by the Editorial Board
Revolutionary greetings to the Student comrades,
Our response to the polemic issued by New Labor Press can be found here.
We applaud the fact that you remain dedicated militants in the solidarity movement for Palestine and specifically that you raise your voices and actions against imperialism and for the self-determination of the Palestinian people in glorious support of their just armed struggle.
We recognize that you comrades correctly insist on revolution being the best and highest expression of applied internationalism. We further acknowledge that you demonstrate what makes a youth revolutionary or not by your integration into the masses and their struggles in both the student front and the international solidarity movement.
You comrades correctly insist that to be pro-Palestine in the fullest sense, in the most rational manner, means being anti-imperialist and not accepting a single platform of vague human rights or simplistic nationalism. We recognize you comrades as newly fledged revolutionaries who are earning great and invaluable experience in the fight against Zionism, the police apparatus, revisionism, and imperialism.
On the basis of these firm agreements and recognition we offer the following analysis and disagreements in the interests of convincing you comrades of a few important points which, if taken up, will certainly improve your theory and practice.
Genocide is not just a policy as your statement insists. Genocide is a tool or method; it is also a necessary reflex to maintain hegemony over the domination of the world by US imperialism. Policies can lead to genocide and there are genocidal policies, but policies can also be changed and altered without the use of armed struggle. Genocide on the other hand cannot be stopped by a new policy as it is the response to armed struggle, a crisis response of a cornered monster. It is not a mere policy choice made by that monster—it is its very nature.
Please take into consideration what was said by Chairman Gonzalo: “from the moment the people take up arms to overthrow the old order, from that moment, the reaction seeks to crush, destroy and annihilate the struggle, and it uses all the means at its disposal, including genocide” and “We know very well that the reaction has used, is using, and will continue to use genocide. On this we are absolutely clear. And consequently this raises the problem of the price we have to pay: in order to annihilate the enemy and to preserve, and even more to develop our own forces, we have to pay a price in war, a price in blood, the need to sacrifice a part for the triumph of the People’s War.”
Our second point is in regard to your language, and, yes, we find language quite important to the question of making revolutionary statements. The language you use is that of academia; when you seek to speak to the masses in justified rebellion and not your college professors, such language is quite unacceptable. Marxism has a common language and this is important—we speak to one another in this common Marxist language. When you speak of “centering” this or to “center” that, you fail to speak as fully-fledged Marxists. When you speak of the “gaze”, the essence of what you are saying is lost in loaded language of existentialists and the critical theorists who long, long ago, turned their back on Marxism to attack it. We revolutionaries must struggle for a common language, scientific terms and precision.
Is it true comrades that “only the people of Palestine can directly defend themselves through armed resistance”? Is it not the case that others can, do, and have defended Palestine directly through armed resistance? We understand that the people of Lebanon are doing just that right now, and that in the 1970s international armed guerrillas carried out direct attacks in defense of the Palestinian people with gun in hand and did so as heroes.
Is it true when you comrades say that “Only we [in the US?] can directly attack the imperialists in their centers of power”? Even if the ambiguous “centers of power” is taken concretely to mean the US itself then we find many cases where “we” are not the only ones capable of doing it. Other imperialists have done it, see Pearl Harbor, and other forces temporarily acting against imperialists have also done it, see the bombing of the World Trade Center. The fact is, comrades, attack and defense is a combined international effort. The proletarian revolution and its base—the national liberation struggles—are international phenomena. You comrades should warn against hard and fast divisions of labor—we fight on different fronts in what is, in the final analysis, the same battle against imperialism. We insist that we fight as part of and in service to the World Proletarian Revolution and that its base force is the wars for national liberation.
You comrades suggest that we ought to “use the outrage sparked by this genocidal policy of US imperialism and convert it into a deep seated all round [sic] revolutionary consciousness among the masses of the United States.” This is a very tall order. The basis for revolutionary consciousness is not nor can it be opposition to reactionary violence far away from a given population; it has to begin with the workers’ own experiences with exploitation and oppression and these have to be linked to crimes of imperialism abroad. You have to begin there and then attach it to the condemnation of what imperialism is doing externally. What must be understood is that the explosion of support for the Palestinian people and widespread opposition to Zionism can and must be a spark that spreads newly forged anti-imperialists far and deep. On this we agree.
On Students
“In a certain sense” you comrades write, “the students can act as a vanguard of the revolutionary movement.” In a certain sense? But certainly not in the Marxist sense! If it is not Marxist, it stops making sense. You comrades adopt the language of critical theory and still struggle with mastery over the language of Marxism, where “vanguard” is quite precise. There are proletarian, petty bourgeois, and bourgeois students. A diversity of classes cannot be a vanguard in any sense. Just as women can be revolutionary, progressive, or reactionary, and therefore class differentiates them more than sex, so too for students. Class differentiates them more than the type of education they are getting.
What is more, higher education comes with the promise to working-class students (a false promise, a swindle) that they will ascend class and enter a higher rung of society. Students therefore cannot act as a vanguard; individual students remain part of the leading and base force of the revolution, but are convinced and pulled away from it. This latter process is what must be resisted. There is no such thing as vanguard plurality. It is a singular thing. The vanguard party is only the Communist Party and the vanguard class—the only class (not a grouping of classes) that can emancipate everyone and free the earth—is the proletariat. And this is for specific reasons. Please hear it from Marx and Engels:
“By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation.” And:
“Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations.” And:
“…the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary.”
The vanguard is that which is capable of leading everyone else against the mode of production. Students have always existed, whereas proletarians have not, and they have a distinct and wholly new relationship to production that allows them to change the entire social order. Communism is not possible without the proletariat ushering it in; it is the last class in history because it is the only class that can emancipate the entirety of humanity by abolishing itself as a class and, by so doing, abolish class society.
We agree with you comrades that because of the specificity of students in the imperialist country, and often all over the world, student movements can provide the least conservative thinkers and be some of the first to be active in many important struggles, that they will provide the proletariat with many revolutionary fighters regardless of class background. However, being early to act does not always entail acting correctly. The students of the May 4th movement in China could go on to help form the Communist Party, but those student organizations, no matter how capable, were limited by the fact that they were not the highest organization of the proletariat. What is desperately needed for the future of the socialist revolution in the US is a class conscious student movement that understands how and why progressive and revolutionary students comprise, when taken together, a critical auxiliary force to the proletariat. Auxiliary is not vanguard, but is necessary to it. You approach this position, but you have not landed where you need to.
We applaud your desires to carry out educational activity among us workers, and we welcome you to do so. However, use the correct method of learn, then teach. As an auxiliary force, student organizations have the duty to support workers’ struggles, just as they have the obligation to support the armed struggles abroad against imperialism. This is what it means for them to be class conscious. As individual students (a transitory condition), they must integrate into non-campus struggles. Auxiliary must be understood as offering support and assistance to the main struggles—which are not campus struggles. This does not relegate campus struggles to an unimportant status. On the contrary, they are quite important and necessary to the training of new revolutionaries in one of several trenches in which the people must battle. We find this formulation to improve upon what you have presented.
You comrades do not need to leave your universities and enter the drudgery of our factories and job-sites to gain class consciousness, nor to become proletarian revolutionaries. In some cases this is necessary for individuals to overcome their worldview—they have to “go down to the countryside”— but when you do this, you will often not be taken seriously and you will face ridicule, especially if you come talking nonsense about centers and gazes. Do not squander your education here where we are forced to work; instead, use your education and whatever income you can snatch to assist our great and difficult cause. You can be among us workers, live among us, struggle among us, and even work among us without becoming tourists in our exploitation. The fact is this: more than we need overly-educated students in our job sites, we need lawyers, doctors, editors, and highly skilled people, provided they learn from us and become both red and expert. Many of you will be poor at working so please be good at law. This is the most suitable way in which you can serve the people and the revolution.
Nonetheless, a greater and greater number of university degrees are useless, and regardless of your grades or talent, you could just as well be thrust into the ranks of the working class and be forced into our conditions; in which case, bring us what you have learned up there so that we can all use it to seize power for our class.
You comrades write, “just as students are isolated on campuses, workers are more or less isolated in their individual workplaces.” This lacks a class perspective. Students may or may not be “isolated on campus” but this “isolation” is made up of concentrating a diversity of social classes on one campus. The concentration of the factories is the opposite. It is concentration of proletarians in large numbers. Here, unlike the university, proletarians are not a minority but come together as a majority to socially produce.
You hope to “bring the light of youth” to our “dark and stale factories and warehouses.” Well, when you get here you will find that many of us are young, and children workers are not such a rare occurrence. It is not the light of youth that we are lacking, it is organization! Bring us organization or stay home. You must begin by giving better study to working conditions in the US.
And what organization must be brought to us workers? The highest form of proletarian organization there is, and one which you comrades seem to take great pains to avoid mentioning, the Communist Party! The Communist Party is where we are transformed into communists, it is where the distinctions between type of industry and intellectual and manual labor are effaced. It is what we are lacking, and this lack is why we cannot get anything; without power all is illusion.
You revolutionary students have a task—one you are not talking about. It is the principal task of all revolutionaries in this country, to taking part in the reconstitution of Communist Party of the USA. All that you do, if it is not for reconstitution, will amount to nothing. Only the Party can lead the socialist and cultural revolutions. Ultimately, student organizing must serve reconstitution.
We provide the following theses on the necessity of the Communist Party:
1) If there is to be a revolution there must be a revolutionary party and that is the Communist Party.
2) This Party must be based in Marxism which today means it must be the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, principally Maoist Communist Party.
3) It must be a well-disciplined Party armed with the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, principally Maoism, using the method of self-criticism and linked with the masses of the people; an army under the leadership of such a Party; a united front of all revolutionary classes and all revolutionary groups under the leadership of such a Party—these are the three main weapons which we must have to defeat the enemy.
4) The Party is the vanguard of the revolution. It is the axis of everything, where the few converge, it is the advanced detachment of the proletariat, the highest expression of proletarian organization, the general staff of the proletariat. It is part of the proletariat.
5) It must be distinct from and opposed to the parties of the other classes.
6) The Party is a contradiction with two-line struggle the driving force in its heart.
7) Where the Party has been lost to revisionism it must be reconstituted. Only the Party can construct its branches etc. and only the Party can build itself in the furnace of class struggle. The Party, leading the masses and its organizations in war, can resolve the problem of the conquest and defense of political power.
8) The Party must be organized along the principle of democratic centralism, with single statutes and with an equal discipline for all and with a single leadership organ at its head, known as the Party Congress. And in the intervals between the congress and the central committee’s congress, with the submission of the minority to the majority, of the district organizations to the central organisms, and of the inferior organizations to the superior.
There is much more that can and must be said about the Party, but this is what we will leave you with comrades and what we seek to discuss.
You have maintained your posts in the struggle of the people, now we must all take part in the struggle to unite under Maoism, in service of the reconstitution of the Communist Party. We eagerly await whatever response to this letter you comrades see fit. It is published in our organ in the interests of collective struggle and to benefit students and revolutionaries outside of your orbit.
Sincerely and with the utmost desire for unity under Maoism,
–The Worker, Editorial Board
