What is the Mass Line? How Is It Used? A Brief Primer:
The present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly. — Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”
The leadership method that Maoists call the mass line is one of the major reasons that MLM represents a new stage, both continuity (of the revolutionary project of Marxism-Leninism) and rupture (with revisionism, dogmatism and social-imperialism that was foisted upon the revolutionary movement by the Khruschevite and Brezhnevite revisionist cliques that controlled the USSR and subsequently changed the color of the CPSU beginning in the 1950s). Maoism and our style of leadership represents a rupture with the commandist, dogmatist methods displayed by classical M-Ls. Mao criticized Stalin for seeing the mass line as “tailism” and not taking the masses and their movements as the true key to the building of people’s socialism. While Stalin is to be upheld as a comrade, errors and deviations originating from the CPSU and the USSR that he led were rightfully rejected by the Chinese Communist Party as being counter to the development of the Chinese revolution. The “Western Paradise” that individuals such as Wang Ming and the 28 and a half Bolsheviks, essentially a “Stalinist” clique that Mao struggled with, had its own problems and errors that if transplanted into the Chinese Revolution would lead to its deviation and destruction, as it nearly did on several occasions when Wang Ming’s clique was in control. Wang Ming’s line and practice, essentially was to do everything to the orders of the Comintern and the CPSU. Mao correctly realized that the Comintern and Stalin were far removed from the affairs of the Chinese Party and masses and thus their guidance, while in many cases helpful, was more often than not harmful due to their lack of investigation before speaking. A major task of the movement to destroy America is to avoid dogmatism and errors of Wang Ming’s type and develop our revolutionary movement according to our own concrete analysis of our own concrete conditions. Any revolutionary organization or party that does not conscientiously and thoroughly study these lessons from our past and history will not develop nor lead a real revolutionary movement.
The mass line is, essentially, the method through which Maoists expand and unfold a revolutionary movement in a given area. We go to the masses, conducting mass meetings, discussing situations and problems with them at bus stops, demonstrations, classrooms, workplaces, bars, homes, churches, and wherever else they can be found. Consider the mass line a sort of factory except instead of products, we make revolution. The ideas, correct ones, from the masses, represent the raw materials. Everywhere we go, our task is to ask people what’s going on in their communities and on their jobs. The police are killing people. There is struggle with landlords. The houseless are being suppressed. Alright. What are we going to do about it? This is another thing we must ask ourselves, and the masses. Prating and whining are not revolutionary solutions, neither is begging the power structure that keeps us in these atrocious situations in the first place for some warmed over solution. Maoists understand that the only way to develop a revolutionary movement is to actually go among the people, do research, talk to everybody and collect both correct and incorrect ideas, and develop ourselves theoretically to ensure that we are able to tell the difference between the two. Maoists seek to unite the advanced, win over the intermediate (most people are intermediate), and isolate the worst of the backward. We also understand that many people who are advanced in one aspect (the necessity to struggle against the police) are often backwards in one aspect (patriarchal, display a narrow sense of nationalism, engage in postmodern, anti-communist identity politics that does not recognize class struggle, etc.). Ultra-leftists oftentimes seek to “isolate” people for expressing one or two backwards views, this is an error and groups that elevate this practice generally remain small and have no impact and cannot develop a mass movement. Ultra-rightists oftentimes allow reactionary views to run amok in an attempt to “win over the masses”, for example the RCP in the 1970s outright opposed busing in Boston and ended up in a coalition with local reactionary politicians. We can work with churches, mosques, and others and furthermore we can struggle with comrades from these places to educate them and develop mass leaders under our guidance. Of course, we should not allow erroneous lines to run amok in our organizations, this is why we politically educate the masses, struggle with them, and develop accountability processes. Political education takes place through study meetings, propaganda materials we produce, and one on one conversations we have with the masses. Maoists never miss an opportunity to engage in political discussion, education, agitation, or development. Everyone we talk to is a potential mass organizer or cadre.
The second stage of the mass line process is interpretation of the ideas we gather, differentiation between correct and incorrect. This is why we engage in internal political education, to both develop ourselves as cadre and Communists and to enable us to judge the ideas we gather and what to do with them. This is the stage where we develop the ideas of the masses towards the development of a line, or line of march. What are we going to do about these problems? People rely on Communists to be tribunes of the people, or those who consistently side with them, represent their interests, and serve them because the liberals and the ruling class can not. Thus, our ideas and our lines and our programs are united with because they come from the people themselves and aren’t just foreign introductions from other countries. To be clear, we use the 150 years of class struggle scientifically summed up (aka Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) from around the world as a guide, not as a blueprint. Mao did not take Marxism-Leninism as a blueprint, but he realized that the framework developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin was correct and could be applied to Chinese conditions, with Chinese interpretations, suitable to Chinese revolutionary terrain, to make revolution. So, we use MLM theory and practice as we understand it to analyze what we see going on around us and develop the revolutionary movement.
The final stage is to carry this line we have developed to the masses. Programs, propaganda, demonstrations, slogans, meetings. This line comes from the masses, it was synthesized through our study and understanding of Maoism applied to our conditions, now it is time to propagate, or spread it, among the masses. This is done until the masses either accept it or reject it, in which case we go back to the drawing board, receive criticism from the masses, and change the line accordingly and repeat the process.
