May 7th, 2002

I. Theses on the vanguard party in the transition to communism

The works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the "Gang of Four" are the foundation on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of these people, Mao, Jiang Qing, Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao lived to see the most experience with socialism.

Here we would like to stress those points of overriding importance in socialist society that Mao and his contemporaries only started to handle. Even Mao Zedong because he followed Stalin only started the struggle against this problem in the last 20 years of life. In contrast, today all parties should be Maoist and start the struggle against the bourgeoisie in the party from day one of state power and even before when ideological preparations for state power are made and when there is as yet no bourgeoisie in the party yet.

Looking back at what has happened in the socialist experience, we propose the following solutions to minimize corruption under the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus thwart the bourgeoisie in the party.

Assumptions

1) Except in exceptional periods of civil war, the masses are as of yet not prepared to govern themselves fully in a socialist manner, never mind a communist one. The masses do not have adequate preparation in the imperialist countries because of the long influence of parasitism and not in the oppressed nations because of the many tasks of economic construction that must occur first and have time to take root including basics of literacy and other forms of education. Even in the semi-imperialist countries, there is as of now no history showing a complete thoroughness of the masses in political matters except for rare instances. Hence, it is the task of the party to maximize political impact without assuming a widely politically active population. Crucially, the belief that the masses are about to absorb politics and administration to run society in its totality is ultra-left at the current moment in most, perhaps all countries, especially those running into the millions in size.

The basis for increasing self-administration by the masses will be laid by the protracted people's wars which most oppressed nations will have to wage and by the communist party's correct policy during the transition to communism.

2) The masses have often justified their own fatalism or cynicism by the corruption of the party.

3) The masses will give support to others demonstrating altruistic leadership, as MIM discussed at the Congress of 2001. The masses do not have to be altruistic themselves to support altruists as leaders.

4) The masses turned to the free market in many Soviet societies in part because of corruption by the party. If low-level narrow self-interest and careerism guides socialism, then the masses have wondered why not have a completely free market with profit motives out in the open. Of course, the masses also had their needs taken care of under socialism and thus ironically and dialectically had reason to become apolitical relative to civil war history and times of intensive famine.

Solutions

The vanguard party must be small, prestigious and powerful. To accomplish these goals, MIM favors the following solutions underlying our vision of socialist society.

1) Toward making the party small and boosting its prestige in a certain way, party salaries and living conditions must be below the average. Whatever woes the society suffers, the party must suffer them disproportionately.

2) Although the party will be paid below average, the party must not be known as a place for the incompetent and lazy. Rather it is a place for those who wish power to carry out social engineering directed toward communist goals. Today in the united $tates, the public believes that many teachers are underpaid given their level of competence. Many teachers teach for the love of their profession, not the money, and that is how it must be in the party. People in the party work in the party for their love of justice and social change ending oppression, not for money, sexual favors or benefits for their family.

3) The party will generally not accept state and technical experts or other cadres just because of their expertise. Quite the contrary, non-party cadres of this sort will receive above average pay to do the party's bidding.

4) The party will arrange a system of awards including large monetary rewards for innovations by the non-party cadres and masses that actually reduce class strife. Likewise the party will punish especially those party members who seek to increase class differentiation through conspiratorial elitist activities. It will be the task of the party not to benefit itself or its families but to see to the reward of those who really contribute to moving society forward. The party should be more like a combined sports coach and referee than the actual sports participant. The people are the athlete that the party seeks to motivate to move forward in the fastest possible way.

If a communist party in state power is not able to grasp how to use its powers of reward to reduce class strife and differentiation over time, then the party will fail. On the one hand, a society organized only on the basis of material rewards is surely headed for capitalism. On the other hand, dialectics applies to material incentives too, so there must be a way to use them to eliminate their use in the long-run.

People who do not believe they can do this should not attempt to join parties in state power. That is the question of leadership, the question of whether or not there is the humyn leadership material present in society to lead forward to the self-evident goal of scientific communism discussed for 150 years now.

5) As discussed in the 2001 Congress resolutions, party members should be volunteers willing to give their lives. That means that whether through intentional error or bungling, the equivalent of the Ford Explorer tire scandal would result in death penalties amongst the party officials running the tire business. This will keep the party on course and maintain the party as a small place, not the most sensible place to pursue money or career ladders. When the prestige of the party is high from such risks and responsibilities assumed by leaders, the people will support their leaders and anything will be possible given time. The prestige of the party in China and the Soviet Union did nothing but decline the longer it held state power and accepted careerists into its ranks. There is an important sense in which the damnation of the labor bureaucracy follows communists into state power. As Mao said in his writings about Yugoslavia, the socialist countries found themselves corrupted by the buying over of party leaders.

Proletarian democracy

We do not hide the fact that if we have a chance to impose a communist coach/referee on society by "authoritarian means," then we are in favor of it, because survival rights cannot be negotiated or voted away--contrary to what bourgeois democratic politicians say. Nonetheless, a majority of people in any society or the world as a whole may choose to put in a system run by the communist coach/referees that we propose. To that extent there are democratic and authoritarian ways of fighting for the survival rights of the people.

It goes without saying that under bourgeois democracy it is impossible for a small party to have power. In bourgeois democracy the more money the candidates spend and the more they lie and not get caught, the more the candidates succeed. Moreover, the more candidates posture and invent the issues at hand in the way a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the better off a candidate will be in bourgeois democracy. Such candidates are expert in saying what majorities want to hear, not in leading societies forward.

In fact, under bourgeois democracy the people are encouraged to take up unrealistic views of power in order to leave the ruling bourgeois elite untouched. In the past, feudal ruling classes were small and did not have majority support, but they too were limited by the inherent economic backwardness and thrust of the feudal lords. In contrast with feudalist sentiment which few people consciously defend even in principle anymore, a common sentiment of the people everywhere is that communism is a good idea that does not work. The people appreciate the principles of communism and often the few communists themselves who would make upright and selfless leaders. Those hated as communist leaders are those careerists and bureaucrats that have arisen after the seizure of state power by communists.

Although scientific communists must oppose parliamentary democracy with its built-in posturing, careerism and manipulation of anti-scientific emotions, it is not true there is no democratic thrust possible under scientific communist leadership. There is nothing stopping a majority of people from choosing to hire a coach/referee to get a job done. When the majority accepts this coach and referee and agrees to live by the rules imposed by such a coach and referee, then in fact we have a kind of majority rule.

Up to now, proletarian parties have become corrupt the more they imitated the methods if not the stands of previous bourgeois or feudal political actors. The masses too have not managed to stop their parties from being taken over by a bourgeoisie. The reason for this is that the communists have failed to understand their strengths and weaknesses relative to previous political systems and actors. It is crucial not to fight with only the methods suitable to other class forces and other periods of history.

A portion of the problem is the organization of the party and another portion is how the masses relate to that party. When the party does not carry high prestige, the masses feel quite justified in raising various kinds of nonsense against the party in the course of struggle against corruption. After all, if the party tolerates low-life activity in its midst, the masses start to assume that that is the normal course of affairs and the masses cannot be expected to exert a positive democratic influence in such circumstances. For this reason, we learn that during the Cultural Revolution, various people used the openness and politicization of the period to drag out persynal conflicts of no consequence to the general public if resolved one way or the other. In the united $tates, the Monica Lewinsky scandal shows that Amerikkkans too can be easily distracted from critical questions of political power. Under socialism, it will remain the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat to convince the masses not to make light of the party in a pornographic way as part of the deal of accepting communist leaders. One way we do that is that we will ask the masses not to persynally impugn communist leaders they do not see up close. Proletarian democracy does not mean spending time on baseless accusations: it means combining actual knowledge with participation. In some cases, it will continue to be necessary to repress the remnants of capitalist society so stubborn as to oppose selfless communist leaders in power for the sake of the overthrown bourgeoisie.

It is the task of the party to keep the people focused on their real goals. Partly the party accomplishes that by being small and altruistic relative to the rest of society. Of course, we are not saying that altruism is the motive force of revolution. That would be anti-Marxist; however, the prestige of the party in particular is bound up with its selflessness. Only a selfless political leadership can lead the people toward the realization of their own self-interests opposing war, starvation and environmental degradation, because at this time the masses themselves are not ready to take the stage as communist actors on a continuous basis.

MIM is in favor of the kind of democracy combining knowledge and participation with power. People in daily contact with a party member will know if that persyn is engaging in black market activities on the side. Such knowledge needs an outlet and to that extent the press must be free under socialism and democracy means that the masses may be the ones to take action to purge unfair referees, just as they do in athletic competitions. No sports league can afford to have the athletes and spectators believe that the referees are corrupt, so too the communist party cannot afford it.

In the Olympics in 2002, corruption of ice-skating judges came out into the open. Without taking sides in the details of that dispute it is clear to MIM that the non-referee people should have input where they are actually in a position to know something. That is the positive role democracy can play.

In contrast, we scientific communists should not encourage dumbocracy--the notion that if a majority of parasites flip a coin and choose a candidate with minimal study of the candidates or issues that somehow the political outcome will be OK. When we encourage people to participate in things they do not know about and do not care to know about, we serve as the greatest possible prop for bourgeois democracy.

II. Discussion of the benefits of the system above

In the past, ultra-leftist and dumbocratic assumptions have ruined everything from political study groups to anti-corruption campaigns. It is our task as the vanguard party to lead. Given what the masses have told us, we demonstrate incapacity to lead if we have not figured out yet that the masses do not want continuous political campaigns and study-groups for everybody. Those of us communists who envision everyone suddenly becoming interested in political study groups have abdicated their leadership. The task is not to assume widespread political participation but to figure out how to motivate its appearance amongst the masses on a voluntary and communist basis--through the use of state power including selective economic awards aimed at reducing class differentiation in the long-run. This is question of the radicalism of political leaders: do they understand the factors underlying humyn behavior or not? People who do not understand the systems and factors underlying humyn behavior should not claim to be communists, because they are not even radicals yet.

In an atmosphere of corruption and dumbocracy, there will be political study groups, but they will turn into rituals and places of further corruption. They will do everything possible to poison the political development of the people.

In contrast, where the party is small and prestigious, the people will act in a more directed way with fewer outbursts of completely irrelevant self-entertainment. By allowing cadres to make money by innovating in a progressive direction, the materialistic and selfish impulse of many will be channeled in a correct direction--not by an "invisible hand" but by a visible one. Since the money-making impulse will have an outlet it will have less ability to contaminate the party itself. It is a plain fact that many people like to play lotteries and gamble for millions of dollars in money. Rather than deny this fact of life we should make use of it until it is no longer true. We should be confident that with the correct scientific leadership, even multi-million dollar rewards that amount to a life of leisure serve no danger to the dictatorship of the proletariat as long as those award-winners do not worm their way into the party heading the dictatorship of the proletariat. The key is to use rewards so that the overall use of monetary rewards in society necessary decreases--what is called in scientific communist theory the restriction of "bourgeois right."

The people are already familiar with the idea of coaches and referees. The people would be angry if they found out that baseball umpires called the pitches and plays based on splitting the championship award money with the team they favored. That would be corruption. However, the people also know that the umpires make less money than the players and in general the people respect the referees and the system of rules in sports. The people do not become concerned that they are not referees themselves and they do not believe that umpires have to be elected every year; even though no harm would come of it in a leisure-time matter such as baseball.

Bourgeois democracy focuses on the head-to-head race of the horses. The choice of referees and rules governing the sport are rarely of interest, but in politics that is what should be of interest. The real race is not the race to get votes through phony posturing, but in bourgeois democracy that is what the referees focus on. We believe there is a basis for getting the people everywhere to agree that the democracy of bourgeois democracy is misplaced. It is better to have a shortage of horses in the race if the results of what political leaders do is better. It is better to discourage people from becoming leaders in the first place than to have to choose amongst leaders on the flimsiest of bases. That is what we call raising the bar. Let the athletes jump over a bar before anyone asks us to choose who amongst them is the best jumper. We ask for people to choose a communist system along the lines we describe or at least to recognize that a majority of the world's population has chosen such a system. Once the people have decided to defend survival rights and choose the vanguard party to do the job, the job of the party is to lead the way coaches and referees do-- without necessarily involving everyone. If the communist party sets up the rules with the long-term goal of communism and without benefitting itself, we believe there is the best chance that a majority will support the communist system just as they support leagues, officials and referees in sports generally today.

III. Discussion for the future

We invite discussion of these theses. Of course it was Lenin who first pointed to the paradoxical benefits of having a small party even when the communists were in state power. It was Khruschev who was the first to relax the atmosphere in the scientific communist party in power so that leaders knew they would not face execution for failure on issues of life-and-death. Without the disincentive of executions ordered by a Lenin or Stalin, the party became a place filled with careerists and incompetents out to benefit themselves in corrupt ways tolerated by Khruschev and Brezhnev after him. Since the party had already created income differentials too and had allowed party members the highest salaries even under Stalin, both the carrot and the stick pointed toward capitalism under Khruschev. Where the party and state are so heavily merged in the personnel as they were under Stalin, the use of the proletarian stick was absolutely paramount to maintain a proletarian orientation. The proof is the era of corruption that followed Stalin.

As a matter of advancing discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat in historical experience, MIM is also collecting opinions about Chen Boda, Lin Biao and various people dubbed "ultraleftist" after the Cultural Revolution. We would like to know to what extent these and other individuals targeted the Chinese population in general as requiring ideological purification and how much they were able to focus their fire on the economic system and the minority capable of putting China on the capitalist road. We have no sympathy for the ultra-leftists who thought the enemy was the majority of the Chinese population, but we seek to examine whether or not there was something else Mao could have done in his political alliances of the Cultural Revolution to forestall Deng Xiaoping.

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