Op-Ed by Farrukh Abadi
In the midst of the present mass movement in solidarity with Palestinian resistance and against US imperialism and its semi-colony Israel, questions have emerged regarding how to deepen and expand this movement to win its objectives. There are always two fundamental approaches that emerge in such struggles: to advance further through increasingly militant actions that develop the class struggle outside the bounds of legality, understanding demands as conquests from the class enemy toward the seizure of power, or to tail after the class enemy and to collaborate with them, viewing the enemy essentially as misled friends that can be won over. With the 2024 presidential elections approaching, a critical avenue for the imperialists to redirect mass struggle into their hands, it is necessary to correctly handle this question within the mass movement.
Conciliation and Ultra-Leftism
The specific dangers a mass movement faces in achieving its demands are conciliation and ultra-leftism.
Conciliation is typically the main problem. Imperialism is the basis of opportunism and revisionism within the struggles of the masses—through superprofits from the superexploitation of the masses of the third world, the ruling class bribes sections of the masses in their home country so that their livelihood is directly tied to the well-being of the imperialists themselves. This has given rise to high-paying positions among the working classes and the creation of a labor aristocracy as well as creating paid activists who are professionally trained to reel in mass movements and channel them toward electoralism, framing the main contradiction as between the Democrat and Republican Parties or some other secondary contradiction rather than as class contradictions. Karl Marx’s famous thesis on materialism—“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”—helps us understand why these people, whose pockets are lined by the imperialists either directly (higher wages, stock options, etc.) or indirectly (grant money, payment from the government or the Democrat Party) gives rise to a special stratum of individuals who will surface in any mass movement and strive to take leadership of the masses in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Conciliationism manifests in a number of ways. It is fundamentally conservative and views the enemy as a friend, someone who can be trusted and relied upon. It is tailist, following the ideological and political line of another force—either the class enemy or backward elements among the masses, which in essence is the political line of the imperialist—and gives up initiative. At its best it is fundamentally unable to succeed in winning any demands more than the masses on their own would be able to achieve through a trade union (reformist) consciousness. Its underlying logic is that if the movement or organization conciliates, then the opposing side—the enemy or the backward masses—will in turn reciprocate this act of conciliation. If we concede, then they will concede; if we disarm, they will disarm; if we tone down our language and stop using specific slogans and chants they don’t want us to use, then they will support our movement and give in.
However, in the case of the class enemy, power does not reciprocate, and such calls amount to demobilization and disarmament in the hopes that the enemy, which makes no such move and which remains in power, will do the same. The class enemy is trusted. This is how movements are crushed and, even worse, how they turn into their opposite and become a tool in the hands of imperialism.
Conservatism is a slippery slope: once you begin making some concessions, listening to the class enemy and viewing what they say as guidelines, structuring your movement and slogans around respectability and orienting yourself to the backward, then your movement slowly starts becoming the movement of the class enemy, a fifth column, the protest police.
Another manifestation of conservatism is tailing after the most backward masses among those who are sympathetic to the movement. In the mass movement today, some fear that revolutionary rhetoric, slogans, and tactics will scare them away and therefore, in the interests of achieving our demands, we should lower ourselves to the bare minimum amount of support for Palestine or opposition to Israel in order to win them over. This often looks like propagating the same Zionist “humanism” that the liberal imperialists have been spewing for decades, that the issue is the vaguely-worded “violence in the Middle East” and that “both sides” are responsible—in essence, a rejection of revolutionary violence.
This view is opportunistic and short-sighted. If comrades disagree about the content of the rhetoric, slogans, or tactics, this is one thing; but if they have unity over it but refuse to implement it out of fear of alienating the masses, then they are doing a disservice to the people by hiding the truth from them. They want to take a shortcut and avoid discussion and debate, they’re not interested in raising people up but want to bring everyone else down to the level of the most backward idea, and hope that if they stoop down to that level, the masses in turn will concede and follow their leadership. This is another form of concession that ends with a similar result as conceding to the class enemy—by orienting toward the most backward elements, adopting their politics and tactics, we turn the organization and movement into a movement of these elements and alienate the more advanced sections. This movement, bogged down in conservatism, becomes a close friend to the enemy and a tool in the latter’s hand. In an attempt to broaden the movement, this type of tailism results in an exodus of all those who are fed up with the bankruptcy of conservatism; what is more, it has become impotent and cannot achieve the demands which it sought to achieve in the first place.
Ultra-leftism also manifests itself in the mass movement, and it derives from the impatient and individualist petty-bourgeois consciousness. While rightism errs by seeing enemies as friends, ultra-leftism sees friends as enemies. Like rightism, it ultimately aims to negate struggle; in this case, by “canceling” and refusing to engage with large sections of the masses who otherwise could be won over through long and patient struggle. Both trends are characterized by rejecting the role of the masses in making history—the rightists see the imperialists as all-powerful while the ultra-leftists view themselves as the saviors of the people. It is elitist and divorced from the masses. Because of the fundamental similarities and results of the two, ultra-leftism is said to be leftist in appearance but rightist in essence—empty posturing to justify the betrayal of the masses.
The Role of Education and Democracy
Education and democracy are important means by which both errors can be addressed and the mass movement can be militantly developed.
Education is a necessary aspect of winning demands and serving the long-term struggle for power. The masses are the makers of history and no change or concession can be won without their active participation. Ignoring the role of education is to treat the people as instruments to win specific demands, to use them as needed and then discard them. In recognizing that the people make history, we recognize that our fundamental goal is for the people to make history consciously according to their interests. Every struggle is a means of instilling and deepening this understanding through the process of fighting for the basic needs of the people that they already recognize while also educating people in broadening their conception of what they need, moving past their daily demands and combining this with the ultimate demand of power. Tactically, this means that the people can only go through the long and winding struggle necessary to win concessions—especially a concession as significant as divesting from the semi-colony of Israel—if they understand this process and consciously and actively participate in it.
All correct ideas come from social practice—it is through the process of transforming the world that we come to understand it. This leads to two forms of education: education from direct experience, and education from indirect experience (reading, listening to a lecture, etc.), which in essence is from the direct experience of other people. Education must take as its starting point the practical needs of the movement, serving the task of uniting with the advanced (the most conscious and active people), raising the intermediate (the relatively less conscious and inactive masses who comprise the majority), and winning over or isolating the backward (the masses united around reactionary ideology and actively propagating it). What this means is using education as a tool to show concretely how the struggle must advance not only to achieve the immediate demands, but also connecting the immediate demands to the long-term struggle for power. In the form of direct education, this means using Maoism as a framework to summarize the ongoing experiences of the struggle to understand what needs to happen next. Indirectly, this means studying and synthesizing the theory and practice of other movements, assessing their correct and incorrect aspects on the basis of Maoism to enrich the understanding of the present situation and its trajectory.
For these forms of education to be both accurate and useful, their processes must be combined with the masses—both in learning and teaching.
In order to properly summarize and systematize the experience of the mass movement, democracy must be utilized. Because reality is infinitely multi-faceted, democracy serves to gather as many dimensions of this reality as possible. The task of the democratic process is to synthesize these aspects with Maoism to most accurately grasp reality while discarding the incorrect or irrelevant aspects. This democracy can only function on the basis of the centralization of ideas, so that the direct and indirect experiences of many individuals can then be synthesized into an actionable plan based on the correct ideas. This is why it is crucial to understand leadership as a political position and not simply an administrative one; it is on the basis of the ideological and political understanding of those individuals that the ideas will be centralized and synthesized and returned to the masses in the form of a concrete plan.
Chairman Mao puts it: “Take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action.”
The process of proletarian democracy should also be understood as an educational tool. In a very basic sense, it educates the masses in dialectical materialism, teaching them to assess the good and bad aspects of ideas from the starting point of their practical implications in relation to advancing the struggle. What’s more, it provides an opportunity to illuminate these experiences from the standpoint of Maoist theory to grasp the trajectory of processes and how to handle them.
Democracy also plays an important function of incorporating people into the movement and winning their support in two ways: 1. It incorporates people’s ideas, deepening and encouraging participation; proletarian democracy teaches and invites people to speak their mind and fight for what they believe in rather than having decisions being made for them; it helps transform people from passive to active, both practically and consciously. 2. If done correctly, democracy serves to reach more accurate conclusions, which translates to better practice, more victories, and more appeal to people to participate and join.
The basis of proletarian democracy is social practice and it in turn serves revolutionary social practice. The synthesis of ideas must be on the basis of centralizing the correct aspects of ideas and not simply reflecting their prevalence; the quality of ideas must take precedence over their quantity. As mentioned earlier, part of the danger of conciliation and opportunism in the mass movement is how prevalent it is, and conceding to ideas simply on the basis of their prevalence turns democracy into a dogma rather than a tool to serve revolutionary social practice.
It is through this process that education and democracy must be combined to develop a concrete plan that serves to unite with the advanced elements among the masses, raise the intermediate, and win over or isolate the backward. A successful plan is one that acts as a lever among the people, incorporating them as broadly as possible and giving everyone something to do while advancing the struggle toward the realization of the short-term goals as a function of the long-term struggle for power. It is one that the advanced will eagerly carry out and develop leading roles within, placing them in a position to raise the level of the intermediate through their concrete incorporation into the plan and incessantly and patiently using the implementation of the plan as a means to educate them and raise them to the level of the advanced through their recognition of its validity.
This plan will prove most controversial for the backwards, and it is the influence of this section of the masses—often times having their own representatives in leading positions or seeking them—that must be curbed or else rightism will become the dominant force. The backward, who are part of the masses but have consolidated around bourgeois ideology, fight with the advanced for leadership among the intermediate elements, which comprise the majority and have yet to align themselves fully with either side. Either deviation—right or “left”—leads to the temporary victory of the backward and the further consolidation of bourgeois ideology among the people: rightism adopts their positions and is in essence a capitulation to them, while “left” adventurism isolates the leaders from the advanced and intermediate and thus pushes the intermediate toward the backwards.
It is through patiently carrying out these processes of democracy and education—and embodying the basic principles in our own practice—that the relations among the advanced, intermediate, and backward can be properly handled in service of both the immediate and long-term interests of the masses. It must be pointed out again and again that conciliation is never in the interests of the masses, not even in the short-term, and those of us who genuinely seek to improve the conditions of the people both today and tomorrow have to boldly and patiently struggle against this trend. Lenin said, “The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”; this must be understood not just in the ideological sphere, but mainly in its application in transforming the world in the interests of the working class, that it alone is all-powerful in its ability to realize both the immediate and long-term interests of the people.
photo: Scene from the Communist Party’s Workers’ School in Pittsburgh, PA, 1930s
