” the liquidator has taught itself “cultic-studies” and is now equipped, for the first time ever, to present an analysis. The listener is given more criteria used by liquidation in the cult frame-up: “Controlling information, controlling behavior, [and] thought reform” are given as examples. All communist parties control the information of their very existence and of course they hold their militants to professional standards, which means all communists have to control their behavior, and communist parties rely on reforming one’s thinking from the thinking ascribed by the capitalist superstructure to thinking like a revolutionary; if they did not do these things, then they would cease to exist. Nothing here is new, the liquidator moves on, adding more to the trash pile of its theory.
The podcast claims “high control groups” mean cults. Lenin expressed that all revolutionary parties must maintain a minimum standard, that the communist party is “the most strict organization” with many organizations attached to it. It is for good reason that the Communist International and all communist parties worth their salt developed or develop what is called a Control Commission, and that once the party leads the conquest of power it maintains organizations tasked with investigating and punishing counter-revolutionaries. These are the classic boogie men for anti-communism. The liquidator adds “authoritarian culture” to the list, while it was Engels himself who insisted that a revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is. It only stands to reason that such a revolution would correspond to a revolutionary culture. “Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?” Engels asks, “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.” There is no rational effort at making revolution which cannot be accused of an authoritarian culture and not be found guilty.
Of course, thought reform and brainwashing are two old school anti-communist tropes based on the ideology of the bourgeoisie being natural and anything else being alien; in this view, the only way people can change is through manipulation and trickery. The revisionist host stammers, “If you are doing something called thought reform you probably are, like, a cult” and asks the liquidator for empirical evidence regarding personal experience with this, to which the liquidator responds:
“[W]ith thought reform or the idea of brain washing... the way I experienced myself was often a really subtle process; all of these kind of cult dynamics start at the base unit of a 1-to-1 personal relationship. You don’t realize how influenced you are by like peer pressure, or people around you, or things that are being told to you, um, you don’t realize you are being coerced because it does not feel like a compulsion, it feels like encouragement or, um, like saying ‘you’re interested in this, maybe consider this, check out this’ like you’re kinda led with your own consent in a way to like, start thinking down a certain path. Uh, once you start down that path, um, there’s different either explicit or generally implicit kinds of soft measures to steer you further down the path and start to suppress any criticism.”
With this criteria, any and all attempts to help a person accept the proletarian world view and class stand over the standard thinking produced by class society in the epoch of imperialism amounts to thought reform and “brainwash.” Any effort to guide a person’s study of Marxism can be condemned under this loose framework. Commandism and coercion are not described here in this individual’s so-called experience. Chairman Mao provides instructions that “Communists must use the democratic method of persuasion and education when working among laboring people and must on no account resort to commandism and coercion.” He expresses this as a communist principle. “Our comrades must understand,” Chairman Mao said in 1957, that “ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people’s ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings. Persuasion, not compulsion, is the way to convince them.” It is plain to see here that the communist principle of ideological remolding is being framed up as “a cult dynamic.”
None of this adds up to suppression of criticism but it is rolled out now by the liquidator to rationalize being a traitor and snitch. There is criticism and there is bourgeois-reactionary attacks on Marxism. Counter-revolutionary work is not criticism.
However, coercion and compulsion are found in the methodology of the liquidators. Their entire informant apparatus exists to do just that—to scare young or new revolutionaries with threats of exposure for supporting this or that organization; holding a banner or passing out a pamphlet is enough to get a person threatened with exposure and slander by the liquidators.
The liquidator admits that the liquidators “launched an attack on the cult based on what we had heard.” By their own admission, they did not launch an attack based upon clear investigatory findings, but rather on hearsay and gossip. The liquidators have made a big investment into their scam by trusting the solidity of bourgeois culture; they think that such empirical and fragmented repetition of “what they heard” is enough to lend them legitimacy. A few people may be swayed by demagoguery and hearsay, but this is a transitory kind of support. Again, one finds starkly different advice from Chairman Mao and would do good to apply it. “It is easy to commit mistakes if you do not hold fact-finding meetings for investigation through discussions but simply rely on one individual relating his own experience. You cannot possibly draw more or less correct conclusions at such meetings if you put questions casually instead of raising key-questions for discussion” [our italics].
When the liquidator states that “we did decide that we should just liquidate this thing entirely” it is critical again that Marxist principles be used as the criteria to determine what is correct and what is incorrect. “To work for unity, or to attempt to bring about splits: this is an important criterion enabling us to distinguish the correct line from the incorrect line,” the Communist Party of China insisted, and further: “revisionist elements are always splitters; this is an objective law...” The liquidator states that “the reason I went in on the cult angle is really a practical reason.” We could not agree more. The practical reason is to bring about splits and sow confusion about communism in an entirely bourgeois manner, and thus to serve the interests of reaction against the communist movement.
The liquidators’ main effort, their only form of “activism,” is to attack communists with whom they disagree; they do not target the ruling class or its police in any regard. They no longer fight for poor renters living in slum housing, they no longer fight for the daily demands of the working class at the shop floor level, they no longer fight the terror conducted by police across the country, they no longer pen articles exposing the horrid and degenerating condition of society under imperialism in crisis, they no longer fight organized fascists who pledge to carry out real abuses, and they no longer show international solidarity with the oppressed people of the world. They do not spread anything but poison to the masses. To the question “Which side are you on?” they have made their answer emphatically clear: they are on the side of and serve the reactionary state, their only pretense is the false idea that they are protecting people from communism. In the immortal words of Chairman Mao, to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing and “It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.”
Postscript: during the final editing of this article, the Maoist Communist Party [Spanish State] issued an important position on this matter. We encourage our readers to study it along with the statement on the Situation of the Maoists in the US by the International Communist League of which they are a signatory. The Worker holds that both the ICL and PCM articles are correct and of vital importance.