Thanks for taking the time to engage this Mike. I appreciate the clarifications and investigating our differences.

First of all, lets talk about conditions. You begin your response by informing us about the nature of communist leadership and the example that it can't be "replaced" mid-war time. Sure. But those aren't the conditions we are in today.

On one hand, I agree that communists should represent the future and struggle out of the process obsessed, NGO minded activists scene. Yes, absolutely.

But this struggle does not mean we retreat home to read Althusser at the expense of ignoring the world outside.

Mao <a href="/http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_12.htm" rel="nofollow">said</a>:

<blockquote>Internally, capitalist countries practice bourgeois democracy (not feudalism) when they are not fascist or not at war; in their external relations, they are not oppressed by, but themselves oppress, other nations. Because of these characteristics, it is the task of the party of the proletariat in the capitalist countries to educate the workers and build up strength through a long period of legal struggle, and thus prepare for the final overthrow of capitalism. In these countries, the question is one of a long legal struggle, of utilizing parliament as a platform, of economic and political strikes, of organizing trade unions and educating the workers. There the form of organization is legal and the form of struggle bloodless (non-military).

On the issue of war, the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries oppose the imperialist wars waged by their own countries; if such wars occur, the policy of these Parties is to bring about the defeat of the reactionary governments of their own countries. The one war they want to fight is the civil war for which they are preparing. But this insurrection and war should not be launched until the bourgeoisie becomes really helpless, until the majority of the proletariat are determined to rise in arms and fight, and until the rural masses are giving willing help to the proletariat. And when the time comes to launch such an insurrection and war, the first step will be to seize the cities, and then advance into the countryside' and not the other way about. All this has been done by Communist Parties in capitalist countries, and it has been proved correct by the October Revolution in Russia.</blockquote>

You seem to be arguing differently, which doesn't make you wrong <i>ex facie</i> but I think the burden is on you to explain to us why Lenin and Mao (and Gramsci..) were wrong and why you are correct.

I respect and even admire Mike's ability to point out major fault lines of struggle, but what good is a diagnosis without the plan to act? You need to be able to use a scalpel too.

For the sake of focus, lets put the question of what forms aside and dig into what is going on outside:

There is a deepening class struggle over local and national resources that the ruling class is removing in the midst of their crisis. Battles over money for public transportation, housing, health care, etc are in fact the issue of the day. War and ecological disaster are happening.

Theorizing about future class struggles and battles is fine, but not at the excuse of not engaging in class struggle today. You suggest that the alternative to not one-sidedly engaging in theory and intellectual work is Ipso facto "pragmatism".

This is wrong for several reasons. I have argued that there is a dialectal interrelationship between studying and practice. That we in fact need both, and why I respect Kasama's serious investigations into the problems of building a communist revolution in this country.

Mike points out the many problems facing organizing today. And he is right and not exaggerating it in the least. There are the Carl Davidson types that argue full sale cooperation with the Democratic Party, and there is that. But there is also dogmatism and irrelevancy as the opposite "graveyard."

I don't believe revolutionaries engaging in elections for example instantly means revisionism. Tell that to <a href="/http://mxgm.org/about/" rel="nofollow">MXGM</a>. But, I agree that using our movements as political capital to maneuver inside the Democratic Party in an opportunist way is in fact revisionism. But we should be more nuanced in our understanding.

Revolution doesn't fall from the sky. It requires years of patient mass organizing, studying, debating and advancing our understanding and practice of revolutionary Marxism in this country.

This means a lot of times struggling with people who are <i>not yet communists</i>. Who don't know whats going on in Nepal, or what the ecological catastrophe means that is happening right now.

Studying waves doesn't mean you know how to navigate them when the time comes to launch your ship. It may help you understand them, but you also need to know how to maneuver them.

Didn't the left refoundationist side of the split in Freedom Road Socialist Organization practically abandon Marxism-Leninism and claim that it is no longer applicable as a science, in favor of a much more opportunistic stance on the international communist movement?

From what I understood, Freedom Road Socialist Organization took a lot of steps back and issued a "critical reinterpretation of Maoism", which basically led to an idealistic view of communist revolution. I'm open to being proven wrong, however.

@ Kassad

1. Freedom Road Socialist Organization split into two in 1999. The minority of the split was the Fight Back! section, or what is sometimes referred to as the Marxist-Leninist FRSO, or what I would call the Brezhnevite stalinoids (to be terribly sectarian)...they were only two districts at that time - Chicago and Minnesota, along with scattered people. I know it is part of myth of the Fight Back organization to maintain they are the proper organization itself, but they were clearly the minority.

2. A lot of what you have written in the span of two short paragraphs contain elements of a lot of ideological struggle across the communist movement world wide. What does it frankly mean to say Marxism-Leninism (or Marxism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) is a science? A science of what? that says what? etc. I know there are people in the proper Freedom Road Socialist Organization, the one often dubbed left refoundationist, that still use this kind of formulation - for my own view this remains just clunky remainders of dead doxa that were reified state ideologies passed down by the Soviet state.

Quick example - how many theories that are distinct from each other exist about materialist dialectics (dialectical materialism) in the so-called "Marxist-Leninist" movement? This conception is the very bedrock of this "science," but there remains one, two, three various ways to speak of it.

Better yet - the your name links to the website of Party of Socialism and Liberation...well are they Marxist-Leninist? This maybe their self-reference, but historically their tradition extends out of a very American only tradition of Marcyism (which came out of Trotskyist thinking) which has little to no adherents in the rest of the communist world.

3. On the piece of "Critical Reinterpretation of Maoism," the piece sits for me (a Maoist) as a meditation on the limits of the general tendency. I don't think it has definite or final word on the subject or represents the line of our organization fully, but it represents the trajectory of our organization as building a post-Maoist revolutionary organization in the country.

<a HREF="http://freedomroad.org/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=253:toward-a-critical-reassessment-of-maoism&amp;catid=164:winter-2003-forward-motion&amp;Itemid=136&amp;lang=en" rel="nofollow">Toward a Critical Reassessment of Maoism</a> by Khalil Hassan

hey Shine the Path your right your description of "the other Freedom Road" is super sectarian and unnecessarily so. I have tremendous respect for the comrades in both organizations, the work folks did collectively before the split and post split. Your entitled to your opinion, i have my own thoughts too. Sometime I would love to suss things out with friends in both groups. Moving forward though folks can still learn invaluable lessons including both groups long time practice of rooting its work in the mass line.

Saoirse,

To be fair, the question posed by Kassad was sectarian in nature.
FRSO/OSCL states in the Crisis of Socialism document that FRSO/OSCL "uphold the science of Marxism-Leninism as an important ideology that can guide successful socialist revolutions in the third world as well as in this country."

But that aside, the rather dogmatic and ridiculous method of making people put their revolutionary credentials on the table is worse than absurd. We should give fellow revolutionaries at the very least the benefit of the doubt that they intend to make revolution.

To speak for myself, I don't think Kassad's comments were sectarian in themselves, they merely repeat a type of ideological talking points and I think we can break down.

On my own sectarianism - it is very purposeful. I know people in the Fight Back! organization that are very cool and genuine communists. But this is an organization that supports China, DPRK, Vietnam, etc. as "actually existing socialism," accepts the legitimacy of the Iranian state (against its rebelling people), and puts forward advances historical revisionist pieces in the defense of Stalinism.

I think people in Fight Back! (and for that matter, PSL and WWP) are better than that, so its important to demarcate that point. They need to hear it in its most brutal and honest way.

i fully support you putting out line and critiquing Freedom Road (www.frso.org). Fight Back is the name of the newspaper. If you've published more elaborated critiques please point me to them I would appreciate reading them. I don't know what a "Brezhnevite stalinoid" is, I suppose I could look it up but its up there with calling folks social democratic hacks, etc. And again I have too much respect for both organizations to get into that sort of name calling. And it doesn't escape me that folks have done this on both sides. but this is the Kasama website and I think we can have a higher level of discussion.

There are good people in just about every liberal, progressive, anti imperialist, and socialist project in the US. But many are in org's with bad politics and wrong line. We all decide which ones are worth engaging with and which others we can dismiss or not focus as much attention to. If we are going to go there - like how this site has engaged the RCP let's go all the way and do it right.

Shinethepath- Thanks for the intervention, but I think we'll be continuing our support for all the socialist countries (as well as elements in Iran and other nations that have an anti-imperialist orientation).

As I was reading this piece on the mass line, I couldn't help but be struck how FRSO/OSCL's theory diverges from its practice. I was a member of the group about a year ago and had been acquainted with members of FRSO/OSCL since March 2008.

In 2008-9, I partook in study groups on the massline and Maoist politics generally. However, I left FRSO simply because the organization didn't practice what it preached.

Let me explain: In the piece above there is a good quote "The Mass Line is not the same thing as Populism, which is a method of collecting opinions and ideas of the people and simply following that. The problem with this method is that the masses often carry with them conservative and reactionary ideas and opinions."

Furthermore: "Tailing is similar to populism. It means just following whatever people know or believe at a given moment."

My experience in FRSO led me to believe that the group was definitely engaged in tailing and adapting to conservative moods. For example, all the FRSO members I met were backers of Obama and progressive Democrats (with varying degrees of criticism). One of my first assignments as an FRSO member was to promote an Obama inaugration event in Jan 2009.

Suffice to say, this assignment left me physically ill. Part of my becoming a communist was breaking with the Democratic background of my family. I hadn't joined a left group to simply go full circle.

Furthermore, there was little Marxist criticism of Obama. I remember debates on the health care bill where members were advocating supporting something similar to the Romneycare of Massachusetts. This is not to say that some members didn't advocate mass actions, but it always struck me as being in critical support of Obama/Democrats.

Despite this, I found the members of FRSO/OSCL whom I met to be nice people with progressive leanings. But I certainly can't consider them Marxists or revolutionaries. I can't speak about the experience of other Kasama posters on FRSO, but mine was decidedly negative. They write good pieces on the mass line, but don't follow it.

Serve the people.

What does this mean, in practice?

I notice that the bus consists of people who believe that the principle issue is the rudeness of staff to customers. A communist wants to know why the staff are being rude to customers. Anyone connected even remotely with the struggles of the working people, rather than engaging in dilettante misinterpretations of the "mass line" as some sort of alien force that will weld Party and masses might go figure that this had something to do with the fact that they are badly paid, overworked, indeed exploited.

The point being that because the workers, in practice, say X is no particular reason why the Party for the workers should accord with their particularist, limited line.

Serve the people.

What does this mean?

"They write good pieces on the mass line, but don’t follow it."

Correctly you identify that this interpretation of the mass line is little more than tailism - but this is evident from the piece, let alone any practice.

B Clinch,

Could you elaborate more? As the author, it isn't "evident" to me how this was tailism. Because I wasn't hawking papers that no one reads?

Patrick

Back in 1944, Mao made a very important contribution to this question. It comes at the end of a speech he made in October of that year. If you do not mind I want to fisk both the OP and Mao's speech in order to point up the distinctions between Mao's understanding of the Mass Line and the one presented in the OP, above.

Mao said:

<blockquote>All work done for the masses must start from their <b>needs</b> and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned.</blockquote>

<i>Emphasis added</i>

Let that serve as the key note here.

In contrast, we find - above - the following, which is clearly at variance with Mao's formulation:

<blockquote>borrowing from my experience bus organizing, we were ready to begin a new campaign and assumed that most bus riders would be upset about the recent fare increase. However, after meeting and talking to hundreds of people on the bus we learned that the largest complaint was about the rude behavior of the bus drivers (and obviously there were were contradictions with that.) This is an important lesson – <b>we cannot substitute what we believe people are feeling for actually engaging with people.</b></blockquote>

There is a lot to criticise here. Superficially, this sort of anecdotalism is not a communist style of work: it is not an analysis of the <b>needs</b> of the working people (let alone an analysis that places the interests of the the <b>working people</b> over and above the interests of other classes that may have been on the bus!). More cogently, there is an abnegation of the requirement to make any <b>class-based and partisan</b> analyses on the basis of the working people's <b>interests</i> in favour of flimsy subjectivism - the mass line is <b>not</b> about substitutions of assumptions about "feelings" for some ill-defined notion of "engagement" (with what exactly?). Sharply put, this is tantamount to the surrendering of the independence of the Party (its conscious struggle) to the spontaneously bourgeois "feelings" of the working people. One way of better understanding the mass line is as the relationship between the Party and class in struggle - it is the unity in action AND the freedom of criticism.

Mao continued:

<blockquote>It often happens that objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will fail.</blockquote>

Perhaps you will want to say - "Yes, this is what the writer was after in the OP - this is what she meant!" But that would be to only understand half the contradiction. Mao adds:

<blockquote>The saying "Haste does not bring success" does not mean that we should not make haste, but that we should not be impetuous; impetuosity leads only to failure. This is true in any kind of work...</blockquote>

And the Fabian cautiousness of the OP, its desire not to "upset" the bus passengers by suggesting (Heaven forfend!) that their view that the main issue was the rudeness of staff (and not the causes of said rudeness) reminds me of what a rightist communist once said to me, years ago, when I was talking of the pitiful level of class consciousness in the British working class: "Oh, but even if there is a wart on the end of nose, one should not point it out!". Really? And when it is not a wart but a bloody great sarcoma that requires immediate excising? What then? Haste is sometimes needed - but not impetuosity. Look at the issue another way: economism (as one Old Bolshevik once put it) is the practice of staring very hard straight up the rear end of the working class - and tailism (one might be drawn to add) is continuing to do so wherever the class may lead one. We come full circle, then: the Mass Line is about identifying the <b>interests</b> of the working people - and differentiating them - and struggling with these (and these <b>alone</b>. It is <b>not</b>, as the OP seems to suggest, a matter of bowing before the spontaneously petty bourgeois class consciousness of the non-Party masses.

To conclude his speech, Mao commented with typical concision:

<blockquote>There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.</blockquote>

I think the OP shows how these truths may be sometimes radically mauled in - as Lenin put it - objectively "being in love with the workers, but in fear of their power".

I might add, without wishing to seem too sharp, that comments to the effect that "at least I was doing something and not just hawking things no-one read" have been the common abuse thrown at revolutionary criticism since the time of the Bolsheviks. As Lenin taught, opportunism everywhere regards advanced theory with a mixture of contempt and fear.

Well done.

Finally, it just occurs to me (I am writing this almost literally "on the fly") that Patrick's rejoinder to my original comment (and the OP, actually) redounds with the awful "feeling" (pace, Pat) that for Pat and his comrades, this thing they dub the "mass line" acted as a substitute for the iron necessity of the communists being armed with the most advanced <i>theory</i>.

It was, after all, Engels who pointed out that the class struggle exists as the aspects of economic struggle, political struggle <i>and</i> ideological-theoretical struggle (I would disagree with Althusser's rather abstruse differentiation of ideological and theoretical aspects of struggle, incidentally). Unless this is grasped, one will have a rather odd (and definitely opportunist) misunderstanding the whole Bolshevik struggle before and after 1917, for example - let along the struggle of Mao and the Party... and these things are rather important to consider.

Before I board my plane:

Mao said:

<blockquote>There are two principles here: one is <b>the actual needs of the masses</b> rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.</blockquote>

The Party leads the masses from wishes to recognition of needs - to being a class <b>for itself</b>. The Party does not simply collate the interests of the masses and then redescribe them in suitably Marxist sounding jargon.

Thank you for posting this, tellnolies! I just sent the link to a group of folks here in philly, a mix of anarchists and communists. I generally use the mass line in my practice and see it as fitting with my anarchist politics. I'm curious what others in philly who read this think, and I want to invite them to participate in the discussion here on kasama.

It sounds almost that the application of the mass line is, in many cases, and to borrow a bit from one of the venture-capitalist entrepeneurialist slogans we hear often in this society, to listen to the wishes expressed by people and then to say, "Really? Is that ALL you want? Is that ALL you're worried about? If you're going to throw down over that, why not take it even further? THINK BIG!"

Does it not sound like what is being teased out here? That the spontaneous expressions of the masses are often of quite legitimate desires or worries, but that part of being oppressed is the fact that these desires and worries themselves are truncated. What is it we see in victims of abuse if not the plain and glaring occurrence of them not believing they DESERVE better, that they do not feel they have PERMISSION to even ask for redress beyond making the abuse less expensive to bandage?

THINK BIG is your friend!