by the Editorial Board
“The Party has maturity comrades. And let’s understand: don’t measure the maturity of the Party with the maturity of each of us. No comrades. We don’t measure the maturity of a Party like that. We do so with the process the Party has.” – Chairman Gonzalo
On the question of acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity of the revolutionary party of the proletariat—the immediate question demarcating the revolutionaries from the revisionists at the current stage of the process in the United States—it is important to begin with defining what is meant by the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the Communist Party, and how it pertains to its reconstitution.
1) It is critical to understand the Party process, that is, the process of development of the revolutionary proletarian Party, the movement to reconstitute it as a whole with stages and sequences. There is one class, the proletariat, which has one Party, the Communist Party, with its process of development, which goes on for a long time, from beginning to end. The process begins with the proletarian movement in the United States, beginning with the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the US South and their conversion into wage laborers and landless-peasants. Karl Marx indicated: “In the United States of North America every independent workers movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” So this is where the revolutionary proletarian movement begins in this country, and consequently, where the Party process begins.
The process makes leaps in stages. The first stage: the struggle to constitute the Party, marked by the two-line struggle inside of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, guided by developments in the World Proletarian Revolution, specifically the October Revolution. The second stage: the struggle between revolution and revisionism internal to the Communist Party of the United States, marked by factionalism, with advances and retreats, eventually succumbing to revisionism, resulting in its liquidation. The third stage: the current stage in which the struggle between liquidation and reconstitution is the main struggle for the Communists. This is one process, with stages, and with sequences within a stage, because there is one class, the proletariat, which is the basic force and the leading force of the US front of the World Proletarian Revolution, manifesting in the socialist type of revolution.
2) It is critical to understand the injury to the class robbed of its Party, made worse by the lack of unity among Maoists. Class is not simply a question of economics, this is economic subjectivism. The economic relationship to production is the substrate from which politics and ideology grow, so the classes principally express themselves in this way. The masses and the proletariat will remain in a state of ideological and political backwardness without the revolutionary armed intervention of the Communist Party. The Communist Party is necessary to transform the politics and ideology of those with a proletarian relationship to production, guiding the thought and action of the class, transforming the working people into class-conscious proletarians, developing their revolutionary impulse and acting as a lever among them, resulting in leaps. This fact of the process can only be understood as mediated through armed struggle, gun in hand. There can be no separations, no walls erected between accumulation of masses and intensification of class struggle. The class expresses itself economically, and this provides the basis for its experience and outlook, but it expresses itself politically and ideologically as well. The principal question is not its economic expression but its political and ideological expression.
3) It is critical to understand that the revolutionary situation in the world exists in relative uneven development. The great Lenin expresses that history forges the fighters necessary to make revolution. This has to be considered within the law of contradiction, expressing itself in uneven development. The main contradiction in the world today is the contradiction between the oppressed nations and imperialism, with US imperialism struggling to maintain its status as the sole-hegemonic imperialist superpower. This is how it is, we cannot conceive of any other process than the revolution emanating first from the Third World, and reality confirms this in abundance. Where has the revolution been made or made great leaps in the first world countries? Following this, the amateurishness and lack of Great Leadership—which is produced by the Party process—in the US has to be understood; it is made worse by the fact that the US is solely hegemonic. There is the role of the individual in history and where leadership emerges; this is to say, the particularities of the US cannot but reach a certain level, it can and will produce leaders, collective and individual leadership, but it cannot produce the quantity and quality of leaders like the storm-centers can. Consequently, with more leaders emerging in the Third World, with more reconstitution and constitution of the communist parties in the storm centers, and above all, with more people’s wars and the conquest and defense of political power, the situations become more favorable in the imperialist countries. Revolutionaries must grasp this and apply the ideology with it in mind. This requires humility and emphatic rejection of the sectarianism of small groups, and specifically rejection of the chauvinism of Avakianism, the main contemporary type of revisionism emanating from the US.
4) It is critical to understand the Party as a contradiction. All organizations of the proletariat, including the revolutionary nuclei at whatever stage of organic development, are also a contradiction. Each organism contains a process of struggle, between the Left and the Right, that are not born fully formed and are formed in two-line struggle. Not ten lines, not 3 lines, but two lines. Why do we keep saying this? Because the two-line struggle is the reflection of the class struggle within the organism, it is a process of forming the proletarian and non-proletarian (bourgeois or mainly bourgeois) lines, just two, because it expresses the two worldviews at the heart of class society—the exploiter and the exploited.
No political line is immediate, it is mediated through class struggle and two-line struggle. It is in the struggle against incorrect ideas that the Left line develops, learns to understand itself and assert itself; it is in the struggle for incorrect ideas in which the Right gains its identity in contention with the Left. The goal of two-line struggle is unity, to prevent the formation of a Right Opportunist Line and assure that the organization is led by the correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line with the correct policy. Marxists consistently oppose splits, they never work toward them or accept them as a solution. On the question of the organic concept, this is the line of demarcation between the revolutionaries and the revisionists: the revolutionaries always and consistently work against splits, and for unity, while revisionism always seeks splits and works against unity. In the event of a split, the Left must self-criticize and learn from its mistakes, it must never whine about its circumstance, it must comprehend how it was routed by the Right, grasping its own errors in order to correct them; it must turn a bad thing into a good thing. The Left must always seek to prevent splits, and when they happen, to make the best of it and overcome the now external Right.
The internal contradiction within the organism is what moves it in its process of development: toward the vanguard Party of the new type—which through war can conquer and defend power, accumulating the masses—or toward liquidation, revisionism, opportunism and reaction. There can be no unity without struggle. To speak of organic unity you must first struggle ideologically for it, you must understand the organism as a contradiction from beginning to end. Ideological unity is of first order, nothing else. From ideological unity, organic unity immediately becomes the order of the day. These stages of the process of the struggle for unity are won and protected through the continuation of struggle, it is never ended. If you do not want to struggle, then do not fantasize that you are a communist, don’t insult the world in this way.
5) It is critical to comprehend that the Party is an instrument. It is an instrument, no different than a rifle, knife, or bomb, it is in the hands of a class. It is not an entity with a special identity which transcends its role as an instrument in the hands of class. The Party is an instrument for leading the revolution and the revolutionary nuclei must without fail conceive of themselves as conscious instruments for reconstitution. But which class is at the reins? This is tied to point four on two-line struggle. Chairman Gonzalo, basing himself on Chairman Mao, indicated that the Party is a weapon, and like all weapons, when it ceases to shoot it belongs in a museum. The Party must be properly maintained and cared for to increase its deadly accuracy. It must fight; without fighting it is a relic. If the Party is not leading the revolution as the axis of everything then it is irrelevant. This, too, is part of the Process, nothing is born as the center of everything, it is a process, directional and incomplete. At the entering of luminous communism, the Party will no longer be necessary; until then, it must be forged, strengthened and maintained in class struggle, above all in war. The Party must lead everything in all the forms and modes possible corresponding to a given level of development.
6) Considering the question of the Party process, the lack of the Communist Party, the relatively backward level of class consciousness in the US, it is critical to comprehend the just and correct principle that the ideological struggle for unity under Maoism is the main way the fundamental task of the revolutionaries expresses itself, and that unity under Maoism is what is essential to organic unity. This is what is required of us in the current stage, in the sequence of this stage in which we find ourselves. No distractions are permissible. The just and correct slogan for the entire revolutionary proletarian movement in the US today is: LEARN FROM CHAIRMAN GONZALO, UNITE UNDER MAOISM. We raise this slogan in the interests of the principal task of Party reconstitution.
