10 Basic Principles of Maoist Organizing
3 min readJan 23, 2021
- Serve the people doesn’t mean handing people a bag of groceries with propaganda. Serving the people means laying down your life for them if need be, fighting alongside them fearlessly, helping mediate quarrels between them, and building mutual trust between them.
- Find weakness within yourself and struggle against it. Weakness means anything that inhibits your ability as an organizer. Fight against self-interestedness, apathy, nihilism, hopelessness and despair at changing situations. How? Root yourself among the people, talk to the people, and engage in regular self-criticism in your collective. The people and your comrades are your lifeblood. This applies to organizations as well. Expel abusers and others who prey on the masses and comrades. Struggle with those who are nihilistic, still have to let go of bourgeois/pb traits, or who are downhearted and disillusioned.
- Be principled, without being dogmatic. You do not know everything, and you never will. There is no “all-powerful”, “omniscient”, “invincible” ideology. When people started talking like this around Mao he laughed at them.
- To win people over means proving the correctness of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in practice, through on the ground work, done in a principled fashion. Many comrades think that correct ideas come from books — they come from practice. People know what they see and they are attracted to success. Constant arguing drives people away, it does not bring them closer. Line struggle should be done in a principled fashion, not in a one-upmanship style.
- Squabbling and quarreling attract no workers. Every American has beef — on the job and at home. Nobody is going to show up to an event or join an organization where the main activity is dumping on other people or quarreling over line.
- Study history. Somebody has been where you are trying to go and done what you are trying to do. Study can save you time and headache.
- It is better to have friends who you can respectfully disagree with yet will have your back than “comrades” of the same ideological tendency who will desert you in your time of need. I have friends who are anarchists who I trust more than many Maoists, and likewise. A good person is such regardless of tendency and you should not drive them away because they are not Maoists. Friends are useful. They can get you out of jail or send recruits your way.
- Every leftist tendency thinks they have the key to revolution. Yet there has been no revolution and Communism has been an organized thing in America for almost a century and a half. Lesson? Be humble.
- Talk about shit that people care about right now. Watch the news, look for bourgeois lies and analyze events through a Communist lens.
- If you criticize a Communist Party that is actually waging people’s war, you are going to be laughed at. Focus on building the Party at home. Like Kwame Turé said, “You can’t criticize somebody who’s doing something when you’re doing nothing”.
