Five Minute Polemic №11: Why the Liberators of Humanity Must be the Proletariat

The cause of communism is the cause of the liberation of the whole human species¹. Nobody is truly free in class society, in which some (the propertied ruling classes) must exist as parasites owning and sucking the fruits of others’ labour and others, the vast majority, must survive by selling themselves and their power to produce to these parasites, subsisting on a tiny share of what they produce while the enemy enjoys the surplus and vast majority of it. Under the capitalist form of class society, both the capitalist and the worker are, in different ways, bound to the institution of capital: one is bound to own it and become in social life for all practical purposes the mere personified embodiment of its interests for perpetual accumulation of more and more surplus value to suck, the other bound to sell their life-activity and labour-power to it, giving it that surplus to suck whereby to grow itself, and to subsist on the tiny wage they are paid from out of the produce of their class, with the rest of that produce stolen away by capital. Between the two is the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society, of exploitation and fundamentally opposed interests. And all other classes and social strata are pulled into an orbit around this dialectical political-economic relationship of contradiction; and all the other principal contradictions of capitalist-imperialism as it exists today arise therefrom. And so communism, the negation of class society through revolutionary socialism and the resolution of all its contradictions and construction of a higher order, is the liberation of all humanity.

And yet, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology tells us the leaders of this liberation must be the proletariat, the working class under capitalism-proper of wage-labourers who, under that order, own no capital or means of production/economically productive property in private and who must sell their labour-power, all of economic import they have, for wages to survive- that it is primarily their liberation and that the liberation of humanity comes as all join with this last class and thus, as it is no longer defined as a class in contradiction with another, class society is overturned and negated, its contradictions resolved, a new and higher order achieved. This correct thesis deserves to be clearly explicated and justified.

In the advanced and fully-developed capitalist economies, especially the imperialist countries, the central importance of the proletariat in history makes a sort of intuitive sense, as they are the vast majority class- thus, while democratic rule under class society, until socialism evolves into the full stage of global communism, is always democratic rule for one or another class², a democratically formed state and social order of one or another class’s class-dictatorship, it seems as if the democracy of the proletariat is in some sense the most democratic democracy- majority rule for the majority class. Yet, this is not the only reason the proletariat must be the class that brings socialism, unites all people with itself, and ushers in communism- and, after all, they still occupy this central importance in countries where they are not the majority, like the countries under semifeudalism and semicolonization that currently host all the world’s active revolutionary People’s Wars led by proletarian communist Parties, where peasants are the majority, though proles a very sizeable minority (a rough 15% to the peasants’ 75%, per Sison’s Philippine Society & Revolution).

Since the alleged “failure” of the Russian revolution and the return of capitalism through revisionist coup-d’etat circa 1956, many dissident trends of the broad so-called “Left” have questioned the status of the wage-labouring proletarian class as “last class” and principal bearers of revolutionary duty. In the first world anarchists and “intercommunalists” have suggested a passing of the torch to the lumpenproletariat; in the third, there is a popular sentiment that sees indigenous groups as the most essential combatants against imperialism; radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin have tried to move the central focus in philosophical critique of social reality from the contradictions between classes to the oppression of women, etc. All of these perspectives represent, in part, genuine concerns: the miserable condition of the lumpenproletariat under capitalism is a contradiction socialism must resolve, indigenous peoples and nations are often the victims of the very worst of capitalist-imperialist violence, and the oppression of women and Queers by patriarchy is one of the essential problems of class society. Yet the idea of replacing the central concern of resolving the proletariat↔bourgeoisie contradiction with a concern for one of these issues, what I have heard some in the academic “Left” call the “search for a new revolutionary subject,” is misguided; these are all problems that can and must be solved in socialist revolution and cultural revolution under socialism, but none can be resolved without solving the fundamental issue of class exploitation (others have written much on this).

It is also widely mis-believed, of course, that Mao Tse-Tung Thought in China was an example of such an ideological shifting, that it moved the role of “revolutionary subject” from the proles to the peasants. But this is a misconception. In actual fact, the modern Red Line of the communist movement, which has learned from Mao Tse-Tung Thought and forged under leadership of Chairman Gonzalo the modern synthesis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (with the universal lessons of Gonzalo Thought), understands the proper way to learn from the lessons and the triumphs and pitfalls of past revolutionary efforts in further forging the iron unity of all progressive classes and forces behind the proletariat, and to go on waging the socialist revolution as proletarian revolution. This is clear in all the philosophical literature of the communist movement and, more importantly, in the actual practice of waging revolution by People’s War.

In fact, the conditions in which the proletariat exists at their lowest, under the blackest exploitation by capitalist and capital, are those that have forged and prepared them to be the supreme revolutionary class in human history, have readied them to wage revolution, transform themselves into the liberated ruling and free majority class of socialism, the socialist proletariat, and to unite all humanity together in this class, abolishing class and forging full communism. These conditions have been described by the great teachers of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in texts like the Communist Manifesto, and others. Consider the difference between artisanal production as it existed under feudalism among the peasants and burghers and smallholders- who would become the bourgeoisie as the contradictions of feudalism reached their highest point and produced the resolution of bourgeois revolution- and as it existed in certain (noncolonial) countries under very early capitalism among the early bourgeoisie and their cottage employees, v.s. capitalist industrial production as it exists now among the great mass of the working class exploited by modern finance capital. In the old artisanal ways of production, one person could raise up her crop of sheep, harvest their wool, spin it into yarn, and knit herself a sweater, all on her own individual bit of land and in her own house, on her own share of the feudal fiefdom. Of course, she could not have done this without the labour of others, e.g. those that had reared the ancestors of her sheep when she was not yet born so that her own sheep could be alive for her to tend now, but it was easy to believe she did it all on her lonesome. But the modern conditions of industrial production have made clear how dependent we truly are, as members of the body politic of human society, upon each other for the production of the use values our survival requires. Today, even a very simple utility-bearing object or service is the product of the meeting of the labour-powers of most probably hundreds or thousands of workers. In a modern shoe factory, a single use-value (a shoe, and its protective and supportive use for one’s feet) is the product of dozens of hands: one worker cuts and seals laces, another threads them in, another glues on the soles, etc. And of course the leather or fabric for the body of the shoe, the yarn for the laces, and the rubber for the sole each come from their own industrial facilities, with their own populations of workers whose labours similarly intertwine. Under industrial production’s conditions as they have developed under capitalism, the proletariat, the class that today carries out all the effort of producing the use-values humanity requires, has been forced and forged together into a collective, has been endowed with and made aware of its collective power and interdependence.

The peasants and burghers of late feudalism or the petit-bourgeois smallholders and journeymen of very early cottage-capitalism could not have been the builders of advanced communism. For it was in the smallholder’s interest to keep to themself, in the peasant or the petit-bourgeois family farmer’s interest to tend their own field and forget the outside world as much as possible. Much the same is true of the modern lumpenproletariat and petit-bourgeoisie. But the modern proletariat have not this option. Our nature and our lot, forged by our role as the contradicted complement and antagonist of our bourgeois exploiters under modern capitalist-imperialism, is an iron-clad solidarity and collective being. We depend upon each other. I cannot retreat from the world and from the huge political-economic struggle of my class, I cannot forget the plight of my neighbour, when I am entirely dependent on my neighbour to do my work and make my livelihood, and she likewise on me. The existence of the proletariat in the space of modern industrial production is necessarily collective, while older models of production forge individuals with individual concerns. And so it is the proletariat, only the proletariat, that has been forged into the final class and the liberating final form of humanity under class society, capable of conquering power for itself in the form of a new socialist state-social order, the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, built up with mass line leadership and People’s War led by the Communist Party in each country. The proletariat is born to attain the iron-clad unity of consolidating itself into the nascent organs of power for the new socialist political-economic mode and society, the United Front of mass organizations and embryonic bodies of worker-governance, the People’s Army, and the leading vanguard Communist Party, and, through the militant onslaught of these three weapons in People’s War against the bourgeoisie, conquering power and exalting them as the organs of a new workers’ democratic semi-state and socialist economy on the road to full communism. Capitalism has dug its own grave by creating, in the dialectical dynamics of its own central contradiction, its own ultimate gravedigger, and that of all other forms of exploitative political-economic modes of class society.

In this way, the historical development of capitalism is described accurately by the dialectical principle that things become, beget, and bring forth their opposites, the law that things must exist always together with their own negations- for capitalism carries in itself the germ of its own negation, i.e. the birth of socialism in revolt of the proles, and the bourgeoisie, through their molding of the class they exploit while they occupy the dominant position in society, mold that class as their own perfect negation, capable of wresting power away from them and taking the dominant position for itself, i.e. building its own state-social order and political-economic mode that resolves and surpasses the contradiction between these classes (though it must do so through continued class struggle on socialist terms³)- socialism and the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, on the road to full-stage communism. The proletariat must be the liberators of humanity because history, their development across time in opposition to the bourgeoisie, has forged them for this role.

The special role of the proletariat in history means that the socialist-communist revolution must be a proletarian revolution, that the new state-social order it inaugurates, in order to achieve socialism, must be the (democratic) class dictatorship of a working-class majority. But this does not mean that other classes, and those of other classes, are to have no role in it. In the semifeudal countries, where the peasants are the majority, the revolutionary proletariat and the cadre of their Parties and People’s Armies must go amongst the peasants and unite deeply with them, bringing them into the nascent organs of power of the New State and preparing them through Mass Line leadership to be democratically raised to the consciousness of the socialist proletariat via the process of New Power/New Democracy. This, indeed, is what is happening now in the countries where revolution by People’s War is under way⁴. The lumpenproletariat, the artisans and artists and intellectuals, and the petit-bourgeoisie too can be brought into the fold of the United Front for revolution, the embryonic form of the new state-social order of socialism, the Democratic D. of the P., and raised up to join the revolutionary proletariat, the democratic majority ruling class of socialism. And even the bourgeoisie, through their negation as a class by the ascent of the proletariat to dominant position in the class-dialectic and through the continuing struggle under socialism to root out bourgeois culture and ideology⁵, must in the end be resolved into human persons beyond the oppressive matrix of class, in the new post-class resolution of full communist society, yet to be achieved.⁶

Nonetheless, the present situation, having been forged by centuries and centuries of development of human history through the dialectical struggles between contradicting classes and the resolutions this struggle has achieved, makes it clear that the modern capitalist working class, the proletariat, is the banner-bearer of human liberation, that will transform itself in its struggle against the bourgeoisie into the socialist proletariat, the democratic majority ruling class of socialism and the D. of the P., and in so doing open the door to the final resolution and abolition of class society.

GLORY TO ALL THE FIGHTING HEROES OF THE PROLETARIAT IN STRUGGLE!⁷

GLORY TO THE PROLETARIAT AND ITS REVOLUTIONARY DESTINY!

PREPARE TO RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY, UNITE THE PROLETARIAT BEHIND IT, AND LAUNCH REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE’S WAR IN THE U.S.A. AND EVERY COUNTRY!

☙❦❧

FOOTNOTES

1. Engels tells us both that “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat” and that “the aim of the Communists” is “To organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” I see these both as complementary theses, vital to one another, and I hope this essay has successfully shown why. The liberation of the whole of humanity comes from the rising-to-power of the proletariat, the last class, and the joining of all humanity into the political-economic system and social order of that class’s democratic rule, leading to abolition of class and full communistic liberty. Quotations are respectively from “Principles of Communism” and “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” two early preparatory essays written in the lead-up to the Communist Manifesto.
2. As Lenin reminds us- see The State and Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution, esp. the chapter “How Kautsky Turned Marx into a Common Liberal”.
3. See e.g. How Does Socialism Guarantee the Full Liberation of Women by Joan Hinton, and her citation of Mao.
4. India led by the CPI(Maoist) and the PLGA, Peru led by the PCP and the EGP, Turkey led by the TKP/ML and TiKKO, the Philippines led by the CPP and the NPA. We also salute the preparatory efforts for People’s War of the PCE-SR in Ecuador, and those readying to launch the seizure of power by the proletariat and People in all countries.
5. See again the Hinton article, and the general concept of Cultural Revolution, as discussed e.g. in the section §“So What is MLM?” in the article “Maoism in the US” in the former theoretical journal of US Maoists, Struggle Sessions- though both that journal and that article have strong ambivalent characteristics, with major correct and incorrect aspects, the article is useful and mainly correct in its theoretical dimensions.
6. The subject matter of this whole paragraph is explored more thoroughly in my article “What will Happen to Me Under Socialism?”
7. Among “fighting heroes of the proletariat in struggle,” we might include not only the heroic warriors of the People’s Armies around the world, and the fighting cadre of Communist Parties and mass organizations, but also those workers presently struggling heroically on picket lines in this country against exploitation by the capitalists of, among other companies and corporate bodies of accumulated capital, Waffle House, Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, and the “Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.”