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March 1995 by MC5
In the middle of MIM's internal struggle over anarchism during the 1994 Party Congress (see accompanying article), the majority drew more and more upon the writings of Chairperson Mao Zedong for guidance on questions of party organization against the anarchists challenge. At one point in the struggle, the anarchists replied:
"One can find a Mao quote to justify anything. One thing you won't find in Mao's writings, tho', is much in the way of references to Marx, Lenin, Engels, Stalin, etc." --Anarchist Wind Internal Document of MIM, July 21, 1994.
Because of his personal popularity, Mao's words have indeed been used to justify a lot of revisionism in China. However, the Party majority countered that if Mao quotations could justify anything, then the anarchists should be able to find Mao equating the leaders of pre-revolution parties with state power, but they were able to find no such quotations.
More important than the substance of this issue, however, is the method with which the anarchists looked at the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, writings we communists refer to as "classics."
Once in power, the Chinese Communist Party saw to it that China publish hundreds of millions of copies of the "classics" in several different languages and set up a publishing house for translating these works into various languages. These books cost pennies in China, and a few more cents in foreign countries. The low cost of "Quotations from Chairman Mao" enabled the Black Panther Party to make a profit on the book and buy their first guns.
Taking Mao out of context and revising his use of this term, the anarchists in MIM derided referring to the classics as "book worship." Here MIM explains why the classics remain critical to the organization of a vanguard party in the 1990s, and why hierarchy, leadership, organization and theory remain critical to the successful revolutionary struggle.
In the 1890s, before Lenin wrote "What Is To Be Done?", the Bolshevik Party was in a more backward situation than MIM is today. Lenin was working with various circles of activists and study groups that kept getting smashed by the state. They didn't have a party structure and they didn't produce regular literature. Nonetheless, he encountered people very much like the anarchists in MIM, who confused the authority of party leaders with the authority of the state. Lenin recalls hearing the first attacks on the "dictatorship" of leaders within the Party in 1895.(1) He wrote:
"We hope that the reader will understand why the Russian Bolshevik, who has known this mechanism for twenty-five years and has seen it develop out of small, illegal and underground circles, cannot help regarding all this talk about 'from above' or 'from below,' about the dictatorship of leaders or the dictatorship of the masses, etc., as ridiculous and childish nonsense, something like discussing whether a man's left leg or right arm is of greater use to him."(2)
In 1905, Russian conditions were more open than they were under the czar, because the regime granted some bourgeois liberties. In the aftermath of a huge revolutionary upsurge, Lenin advocated that the Party quickly take in new revolutionaries. However, he anticipated that some might complain about giving a vote to new comrades, and he argued that the Party was strong enough to take in people as well as train them quickly in large numbers.
"Is Social-Democracy ["socialism" in the language of Lenin's day] endangered by the realisation of the plan we propose?" he asked.
"Danger may be said to lie in a sudden influx of large number of non-Social-Democrats into the Party. If that occurred, the Party would be dissolved among the masses, it would cease to be the conscious vanguard of its class, its role would be reduced to that of a tail. That would mean a very deplorable period indeed. And this danger could undoubtedly become a very serious one if we showed any inclination towards demagogy, if we lacked party principles (programme, tactical rules, organisational experience) entirely, or if those principles were feeble and shaky. But the fact is that no such "ifs" exist. We Bolsheviks have never shown any inclination toward demagogy. On the contrary, we have always fought resolutely, openly and straightforwardly against the slightest attempts at demagogy; we have demanded class-consciousness from those joining the Party, we have insisted on the tremendous importance of continuity in the Party's development, we have preached discipline and demanded that every Party member be trained in one or other of the Party organisations."(3)
Although Lenin won the votes at the Second Congress, the newspaper Iskra -- one of the bases of Lenin's faction of Social-Democracy -- was taken over by the Mensheviks after the Congress, thanks to Plekhanov. In periods of weakness, vacillators can do a lot of damage. And Plekhanov had distinguished revolutionary credentials with which to act as a sell-out. This experience reveals that revisionism must be combatted no matter how hard its proponents work. Line is decisive in a vanguard party.
In the period following the failed Revolution of 1905, Lenin advocated more openness in recruiting. While MIM's anarchists found some support for their line in this period of Lenin's (1905-1909), there are some crucial differences between his Party and MIM. When arguing that workers are "instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic" and thus openness with regard to recruiting workers was appropriate, he admonished:
"Don't invent bugaboos, comrades! Don't forget that in every live and growing party there will always be elements of instability, vacillation, wavering. But these elements can be influenced, and they will submit to the influence of the steadfast and solid core of Social-Democrats."(3)
The Bolshevik Party did open up, emphasizing less theory. At this moment for the Party, he argued for a party composition of 90% workers and 10% intellectuals:
"We have 'theorised' for so long (sometimes -- why not admit it? -- to no use) … that it will really not be amiss if we now 'bend the bow' slightly, a little, just a little, 'the other way' and put practice a little more in the forefront." He also said: "Let this question be the exception (it is an exception that proves the opposite rule!) in which we shall have one-tenth theory and nine-tenths practice. Such a wish is surely legitimate, historically necessary, and psychologically necessary."(4)
This call for a more open Party, relying on worker spontaneity, was a failure. Clearly, MIM today cannot just open our Party to anyone calling themselves workers and expect that the correct line will spontaneously flourish.
Attacking hierarchy and theory in the Party, as the anarchists in MIM did, means attacking the forces that weld the Party together and make crucial organization possible. The result of Lenin's call for openness and less theory, at the Fourth Congress, was that the Bolsheviks lost their majority. The Congress elected a Central Committee of three Bolsheviks and seven Mensheviks. The editorial board of the central organ was Menshevik. As a result of this and years' more experience, Lenin learned that having an effective Party was a matter of emphasizing theoretical clarity and not tolerating intellectual vacillation.
By World War I, he saw that the larger European parties took up national chauvinism and led the workers into imperialist war. Zinoviev argued that it was better to have a steadfast Party one-fifth the size of a larger one that vacillated. Confusion hurts the leadership and recruiting process needed for proletarian revolutionary victory. As late as 1917, the Bolsheviks, with Lenin's guidance, knew when to stay small and not try to become too popular at the expense of their line. They maintained an unpopular opposition to World War I because they knew it was just a matter of time before the reality of the Russian working class asserted itself.
Just as the anarchists in MIM attacked MIM leadership as formalistic, bureaucratic and "Stalinist," so did the Mensheviks attack the Bolshevik Party leadership, using the same language:
"As a matter of fact, Comrade Axelrod and Comrade Martov['s] … entire [opportunistic] position … in organisational questions already began to be revealed in … their advocacy of a diffuse, not strongly welded, Party organization; their hostility to the idea (the ëbureaucratic' idea) of building the Party from the top downwards, starting from the Party Congress and the bodies set up by it; their tendency to proceed from the bottom upwards, allowing every professor, every high-school student and 'every striker' to declare himself a member of the Party; their hostility to the 'formalism' which demands that a Party member should belong to one of the organisations recognised by the Party; their leaning towards the mentality of the bourgeois intellectual, who is only prepared to 'accept organisational relations platonically'; their penchant for opportunist profundity and for anarchist phrases; their tendency towards autonomism as against centralism…"(5)
Upholding the "very precise (formalistic and bureaucratic, those would say who are now using these words to cover up their political spinelessness)"(6) policies passed by the Organizing Committee of the Bolsheviks, Lenin continued: "Opportunism and anarchism, or bureaucracy and formalism? -- that is the way the question stands now, when the little difference has become a big one."(7)
MIM is not the first party to have the problem of comrades who favor loyalty to small groups in the party before the central party organization. Lenin argued against Comrade Akimov's call for small group autonomy within the party:
"[I]nasmuch as the Party is one whole, it must be ensured control over the local committees. Comrade Lieber said, borrowing my expression, that the Rules were 'organised distrust.' That is true. But I used this expression in references to the Rules proposed by the Bund spokesmen, which represented organised distrust on the part of a section of the Party towards the whole Party. Our Rules, on the other hand … represent the organised distrust of the Party towards all its sections, that is control over all local, district, national, and other organisations."(8)
He continued:
"He inveighs against my 'monstrous' centralism and claims that it would lead to the 'destruction' of the lower organisations, that it is 'permeated through and through with the desire to give the centre unrestricted powers and the unrestricted right to interfere in everything,' that it allows the organisations 'only one right -- to submit without a murmur to orders from above,' etc. 'The centre proposed by the draft would find itself in a vacuum, it would have no peripheral organisations around it, but only an amorphous mass in which its executive agents would move.' Why, this is exactly the kind of false phrase-mongering to which the Martovs and Axelrods proceeded to treat us after their defeat at the Congress."(9)
In the end, Lenin's Party led a successful revolution, while the anti-centralism, anti-bureaucratic Mensheviks wasted away.
Lenin argued against counting "all who help" in the struggle as Party members, labelling it "anarchistic."(10) But Lenin's critics portrayed him as an elitist purge-monger, who wanted to "throw overboard" valuable "Party members" who were not directly members of any Party organization. Lenin countered that better centralism within the Party would mean more fruitful and expansive relations with the non-Party masses.(11) Recently, MIM created the MIM Supporters Group (MSG) and the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL), which are associated with MIM but not directly a part of it. This followed our recognition that while MIM is best off with only Maoists as members, valuable revolutionary work can be done by people who have a lot of unity with Maoism but are not in a position to be in a Party. Anyone outside the Party can help in the revolutionary struggle. But to be inside the Party you are supposed to do more than just help, Lenin said, and we agree.
After initially defeating the Mensheviks and then losing ground to the them, Lenin had a brief resurgence in 1907, only to get his faction smashed again after yet another major round of degenerations. By 1909, he was no longer talking about openness.
"A year of disintegration, a year of ideological and political disunity, a year of Party driftage lies behind us. The membership of all our Party organisations has dropped… The main cause of the Party crisis is indicated in the preamble of the resolution on organisation. This main cause is the wavering intellectual and petty-bourgeois elements, of which the workers' party had to rid itself."(12)
As MIM has pointed out before, Stalin probably disagreed with us about the early stages of party-building. In "Foundations of Leninism" and elsewhere, Stalin argued that great personalities necessarily play a disproportionate role in the early stages of party-building. From what we understand, we believe he would advocate joining large organizations of the oppressed masses in order to weld them into something like a party at this stage of the struggle. In contrast, MIM has emphasized the scientific element of party-building at this stage. Taking a strong anti-imperialist stand requires small numbers at this stage in the revolution, because of strong material pressures to ally with imperialism or to push for a new neocolonialism.
So While MIM looks toward the classics for guidance on questions of political line and party organization, we also recognize the different material conditions in an imperialist country. In Russia and China it made sense at the initial stages of party building for communists to join large organizations such as the Guomindang and trade unions. Perhaps in the United States the starting point would be the Black church, the Rainbow Coalition. But MIM instead believes it is important to publish independent party literature and to divert those in the Black church and the Black electoral struggles onto a better road.
For the mature party, and for the party that holds state power, Stalin's writings are more universal. In 1923, when the Bolsheviks held state power in the Soviet Union, someone named Rafail rose within the Party. When Rafail compared Party discipline to the army, as did the anarchists in MIM (and we don't even hold state power!), Stalin countered:
"The Party is the advanced detachment of the proletariat, built from below on the voluntary principle. The Party also has its General Staff, but it is not appointed from above, it is elected from below by the whole Party. The General Staff does not form the Party; on the contrary, the Party forms its General Staff. The Party forms itself on the voluntary principle… Hence the specific character of Party discipline, which, in the main, is based on the method of persuasion, as distinct from army discipline, which, in the main, is based on the method of compulsion. Hence the fundamental difference between the supreme penalty in the Party (expulsion) and the supreme penalty in the army (death by shooting)."(13)
In MIM's Congress, the anarchists complained that they were effectively executed with words. They too likened purges with militarization. And like the MIM anarchists, Rafail was part of an opposition to party leadership which argued for the freedom to form factional groups within the Party.(14)
Stalin also contended with forces in the Party, including Trotsky, who made the non-Marxist, non-materialist error of separating the "Party" from the "Party apparatus," or leadership, and criticizing the latter. Stalin argued that this distinction was impossible to make: what would the Party consist of separate from its apparatus?(15)
(At this time, early in the split with Trotsky, Stalin did distinguish Trotsky from more revisionist Mensheviks, and gave him credit for having a better line than the more inexperienced Party elements whom he influenced. MIM also can uphold Trotsky from 1917 to 1923 while upholding Lenin over Trotsky in that same period when the two disagreed.)
In MIM's case, not only is the distinction between the Party and its leadership a false one, but the expansive powers of MIM's leadership were purely imagined by its anarchist critics.
In 1944, Earl Browder, then General Secretary of the Communist Party-USA, along with 38 of 40 members of the CPUSA's Politburo, thought the best way to protect socialism in the Soviet Union was to dissolve the independent role of the CPUSA, and win over the Amerikan people without intimidating them with a communist party. Browder would have sacrificed anything for international peace with the Soviet Union. (Today, this tendency among imperialist-country communists manifests itself in groups such as the non-Maoist party in Quebec, which is making support of PCP its main task. They have since moved on to trying to form parties which apparently is involving a process of splintering, which is probably necessary. They don't take to heart the idea that their task should be to overthrow North Amerikan imperialism, not sacrificing everything for the PCP.)
In the case of the CPUSA, this problem was the result of revisionism, and it was discovered way too late to be corrected. Browder's critics, including William Foster, incorrectly believed that the white working class was exploited and fundamentally anti-imperialist, so their correct criticisms of Browder's dissolution must be taken with a grain of salt.
First, the critics argued that Browder had too much authority in the party. To counter this authority, they argued (significantly, unlike the MIM anarchists) that comrades needed to show more theoretical mastery and take on more party leadership. They wanted to reconstitute the independent party and stress the study of theory.
Browder's critics wrote a new Constitution, saying:
"Some people think that we can fulfill our vanguard role today by merely reflecting and putting into more precise and correct form what the democratic masses are thinking. Obviously, this is not correct. This does not mean giving leadership to the mass movement, for it can only result in tailing behind the mass movement. While we must constantly feel the pulse of the people, and remain an integral part of the mass movement, we can never forget that the Party, as one of the Marxist classics emphasizes, 'cannot be a real party if it limits itself to registering what the masses of the working people think or experience…' In fulfilling the vanguard role of the Party, we must be able to project ideas often not yet fully accepted or understood by the masses, and do so in such a convincing and effective manner that we can influence labor and the people to accept them as their own."(16)
MIM's internal struggle similarly included anarchists who wanted the party to merely reflect the proletariat but not lead it. Communists who believe the best road to revolution is a vanguard party must struggle resolutely against this trend, which results in dissolution. Just as the anarchists in MIM wanted, Browder's first steps toward dissolving the party outright included downplaying the party leadership and increasing the autonomy of the lower organizations. Finally, like the anarchists in MIM, Browder downplayed theoretical study in favor of mass work -- underestimating the importance of the former and the nature of the latter.
Browder's critics countered:
"This distortion of and contempt for Marxian theory is dangerous and has nothing in common with Marxism… It is our deep conviction and determined purpose to insure that now, as never before, for us Communists, theory must serve as a guide to action."(17)
Rather than take the course advocated by today's party anarchists, the CPUSA's correct pole in the 1940s sought to put the role of the party "clubs" back on par with mass organizing. The party clubs were the basic cells of the party, with 45,000-90,000 members. They restored the requirement for internal party struggle. In contrast, anarchists in MIM said less theoretical struggle would combat personality cults (such as Browder's, and, the MIM anarchists claimed, personality cults within MIM) and other leadership problems. This line holds that when theory is elevated, the role of individual leaders is increased and distorted.
Even at the height of the CPUSA's membership, Browderite revisionism went basically unchallenged. Resistance to Browderism was not strong enough to create new parties or prevent the party from shrinking. Large numbers of members does not prove the line correct. Tens of thousands of people had the chance to think for themselves, and without international pressure they basically failed.
Those on the correct pole of the CPUSA -- opposing Browder's right-opportunist liquidation in the name of merging with the masses (garden-variety rightism) -- saw the danger of anti-theory pragmatism: "We often confused the woods for the trees, and tended to evaluate or raise short-term tactics and transitory phenomena to the level of strategy or a 'new theory.'"(18)
In self-criticism, the anti-Browderites quoted Lenin from "Marxism and Revisionism":
"To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the day to the windings of political trivialities, to forget the basic interests of the proletariat and the main features of the entire capitalist system as well as the whole capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these basic interests for the sake of real or would-be advantages of the moment -- such is the policy of revisionism. And it obviously follows from the very essence of such a policy that it may assume an infinite variety of forms and will give rise to one or other variety of revisionism, each time when there is some 'new' question, or when there is more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events, even though this turn changed the basic line of development to but an insignificant degree and for but the shortest period of time."(19)
Quoting from the History of the CPSU, the CPUSA of 1945-6 found something used by Mao in "Combat Liberalism" and other places:
"A party is invincible if it does not fear criticism and self-criticism, if it does not gloss over mistakes and defects in its work, if it teaches and educates its cadres by drawing the lessons from the mistakes in Party work, and if it knows how to correct its mistakes in time. A party perishes if it conceals its mistakes, if it glosses over sore problems, if it covers up its shortcomings by pretending that all is well, if it is intolerant of criticism and self-criticism, if it gives way to self-complacency and vain glory and if it rests on its laurels."(20)
Through its struggle with anarchism in 1994, MIM progressed to its deepest understanding of Maoism yet. Some people degenerated and a little Menshevik rot in the Party was swept away. We must rid ourselves of anarchism, tame our ultraleftism, and expose the right-opportunism that opposes inner-party struggle just as it opposes righteous struggle with the masses. If we can do these things and keep the "book-learning" and inner-party struggle moving forward on an even keel, then we can avoid some massive disruptions and battles with revisionism, and we can reach outward for a meaningful and effective mass line.
At the MIM Congress, the initial anarchist outburst came from a desire to protect some people from criticism and use that to advance an anti-democratic-centralism agenda. By the end of the struggle, MIM's anarchists were openly saying that we were making ourselves too "small" by "persecuting" (criticizing) people. The majority reminded the anarchists that our Third World comrades have truly suffered at the hands of the imperialist state and know that persecution is very different from mere criticism.
According to Mao:
"Criticism must be sharp… If you do not do things well, I won't be satisfied with it, and if I offend you, I offend you, and that's that. To be afraid of offending people is nothing more than being afraid of losing votes and being afraid of having difficult relations in one's work with one's co-workers. Will I starve if you don't vote for me? Nothing of the sort. Actually, relations will be smoother if you speak out and put the problem clearly on the table… A bull has two horns because it has to fight. One purpose is for defense and another purpose is for offence. I have often asked comrades, ëHave you grown any "horns" on your head?' You comrades can feel your heads and see… I think that it's better to grow two ëhorns,' because that conforms to Marxism."
Contrary to the sizeist ideas of "growth" promoted by MIM anarchists, who were trying to call right opportunists to their aid, Mao saw criticism of petit-bourgeois individualist ideas as part of their own "growth."
"The source of such incorrect ideas in this Party organisation lies, of course, in the fact that its basic units are composed largely of peasants and other elements of petit-bourgeois origin; yet the inadequacy of the Party's leading bodies in waging concerted and determined struggle against these incorrect ideas and in educating the members in the Party's correct line is also an important cause of their existence and growth."(21)
In North America, where most of the petit bourgeoisie does not belong to oppressed nations, there are even more mistaken ideas to correct. Here we should be all the more willing to engage in criticism and self-criticism.
MIM can take guidance from the following quotation from Mao, even though he speaks of a military situation. But at our current stage of party building and public opinion, we have different kinds of battles, and hence the following is of some use:
"Since the Fourth Army of the Red Army accepted the directives of the Central Committee, there has been a great decrease in the manifestations of ultra-democracy. For example, Party decisions are now carried out fairly well; and no longer does anyone bring up such erroneous demands as that the Red Army should apply 'democratic centralism from the bottom to the top' or should 'let the lower levels discuss all problems first, and then let the higher levels decide'. Actually, however, this decrease is only temporary and superficial and does not mean that ultra-democratic ideas have already been eliminated. In other words, ultra-democracy is still deep-rooted in the minds of many comrades. Witness the various expressions of reluctance to carry out Party decisions.
"The methods of correction are as follows: (1) In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultra-democracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organisation and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next, it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petit-bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought in the Party, it develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organisationally."(22)
The anarchists in MIM openly struggled against having a Party hierarchy, arguing that powerful leadership would thwart the Party's growth, and most importantly, quell the initiative of the local party organizations. They claimed Mao Zedong would not have supported hierarchy in the Party. The majority in MIM claimed, and maintains, otherwise:
"All decisions of any importance made by the Party's higher bodies must be promptly transmitted to the lower bodies and the Party rank and file…
"The lower bodies of the Party and the Party rank and file must discuss the higher bodies' directive in detail in order to understand their meaning thoroughly and decide on the methods of carrying them out."(23)
"The Chairman said: 'The slogan of 'Doubt everything and overthrow everything' is reactionary. The Shanghai People's Committee demanded that the Premier of the State Council should do away with all heads. This is extreme anarchism, it is most reactionary. If instead of calling someone the 'head' of something we call him 'orderly' or 'assistant', this would really be only a formal change. In reality there will still always be 'heads.' It is the content which matters. There is a slogan in Honan, 'The present-day proletarian dictatorship must be completely changed.' This is a reactionary slogan.'"(24)
For people lower in the hierarchy to criticize the leadership is not only fine, it is a matter of duty. Struggles within the party can and will arise and become bitter, but when people emerge from these struggles calling for the abolition of hierarchy and democratic-centralism, when comrades cannot make the distinction between a revolutionary party without state power and the bourgeoisie, those people have emerged as anarchists and do not belong in a Leninist party.
Anarchists in MIM further asserted that strong leadership in a Party undermined the mass line. The most famous quotation from Mao on the mass line follows. MIM's anarchists only presented the first part of it:
"In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily 'from the masses, to the masses'. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge."(25)
But crucially, in the same article, Mao emphasizes the role of Party leadership:
"In relaying to subordinate units any task (whether it concerns the revolutionary war, production or education; the rectification movement, check-up on work or the examination of cadres' histories; propaganda work, organizational work or anti-espionage, or other work), a higher organization and its departments should in all cases go through the leader of the lower organization concerned so that he may assume responsibility; in this way both division of labour and unified centralized leadership are achieved… Both the person in over-all charge and the person with specific responsibility should be informed and given responsibility. This centralized method, combining division of labour with unified leadership, makes it possible, through the person with over-all responsibility, to mobilize a large number of cadres -- on occasion even an organization's entire personnel -- to carry out a particular task, and thus to overcome shortages of cadres in individual departments and turn a good number of people into active cadres for the work in hand. This, too, is a way of combining the leadership with the masses."(26)
Stalin and Mao both struggled against the tendency of the party leadership to be "divorced" from the masses, but neither opposed leadership and the party apparatus wholesale. There was a time when there were no "bureaucrats" in MIM. The very first one was named with permission from the rest of the party and a sardonic and self-critical air. But the record will show that before there were bureaucrats (office-holders) there was not a monthly newspaper, a theory journal or other regular party projects. Bureaucracy, departments, hierarchy, centralism -- these are the only ways to organize the masses, who do not want to follow anarchists into failure.
Mao continues his defense of hierarchy within the Party:
"In view of Chang Kuo-tao's serious violations of discipline, we must affirm anew the discipline of the Party, namely:
"(1) The individual is subordinate to the organization; (2) the minority is subordinate to the majority; (3) the lower level is subordinate to the higher level; and (4) the entire membership is subordinate to the Central Committee.
"Whoever violates these articles of discipline disrupts Party unity. Experience proves that some people violate Party discipline through not knowing what it is, [emphasis added] while others, like Chang Kuo-tao violate it knowingly and take advantage of many Party members' ignorance to achieve their treacherous purposes."(27)
Communist anarchists, such as J. Sakai, can be valuable friends of the people and the party. They share with communists the central ambition to achieve a society without oppression or hierarchy. But when anarchists claim Mao Zedong for their anarchist ideas, inside a party, they become harmful to the Party and need to change their ways or be purged.
Mao had several criticisms of communist leaders with regard to their implementation of the mass line. First, he thought some comrades underestimated the masses and the material situation, actually opposing the upsurge of the masses in cases where sturdy leadership would have brought the revolution faster.(28) Second, when the comrades are divorced from the masses and know nothing of the specific conditions of the masses; and third, when the comrades just don't exert leadership -- how liberalism basically rots the mass line and causes it to break down.
"For over twenty years our Party has carried on mass work every day, and for the past dozen years it has talked about the mass line every day. We have always maintained that the revolution must rely on the masses of the people, on everybody's taking a hand, and have opposed relying merely on a few persons issuing orders. The mass line, however, is still not being thoroughly carried out in the work of some comrades; they still rely solely on a handful of people working coolly and quietly by themselves. One reason is that, whatever they do, they are always reluctant to explain it to the people they lead and that they do not understand why or how to give play to the initiative and creative energy of those they lead… To solve this problem the basic thing is, of course, to carry out ideological education on the mass line, but at the same time we must teach these comrades many concrete methods of work. One such method is to make full use of newspapers."(29)
So according to Mao, abdicating leadership is destructive to the mass line. Anarchists will try to present the opposite, arguing that leadership itself is opposed to the mass line. Abdicating leadership is an excuse for passivity -- a common problem among the petit bourgeoisie.
The struggle between the MIM majority and the anarchist wind was largely the struggle between centralized party discipline and the small group discipline that the anarchists promoted. This problem occurred in the Chinese Communist Party as well. Mao wrote:
"What are the remnants of inner-Party sectarianism? They are mainly as follows:
"First, the assertion of 'independence.' Some comrades see only the interests of the part and not the whole; they always put undue stress on that part of the work for which they themselves are responsible and always wish to subordinate the interests of the whole to the interests of their own part. They do not understand the Party's system of democratic centralism; they do not realize that the Communist Party not only needs democracy but needs centralization even more. They forget the system of democratic centralism in which the minority is subordinate to the majority, the lower level to the higher level, the part to the whole and the entire leadership to the Central Committee. Chang Kuo-tao asserted his 'independence' of the Central Committee of the Party and as a result 'asserted' himself into betraying the Party and became a Kuomintang agent. Although the sectarianism we are now discussing is not of this extremely serious kind, it must still be guarded against and we must do away completely with all manifestations of disunity. We should encourage comrades to take the interests of the whole into account. Every Party member, every branch of work, every statement and every action must proceed from the interests of the whole Party; it is absolutely impermissible to violate this principle.
"Those who assert this kind of 'independence' are usually wedded to the doctrine of 'me first' and are generally wrong on the question of the relationship between the individual and the Party. Although in words they profess respect for the Party, in practice they put themselves first and the Party second. What are these people after? They are after fame and position and want to be in the limelight. Whenever they are put in charge of a branch of work, they assert their 'independence'…
"Cadres from the outside and those from the locality must unite and combat sectarian tendencies. Very careful attention must be given to the relations between outside and local cadres."(30)
Revisionists claim to uphold Maoism while gutting its contents. When MIM's anarchist wind claimed Mao for its line, it went from ultraleft deviation to a revisionist line. They never attempted to back up their line and instead counselled on the one hand that it was not important to read the classics, but on the other hand that if one does read them, one will find their anarchist conclusions in them.
MIM's relative youth and specific conditions guaranteed that Liberalism, empiricism, provincialism and nationalism would go together in two-line struggle. MIM's anarchist wind sought to deny that there was anything universally valid in the classics for MIM's two-line struggle. In contrast, the Party majority believed that what Lenin said about 1895, what the anti-Browderites said in the 1940s, what Stalin said about Rafail and what Mao said about hierarchy, bureaucratism, sectarianism and the mass line are all applicable in our situation as well (with careful attention to the differing conditions). There is nothing new about Liberal opposition to party hierarchy and discipline. To believe otherwise is to succumb to provincialism, the belief that conditions we face are so completely unique as to defy the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Notes: 1. "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder," in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Vol. 1, International Publishers: New York, 1967. p. 358.
2. "Ultraleftism and Infantile Disorder," in Ibid., p. 361.
3. "The Reorganisation of the Party," in Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 575.
5. Ibid., pp. 260-1.
6. Ibid., p. 264.
7. Ibid., p. 303.
8. Ibid., p. 301.
9. Ibid., p. 300.
10. Ibid., p. 305.
11. Ibid., p. 306.
12. "On the Road," in Ibid., pp. 584-5.
13. "The Discussion, Rafail…", in J. V. Stalin, On the Opposition, Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1974. p. 33.
14. Ibid., p. 34.
15. "Thirteenth Congress of the RCP(B)," in Ibid., p. 59.
16. "On the Struggle Against Revisionism" CPUSA, 1946, p. p. 71
17. Ibid., p. 52.
18. Ibid., p. 55.
19. Ibid., p. 55.
20. History of the CPSU, p. 80.
21. Mao "On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party," 1929. Selected Works, Vol. I. Foreign Languages Press: 1967, p. 105.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Stuart Schram, ed. Chairman Mao Talks to the People, Pantheon Books: New York, 1974. p. 277-78.
25. Mao Zedong, "Concerning Methods of Leadership," Selected Works, Vol. III, 1975, p. 119.
26. Ibid., pp. 120-1.
27. Mao, "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War," Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 203-204.
28. Selected Works, Vol. I, pp. 23-4.
29. Selected Works, Vol. IV, pp. 241-2. 30. Mao Zedong, "Rectify the Party's Style of Work," Selected Works Vol. III, 1975, pp. 43-5.