Note: this is a redacted document prepared for public release; it has been circulated in its original form among certain groups and individuals who have had some degree of connection to the effort to reconstitute the CPUSA.
Proletarians of all countries, unite!
The proletarian socialist revolution in the United States, in the bowels of the worlds sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, will necessarily pass through complex and difficult situations. In March of 2021 the Maoist movement and adjacent activist networks suffered a major split, the results of which have been disastrous on one hand and on the other offer a special opportunity to train communists, to teach the class and the masses. Comrade Stalin was correct to insist that the Marxist method of self-criticism is integral to Bolshevism, that it is the method we communists in formation use to teach the class and eventually the masses.
The first question is, who benefits from the split? Following this, how do communists, grasping the law of contradiction, transform a bad situation into a good one?
The beneficiaries of the split are imperialism, reaction and revisionism. We don’t have to look very far to see it. The main objective of the waves of repression, arrests of entire demonstrations and trumped up charges is simple, to set back the reconstitution effort, to spread it thin to separate the militants from the masses and to disperse the revolutionaries. The split has met these objectives.
Harm to international solidarity actions for the comrades we on different sides of the split cherish is the first consequence. It is critical that this work resume or improve as the US movement is strategically located at the vital organs of the world’s foremost gendarme. Currently the setback to international solidarity is most evident in the inability to hold the post. It has been pointed out by the proletarians, revolutionaries and Communists in the world that our movement in the US had a large voice, it stands that such a split has negative reverberations elsewhere. It has become evident to anyone with eyes to see that the liquidationists have enlarged their attacks, targeting the International Communist Movement.
The second consequence is the lowering fighting capacity of the comrades on all sides of the split, the very real people defended by the movement, the poor and working class renters, the factory workers being mistreated, families of those killed by the reaction etc. etc. have basically been left to the mercy of the ruling class. All the positive practical work suffers along with the people it served.
The third consequence is the comrades and activists caught in the middle, who have lost clear direction, suffered demoralization or come to regard politics with apathy. Formerly active elements have lost their connection to the masses or politically surrendered. This is a situation harmful to the class, the masses as well as those individuals who have not been able to hold firm or find their bearings and have sunken into private life.
Who cheers for the split? Sectarians, revisionists, police agents and agencies. The social fascists have all proclaimed that their electoralism and vapid liberalism is correct and with no shortage of liquidationists chiming in, joining or issuing some support for social fascism. The postmodernists have, with so much delight made a crucifixion with all the rumors and gossip. Those most despised elements wasted no time in coming back, seeking a spotlight and spreading their corrosive influence among others. Every strand of cretin in unison shouts, “see! Maoism is wrong.”
For our part, we have nothing at all to fear from being wrong, but because Maoism is not wrong we are armed with the weapon of self-criticism. Self-criticism is exactly what is needed to identify, deepen our understanding of our mistakes, and correct them, all to keep fighting. With self-criticism we will disclose and eliminate our primary errors. This is how we turn a bad thing into a good thing. The fault of the reaction always rests with reaction, identifying our errors in revolutionary work in no way means pardoning the reaction, to give credit to its slanders, bourgeois courts and bourgeois press etc. It is at the same time unthinkable to blame the reaction for our own mistakes, to play the role of victims of a maddening circumstance. Communists cannot do this, others do this, the false friends of the people, the dejected “former communists,” traitors whose existence is already an awful sentence.
Only when armed with the correct ideological, political and organic line developed through the correct handling of the two-line struggle, the reconstitution effort will be invincible, no enemy can halt the march of our class to victory, every quota will be paid, and every debt collected in the glorious peoples war led by the reconstituted, militarized Communist Party, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist Communist Party which grasps and applies the universal contributions of Chairman Gonzalo. Development of correct politics, and better organization depends on grasping the ideology deeper, it is a process, which one moves closer and closer in the course of revolutionary activity depending on class struggle, the masses, criticism and self-criticism. There are no smooth straight paths, the road is difficult. Only by confronting one’s own mistakes with neither cynicism or attachment can the task of correction be realized.
The Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the USA exists, and it will exist until its tasks are fulfilled. We have no doubts that self-criticism belongs to aspect of winning and not losing. We have raised a glorious red flag, emblazoned with the hammer and sickle and we will never lower it.
It is only fitting to begin with self-criticism as such. The Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the USA and the movements and organizations which proceeded it, the ranks and especially the leaders did not practice self-criticism correctly or attribute enough importance to it.
In many respects self-criticism was left as a form of admittance of guilt or error, often lacking analysis. It was something that was demanded but not eagerly provided. This indicates that the ideology was not properly grasped, that the role of self-criticism in the transformation of a thing from bad to good was not emphasized. This is especially true for leaders who shoulder the responsibility for the entire organization, the movement and the class. When self-criticism is weak and not exercised the understanding of it becomes flabby, it devolves into lacking political sense, into apology, criticism degenerates into vulgar attacks, it gets personalized, mistakes are privatized down to the individual, creating more individualism among the entire effort to reconstitute.
Specifically, collective self-criticism of general errors were not prioritized over personal mistakes. If the leaders are not using self-criticism properly, the ranks will not learn to use it properly either and the class and the masses will suffer. This is a critical element to hostile feelings, bitterness, jaded outlooks and the fomenting of sectarian splits. The pressure builds and mistakes persist, then explosion. What else can be expected? Without grasping this, and grasping it fully, one will become a cannibal.
Leaders made a terrible mistake of one directional educational and rectification campaigns which were targeted down and not up. Political education must be prioritized in a formal way specifically among leadership. Leadership was not learning from the ranks and formatted political education in a bourgeois manner as a result. Some leaders learned from years of practice, and some lacked these years but what they all had in common was a top down method of developing political education and therefore left individuals in leadership with no cohesive educational requirements or practice consistently being applied to them. This led to the poor training of leaders and the promotion of administrators who lacked political training to vital posts and this error rests on leadership.
Political education in the communist sense can only suffer when it is cast from on high without also being deployed among leaders who are engaged in systematic study of Marxism. It is essential that communist leaders instruct militants, the class and masses on what to study, on which texts provide the necessary foundational understanding of Marxism and how this, when combined with practice leads to knowledge of Marxism. However if they do not do this among themselves, then things degenerate, and throughout the whole process there must be a connection between the leadership and the ranks regarding what is being taught and learned.
The experience with political education was not all negative; there are many who have developed a much better understanding than once possessed, but it is not enough to get comfortable with it, and what is clear from actors in the split is that they were not grasping the lessons and principles of Marxism. They lacked the ideology. Others understood Marxism to a degree but rejected its essence. With a poor grasp of ideology and the influence of some bad elements, several comrades turned into their opposites or revealed their role as reactionaries and revisionists. This to some degree is the responsibility of handling education and rectifications wrong. What is more important, there are many more good comrades who also lacked understanding and could be taken in for a time by bad elements. The comrades who fall out of work or into the centrist positions, they too suffer to grasp the principles of Marxism and to some degree lack the ideology, and this is the fault of the leaders. It is after all the visible mistakes of leadership which assist bourgeois ideology in making slanders believable, and self-criticism is what transforms this condition.
It is correct to say that criticism and self-criticism were not developed, education and rectification movements were not developed in a rational and cohesive manner applied to all, mobilizing all etc. This created major weakness in defending, upholding and applying Maoism, beginning with the leaders and spreading from them to the ranks. Most problems of uneven ideological development, lack of ideological consolidation etc., are directly linked to the problems above.
A vulgarization of criticism and self-criticism had been cultivated which deviated from the methods expressed by Comrade Stalin and were as a result unable to pass from individual critical remarks to deeper self-criticism. Instead of business-like criticism of shortcomings in the reconstitution effort there was a tendency toward ostentatious outcries against excesses in private life. Criticism would be taken casually and made without scientific preparation and in some case become criticism for sport, a form of sensation mongering. Because of this, a tendency began to use criticism as a witch hunt and this is most apparent in the split. The activity of the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists is only the most extreme reactionary lengths of this error which existed long before them.
By individualizing criticism the most commonly shared deviations and mistakes are camouflaged within the political line and the entire movement suffers when adjustments and corrections cannot be made.
The Politburo was no good at summing up campaigns, at expressing to the Committee ranks the successes and failures of a specific campaign, and this creates another major weakness in terms of grasping and consolidating the ideology. It allows errors to reproduce and persist. It closes the door to the enthusiasm of the militant to improve the Committee by keeping them without good summary reports. Summing up campaigns was done at times but in an incomplete manner, and when it was done discussions of the summary were not organized by the leaders. Hence there could be no rationalization of labor, no focus on principal and secondary tasks, no assessments or insufficient assessments of forces and capability of forces. What is more, the means of doing this were available, internal summation can and must be carried out through reports or the circulation of internal “Party Organizer” publications with a routine schedule of release. When summations were made, sometimes they were made for the wrong reasons, bragging or exemplifying a preference without a a concrete assessment.
All of the above points draw attention to the main ideological weakness, the deviation of subjectivism which is in the final analysis the principal error of the efforts of reconstitution to date and which runs like a thread through this entire self-criticism. Leadership engaged in subjectivism and thus failed to combat it completely among the ranks and instead reproduced it.
From the onset, revisionist, postmodern and bourgeois ideology generally plagued the movement and leadership was no exception. It is true that at some point the Committee and its prefigurations did not know any better and had to learn through study and practice the hard way to begin confronting these with two-line-struggle and theoretical and practical work. The point is not to blame ideological imperfection; great strides were made in the difficult conditions in the US to grasp Maoism and unfurl our flag for the workers and masses to see. The point is to expose how these ideologies emerge and develop in our ranks and among leaders. This exposure is necessary in order to figure out how to fight them.
Postmodernism is an ideology of the bourgeoisie in decomposition. It is a pervasive worldview leading to political positions which wholly infected the Maoist movement beginning (at least) in 2014. It is rooted in bourgeois academia and spread on the internet, passed off as solutions to the questions “unaddressed” by Marxism, the so-called problems Marxism is “unable” to solve, and specifically questions which are tangential to class struggle. These were most apparent in the forms of identity politics, chasing sensationalism, provocation of petty quarrels and politicizing or enlarging interpersonal contradictions and individualism to a dangerous degree. In form, postmodernism came under attack by the left, but essentially even the left maintained postmodern methods of work and vestiges of its world view. At several critical moments, leaders found it easier to focus on individuals among the activist left, or among the communist ranks or even random masses for real or perceived affronts rather than to mobilize the masses in class struggle. Hence a form of sensationalist “ambulance chasing” ensued. This practical postmodernism preserved ideological postmodernism and set standards for Committee conduct which were bereft of Marxism. Not only this but it drew those ideologically committed to postmodernism into the practical movement bringing further corruption and degeneration.
Avakianism is the principal form of revisionism in the broader Maoist movement, specifically Bob Avakian and the RCP’s definition and understanding of Maoism. This is quite penetrating, more than anyone has previously accounted for. The Avakianite world view exists independently of its most acute expressions in the so-called “New Synthesis of Communism” espoused by the RCP today. Its main tenets are as follows: denial of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, as the base force and leading force in the socialist revolution; denial of Marxist philosophy, including the law of contradiction and theory of knowledge; confusion on stages of revolution and the character of imperialism; historical revisionism regarding the right and left of the RIM as well as a rejection of the VII Congress of the Communist International; the role of production in human history, the role of economic determination over society in most cases; and denial of the definition of cultural revolution as the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat and in its place understanding it as an immediate task or a method of problems solving.
Most of the above characteristics of Avakianism share some commonality with postmodernism. They both focus on identity over class in regard to the question of to which masses we go; they both supplant bourgeois philosophy for Marxist philosophy, specifically they deny the existence of objective truth and present themselves as critics of “mistakes” of the communist movements historically; they seek to transform the capitalist superstructure without altering the economic base, or at best the foolish idea that the economic base of capitalism can be changed by changing the superstructure of capitalism; they both deny the role of class struggle in human history by denying the basic fact of Marxism that production in the last instance determines society. Note that there is much convergence between Avakian and the revisionist Althusser, which was also an influence on the movement’s leaders in the beginning of the sequence.
The vestiges of or outright domination of these mistakes throughout different points in the history of the movement have too many examples to list, and they remained stamped on the methods and conduct.
How do these emerge in the ranks of a communist organization? First they exist outside the organization and as bourgeois ideology already in the heads of those inside the organization. On one hand, postmodern or revisionist positions and actions are applauded by lots of people (mainly petty bourgeois) and it is easy to think that by going with this tide you “earn support” but it is the wrong type of support and quickly repels working people. The predetermined positions taken by postmodernism often prevent one from using Marxism to understand the same issue, because the results provided by applying the law of contradiction to analysis and practice gain a lot of enemies. One reason for the emergence and persistence was a hesitation (a rightist deviation) to go against the tide, resulting in many “left” deviations expressed by postmodernism. Postmodernism seeks to dissolve everything into a million pieces, highlighting and embellishing the individual and interpersonal contradictions, privatizing the truth etc. which can only cause endless fractures. This is stamped all over the split, and it is also a problem of leadership.
The campaigns against postmodernism and Avakianite deviations were not organized in a systematic way or with proper study, the leadership’s stash of these same bourgeois ideas were not fully uprooted, only the most apparent forms were ever combated, as if the leaders themselves had rid or could rid themselves of postmodern and revisionist ideas without the help of the ranks and more generally proletarians, and ss if leaders could ever even discover their mistakes fully without broader discussion of the issue. One problem is that an all out confrontation with the postmodernists could have caused a split sooner and leaders had a poor ability to assess the situation for the most favorable results.
A failure to confront postmodern idealism with militant materialism led to sheltering certain reactionary elements, and recruiting many on the basis of superficial bourgeois politics in fashion at the universities who could be deceived by those reactionaries. This creates a bad situation in which insistence upon materialism that contradicts the common sense kind of idealism of the petty bourgeoisie can provoke premature splits. Leaders did not show enough consistent faith in the correctness and omnipotence of Marxism, nor in the best elements of the movement to carry out this battle to the correct conclusion. They did not hold tight enough to Lenin’s “better but fewer.”
Finally, the agitation and propaganda of the movement, and especially the methods exemplified by leadership, were often wrong. These propaganda activities which were wrong attracted the wrong types of people, alienated many workers and attracted many of those who seek to be shocking and controversial, those who seek to strike a pose etc. that is to say, anti-social types. When anti-social elements are attracted to a movement, the movement needs to self-criticize on its anti-social activities and especially its propaganda. So many of the RCP’s propaganda methods which are not Maoist persisted in our movement, and so many postmodern forms of propaganda persisted as well. This includes but is not limited to “call outs,” reckless labeling, hasty responses, and a failure to understand concrete conditions of the masses armed with a subjective approach.
When understanding propaganda and agitation in an all-sided way it is clear that they are powerful educational tools, not only for the class and the masses but internally as well. The method, the idea, and the technical skill of the propaganda all convey a lesson. Hence amateurish propaganda educates comrades in infantile methods and an infantile outlook.
All of the ideological mistakes stemming from weakness in the ideological field caused significant misunderstandings of two-line-struggle (also understood as subjectivism). Specifically the emergence and developments of two lines in a given organism. Instead of understanding development dialectically, a superficial one sided view was foisted onto reality.
Dialectically left and right emerge in struggle, in the contention between two ideas, they are formed over a long period of contention in which there is exchange and identity between them and they develop into left and right respectively. The superficial one sided view is that left and right emerge fully formed and merely have to be identified. Conceptually there was a tendency to conflate things: opinions, positions and individual interpretation or opinion were treated as political line, which again ignores the important process of development within a thing. This exposes a significant mishandling of two-line-struggle, a major mistake in the organization of two-line-struggle and a quickness to label disagreements which have not developed fully and exacerbate problems instead of allowing the deepening and development of exchange to strengthen unity and prevent the emergence of a rightist line which leads to a right opportunist line. This is without a doubt a most significant weakness in the field of ideology linked to subjectivism because it rejects the application of the law of contradiction to internal ideological life, leading up to an end of ideological life and the festering of liberalism.
Individualist approaches made their mark on the conception of two-line struggle as well, leading to a vulgarization in which individual views were elevating into a unique “political line.”
It must be reiterated that the left proletarian line and the right bourgeois or mainly right bourgeois line are always in contention but not born fully formed, that there is a dialectical process of development with a basis in class forces instead of a dialectical idealist conception which allows for immediacy with no mediation. Likewise, deviations have been treated as revisionism instead of mistakes which can be corrected as the great Lenin pointed out. Treating a deviation as revisionism immediately only makes the deviation develop quicker into revisionism; it is dangerous to do this and must be stopped. Those making errors are left no way out, left no method of correcting their course.
The idea that individuals have their own individual political line, and this idea existed tacitly without correction, is one of the stupidest deviations imaginable. It has been extremely harmful and discrediting. The problems of subjectivism are closely linked with the problem of individualism. We highlight here one of the postmodern views that leaders maintained even in their struggles against other postmodern views.
The Committee, mainly its leadership, failed to make concrete the principal task of reconstitution in the context of socialist revolution. This is a failure to consistently emphasize the type of revolution taking place in an imperialist country. Instead nebulous and often contradictory politics were set as a buffet option for anyone disenchanted with the status quo. This is a problem of political line going all the way back to the 1960s. It is most evident in the fact that things proceeded to formation without the goal of establishing unity around the principal task, which is the reconstitution of the CPUSA. Because of this mistake there was poor political basis of unity and in its place there was personal affinity for eclectic work that held the movement together through the turbulent times.
Positive and negative form a dialectic, by uniting on what we are against the movement was one sided. Unity first and foremost requires the basis on what we are for, and therefore what we are against. Subjectivism here leads to cynical nihilism.
Opposite and irreconcilable viewpoints would be expressed by representatives within a single organism yet these were often sidelined and the differences were not exposed and struggled with right at the beginning. Reconstitution itself was in some areas treated as merely another word for “Party building.” Therefore what was correct was poorly applied and what was incorrect allowed to persist.
Without a correct foundation around the principal task all manner of bad political positions could be free to sprout up after the split, including thinly veiled anarchist ones. This goes without saying that the political failure on the part of leaders led to a poor conception of the principal task among the movement and external friendly forces alike. The problem of a Politburo is concentrating a political line based on the concrete conditions of a specific country, yet the Politburo did not devote enough energy to this task; the attempts were haphazard and amateurish. Hence the type of revolution and the stages with which that revolution passes were not correctly reflected in the political line. This is summarized in the following points:
First, the Politburo, tasked with leadership of the whole reconstitution effort, failed to develop a draft program of reconstitution which could be developed into a program of reconstitution and serve as a formal basis of unity, a program which the masses could be organized and mobilized to carry out. When steps in this direction were started, they were halted by pressing tasks which were unable to be completed because there was no existing program before beginning them. Hence disorganization of politics sprung from a lack of program.
Secondly, there were no formal rules or charters based in a program for reconstitution, these things were left to retroactive policy or policy which came after the fact to deal with the problems of disorganization. What is worse is that these were not concentrated in a single document which comrades could study, criticize or challenge. Hence the flurry of policy coming out was treated as one sized fits all, when this is not appropriate for every policy and every rule. Thirdly, without formal rules for membership there could not exist any formal rights of members; the rights of the communists in formation were in some respects established but never concentrated in a single document. They were left in the heads of individuals.
Breakdowns in the links between the center and body and between the organization and the masses were facilitated by such a political line and mishandling of politics. This led to at least two more significant problems: 1) a lingering mistaken orientation towards the petty bourgeois, and 2) an inability to “play the piano well,” both of which can be summarized by saying that the political line being deployed was unable to mobilizes necessary portions of the masses and develop militants and cadres, hence the political line being practiced could not serve the current stage of the socialist revolution in the US or achieve the realization of the principal task.
The lingering mistaken orientation was inherited from the worst deviations exemplified by the early movement: the shifting of the revolutionary subject from what was outlined by Marx and Engels and defined as the proletariat to poor people generally with no regard to production, based on identity politics and US activism dating back to the 1960s. When social investigations were made, production was seldom taken into account, so very little was accomplished in the way of class analysis in the practical work. Identity politics most often filled the void left by this mistake in the Committee’s attempts to answer “to which masses do we go?” While it is true that the Committee made strides to correct this, the correction suffered greatly from ingrained conceptions, from the influence of the right and, most importantly, from a lack of concentrated training material and study to grasp the need for the correct orientation. Not enough effort was placed on this important task, winning over the militants to the question of the proletariat and proletarians of specific importance at this stage in the socialist revolution which itself must be broken down into stages. This deviation armed the right who oppose integration into the proletariat with general leftist-populism and social-democracy.
The concept of going to the deepest proletarian masses and basing communist work among them was correct and correctly paired with auxiliary work among other sections of the people, but it was incomplete due to inarticulate political lines easily decomposed by a game of telephone. The mistaken orientation lingered because of two things: the right and its petty bourgeois refusal to meaningfully break with identity politics, and the left which failed to facilitate the political importance of the proletariat among the ranks. The mistakes of the left are principal here and failed to prevent the rise of Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationism by fully correcting the issue of orientation. This is made worse by the fact that the left itself was composed of petty bourgeois leaders and proletarian leaders who had a shared history with the right in regard to disorientation.
Hence the right will continue doing what it always has, and the left failed to really do something new. We criticize the left. It is important to mention here, that the question of “to which masses do we go?” is properly answered by basing reconstitution forces (once they have concentrated) among the deepest and most profound stratum of the proletariat first, then, when a basis of support is secure and firm, to go among all classes to gain support and spread revolutionary influence, just as the great Lenin instructed, and just as Chairman Mao masterfully demonstrated. In this sense “to which masses do we go?” must be understood in its tactical and strategic aspects.
The Committee as a whole was unable to play the piano well, and this is an important problem; leadership failed to organize political tasks according to importance and failed to train militants to carry out structured and consciously hierarchical multi-tasking. This is true in the realm of the internal politics as well as the external political practice. Many terms have been used to describe it: chasing clout, chasing ambulances, putting out fires and spinning plates etc., these are all true and all did happen, and what must be specifically understood and emphasized is that this happened politically–the matters of most political importance were not grasped and other secondary matters of less importance were elevated. This, as with all problems in politics stems directly from weaknesses in ideology. Hence even though the principal trench was established late in words, the auxiliary trenches were still awarded more political importance. A healthy political line could not form without having been organized, discussed and strengthened in struggle. The focus on personal lives, on individual errors, all the mistakes and weaknesses regarding self-criticism and criticism made this problem much worse. The subjectivist errors and deviations at this juncture develop into an internal culture of sectarianism, which though uneven was a problem of the entire Committee.
The mass line is not a theoretical category; it is not a method of leadership, but rather it is the political line of an organization in regard to the question of mass work, mobilizing the masses to carry out the Party program and fight in the peoples war. This was not understood by leadership or militants alike, and all kinds of unqualified talk was taken as a correct theoretical basis, to the point where what was written by Chairman Mao and the PCP was read on a basis of misunderstanding and became a foot distorted to fit a shoe. Leadership took the “mass line” to mean from the masses to the masses and express the method of leadership, however they understood it as a theoretical category and hence never articulated an actual mass line. Methodology here replaced doctrine and only deviation can occur when that happens. There are those who seek to make the ideology (Maoism) into a mere collection of methods and rob it of its doctrinal character. Here the leadership had been duped by the very revisionists they opposed.
Understanding this error reveals other errors too, the fact that many published political lines were corrected moving forward but not organized in a self-critical way. When the political line was adjusted, the old political lines were just left standing and informally criticized in retrospect indirectly without direct self-criticism. These being left like rotting fruit hanging on a tree were free to infect the newer adjustments. Hence unhealthy tumors were left in parts of the Committee body and leadership failed to cut them out. This is evidenced in the fact that all the erroneous political lines that were assumed to have been overcome: the national line, the so-called “gender line,” the line of charity and disconnected study, Avakianite definitions and revisionism, were not defeated and in fact came right back after the split. This shows that the political line of the left was not carried out to strengthen unity but only accomplished superficial dominance. The most dangerous and significant of these is the line on Cultural Revolution.
Weaknesses and errors would fester and blow up fomenting the split, and leaders acted in a cowardly manner in correcting their mistakes; it was not thorough going. The left learned there were mistakes but failed to carry out correction of them which allowed the right to accomplish a lot of damage, but principally the left failed at educating the class and the masses. A theory of Cultural Revolution applicable to conditions of capitalism was put forward in place of the development of professional revolutionaries in class struggle, a costly mistake. It was presumed that “bombarding the headquarters” was a tactic of universality and this is again, bad methodology and a false understanding of what Cultural Revolution is. For clarity, while cultural revolutions can transpire under the old mode of production on the basis of society’s internal contradictions ex. The May 4th Movement in China, the fact remains that the stage of the socialist revolution expressed by its continuation under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which furthers socialist society along the communist course, cannot take place under the old mode of production.
Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a transcendental perspective, it is the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is transcendental, of course, not a task for the current stage. Cultural Revolution was treated and conceived of by leadership as a task applicable to conditions without a Party and where there is no seizure of power by the proletariat, hence this conception voids out what is fundamental in Maoism. This same revisionist distortion can be found in Althusser and Avakian, but in its most naked form in Alain Badiou. It is as if leadership could not but play act the methods of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in completely inappropriate conditions. Hence the method of struggle was often imposed as if the Party existed and socialism had been accomplished and the dictatorship of the proletariat was an operable fact.
What happens when you bombard the headquarters of those not in power taking the capitalist road but rather of would-be revolutionaries facing state repression, even those making mistakes? What then is a Dadzibao but an apparatus of police work? This method, used against revolutionaries by the PDRL, was the fruit of bad political lines. It was chickens coming home to roost, one might say. It is what necessarily grows from the mobilization of the ranks against leaders who made mistakes which the Politburo had a penchant for doing, most vulgarly in the conception of “struggle sessions” based mainly on one’s personal life and personal problems. This taught the militants and masses that the communist method of correcting mistakes was to merge levels of organization to confront those who made mistakes, to critique one’s personal life, exposing them and their work, to attribute political errors to personal problems and exacerbate interpersonal contradictions elevating them in place of politics and political line. The right did and does this to the extreme but they have only taken a cue from the worst errors of the left.
This is perhaps the most significant practical mistake and it stands to reason that the damage was and is costly. This damaged the Committee’s attempts at rectification and fostered a negative environment of infighting, witch hunts, and fears that errors would result in personal humiliation, resulting in conciliation and concealment. This led opportunists and bad elements to use these conditions to cultivate paranoia and fear to create a culture of hysteria when it was unwarranted. It also let good comrades sink into similar but genuine despair and jump to similar conclusions as the opportunists, who were waiting for their moment to capitalize on the mistakes of the Committee. The left prepared the right to attack them, and simultaneously rendered their defenses moot.
The atmosphere created by this deviation, and even initially begun by leadership, was reciprocal; on one hand comrades lived in fear of being targeted for inevitable and minor mistakes, and on the other hand the leadership, instead of dealing with the problem comprehensively, understood that these methods could be used opportunistically and so remained on vigilant guard to prevent attack against the Committee. This was a miserable condition of suspicions and factionalism which provoked responses deemed necessary but would have been completely avoidable had the deeper errors been noticed, the line been corrected, self-criticism made, etc. The left in essence through an ultra-left (rightist) deviation armed opportunists, wreckers, and splitters. The responsibility rests with leadership who had ample evidence and even clear warnings that this was a mistake, but who in their amateurish posturing and copying stubbornly persisted in the mistake.
All of the weakness in politics, all of the mistakes, amount to incorrect forms of struggle, not only incorrect methods, but also incorrect struggles and incorrect subjects of struggle which bogged the entire movement down, required extensive work which took away from the main field and compelled many to quit the field altogether. Many people who could have been developed were not, and many who could have been mobilized to fight real class enemies were not. This is essentially what is rightist about it, the incorrect struggles took away from the correct struggles and hamstrung revolutionaries and weakened the Committee, its work etc. and undermined unity around the principal task. Left and right here are relative to one another; the mistakes were of course right in essence. What specifies the left here is that even with mistakes in carrying it out, there was a struggle to move things in a proletarian and not bourgeois direction.
The organizational mistakes follow on the heels of the political weakness. These can be summed up as improper or superficial unity on a nation-wide level, or formal unity paired with essential disunity. This is not Marxist unity but a form of liberal coalition which underwent attempted Bolshevisation, an organic chimera of sorts. The Politburo failed to organize two-line-struggle well, failed to carry it out properly, and failed to develop the two-lines within the broader struggle. Unity was at times the fruit of struggle and this self-criticism is precisely regarding the mistakes; it is vulgar to use mistakes to paint a thing utterly bad–the Marxist position is that exposing and correcting mistakes shows a level of maturity, a level of Bolshevik principle which is good. If our setbacks are costly, our lessons must be great, and we are to gain the most valuable thing of all: the correct footing needed to serve the reconstitution of the Communist Party.
A problem for the Committee immediately emerged with the small groups maintaining small kingdom practices. This is a problem of integration into the Committee, however the Politburo tended to solve this administratively out of convenience and urgency, and thus did not solve it at all.
Leadership showed a lack of patience in the construction of the Committee. In spite of the same leaders insisting, against the line of revisionism and “party building,” that construction and reconstitution are not rushed endeavors, a Party takes longer than baking a cake, and even a cake which only takes a few hours cannot just be declared. Leadership did not heed its own advice fully, and was not deterred by the abysmal failures which were already apparent. Positions and counter positions were not developed and properly articulated. In the organic process, speeches were given, delegates formally agreed and nothing in terms of disagreements were accurately considered. Leadership failed to fully grasp that the question of quality of forces answers the pending questions of quantity. A closer study of the history of the constitution of the Communist Party of China makes this issue clear.
Repression and minor victories had more to do with consolidating the collectives under one leadership than it did with grasping the ideology. This is a problem. From the start this error imposed uneven ideological development, poor ideological consolidation. It cultivated a tendency of misunderstanding the ideology and preserved a lack of uniformity among the branches and cells of different localities.
This led directly to improper expansion of the work in improper directions. It was embodied in the continuation of impatient and petulant organizational methods which were expressed in an infantile organic line, which was never formalized but always operational. There are organic consequences for infantile operations and these only accumulated into a leap from bad to worse coming at last in the form of the split. The organic line can be understood as a rush to form organizations, a rush to administer them, and a rush to close them upon failure or set back. This includes over-extension of limited forces to multiple fronts.
There was a rush to fill posts with unqualified forces, important positions being assigned to individuals who had already established patterns of considerable and dangerous mistakes in the past and even bad elements. This is mainly a problem of leadership; conditions imposed by repression meant replacing leaders, militants and cadres, and in so many cases leadership failed to develop the replacements and settled for unqualified or dubious replacements. This was not just a matter of unfortunate circumstances which are beyond the control of the Committee leadership, but a matter of lacking foresight and ignoring specific concerns that were raised by other veteran leaders. Leaders ignored the warnings of other leaders regardless of left, right, and center when it came to placement of cadre. In some cases even the policy developed by the Committee on cadre development were ignored; leaders were violating their own democratic centralism and acting against the very policies they had a hand in issuing. The organic line of rushed development ran away from itself at every turn. The Politburo developed this bad method of organization and could not take a step back to control expansion, streamline work, or slow down in order to be actually capable of fulfilling the most necessary tasks. When some leaders realized the problem, it was too late and leadership of the Politburo in all its iterations have been guilty. In terms of the organic work, leadership could not grasp the principle of an orderly and strategic retreat, and this preserves weakness which degenerates the organism.
There is a problem of assuming the subjective conditions must rise to meet objective revolutionary ones, disregarding uneven development of the situation on a world scale, dismissing particularities of the country objectively and rushing to clone international examples, applying them incorrectly. These mistakes stem from amateurishness and subjectivism, and they amount to an inpatient approach to the work needed and do not accurately examine the political level of the US proletariat. It is a kind of reification in which general theory is superimposed even when the conditions contradict. In efforts to confront right opportunism, which insists on trailing behind the masses at every step combined with an effort to brake their forward motion, the left tended to overshoot their angle with competitive theories not always based on reality.
Here are two bad theories: the dogmatic handling of “learn from doing” and the lack of theory taking its role in practice. So often the poor conception of epistemology led directly to a bourgeois empiricism.
This is a problem of mishandling the law of uneven development, a problem that is clear in the fact that the masses need so much and we have so little. It is the fact expressed in the correct slogan “what do we have? Nothing! What do we want? Everything!” The mistake was in organizing what needs to be organized to meet the objective conditions, the problem of rushing to be everywhere at once without the forces to accomplish the fight. It is like this: a column of enemies are marching on a village to rape and pillage and they must be routed. The peoples forces are weak and the guerrilla are but a few. Options emerge: warn the village and encourage retreat and continue the work among the people standing and fighting beside them if they insist, attack the enemy head on with a losing army, or do nothing and allow the enemy to pillage. Failure to take the first option and a tendency toward the second two options is how the Committee has organized itself and its mass work. Evictions are coming, layoffs are coming, attack the enemy head on. Women must be mobilized as a force for proletarian revolution, attack the enemy head on. Workers at the point of production must be reached, do nothing and allow the enemy to pillage. This has been the practical application of the organic line of the Committee in spite of a few genuine attempts, and no amount of hand wringing or insisting that there were those in leadership who opposed these methods can change that fact.
The issues of putschism which the left leadership correctly combated were the results of the organic line issued by the same leadership. This is a complex issue which deserves much further elaboration than this circumstance permits. Nonetheless it is necessary to start in order to open discussion which can and will deepen self-criticism. What is apparent is that leadership and the Politburo did not assess their forces carefully or soon enough and instead developed to confront and rise to conditions when they were incapable of meeting them. When this assessment did come it was already to late for them to do anything about it, and action resulted only in spreading even thinner to confront more problems which hemorrhaged support. Had leadership developed plans properly and carried out their own agreements properly and sooner, many failures would be avoided. Had the entire movement been encouraged to assess US reality and proceed accordingly, rather than bend the stick with which they had to hit revisionism, much better results would have been seen.
The Politburo failed to develop a plan for necessary organic forms for organic control and education, and this is from being too distracted by their own disorganization to appropriately study the problems. Then finally when the absolute necessity of these organic forms forced leaders to develop a plan, they did not carry out the plan and instead prioritized all the wrong things, confronted issues they could not confront without the necessary organisms to confront them instead of developing the organisms. The comrades who could have filled these organisms and worked their levers were too busy on other assignments while, simultaneously, bad actors were being slotted for vital posts. What existed in name only was not implemented correctly and instead of focusing mainly on political tasks the focus was on the personal mistakes of individuals.
So the lack of quality cadres, the lack of mobile cadres, all persisted because control organs were not staffed and implemented, and the education organs were not staffed or implemented. This same issue spreads to the work among the masses; many organisms were closed and the fronts they fought on continued. This ended up with only one organism in many locals without any form of Committee leads involved in them. An implosion prefigured the explosion. The demand placed on militants and activist would become too much, guidance too little, with rules that attempted to be fire extinguishers once the damage had already been done.
When things began to come apart, there was no one who could be deployed to correct mistakes, state the truth, to self-criticize, or to confront outright lies. This is a major problem at the feet of the Politburo, and a problem of their own making. Investigations were lopsided or false. As a result, fact finding meetings were prevented by liquidators and pressure was exerted by them to prevent hearing from both sides when things did not make sense. This remains a big problem, the Politically Degenerate Right Liquidators have carried out their plan both in open and closed forms; they have a few bad elements in active work and carry out their attacks to this day. As a result, some distortions and fabrications have gone unchallenged and become assumed facts by those good comrades who have not managed to investigate.
The weaknesses in the organic line and all the organisms are directly linked to leadership’s deviations from the correctness of Concentric Construction of the three instruments corresponding to the stage and the type of revolution which must be carried out in the US. The matter was rushed. The fact is the Committee was not prepared to generate its subordinate organisms. Once started it is better to continue and formulate a controlled retreat rather than a panicked run. Reform should have been implemented before problems got bad.
This is what can be understood as the putschist organic line of the Politburo which created worse disorganization and hardship for the Committee and movement. What is clear is that unqualified and unstable individuals were placed in critical positions in the work, and this is also reflective of the bad organic line. Whether the individuals in question were either well-intended or engaged in malfeasance, it does not absolve leadership of this major mistake because the mistake itself is not stemming from difficulties in practice, but from a rightist deviation in the understanding of Concentric Construction. The reasons for this deviation are not so simple; on one hand there is little doctrinal material about concentric construction and on the other hand, the Politburo rushed decisions and did not study the problem properly or apply Maoism creatively. So some mistakes were unavoidable and others avoidable. What they have in common is utility in learning how not to make them.
Finally, the Politburo, in its failures in orientation, developed a one sized fits all process of recruitment into organisms and especially into the Committee itself. This is not proper; organizations have specific needs from most to least strict and these vary from organization to organization. While this was understood in part it was not understood fully. A proletarian should be recruited sooner without the longer waiting periods imposed on the intellectuals or those from the exploiting classes. The mistake made in this regard led to a persisting imbalance in the Committee. The composition of forces could not be corrected as a result. The breakdown between the leading body, the Committee, and its generated organisms are guaranteed by this. The training of forces, the composition of forces, etc all suffered from the weakness in the organic field. The Committee lacked healthy democracy in its recruitment methods; not enough emphasis was placed on the criteria established by Chairman Gonzalo to allow the future militant to make the decision on their own to enter the organization where ideological training begins and they are forged as communists. Likewise it has been pointed out that at the first military school of the PCP there was not weapons but books, and this observation holds incredible insight to many major errors made in the organic field by the Committee.
The ground in which Politically Degenerate Right Liquidationists made their attacks was opened by a failure to grasp and creatively apply the principles of Concentric Construction, with the Party as the axis of everything.
The main weaknesses in the three fields meant a weak Committee, and a weakened reconstitution effort. Organization is the only weapon the proletariat has against the bourgeoisie. Therefore, the Committee, should it accomplish its struggle for unity with its many comrades who are not in the service of reaction, must work tirelessly in developing two-line-struggle, reaching agreements and strengthening its core.
Self-criticism to correct one’s mistakes, educating leaders, militants, the class and the masses, is integral to this process. It takes place in the practical activity and ideological life of the organization and not opposed to it. Self-criticism detached from practical work and ideological life slumps its shoulders in surrender to liberalism. Communists in formation must not fear struggle but must conduct it in a professional business-like manner with better organization. This relies on a better grasp of what is meant by “professional revolutionary.” This is one whose profession is revolution–regardless of financial subsidies the militant must first be capable of strict professionalism.
Through a process of restructuring expressed in rectification this general self-criticism serves as a step in reconstitution that represents maturity. Formation of formal grievance systems, action requests, reports and meetings coupled with a formal Committee charter, constitution, and an operable draft program sets the Communists on a business-like footing and arms them with proper channels and proper recourse to go among the masses and it is the masses that regulate bureaucracy and prevent lifelessness. This necessarily means correcting mistakes to turn the weaknesses in the three main fields into inexorable strength. These are pressing tasks, practical ones that demand our attention right now and not some other time.
This generalized self-criticism is intended to deepen discussion on the principal weaknesses and is not intended to focus on individual errors. It is an opening shot, not a closed book. At the current moment of this writing, it is only the Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party which has issued self-criticism for activity of the first stage of the Maoist movement beginning in 2014 and which persists today entering a second stage. It is by the example of the Committee that the best sons and daughters of the class who are linked to other nuclei can take up the mantle of Bolshevik self-criticism and contribute greatly to our shared march forward, to reconstitution, peoples war, socialism, and the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, for Communism–our unalterable goal, forever luminous, in which we all enter or no one will.