Some Thoughts as 2018 Draws to a Close

2018 was one of those years that will be consistently referenced and cited by future revolutionaries as the one which saw the first seeds of their radicalization planted. Radicalization and revolutionization of an individual isn’t the product of harangues or speeches or exclusive and close readings — radicalization is the product of social experience and practice — real shit impacting a real person. Realizing that you’ve been robbed at work. Realizing that that cop was preparing to take your life hadn’t it been for an intervention from a comrade. Witnessing ICE dragging away a migrant mother or getting called a racial slur for the very first time — these are things that radicalize us and make us determined to scientifically destroy this fascist society. The things that happened this year, whether they be spinning your wheels working to get an opportunist elected to Congress only to be fucked over or watching in horror as a fascist massacred innocents in a synagogue, undoubtedly will be marked in many minds as the impetus for them to pick up the gun and put down the ballot and the selected works of the racist Ghandi.

But, make no mistake, the coming decade will be one of crisis and chaos on an unprecedented scale. Imperialism becomes more and more desperate the closer it comes to defeat. It is incumbent on all revolutionaries and progressive forces to study deeply Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and New Afrikan revolutionary nationalist theory but not simply to attempt to copy and paste the conclusions wholesale onto the block. We are not in Oakland in 1968, Manila in 1985, Ayacucho in 1980, or Jinggangshan in 1928. Attempts to repeat the past will lead to abysmal failure. As we study, we take what is universal from our revolutionary predecessors and apply them to our own particular situation, our own block, our own complex, our own school, our own workplace. There is very little theoretical work that seeks to wrestle with the contradictions and issues relevant to the practice of building base areas, building a real revolutionary Party with a mass base, and building a real united front in the United States that is a real united front encompassing hundreds of thousands and millions of people, not a few scattered generated organisms that share a “line” and are known to a few dozen people, tops. This work is what all Maoists should focus and dedicate themselves to in the new year. Social investigation and class analysis of your own community should be top priority. Study of the social forces at play, engagement with them, and sorting real enemies from real friends should be on the agenda.

Maoists in the US are at a unique point. As modern revisionist organizations crumble in on themselves in a series of disgusting scandals and burnout spurred on by the fact that defending social imperialism and rightism is not what the rank and file sign up for, anarchists continue to chase after spontaneity yet never learn from mistakes, and social democracy continue to expose itself to more and more people, it is important to not just seek to capture as many organizers who rightfully defect from these opportunist cretins but also the broad masses, the lowest and deepest of them, who were never wont to engage with them in the first place. This can not be done by stupid stunts like pasting obtuse propaganda in stereotyped Party language in their windows, regular people think that’s stupid and weird and they won’t listen to you. You’re not going to go around shooting at DSA or PSL members and you and them both know it, you ain’t cut like that and you’d die in prison which you’re really not cut for, so it would be good if you try to calm your liver and get in some mass work and principled struggle. Indeed — revisionism is the enemy of Communism, but many of the rank and file do not know why or what these formations really are. Alienating the rank and file is not a Maoist strategy — winning over the mass base and isolating committed revisionist leadership is. This is done through patient education in the fundamentals of Maoism, inclusion in our mass work, and, ultimately, out-organizing and building something better. People join these organizations because they offer members a sense of community and “getting shit done”, until a Maoist Party has formed and proven itself not through polemicizing and sectarian wrecking but through patient and disciplined mass work, people will continue to join bad things and get hurt. Our goal should not be to harass people in revisionist formations until they leave politics unless they are committed to revisionism, we need every potential cadre and mass organizer that we can get for our task. We also need to lose all small circle style thinking and stop the delusion that “everybody who disagrees with my specific interpretation is a revisionist”. You do not hold the sole key to unlocking some mythical shangri-la. Neither does Gonzalo, nor anybody else. Fourth and Fifth and Sixth swordism is metaphysics — Maoists do not look for living or dead gods to worship. You don’t want to be running around sounding like the RCP Avakianites, so enough of the Great Leadership and Jefetura horseshit. Thankfully it’s only the hyper-Gonzaloite crew that ever really believed that bullshit anyways, but any repetition or belief in it is harmful to the Maoist task. Any Maoist’s goal for 2019 and beyond is to unite all who can be united on the base of MLM developed for the unique conditions of struggle on Yankee imperialist terrain, make qualitative leaps in our local mass work, recruit more and more people to the banner of Maoism through patient, principled struggle, win ever more people away from revisionism, leave sectarianism, dogmatism, and delusion in the past, dig deeper and deeper into the masses, make better propaganda and educational materials, develop our theory through study, investigation, and struggle, and build real fighting mass and intermediate organizations to serve as real schools for Maoist party cadre and as fighting instruments of class struggle. The Communist Party of the Philippines just marked 50 years of struggle and its our task to not let them down by working and developing a real party of our own.