The Liquidationists are Still Liquidating and the Rats are Still Ratting

On the Avoidance of Responsibility by the Liquidationists at “The Masses”

Last October, The Worker exposed how “The Masses” website under the control of Liquidationists Inside-Out promoted police work against comrades in the New Democratic struggle in India, and how when asked for comment, those in control of the website promptly removed the article instead of responding.

Five months later, the opportunists behind this website feebly attempted to clean their hands of the filth of snitching. They wrote that the article in which they promoted police work against persecuted activists in India was “an interview by a former editor of the prior editorial board” in an attempt to distance themselves from the fact that some of those they helped to snitch on were subjected to torture by the Indian state.

The cretins would not take a principled stand against what had taken place. They continued, “SfPD [Students for People’s Democracy] is considered by many in the Indian revolutionary mass movement to be engaging in liquidationism, opportunism and red-tagging. This interview concerned a case of sexual harassment within the publication Nazariya Magazine. This article, written and published at the discretion of the prior editorial board, did not engage in a full and comprehensive review of the facts and parties involved. Instead it haphazardly intervened from afar into the internal two-line struggle of another country’s revolutionary movement in a haphazard way which was fundamentally incorrect and did not seek truth from facts. Thus, for the prior editorial board to have uncritically platformed SfPD, was to platform liquidationism, and we reject the prior article.”

This is not a self-criticism. It is an avoidance of responsibility “in a haphazard way.” At no point do the so-called new editors condemn the police work. They simply suggest that “many in the Indian revolutionary mass movement”—not the so-called new editorial board—consider SfPD to be rats. The so-called new editors omit the fact these “many” actually include Nazariya as well numerous established Indian revolutionary organizations with prestige and credibility.

What is more, they blame the old editors without expressing what became of them, how the website has come under the control of this “new editorial board”, and how this mistake of platforming snitches is corrected, sweeping it under the rug. They do not express why the snitch article remained on their website for over a year until The Worker asked for a statement, nor why they removed it then without comment and only five months later issue this pathetic attempt to avoid responsibility.

The reality is “The Masses”, in its own words “the official news organ of the People’s Defense Committee”, is like the rest of the septic tank in which it resides since the split of 2022. They were born in the filth of snitching and never washed themselves of it, and they have never opposed it in principle. Instead, their bourgeois ideology is that snitching is a legitimate means by which a movement can self-regulate against so called “abuse”, in other words a postmodern rejection of principle.

By elevating interpersonal contradictions to an extreme degree, following extreme individualism, which is part of the general ideological decomposition of imperialism, the postmodernists and our Right deviationists and liquidationists over at “The Masses” and all similar outfits consider it fair game to “expose abusers” and focus on sex-based allegations as if this were the principle contradiction in the societies in which they reside.

The fact that they resort to call-outs only indicates their organizational impotency. As the comrades in India point out, real regulatory bodies and people’s courts exist in India where the People’s War has conquered power. So such impotency among the Rightists amounts to relying on the state to resolve their problems. Having been the product of this same kind of police work, “The Masses” and the “PDC” are ill-equipped to actually denounce call-outs, public doxxing, and red-tagging. While they might refrain to some extent on their websites, as individuals and all over social media they continue doing this against the revolutionaries in their own country, based on the same postmodern criteria that rejects Marxism.

This same ideological deviation is evidenced by the fact that the liquidationists in the US who operate “The Masses” today consider the issue at hand not the fact that their website platformed and legitimized snitches, but that they “haphazardly intervened from afar into the internal two-line struggle of another country’s revolutionary movement in a haphazard way”. In other words, they do not reject police work in principle, but opportunistically word their denunciation to justify continuing police work domestically while searching for international support.

We should be extremely clear, since our liquidationists like to squirm around in the dark, adjusting things till they bear no responsibility and persist in their errors: SNITCHING AND POLICE WORK ARE NOT PART OF TWO-LINE STRUGGLE! It is important to note that the so-called new editors of “The Masses” fail completely to identify “SfPD” as rats, and this is because they operate on the same postmodern criteria in the US as SfPD is in India. They lack even basic principles.

To release the names and identities of targeted activists, especially revolutionaries, and to suggest their affiliations with targeted movements, is police work. It is not two-line struggle. This is not only what the “SfPD” rats have done, but it is exactly what their allies in the US continue doing. Two-line struggle is non-antagonistic; it is to be handled like a contradiction among the people, whereas snitching is to rely on a contradiction between the classes, between the people on the one hand and the state on the other. No matter the intention, public call-outs of activists and revolutionaries for allegations of sexual harassment (which is not what “SfPD” actually accused Nazariya of) or abuse always amounts to police work because as long as it transpires under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie it will always be used to target the peoples struggles with repression.

One way liquidationists use call-outs is to discredit and then dismantle revolutionary organizations. In a word, it is a dejected response from the petty bourgeoisie to revolutionary setbacks that serves to damage not only organizations but Marxism itself to the benefit of the old state. This is why it is called liquidationism. Postmodernist bourgeois ideological deviations all invariably embody this type of liquidationism and they must be destroyed root and stem. It is precisely for this reason that the US government and particularly the CIA have spent decades undermining Marxism at campuses across the world and replacing it with postmodernism, to spread this corrosive disease through the vacillating petty-bourgeoisie and wreck progressive and revolutionary movements.

What determines if a social contradiction is a contradiction among the people or between the people and enemy? Chairman Mao provides guidance on this question. Who the people are and who the enemies are exist in relation to the pending historical task of a given society. Today in the US, the people includes all classes, strata, and social groups that favor, work toward, and stand to benefit from socialist revolution and the current stage of reconstitution, while the enemy comprises all social forces and groups that are hostile to and oppose socialist revolution.

Contradictions among the people are handled by first investigating the problem. This means looking at the two sides of the situation and examining its present facts and past history rather than immediately jumping to conclusions on the basis of identity.

These contradictions are handled by “drawing a clear distinction between right and wrong,” Chairman Mao says. “The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, criticism, persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression.”

If someone has done harm to the interests of the masses, this by itself does not make them an enemy of the people. During the New Democratic Revolution and socialist construction, Chairman Mao includes the national bourgeoisie—an exploitative class—within the category of people. Even though this class is actively harming the masses, the principal aspect of this class during such a period is their opposition to imperialism, and therefore they can be united with.

“Thus we have two hands to deal with a comrade who has made mistakes,” Chairman Mao says, “one hand to struggle with him and the other to unite with him. The aim of struggle is to uphold the principles of Marxism, which means being principled; that is one hand. The other hand is to unite with him. The aim of unity is to provide him with a way out, to compromise with him, which means being flexible.”

If contradictions among the people are not handled properly, “antagonism may arise,” Chairman Mao teaches. If certain social forces refuse to struggle for unity and are not transformed by democratic methods, they may turn into their opposite.

The contradiction between the people and the enemy must be handled in a way that strengthens the forces of the people and weakens the enemy. Public call-outs of targeted activists are reactionary because they serve to strengthen the enemy by relying on state repression to accomplish their aims.

People’s justice means mobilizing the people to carry out what is in their interests against a class enemy. It is a question of conquering power bit by bit; the more power you conquer the more you can administer. People’s justice is not simply a matter of eliminating an enemy, but accumulating forces through that process.

The call-outs of the liquidationists are performative acts that serve the ability of the state to access information, making it police work. Because of the influence of opportunist, bourgeois ideology in the form of postmodernism and their lack of principles, the liquidationists are unable to answer the first question of the revolution: who are our friends, who are our enemies? As such they become a Judas in class terms and turn into reactionary servants of the dictatorship of the imperialist ruling class.

The Right Liquidationists Raise Money for Snitches in India

Our question, what happened to the “old” editorial board of “The Masses”, starts to get an answer with the development of yet another “organ”: “Serve the People Press,” a book publishing outfit belonging to the Right Opportunist camp in the US, formed April of this year. There are certain indicators in the writing style that mimic some of the articles appearing in “The Masses” and found in the so-called “Revolutionary Maoist Coalition”—which is now part of the “PDC” along with the historic Right Opportunists from around the country—one example being putting the US in scare quotes.

When this “STPP” was first generated, it had an Instagram page only followed by those in the same area where “The Masses” originated, and it employed the same graphic designer responsible for the images used by “New Labor Press,” “Class Partisan,” “Revolutionary Student Union,” “PDC” and others, all work publicly credited and visible on the designer’s personal page. The graphic designer has since deleted the logo of “STPP” from his Instagram page without comment.

Due to the amateurism of this camp, the first Instagram account was abandoned because they lost the passwords for it and another had to be created. It was generated with the support of “PDC” supporters already baked into its fabric; this is in and of itself not a problem nor is it worth mentioning if not for the fact that they are still promoting the “SfPD” snitches in India!

The first book of this liquidationist press, “Anti-Caste Struggles for Land and Dignity Vol 1”, is in fact a book by the rats of the “SfPD”, and all profits go to benefit them. Not only are our Right opportunists the Liquidationists Inside-Out platforming the snitching in India and still siding with it, they are now helping to finance it and further legitimize it. They have not only failed to learn from their mistakes but have firmly sided with the enemy. Their opportunist ways see that they still issue formal support from other “organs” in their same camp for the revolutionaries in India. Such support is trafficking because it is dishonest and inconsistent.

Such treachery among the Right is to be expected. What must be understood is that it is allowed to flourish by those who fail to take a principled stand and instead take a centrist position on the issue. This too is a significant ideological problem, a problem of conflating the contradictions generally and of tolerating police work and snitching as at worst a “misunderstanding”. The centrists invariably seek a middle ground between revolutionary principles and postmodern criteria for the sake of superficial prospects for unity, amounting to including rats at the expense of the class interests of the proletariat.

This also manifests when the centrist elements reify abstract principle onto concrete subjects without a concrete analysis (idealism). In other words, the abettors and enablers of snitches all claim that since they are not all individually snitches, the liquidationists and splitters who form a Right opportunist camp, which is based on a common background of snitching, should be patiently struggled with, and to do so we can’t offend them by opposing their snitching.

In most cases, the centrists themselves are the same as the liquidationist Right, only far more cowardly. They agree with “calling out” or “isolating abusers” in principle, but do not want to get their hands dirty by either snitching or condemning snitches, so like pacifists they promote an inactivity that strengthens the active ideological and practical forces of reaction in the so-called “left.” The worst features of the centrists in this country are their historic inability and refusal to meaningfully break with police work, to denounce splitting, to maintain their agreements, and to focus on the concrete conditions. Centrism only nourishes the right, and all comrades must reject it.

More articles will be appearing in The Worker soon delineating the process of development of the Right Opportunist Headquarters and the complicity of the centrists, the question of revolutionary leadership, and more. In the current conditions, it is imperative for the interests of the class to violently break with postmodern criteria, including police work, call-out culture, and all forms of snitching. This includes domestically and internationally. Boycott the wares of postmodernism and sectarianism and do not supply resources or information to the unprincipled rats who have not developed an ounce of Marxism in thought or action. We ask our readers to not only boycott “Serve the People Press” but to actively expose the snitches and their collaborators and struggle against them.

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