Out of Chaos and Crisis: Build for Revolution

It’s often been said that it would take a crisis to generate conditions for the rise of a real revolutionary movement in the United States. By real revolutionary movement, we mean a vanguard, recognized by the people as such. Vanguard party-building requires firm links to the lowest and deepest, most revolutionary masses. The United States simply must have a real, lasting vanguard capable of meeting the demands the people levy on it. It must be unbreakable in the face of repression, state or otherwise. It must be able to weather splits and defections. It must be rooted in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism applied to specifically American conditions and it must uphold armed struggle, protracted people’s war of a new type for imperialist industrial countries, as the only way to wage revolution. Cadres of this party must be steeled in class struggle, veterans of such movements as the Ferguson Uprising, the occupations being led by houseless working class people in California, and the wave of wildcat strikes currently laying low the imperialist economy. They must not only be masters of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory but more importantly masters of teaching and applying this theory to the concrete conditions of the areas where they live. These cadres must be patient, reject left and right deviations, and capable of building fighting movements that grow, rather than split and wither on the vine.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the piss-poor imperialist response is that crisis. Many political lessons are being taught. People are no longer comfortable, their lives are being disrupted and they are learning in practice the pitfalls inherent within late stage capitalism-imperialism. Hundreds of thousands of people are learning and looking to the revolutionary movement for leadership. We see Britney Spears, of all people, calling for a rent strike. We see both wings of the American bourgeois leadership class being exposed as only concerned about the welfare of their stock portfolios, and the masses are sharpening their knives against the landlord class as well. Demands for rent strikes are cropping up daily, along with organizing to these ends. To the dismay of certain rightists who most likely want to continue staggering from crisis to crisis to preserve their social clout and in many cases their nonprofit-industrial complex jobs, the masses are taking matters into their own hands over the heads of the paid organizer class. We also see the masses simply taking homes of their own from developers and cities. This trend should be emulated, lauded, and propagandized far and wide. Housing is a human right, instead of begging, the masses are taking. We see mutual aid networks cropping up and people are learning, once again, that we are all we have. A $1,200 or $2,000 check from the government is not going to cut it, and the people are making this known.

Now is the perfect time for the spread of Maoism. Revolutionary optimism, the internalization that we all must give our lives to the development of the Party and the movement to ensure that our children and grandchildren and species as a whole live on a habitable planet, must be our watchwords. Wallowing in nihilism and despair are the provinces of the dilettante who was never really on board with the revolution in the first place. You must be with us in good and bad times, because this world does not sleep. Movement and Party building should always be in the forefront of your mind. How can we spread Maoism? By being on the front lines at all levels, spreading propaganda, urging people to organize, organize, and organize. A rent strike is not sharing a meme on the internet, a rent strike, if you really want it, involves building a wide network of support. The more people who are willing to join the strike, the more chance it has of resulting in something other than abysmal failure. A certain few rightists have taken to calling embryonic rent strike organizing “adventurist”. I ask: if not now, when? Now is the perfect time for an ongoing rent strike. This will turn bystanders into activists and revolutionaries. Revolution does not flow from the pages of Jacobin Magazine or from the keyboards of its readers, but from the arms and strength of the people in their millions.

Chaos and crisis offers opportunities, but only if there is a disciplined, organized movement ready to take advantage of it. If not, other forces will take our place due to our own ineptitude, sectarianism, and incompetence. Our calls and analysis during this period should consistently and constantly be exposing the class enemy, promoting organizing at the deepest level, and educate the people in the science of MLM.