Cliqueism is not Great Leadership (a Polemic & a Critique)

The US Maoist movement has, since the days of the Red Guards, the forerunners of the CPUSA(Committee to Reconstitute), been deeply marked with those tendencies it has inherited from that organization’s past leadership and leading role in our movement. We have inherited a lot of good aspects: from the Red Guards we take a far clearer understanding of MLMism and its key theories and its history, from the age of Marx to that of Gonzalo, than past communist organizations, like the BARU/RCP-USA, had¹; we take up their affirmation of the lesson of Gonzalo Thought that revolutionary violence and military conquest-of-power is ever-decisive in the class struggles defining human history; we take up from their past leadership MLMism and the first building blocks toward the Guiding Thought of its application in the US. But the present US Maoist movement carries with it also grave negative aspects inherited from these predecessors, continuing legacies of the old leadership’s errors and abuses.

Part and parcel of the inheritance of our present Maoist movement from this past is the tendency toward cliqueism in leadership. Activist Study (Araling Aktibista), a mainstay text of revolutionary organizing we take gratefully from our comrades in the Philippines, deftly describes cliqueism and its pitfalls:

We need to unite with our collective and learn to behave even if we are not comfortable with our comrades. Forming small groups, cliques or a barkada [this is a Tagalog word borrowed into English, denoting a clique of close friends, in this case one excluding other comrades who are not such close friends] system will also weaken and decay the unity of the committee. We need to be helpful towards our comrades. We need to guard ourselves on anything that will destroy the unity of the collective action of the committee… Some comrades consider only the interests of their own small group and ignore the general interest. Although on the surface this does not seem to be the pursuit of personal interests, in reality it exemplifies the narrowest individualism and has a strong corrosive and centrifugal effect -ArAk, pg 45, 148.

There are key lessons to take from ArAk’s critical notes on cliqueism as a phenomenon:

1. It is necessary to understand what is and is not serious political criticism, what is and is not justifiable cause for struggle, and when it is and is not appropriate for contradictions among comrades in political revolutionary organizing to become antagonistic and develop toward division in the political group. The slogan “the personal is political” has famously been raised by the feminist movement, and in the spirit of proletarian feminism and of “ruthless criticism of all that exists” as espoused by Marx, we in some sense agree with it; nonetheless, however, it is important to understand when personal matters are and are not legitimate cause for political critique, and what personal matters are and are not grounds for setting up or dismantling relationships of political work. Merely disliking somebody (or finding them annoying, or thinking they smell bad, or not engaging well with their personality) is not cause to denounce them politically or demand they change their character; similarly, personal friendship and close association or personal gravity is no excuse to set up and prioritize a private clique within political organizing, cut off from proper open critique and communication with the rest of the organization or committee. Individualist fixation on one’s personal likes and dislikes, one’s personal relationships of friendship and emnity, corrodes revolutionary organizational unity, and thus the building of a broad movement. This is part of the struggle to avoid individualism- we must sublate our personal whims into the collective political cause of the working class and its struggle for liberation, not lionize our personal likes and dislikes as though they were serious political contradictions to struggle over.
2. Maoist thought, the highest stage in the development of the universal guiding revolutionary proletarian ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, has taught us open internal line struggle through organized and systematic criticism and self-criticism, resolving contradictions within an organization on the basis of beginning in unity and struggling toward resolution in a new, stronger unity. If we truly believe in these principles, then we must be very careful to avoid any methods of leadership, of organizing, of teaching, and of ideological line development that negate the principles of open and democratic struggle, founded on a basis of unity and shared Marxist-Leninist-Moist principles, carried out through democratic centralist structures within the political organizations and in alignment with the principles of Mass Line leadership and Unity-Struggle-Unity.

The practice of cliqueism is the deleterious negation of these lessons and principles.

The US Maoist movement must struggle and strive hard to rid itself of cliqueist tendencies embedded in it, which it has inherited from the old leadership clique led by “Comrade Dallas²” in the CPUSA(CR) and before them the Red Guards Austin. This clique performed exactly in the manner rightly denounced in ArAk, and additionally put its cliqueist policy into the role of the leadership of our movement: the “Great Leadership” of the movement and its leading Committee was the clique of Dallas and his immediate friends; “criticism” or rather personal attack was leveled against those not to the liking of this clique (especially in the central and higher bodies of the movement, where genuine criticism was often substituted for entirely unprincipled abuses and punitive measures); lines were taken up by this leadership not based on their correctness, not based on thorough investigation, not based on Mass Line leadership and a rigorous process of going among the people and finding the solutions to their problems within their own struggles and life-activity, but based upon the private whims of the clique itself³; all that was of the clique and its membership was to be praised, regardless of merit, and comrades who challenged its ideas and its members’ central role were excoriated and belittled, regardless of the legitimacy of their views⁴.

While we have rightly toppled the old leadership, and I applaud the work of groups like the RSG (the national network of Revolutionary Study Groups, including branches in Portland, Austin, etc.) in setting a more genuinely Mass Line-ist and Democratic Centralist foundation for reconstitution of a genuine Communist Party in the US, the problem of cliqueism remains with us- for it was in the shadow of cliqueist leadership that the present generation of revolutionary Maoists in the US learned to organize.

Cliqueist leadership legitimizes itself, as it did in the CPUSA(CR)’s case, under the aegis of supposed Great Leadership. For we know, from MLMist historiographic philosophy, that the rising currents of militant class struggle that define the shape and progress of history bring with them a Great Leadership, a set of leaders who embody the rising consciousness of the progressive classes and can lead them ideologically and strategically in their struggle to overturn old political-economic and state-social orders. We look back on Robespierre and the leading Montagnards and Jacobins in France’s bourgeois capitalist revolution or the leading Whigs and Parliamentarians in England’s, on Lenin and the leading Bolsheviks and Communists in Russia’s proletarian socialist revolution or Mao and the cadre of the CPC in China’s, etc. But Great Leadership does not properly manifest as cliqueist leadership! Chairman Gonzalo speaks on the proper sense of great leadership in his legendary Interview with El Diario, a cardinal MLMist text of the present age:

The third important lesson is the need to forge leadership. Leadership is key, and it does not develop spontaneously but must be forged over a long period of intense and arduous struggle, particularly in order to provide leadership for a people’s war… there is no Leadership that does not base itself on a body of thought, no matter what its level of development may be. The reason that a certain person has come to speak as the Leader of the Party and the revolution, as the resolutions state, has to do with necessity and historical chance… A leader is someone who occupies a certain position, whereas a top leader and Leadership, as we understand it, represent the acknowledgment of Party and revolutionary authority acquired and proven in the course of arduous struggle — those who in theory and practice have shown they are capable of leading and guiding us toward victory and the attainment of the ideals of our class.

The Great Leadership, or “Jefetura” or leadership with a capital L, must be forged across time, in the struggle, as the necessary solution to the problems that arise for the masses in the revolutionary struggle. What this must mean is that Leadership, in the manner prescribed by Lenin at the head of a Vanguard Party democratically leading the working class, arises from and amongst the most politically advanced leading stratum of the broad working class and progressive masses. In other words, the Leadership must emerge as the the Leadership as its ideological teaching is recognized and embraced by the masses, and forged in the process of the masses’ applying it, in the active waging of the struggle. This means, of course, that a genuine Leadership in a Communist Party and a movement to establish the socialist D. of the P. must arise out of and in practicing the Mass Line; the communists must go amongst the masses, learn the Guiding Thought of applying MLMism to the actually existing conditions of the masses’ life, and only in this way, actually going amongst the masses and resolving the concerns of their collective life productively and creatively, can a group of communists found a genuinely leading vanguard Party and emerge as a genuine ideological Leadership of the class struggle. The ideas, if they be correct, must emerge from the material struggle of the People; they cannot simply come from a few smart friends.

Cliqueist leadership, then, is the antithesis of genuine Great Leadership, because it entails a clique of persons appointing themselves as leaders arbitrarily, not a genuine Leadership emerging as the People recognize their leading thought in the struggle, as an actual solution to their problems. It does not matter if the membership of the clique believe they have the best and most advanced political understanding; ideology is nothing if not meaningly applied in waging progressive struggle, and the only correct usage of an advanced political understanding by those possessed of it is to bring it to the masses, teach it to as many as possible, and encourage its active application and testing and refinement by many, not a few, in pursuit of building a Party and United Front and waging revolution.

All the incorrect and unprincipled behaviours associated with cliqueism, as criticized and cautioned against in ArAk, become the methods of cliqueist leadership in a political organization- and wreak havoc on efforts at serious political organizing and material political practice toward revolutionary seizure of power by the proletariat.

Cliqueism begins, of course, with the formation of the clique. This is of course simply “a group of close friends” (see ArAk, above), who may not per se have ill intent at all, but only genuine aspiration to grow the revolutionary movement. They will believe that they are of a more advanced, militant, and correct communist and revolutionary consciousness than those around them- and they may well be correct! But their impulse will not be to bring their knowledge to the broadest masses, to apply and test it in waging the struggle of those masses, and in so doing to refine it and to forge an organized body of those masses up to the task of becoming a mass organization or a leading working-class Party of the Leninist type; it will be to gather in a dark room and plan the revolution like a Blanquian secret society, like Rosicrucians, deciding which of the masses’ struggles are legitimate and which not, which are fundamental and which peripheral, without truly carrying out the Mass Line, without truly embedding themselves deeply in the struggles of the working class. They will draw clear lines of emnity and superiority-inferiority, deciding who is a comrade worthy enough to let into the clique’s orbit and who is not, who is a real clique insider and who on the fringes. All of this they will decide behind closed doors, in secret, without democratic struggle, without the systematic practice of criticism and self-criticism on the basis of starting from broad unity and moving toward broad unity.

Once they have assembled or rooted into a political organization and set themselves up in leadership, the above will define the trend of how they lead. There will be an external appearance that the organization welcomes all genuinely progressive comrades committed to revolution and strives to embed itself in popular struggles and join deeply with the working class in leading progressive struggle; in practice, the clique will retain absolute control over what the organization does and does not do, allowing in their friends and subtly discouraging progressive-minded and working class political actors they do not personally like from entering their orbit. Within the organization there will be an appearance of democratic centralism, of the cadre struggling to unite in a political line that has been proven in the rigors of open criticism and self-criticism and in the battlefield of class struggle to be the most productive to the aim of total working-class emancipation; in practice, however, all will be controlled by the clique- elections of group leadership will be decided before they are ever carried out, and the clique will hand positions to their friends, not to those that have proved themselves as leaders before the cadre and the masses of the working class. Of course, a political organization, with iron-clad devotion to a real revolutionary communist ideology and goals, cannot and should not let everyone in its doors, cannot and should not be totally without orchestration and guidance in its democratic-centralist functioning. Leadership of course is necessary to any political movement or group; Mao writes in On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People: “…freedom is freedom with leadership and… democracy is democracy under centralized guidance[.]” But this leadership is precisely that Great Leadership that emerges in struggle, within the masses from their resolution of problems in waging class struggle for a better future and within an organization from criticism and self-criticism, from ideological struggle and unity carried out in a systematic manner starting from and concluding in unity of the class and the movement and the organization to wage struggle against the enemies, the forces of capital and imperialism. It is precisely not cliqueist leadership, control through haphazard means, through gossip and slander and rumour and manipulation, by a little secret circle of friends.

Cliqueist leadership in an organization will happily flout the proper Maoist precepts of organizational behaviour, behaving in all the individualist and liberal manners critiqued and denounced by communists since Mao in Combat Liberalism⁵. Mao writes:

To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one’s own inclination. This is a second type [of liberalism/liberal behaviour].

To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type [of same].

These two passages, together, describe the habits of rumour-mongering and gossip, slander-slinging and division-making. Such unprincipled ways of relating to comrades are the very negation of proper criticism and self-criticism- yet cliqueist leadership will happily utilize them within an organization. Such a leadership will gather every morsel of gossip or grievance between members, and save them up as in an armory, and- when a former insider displeases the nucleus of the clique- deploy rumors and half-truths, devoid of provenance or transparency, source or credit, or of material existence as a real incident, yet in the guise of genuine criticism, in order to discredit this person by means of vague character assassination. Rather than serious political line struggles, the clique will deploy one bit of personal grievance after another, piling on one after another rapidly so that there can be no hope of genuine struggle over any one point. And when the so singled-out cadre of the organization or group attempt to disclaim the illegitimacy of such “criticism”- that, say, one person’s dislike is not a genuine political contradiction- they are further excoriated, for refusing to acknowledge or struggle with the supposed essence of the contradiction, though no such essence in fact exists to struggle with. And so the clique traps the victim of their improper methodology of critique in a sort of Catch-22: if they try to struggle sincerely over this criticism, which is in fact stockpiled and tactically deployed back-room gossip, they will fail every time because there is no real criticism to struggle with; at the same time, if they refuse to attempt such struggle, they are denounced for failure to properly adjust themself to the work of political organizing and revolution. This is the strategy of cliqueist leadership, in place of genuine criticism and self-criticism on the basis of forging through struggle serious unity for waging serious class war, for keeping control over all cadre in the hands of their friends, for eliminating cadre they personally dislike, and for disguising an individualistic sort of barkada as political Great Leadership for true organizing of the masses. Recall that this is precisely the kind of individualistic personal griping denounced in ArAk’s passages on cliqueism, precisely the kind of liberal and individualistic gossip and quarrel-picking denounced by Mao in Combat Liberalism. This- liberal, individualistic, unprofessional, imprecise, and without rigor or dedication to forging the broadest possible united movement of the working class and progressive masses for building a socialist political-economy and state-social order- is the manner in which cliqueist leadership pilots a political organization.

It should not be surprising that organizations led in a cliqueist manner, including the former CPUSA(CR), largely fail to integrate deeply with the working masses in the places they live and struggle and work, to appeal to and win over the vast majority of them, to forge around and in applying revolutionary ideology an iron unity and mass movement of the working class, a Party and an Army and a United Front capable of waging war and conquering political-economic power to build and become socialism and the new proletarian state-social order. There cannot ever be a true mass movement, a United Front of all possible revolutionary interests and a solid leading and scientific Party forged on the political and military unity of the advanced working class, built on the foundation of a mere clique of friends, their mere personal likes and dislikes, their individualist grievances and gripes and desires for prestige. Building the revolutionary movement and ultimately the new state-social order, the socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, requires subordination of the individual interests of revolutionaries to the good of the proletarian majority and all humanity; cliqueism encourages, rather, leaders to lionize and reify their own personal feelings as though they were political line, and annihilate the interests of their comrades and cadre.

Of course it is a good thing to have friends, and revolutionaries and communists should have them. But it was not merely a little jest when, in the El Diario interview, Chairman Gonzalo said:

EL DIARIO: Do you have friends?

CHAIRMAN GONZALO: No, I don’t. I have comrades. And I am very proud of having the comrades I have.

Friendship is not the relationship that exists between cadre of an iron-forged and militant political organization; that relationship must be comradeship. The organizational unity of revolutionary cadre is not, cannot be, forged or overturned on the basis of personal likes or dislikes, or of liberal and individualist gossip, or idle chatter and rumour-mongering between friends. The comradely unity of revolutionary cadre is forged in shared opposition to the class-opponents of the working class and their historically progressive interests; it can be divided in a principled way only on the basis of real contradictions of ideology, political line, and revolutionary action. A revolutionary organization must not be led by a little clique of friends, deciding things based on personal likes and dislikes, based on casual chatter and unsourceable rumor, based on whim and caprice. A revolutionary organization must have a genuine democratic centralist structure and leadership, deciding things and developing a line through scientific waging and understanding of class struggle, and acting to advance the revolution in genuine unity against the class-enemy, against the bourgeoisie and bourgeois state. Such a leadership structure cannot be built around an individualistic personal clique.

Cliqueist leadership is not always as prominent and as overwhelmingly negative for a movement as was that of Dallas and his clique in the former CPUSA(CR). Cliqueist leaders are not always absuive to their comrades, and not always propagators of reactionary views within a progressive movement, at least not egregiously; they may be genuinely revolutionary comrades making simple errors, but with significant consequences. Cliqueism easily crops up when a political organization is small and starting out, since it will in all probability begin as the project of a group of friends; they must take pains that they do not become a clique running things based only on personal whims but rather they are ready to meaningfully sublate their own will into the larger project of working class liberation and thus allow a broad base of cadre to form, integrate genuinely with the masses and their struggle and their will, and allow serious democratic centralism and a political line speaking to the needs of the masses to develop scientifically and through real advancement in material struggle. Otherwise, while these comrades may not be committing any terrible harms to the movement as Dallas’s leadership did, their attempts to organize will stagnate; they will not integrate deeply with the proletarian masses and learn to truly fight in the struggle for their emancipation or to apply and develop ideology for that fight; they will alienate potential comrades and not expand into a mass organization.

I have been of late involved with a small, local Maoist-led political organization which I think sunk into the errors of cliqueist leadership. I will not go into any sort of details which threaten the security of these comrades, because I am not a fool, and because I do not intend to denounce them as some sort of counterrevolutionaries- on the contrary, I think they still have real and valuable potential for the movement in this country to reconstitute a genuine communist Party and move toward socialist revolution and building the D. of the P., and I hope they think the same of me. I should sincerely like to continue to work with the organization, or its members in another form, in service of the movement in future. I must state with all emphasis that I bear them only comradely good will, that I see them as comrades in this cause. But I am no longer a member of the organization because I saw its cliqueist leadership go awry.

I was a founding member of this group, together with two others, comrades and friends. I would say, with hindsight, that we operated less so as a cell of comrades and more so as a clique of friends- to the detriment of our revolutionary efforts. As a clique, we met privately to “discuss” and “criticize”- or, indeed, to gossip- about anyone else in our area who was trying to organize in a proletarian-revolutionary political way, mingling what was admittedly serious political evaluation and critique with what was admittedly snide personal gossip. When we succeeded in gathering up a broader cadre base for building our organization, we fostered an appearance of disciplined democratic centralism, but in reality the functions of the organization were controlled from behind by this clique of three. Persons who should have been potential comrades were prevented from joining because the clique did not like them. Apparent democratic leadership processes in the organization were really clique decisions. Whatever appearance there was of real systematic criticism and self-criticism toward proper organizational and line development was overshadowed by gossip circulated from unclear sources by and between the members of this clique of three.

At the time, in ignorance, I believed we were engaging in proper “leadership.” We were not. In time, for reasons less to do with any genuine political division and more with the personal whims and likes and dislikes of the clique (in truth, they found me annoying), I fell out of favour with the other two members- who had been “elected,” through an election in which all other cadre’s votes were irrelevant next to the pre-decision of the clique, to the organization’s leading offices- and increasingly all other political efforts seemed to be sidelined in favor of their “criticism” of me. Criticism of course is no enemy of a communist- proper, systematic criticism and self-criticism is how we develop our line, how we refine our ability to sublate our own personal concerns into the cause of the whole working class and its revolutionary destiny. But never once in my membership in the group, although I urged both the leaders and the whole membership to do so, did it carry out any kind of actual such systematic, scientific criticism. Indeed, most of my proposals for rigorous work within the organization or for revolutionary consciousness-raising action among the public, though I was nominally a cadre in good standing, were ignored. Instead, I was called more and more often into meetings with these two leading cliqueists where I was confronted and berated with vagueries and uncertainties, baseless rumours that came from no identifiable source and had less to do with any issue of political line and more to do with an insistence that I was somehow unlikeable as a person- these two leaders would continually insist that someone had told them I was unpleasant, or rude, or talked too much, or struck people as haughty, or somehow discussed issues incorrectly in what were ostensibly open forum discussions, which I myself had helped organize; all of these rumours came from the same two people, in meetings which only the three of us knew about, and yet they insisted- despite a lack of any evidence of it, and despite the overwhelming positiveness of my dealings with everyone else in our organizing- they spoke for everyone else we knew, for the masses. So, rather than open and systematic airing of all criticisms by all cadre in service to a greater unity, in an organized and democratic organizational meeting serving the construction of a centralist leadership and strong shared line, we had back-door gossip and rumour-mongering on the basis of which former comrades and potential future comrades were alienated. Recall Mao and ArAk’s advice against substituting such individualist cliqueist behaviour for the real techniques of organizing a broad base of comrades:

We need to be helpful towards our comrades. We need to guard ourselves on anything that will destroy the unity…Some comrades consider only the interests of their own small group and ignore the general interest. Although on the surface this does not seem to be the pursuit of personal interests, in reality it exemplifies the narrowest individualism and has a strong corrosive… effect

&

To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one’s suggestions to the [whole] organization… To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type [of liberalism].

At such times as I tried to respond to these gossips as if they were genuine criticism, new ones were simply conjured from uncertain sources, from apparent conversations the cliqueists claimed to have had- though they would never say when or where or with who or why, and would never air them in proper systematic criticism meetings of the organization, not just their secret clique (which other cadre were not aware of), and always conveniently conjured them right at the moment their last rumour had run dry; when I protested that they were not, I was told off for refusing to engage with “criticism.” At last, in one of these many intolerable secret meetings, after I expressed that I was unwilling to continue hearing that there was some nebulous thing about me that made me unlikeable to- apparently- everyone we knew (though everyone else I knew seemed to disagree) but that they would not and could not explain what or provide examples of it in any real scientific sense that was not mere gossip, I was told off harshly for “saying you’re unwilling to investigate the problem.” I was furious; that wasn’t what I said, and it seems to me- did then, and still does now- entirely absurd that I was expected to respond to “there is something wrong with you but we don’t know what, now fix it” by bending over backward to identify every tiny problem in my own temperament, not by asking that critique actually be proper critique, not simply someone’s idle backroom gossip about not liking me, before I dignify it with response. I had had enough; I refused to continue pretending I was being genuinely criticized in a systematic and scientific matter and not simply being yelled at for being “unlikeable”- and so, I left.

I cannot of course pretend I was always a perfect cadre in this group, that I was never in need of legitimate criticism. I had at times strayed from proper deference to organizational discipline and shown insufficient adherence to a united political line; this behaviour, which is one sort of liberalism Mao critiques (type 4), I was legitimately criticized on, by these same cliqueists, in a manner that, although I still say it should have been and wasn’t properly systematically carried out, was to the improvement of my political consciousness and my ability to serve the interests of the proletariat. But precisely because I had been subject in other political organizations, and occasionally in that one too, to the kind of scientific evaluation of political thought and action serious criticism ought to be, I was able to identify what was not serious criticism but simply cliqueist gossip. Of course it is legitimate for a political organization to take pains to have its members behave properly in organizing and to maintain a united political line and to apply and develop it in service to the masses; of course it is legitimate to apply some prudence to who is allowed to join such a group and to how they are led- Mao’s above quotation from Correct Handling is again relevant here. But I state again emphatically that this must be done by a democratic centralist leadership, speaking for the whole body of cadre and for the line that has emerged in struggle from the concerns of the whole class, and through the proper practices of criticism and self-criticism. It is no such leadership for a clique of friends to simply sit in a back room and gossip on something as individualistic as who is and is not likeable.

In point of fact, criticism and self-criticism- which I have personally seen carried out properly in other political organizations in this country I would call wedded to the international proletarian and peasant revolutionary cause- together with being systematic and scientific, should not have so much to do with our personal likes and dislikes. Barring someone whose personality is somehow compromised by deep bourgeois attitudes or reactionary bigotries- and my comrades in this organization admitted I was not so compromised- criticism should be with the aim of building people up to work as effectively as possible in integrating with the masses and aiding and advancing the cause of proletarian emancipation, and breaking down misconceptions and unhelpful tendencies of political line, not with simply pooh-poohing people you find unlikeable individuals. A political organization is not a supper club; our business is not with individuals, but with the cause of the proletariat, and it is around this and around discovering in struggle the ideology that best serves its advancement that serious criticism and line-struggle should orbit. Our business is with a class- not with our friends.

I very much dislike talking personally about myself on a political blog, for many reasons, one being security. But perhaps I should mention I am diagnosed as autistic. It is no unfamiliar thing to an autistic person to think you are having a friendly conversation and then be yelled at for being “annoying,” or to be shunnned by your former friends because your interests are “boring” or “pretentious.” This, of course, is the kind of personal disagreement and dislike that troubles a clique of friends. It should not trouble, it has no place in, the internal criticisms and discussions of a serious political organization. The conflation of the two is detrimental in all manner of ways; it encourages unimportant contradictions to fester and become antagonistic and organization-splitting, while preventing unity in uniting with the broadest masses and tackling the real contradictions against the class enemies, the bourgeoisie and their state.

This is how cliqueism prevents a political organization from the serious practice of mass line and genuine line struggle, how ultimately it prevents advancement of the class struggle and the uniting of the proletariat into a revolutionary movement, a nascent state-social order of the D. of the P., the embryonic power of socialist political-economy that can overthrow that of capital. This is how it did so in the case I speak of. I hope the organization I’ve spoken of, in which I still see genuine potential, will continue working to go among the masses, forge a line representing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the proletarian cause, and help build the movement for a Party and socialist D. of the P. in this country; I hope it will move beyond its cliqueist errors and grow and integrate with the masses and in so doing become more effective, and I hope I can continue to work with it along with other revolutionary-oriented political groups in our area. But it cannot be denied how cliqueism as a habit and a behaviour and an incorrect path of leadership has retarded and damaged the becoming of the revolutionary potentiality of this organization.

All would-be revolutionaries must learn, then, to avoid cliqueism in organization; we must learn to practice the mass line truly, deeply integrating with the masses and uniting all that can be united into building revolutionary organizations, and we must practice true criticism and self criticism and true democratic centralism in those organizations, building an iron-forged MLMist ideological unity refined and applied in serving the struggle of the proletariat to win their needs of life and their freedom from exploitation, their total control over the means of production and their own life and labour, and its product, the wealth of society, for the good of all. We must take care that our guides in organizing are not unprincipled personal whims, friendships and likes and dislikes, but rather the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the guiding scientific ideology of the liberation struggle of the proles, and our will to unite with the broad masses and build up out of all of us working together a Party, Army, and United Front ready to conquer power for the proletarian majority, destroy capitalism and bourgeois rule, and construct by war and by human effort socialism and the state-social order of the democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Without cliqueism, when they readily sublate their individual concerns into the larger cause of the oppressed masses and the revolutionary cause of the proletariat, communists and revolutionary organizations’ cadre achieve great things. The comrades of the Austin RSG have of late been the leaders in the successful building of a mass campaign to defend the trans proletariat in Austin, for instance, and the proletarian feminists of the mass org Interim Revolutionary Feminist Committee have united together with comrades from around the world, including representatives of the Filipino diaspora and the Philippine National Democratic revolutionary movement, in the movement against this year’s APEC imperialist economic convention. And this is just a hint of what can be accomplished when communists go amongst the masses, practice the mass line style of leadership, experience the masses’ struggles and develop application of Marxism to resolve the contradictions in their social life, and lead the construction of a really revolutionary mass movement. Ultimately, doing thusly, we can build up the movement that will overthrow capital and capitalism and construct socialism.

SUBLATE INDIVIDUALISM INTO THE COLLECTIVE WILL OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WORKING CLASS!

UNITE TO BUILD THE NEW COMMUNIST PARTY, REVOLUTIONARY ARMY, AND UNITED FRONT!

PREPARE FOR THE RECONSTITUTION OF THE PARTY AND THE LAUNCH OF REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE IN THE USA!

CONQUER POWER, CONSTRUCT SOCIALISM!

☙FOOTNOTES❧

1. For more on this see this article of the former Struggle Sessions, defunct journal of the US Maoist movement, and the history of BARU and RCP-USA in the book Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on America’s Maoists (by Aaron Leonard & Conor Gallagher). Both of these works have mixed aspects, and should be both studied and learned from and critiqued. The StrSes journal is subject to many of the same critiques as the CPUSA(CR) and RGs themselves- see below, and the way their “criticism” of comrades outside the leadership was often closer to cliquest slander-slinging and gossip-mongering. And Heavy Radicals has a liberal, “anti-Stalinist” slant.
2. Dallas, or Jared Roark (and I note it is not any kind of doxxing for me to reveal this latter name; it is by now well in public record, from well-deserved criticisms and denunciations published by comrades harmed by his opportunist leadership in the former CPUSA(CR), such as those published by RSG), is a complex figure in the history of our movement- I think we cannot deny that the CPUSA(CR), and the RGs before them, have been important in the history of Maoism in the US, that they set a foundation on which the movement as it is today has built with some success, a foundation of understanding of MLMism. Nonetheless their errors were sometimes grievous, and for Dallas’s abhorrently opportunistic, cliqueist, and abusive mishandlings of his leadership role it is absolutely justified that he has been ousted from leadership in our movement and harshly criticized by our comrades. Abusive opportunist leadership like Roark’s demonstrates the very worst of cliqueism and individualism. With genuine democratic centralist Great Leadership, the CPUSA(CR) would have gone much further, would have been worthy of its claimed goal of building a vanguard Party for the US working class to lead them in conquering power and constructing the socialist D. of the P. Under his clique’s leadership, it wasn’t.
3. This is observable for instance in the disgracefully backward and uneducated views on transgender and nonbinary persons allowed to propagate in the editorial staffs of the old publications of our movement, e.g. Incendiary and Struggle Sessions- which the editors knew would not pass the critical rigors of line struggle within the mass line of the whole movement and its supporters among the broad working-class and progressive masses, and thus kept secret, but nonetheless clung to because they were close to the misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes the clique clung to. Anyone who has ever met a trans or nonbinary proletarian could more thoroughly understand our condition than “Comrade Dallas” did in his hubris and narrowmindedness- and these were the people who claimed to be the most advanced leaders among the entire communist movement!
4. See above.
5. Combat Liberalism (together with Serve the People, a eulogy for Comrade Norman Bethune, The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains, On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party, and The Basic Revolutionary Attitude) is one of the five short but brilliant essays by Mao known collectively, and often studied as a single work outlining many of the basic attitudes and practices of a communist activist, as the Five Golden Rays. The Rays are included in the above-linked edition of ArAk.