Ten-Point Credo for Revolutionary Intellectuals (an essay on Serving the People)

Every social class, coming into existence on the original basis of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates with itself, organically, one or more groups of intellectuals who give it homogeneity and consciousness in function not only in the economic field but in the social and political field as well[.] (emphasis added).

…

One of the most important characteristics of any class which develops towards power is its struggle to assimilate and conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals. Assimilations and conquests are the more rapid and effective the more the given social class puts forward simultaneously its own organic intellectuals.

• Antonio Gramsci, “The Formation of Intellectuals.”

The intellectuals [must be organized] so that they may fulfill their role as revolutionary intellectuals serving the proletariat and peasantry within the People’s War. Among them are the secondary school students, university students and professionals, etc. See their specific revindications[:] that they should defend what is conquered, aiming at a new national, scientific and mass culture, making them conscious that they can only achieve this with the revolution.

• Communist Party of Peru, “Mass Line,” General Political Line.

I: Introduction

Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist-Leninist, sets the stage for a Marxist analysis of the social position of intellectuals. He is a thinker I regard as imparting, from his position in developing the guiding thought of the Italian sovietist and anti-fascist struggle, very important lessons unto the International Communist Movement for modern Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. In particular, its application to the haute-capitalist imperial-core countries (like mine). Gramsci is keen for us to understand that the “intelligentsia” do not exist as a class as such, i.e. do not occupy a distinct definable relational position relative to the means of production. Rather, intellectuals (which social stratum Gramsci defines somewhat more broadly than the standard usage of the term- and his usage of it is the usage I apply here), exist as a stratum defined by a role they play in the superstructure of society built up around the social political-economic base of production. The intellectuals are those members of a society who are engaged in the work of making its culture, its science, its ideology and philosophy, etc.- its intellectual life, which is marshaled in service to the political-economic basal system and its ruling class and their interests; the intellectuals are those who, to quote the same Gramsci text which heads this article, relate to production as the central feature of civilization in a way “not immediate… [but] ‘mediated,’ in different levels, by the whole social fabric, and by the complex of the superstructure of which the intellectuals are in fact the ‘officials.’”

Being that the intellectual life of persons follows from the base of political-economic life, the development of the social activity of the intellectuals, no matter how independent they believe themselves to be, occurs in the context of the historical development of human political-economy and class struggle. It is not a coincidence, e.g., that the engineering of steam engines reached a point of development sufficient for heavy industry at that time in European history when such industry became necessary for the expansion of capitalist production and the power and capital of the bourgeoisie; it is not a coincidence, e.g., that Plato’s political theory legitimizing rule of a docile labouring majority by an educated, propertied minority of paternalistic “guardians” emerged in a society whose economic system was defined by slavery. In a society with a given political-economic system and its corresponding superstructural state-social order, therefore, it is the power of intellectuals only to be either for or against hegemonic norms, never to be neutral.

The revolutionary intellectual is they that choose consciously, explicitly, to be against the prevailing ideological and cultural order that serves to maintain a terminally backward and contradictory political-economic system and class order. Whether they come by birth from the ranks of the subjugated class struggling to conquer power and free itself and humanity, or whether they choose by principle to associate themselves with that progressive cause, these must play a role in uprooting backward and reactionary ideas and so-called “common sense” from the minds of the masses, planting in their place the first seeds of a new cultural and ideological order for the world of tomorrow’s social structures, which must germinate and flower in Cultural Revolutions after the new political-economic system and social order has been won by revolutionary conquest. Of course, the pivotal role in historical struggle is played by revolutionary violence and physical endeavour, the destruction of the old and construction of the new in a very literal sense. But just as Lenin said there is no revolutionary practice without the revolutionary theory, which flows from it and nourishes it, the forceful concrete action of a revolutionary movement must be nourished by its intellectual life, and revolutionary intellectuals have a role in producing the art, science, culture, ideology, and philosophy to develop that intellectual life and, ultimately, the New Culture of the new communist world.

II: Credo

One: It is the destiny of the proletariat to conquer the Earth- the working class can and must rule the word. It is the duty of the revolutionary intellectuals to serve this end through intellectual work.

The proletariat has been forged through the historical experience of class struggle into the generation of humanity capable of liberating the human species from class society. The essential contradiction in capitalist society is the exploitation of the proletariat by capital and the bourgeois class that owns capital, the contradiction between the communal nature of labour and production under modern industrial conditions and the private ownership of the machinery and fruits of that production for the expansion of capital to a few’s benefit and the deficit of the rest. Today, in the imperialist stage of capitalism, the contradictions of capitalism take as central the contradiction between finance-capital in the imperialist countries which is exported through colonial violence to the colonized countries, and the People, principally proletarians and proto-proletarian strata (peasants, fisher-folk, etc.), that it exploits in those countries. The resolution of the contradictions of capitalist-imperialism, the construction of a world in which social existence is possible beyond the iniquitous matrix of unequal dialectical class-relations, must come through the victory of the proletariat in dialectical struggle against the big capitalist class, its total seizure of collective power over its own life and labour-power and the means and fruits of the production in which that power is enacted, to manage them for the common good of all, and the joining together of all humanity into the economy and state-social order of that collective rule.

Communistic restructuring of labour and political-economic life must stretch across the entire span of human life. Most essentially the socialist economy and order of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, built through revolutionary seizure of state and economic power by military means under leadership of a Communist Party, must bring about collective, democratic, and need-directed control of labour and production by governing collective bodies of the workers themselves in the central sectors of industry, agriculture, etc.- the basic roots of civilization, the feeding, watering, sheltering of the people. But we must also see the collectivization of the means of production, their return to the hands of those who work them honestly to supply the common treasury, and the redirection of that work away from profit and toward common need and benefit, in every sector, among professionals and intellectuals, doctors and artists and architects and scientists and engineers, in the course of a total political-economic, social, and cultural revolution, uniting humanity, resolving class contradictions and completing the historical dialectical-material struggles of class, and bringing human history into its next stage, communism.

And intellectuals of progressive mindset, those within these sectors who aspire to see a communist world, or to bring it nearer for the people of the future to see, must bring ourselves fully in line with the position and guiding ideology of the most advanced sector of the international proletariat and its struggle, the struggle to liquidate imperialist finance capital and its state powers and build up socialist rule by a unified liberated working class, through revolutionary People’s War led by a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist party, in every country. We must work to promote the line of the communist movement within intellectual sectors of society, and to utilize intellectual work to serve the struggle waged by the proletariat and allied strata in all sectors of society, promoting and advancing revolutionary intellectual life.

Two: Whatever our own background, revolutionary intellectuals must endeavour to surrender the attitudes and foibles that come with the classes we have been assigned into by capitalist society, and take up the deepest concern for the interests and principled ideological lessons and outlook of the proletariat.

A large section of revolutionary intellectuals, of course, come themselves from amongst the deepest ranks of the masses. These comrades know how to turn their intellectual work toward the building of the revolutionary culture and thought of the mass movement, which will negate that of the dominant hegemonic state-social order of bourgeois dictatorship, will ultimately surpass it in historic struggle to build up that of the new socialist world. These comrades hardly need instruction from the likes of me.

But a great share of those who wind up as intellectuals (philosophers, scientists, artists, etc.) with views opposed to bourgeois rule are themselves of petit-bourgeois origin: their family background is of professionals, who both do productive work in some (generally partly or entirely intellectual- legal, educational, medical) field and own small amounts of capital unto which they draw profit through capitalist markets and production, and from which they draw stability and “middle class” status. I am myself of this group; my parents, who are educational professionals, were petit-bourgeois small-landlords throughout my childhood (they are no longer), and come from a background of other petit-bourgeois professionals. Or else their background is of labour-aristocrats, professional proletarians who live entirely on the sale of their labour-power but nonetheless tend to have class interests close to those of the petit-bourgeoisie by nature of their high pay and “professional” status.

These are probably the largest share of progressive students radicalized toward communism on their college campuses. And these have a real potential to be invaluable aids to the proletarian movement; certainly it is altogether unscientific, and fails to recognize the essential feature of material reality to change through dialectical development, to judge people unduly for where they have come from, and such people may have many resources available to them which are unavailable to the wider proletariat and can be useful to that class in its waging of war against the exploiters (from money, to medical and legal training, to the ability to travel long distances in order to achieve a goal). But is necessary for people of such a class background, and again I include myself in this, to endeavour earnestly to overturn and negate the reactionary or middling world-outlook it may have imparted to them, and surpass it to take up instead the revolutionary and progressive subjectivity of the most revolutionary and progressive sectors of the working class.

In an essay published by the Revolutionary Union, later the RCP-USA (prior to its Avakianite revisionist period), in the second volume of their journal Red Papers, entitled “Revolutionary Youth and the Road to the Proletariat” and dated 1969, we find the passage:

Revolutionary youth must go wherever workers are concentrated, initiate struggle and build cadre there. This means, in addition to schools, the army and working class communities. And it means the shops where large numbers of Black and white workers are concentrated in production or transportation. Even while working with students, guys in the army, women in the community, and unemployed men and women, we should be putting forth proletarian ideology, building anti-imperialist consciousness and promoting forms of struggle in the interests of the working class as a whole. And, on the other hand, our work with industrial workers should avoid the pitfalls of economism. Our most important task is to find the advanced workers who can grasp revolutionary ideology, lead the masses of workers against lay-offs, speed-ups, inflation, taxes, and denial of democratic rights to union members, etc., and can build among them class solidarity and proletarian internationalism[.]

I think this essay is perhaps too extreme in demanding all young student and intellectual radicals immediately drop their textbooks and go off to apply for work at a factory- where, after all, they might not actually have the skills to be any real help to their worker peers, but only get in the way of their work and thus fail to impress as class organizers and instead make our politics look silly to those we are trying to win over- but it gets at the essential point: those of the revolutionary intellectuals who are not themselves of the core of the proletarian class must make a conscious effort to take up to the greatest degree feasible and useful the social position and principled outlook of the advanced sector of the working-class, in order to advance the cause of that class toward its liberation and that of all humanity in the establishment of socialist communism.

Three: In pursuit of the above, revolutionary intellectuals must aspire to an arduous willingness to be politically critical and self-critical, putting themselves and all political causes and parties to the acid test of the interests of global proletarian and oppressed-strata liberation, not in a manner which entails unkindness and meanspiritedness toward oneself and others, but in a manner constructive and dedicated to refining revolutionary ideas to be more useful to the communist cause.

The Pantherist revolutionary thinker Huey Newton gave the name “revolutionary suicide” to what others have called “class suicide”: the process of purgation from oneself of counterrevolutionary tendencies, originating in the ideological inculcations of hegemonic bourgeois culture or in the implicit class-outlook of one’s background, so as to sublate one’s ego and become principally a life in service to the interests of the oppressed and their struggles, principally the world proletariat and their revolutionary historical trajectory. Absolutely, this is necessary. Indeed, since the existence of a self is precisely in its relations with other selves, it is precisely in the further development of these dialectics, the sublation of “individual” selves toward common resolutions to the greater benefit of all selves, toward the resolution of their contradictions and the meeting of common interests, that “self-actualization” is achieved. It is in serving the People, a comrade memorably said to me not long ago at a meeting of a progressive mass organization, that one truly finds oneself. I agree.

This is why we should not be afraid of criticism, of ourselves or of our comrades, if it is done right. The aim of criticism within the movement, i.e. of correct handling of contradictions within a movement, is in none but the most extreme cases to attack, alienate, injure, divide. To the contrary, we criticize our comrades, criticize ourselves, take criticisms from our comrades, and encourage our comrades to criticize themselves precisely to the greater benefit of our comrades and ourselves, and of the whole movement. In resolving the contradictions between myself and the broader interests I strive, as a communist or an anti-imperialist or a New Democratic or worker power activist, to serve, I am not in any way harming myself; no, in sublating my ego into the interests of the historic progress of all humanity I am improving my own life and that of my comrades, increasing the harmony of my community, on the road to the communism in which all class antagonisms are replaced with harmonious cooperation, enabling history to advance beyond problems of class, and onto new problems.

When corrected by a comrade, if you are sincere and the comrade is sincere, never take it as an insult or attack. For precisely what is really happening is the forging of a greater unity- not attack, but refinement toward common goals. It is in this manner, sincere critique in pursuit not of “putting down” rivals but forging greater unity with which to confront the real enemy, the big bourgeoisie and capitalist-imperialist states and institution of capital itself, that we should approach correction of our wrong attitudes, our wrong ideas, our wrong behaviours, etc., and the reforging of ourselves into the best servants of the People we can be. There are many texts on how best to approach this; Araling Aktibista from the Filipino revolutionaries has my hearty endorsement.

But I think calling this process “suicide” goes too far. Again, the point is not self-destruction, to the extent there is even a self to destroy, but refinement of the relationships that define the self toward common interests and the resolution of problems, i.e. victory of the cause. If your “comrade” is cruelly berating you with the intention of making you feel terrible, then this is not criticism, and they are likely not your comrade, or if they are they are in dire need of correction. Criticism is really not about feelings, or shouldn’t be. It’s about working together for common goals as harmoniously as possible. This entails fearless desire to resolve contradictions in our midst, yes, but also deep love for our comrades and the people we fight for, and desire to create unity in our cause against the real enemy- not to strain our fighting strength by inflaming secondary intra-movement contradictions while neglecting the real antagonism we ought to have against that enemy: the big bourgeoisie and capitalist-imperialist states, and the institution of capital itself. Criticism should be carried out not in the name of hatred of ourselves and our comrades, but love of ourselves and our comrades, and hatred of the enemy- we do not attack our own; we strengthen ourselves and each other, to attack the enemy!

Four: To the extent possible, revolutionary intellectuals should join the broadest masses of the proletariat in maintaining and advancing society through labouring for production of new use-values and organizing and struggling in the theatre of that production and labour. This may mean taking up an industrial, agricultural, or service waged position as a member of the base echelon of the proletariat, which is the heart of the proletarian revolution; it may mean existing in a more conventionally “professional” role on the fringes of the proletariat (lawyer, doctor, writer, scientist, artist) but using one’s intellectual labour in that role to serve the broader proletariat.

The American socialist Eugene V. Debs said:

It is when you have done your work honestly, when you have contributed your share to the common fold, that you begin to live. Then, as Whitman said, you can take out your soul. [From a speech given at the founding of the Federal Council of Churches in Girard, Kansas, 1908]

Debs is a highly ambivalent figure and not, perhaps, a bright star in the constellation of American communists as is, say, Hughes or Hampton; nonetheless he had this right.

We are believers in the liberation of the proletariat, that exploited majority class of toilers who, even as they are brutalized by the exploitative buying-up and exploitative squeezing-for-profit of their labour-power by capital and the rich propertied class of capitalists, still do the labour that holds up human civilization and advances the happiness and wellbeing of humanity through the creation of all new utilities and use-values. Intellectuals who are believers in such cannot hold themselves apart and separate from this political-economic structure of society- it is impossible, indeed for anyone to be apart from society, but all must have a side and a stake in its dialectical dynamics of unity and struggle. Such persons must strive to be, too, workers contributing productively to the common wealth of humanity, which socialist revolution shall take out of the hands of the exploiter and put in the hands of the produces and of all. This may mean attempting to integrate oneself into the industrial or agricultural workforce (as the RCP-USA prescribed); this may mean working within intellectual sectors in ways that take care to be for the expansion of the collective wealth of humanity and of positive community, not just for our own egos. In either case, it remains true that those who aspire to contribute through their intellectual efforts to the liberation of the oppressed, toiling majority of humanity must also join that majority in one way or another, must be labouring in the economic life of their community producing positive new benefits to that community, whether through those efforts or through industrial manual labour.

Five: Revolutionary intellectuals must utilize intellectual work to advance the cause of proletarian emancipation, socialism and communism, to the fullest extent they are able.

Not only, of course, must intellectuals be intellectual workers who strive to contribute to our communities in a general sense- it is not enough to simply make nice things for our community when we know that everything made under the present economic system will be controlled exploitatively by capital at our expense and that of our comrades and peers. So we must direct intellectual work indefatigably toward revolution, toward the collectivization of that common wealth under socialism, for the good of its makers and all people, under workers-democratic collective power, developing toward communism.

The negation of the hegemonic culture and ideology enforced through oppressive force by the capitalist-imperialist economic system and its state-social order of bourgeois dictatorship must come as a revolutionary culture and ideology, consciously built up by intellectual work in and through the process of historical progressive struggle, which will confront and triumph over the reactionary old bourgeois culture in cultural revolutionary struggle under socialism, once socialism has been established by military means of conquest of political-economic power for the working majority, leading humanity forward toward the post-class-antagonist culture of communism.

The forging of what will become the new revolutionary culture, the new intellectual life of the liberated proletariat and People and of their state-social order of the socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, must be undertaken by revolutionary intellectuals- those of proletarian origin and background, those of allied social strata, and those that have taken up progressive viewpoints and stands out of conscience in spite of privileged or bourgeois origins. It must be done through the arts, through propaganda and education and agitation materials, through literature, through philosophy, through the application of the sciences to the good of the oppressed, and so on.

Six: Not merely believing in correct ideas nominally, but recognizing that correct ideas come from practice and must be returned to practice in order to transform and advance political struggle, understanding the development and use of correct ideas and ideology as a material-dialectical cycle in which practice is principle, revolutionary intellectuals must to the extent they are able go among the masses to develop the mass line of the communist movement in membership or solidarity with the struggling organizations of the proletariat and other oppressed, revolutionary strata. Revolutionary intellectuals must go among the masses in mass organizations of the United Front and in the communist Party, or the movement to found it, and join arduously in waging militant struggle. Only as a complement to militant concrete struggle does intellectual work have use-value.

It is important that revolutionary organizations and mass organizations, the organized bodies of whole classes on the march, can do more for humanity than one person ever could. This does not mean people with progressive politics should join revisionist and backward groupings only to be “part of the movement,” instead of working to build good ones, and does not mean that there is no revolutionary work and transformation to be done on the level of one’s personal life and subjectivity. But the most important thing, in aligning oneself with the proletarian revolutionary tendency of history is not to make oneself as “pure” as possible in one’s thinking; it is to be among the masses when they rise to fight for their freedom, and to be one of the people that advances that fight rather than holding it back.

Revolutionary intellectuals must stand with the proletariat on the battlefield of class war, the battlefield of historical progress through struggle to unseat the exploiter, in every case. It is very good and valuable for proletarian intellectuals to join revolutionary communist, worker-power, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, New Democratic/National Democratic and so on political organizations, and, if they exist in one’s area and are indeed rigorously revolutionary and committed to advancing the class struggle toward genuine revolution and socialist construction, it should be taken as a duty to join them. We must also stand in solidarity with all other organized social mechanisms that may be utilized by the proletariat in the historic process that ultimately leads in it conquering political-economic power through revolutionary People’s War and soviet-democratic dual power, all “fighting organizations of the working class,” when they are acting progressively, even if they are highly flawed and imperfect. Many trade unions in the imperialist core today are deeply infected with reformism, labour-aristocrat anti-militancy, and “business unionism”- but, when workers are on the march under a union banner we must march with them, even as we work to expand the Mass Line of our revolutionary organizations, negating those errors, and even as we maintain intense militant criticism of the pro-capitalist leadership of such unions.

Whether associated with such organizations or not, whether with them or alone (though, again, it is certainly preferable to organize collective political life than to act as an individual), revolutionary intellectuals, as well as working in intellectual fields (again- art, culture, literature, philosophy, education, etc.), should march along with the broad masses of workers when they take to the streets in open struggle. In our universities, workplaces, places of study, and all communities, when there is a strike of labourers, or a call for institutional divestment from imperialist finance-capital, or a protest against police brutality, or action in solidarity with those resisting imperialism in the colonized countries, then revolutionary intellectuals must take it as a duty to join them in the march, and when the time comes, in the fight.

Seven: The effort of revolutionary intellectuals must in every way possible drive the class struggle and communist cause forward, not back. The revolutionary intellectuals should always strive to represent and to construct or find the correct ideological Red Line in the movement. In and among struggling organizations of the masses, revolutionary intellectuals must be voices for the most radical and correct lines, subordinated to service to the will and interests of the People.

When joining with the broad masses in protest or militant action, it is not the job of an activist or intellectual to assume they have the right to take on the leading role. But all persons that involve themselves in a movement contribute in some way to the synthesis of its collective essence, and so it follows that intellectuals, those who endeavour to productive work in the area of ideology, must be mindful of how they contribute to it ideologically.

Though a kind of indecisiveness and hesitancy about agressive or abrupt political action comes naturally to the academy, founded as it is on long slow processes of research, intellectuals in the revolutionary movement must shed the reactionary attitudes of the academy and eagerly cheer on the forward march of history through militant struggle by the working class and allied strata against capital and all its institutions. When the march of class struggle falters, when organizations like unions begin to capitulate and there is a risk of the workers forgetting the promise of liberation, those in the communist proletarian liberation movement with intellectual skills of any degree- artists, writers, musicians, propagandists, speakers, teachers- must use them to push the cause back in the radical direction.

Above all, let no “communist” write to call for moderation, critical participation in the bourgeois-dictatorial system of state and social rule over open militancy against it, or opposition to the global war of the working class and all oppressed and exploited People against the ruling classes and states of capitalist-imperialism, as the revisionists and phony “socialists” do. This is not the work of a revolutionary intellectual but of an establishment, bourgeois one, wearing a phony red mask.

Eight: Revolutionary intellectuals should be neither tailists nor adventurists.

Those who have the gumption to suggest they are or can be genuine contributors to the revolutionizing of human life- had better go about it right.

It does no good for a militant few to declare themselves great intellectuals and go about trying to launch a military revolution of their own, without making any serious effort to genuinely engage the masses with the ideology of their own liberation and actually lead them forward in a Mass Line manner that follows the Maoist maxim “from the masses, to the masses.” A few plucky undergraduate dropouts, no matter how correct their worldview, cannot topple capitalism just by the strength of bombs and convictions. Adventurism, to strive boldly forth in a clique of “radicals” without trying to engage a mass movement that can become the nascent Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat- this is the error of groups like the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, 1970–98) in Germany, or the Weather Underground (1969–77) in the so-called USA, of the failed tactic of “propaganda of the deed.” This is a disease that comes easy to young intellectuals and students. Even if we commend partisans of such efforts for their courage and commitment, it must be seen that their tactics display the juvenile impatience and the elitism of those who believe themselves to be the most radical, the most revolutionary, the most special- these are the sorts of incorrect attitudes and resultant behaviours that one may see in petit-bourgeois youths, a common background for intellectuals, who fail to self-criticize and reforge themselves for the class struggle instead of bourgeois individualist self-interest.

Conversely we must not allow ourselves to fall into the comfortable lethargy of the tailism of more etsablished academics: meeting in lecture halls and hip cafés to discuss Adorno, opining the fact that the revolution is (allegedly) not happening, doing nothing to bring it about but waiting idly on the most exploited masses to rise up in a way approved of, pooh-poohing uprisings when they are done in the “wrong way” (without intervening to help them in the right direction), treating the proletariat with a combination of awe-stricken fetishization and idolization and the elitist petit-bourgeois disdain of “successful professionals.” Many academic “Left” organizations function in just this way, and many young would-be revolutionary intellectuals of petit-bourgeois background fall into them, like rats, hungry for political action, into waiting traps that ultimately deny it to them.

Like Scylla and Charybdis, we must avoid both these detours. We must fully embrace the broadest masses in the struggle of the working class and allied strata, marching along with them, not demanding they follow our lead but accepting and working toward producing the class Leadership of the proletariat as a whole, embodied in a militarized vanguard Communist Party.

Nine: Revolutionary intellectuals must be committed, in subordination to the will, interests, and readiness to unite behind it of the masses, to the formation and advancement of a militant and militarized Communist Party to successfully lead the seizure of democratic state power by the proletariat, in order to utilize it in a revolutionary manner toward the goal of communism. This is a Party formed not of a special elect stratum of intellectuals or petit-bourgeois bureaucrats, however, but of the most advanced and politically insightful and capable Great Leading segment of the masses themselves, of the revolutionary working class.

We understand in the living doctrine of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the practical and scientific guiding ideology of waging revolution, the need for a full-time, serious Leadership of the working class’s movement to seize power, which must emerge from and be constituted as the most advanced contingent of the working class itself, and must constitute itself in an organized full-time leading structure that can provide leadership, guidance, and strategy to the movement in which the working class organize themselves to seize democratic political-economic and state power for the historic advancement of humanity toward communism.

It is fashionable to rail against the “party form” of organizing revolutionary leadership: anarchists love to do it, and so too do “Marxists” like French quasi-Marxist (and former quasi-Maoist and member of the Union of Marxist-Leninist Communists of France) Alain Badiou. They attack it from an assumption that it has failed: past socialist societies in which the working class has seized power via the leadership of its Party have collapsed (China, Albania, the USSR, etc.), and- they claim- no project attempting to apply it today is going anywhere.

But this claim is myopic, revealing the anarchists and “post-Marxists”- as usual- have little capacity to see beyond their own noses here in the imperialist political-economic core. In fact, revolutionary seizure of proletarian-democratic power, through a stage of worker-peasant New Power where necessary, led by a militant Communist Party, is the only method of struggle to build socialism that has ever succeeded, since its development, and is actively on the forward march today in a multitude of countries: the masses in Turkey with the TKP/ML, the Philippines with the CPP, Perú with the PCP, and India with the CPI(Maoist) are all actively waging revolutionary war; forces muster to prepare for it in Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Norway, and more. What we must to is simply apply this method, which we know works, wherever we are. If we have no interest in doing that we cannot claim to be communists!

The intellectuals have a valuable role in forming a Party in helping to shape its ideology, the local Guiding application of MLMism to its country’s particular circumstances, and its programme which will be democratically ratified and followed in constructing dual power, the revolutionary United Front, and ultimately the workers’ socialist government. Groups organizing young progressive intellectuals toward Party reconstitution in the territory of the “United States” bourgeois republic include- I don’t imagine they are limited to- the members of the Rev. Study Groups and Revolutionary Student Union coalitions. Revolutionary intellectuals should stand in solidarity with them and, if it is politically useful and possible, join local chapters.

Ten: We must subordinate ourselves, in all matters, to the true makers of history: the masses, the majority working class struggling for their freedom. And, as they emerge, to the Leadership and revolutionary vanguard Communist Party of that class and its revolutionary cause.