Mass line, Stagism and Revolutionary Politics

[flyby]

Lurigancho raised on this site the issue of "mass line" and the controversy over whether this is linked to revisionist approaches in mass work.

this has been touched in some initial line struggles on anouther site (2changetheworld.info, which will soon disappear.)

So I suggest we move some of these threads over here, especially the more meaty and substantive posts. And explore some of these questions.


While we should avoid petty and unprincipled and anecdotal discussion of these issues, we should dive into the substantive matter -- from the high plane of two lined struggle!

And we need to remember that the point is not just to "have a good debate" but to have a correct, revolutinary and communist line win out, and be better understood by everyone -- in opposition to incorrect, non-revolutinary and revisionist lines.

[flyby]

here, as a basic background is the RCP's summation of "mass line" from its current Draft Programme:

The Mass Line
The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses. To apply the mass line means to seek out and learn from the ideas of the masses and to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to concentrate what is correct in these ideas, distilling and synthesizing them into a more all-sided and correct reflection of reality and what must be done to change it. The party then takes this back to the masses in the form of line and policies, works to win the people to take these up, and unites with the masses to carry them out…summing up the results and then repeating the process.

The mass line is an ongoing process which links theory with practice and the vanguard with the masses in an ever-deepening way—all in the service of the masses’ fundamental revolutionary interests.

The Spontaneous Struggle and the Party
The struggles waged by the masses around their conditions are of vital importance in preventing the masses from being crushed and in developing among the masses a sense of their ability to unite and fight back against their oppressors. But, in and of themselves, these struggles cannot lead to revolutionary consciousness or a revolutionary movement. By definition these struggles have limited aims and scope—most involve a demand for a partial change or reform and are targeted against a particular oppressor or aspect of state power.

Thus, the revolutionary party cannot take the view that the struggle of the masses will spontaneously make the leap into a revolution. In addition to the inherent limitations of any single struggle, the bourgeoisie sends its political operatives into any mass movement of significance, promoting directions and lines which draw people more deeply into the suffocating “proper channels” of bourgeois political life.

Even struggles which spontaneously develop into very powerful outbreaks of mass upheaval will eventually ebb, leaving the system that spawned them intact, if battered. Surely the history of the United States—full of heroic mass uprisings by different sections of the people—proves this. The party cannot tail in the wake of spontaneous struggles and seriously call itself revolutionary.

But the genuine proletarian party does not stand aside from the masses’ spontaneous struggles. Such struggles provide a strong basis for the work of the party. While at times the party must and should play a direct role in tactically leading, or striving to lead, these struggles, its most crucial and essential role lies in raising the consciousness of the masses, and developing their fighting capacity and organization—all as preparation for going over to something different: the struggle to seize power from the capitalist class when the time is ripe.

To paraphrase Lenin, the party must divert the many different streams of struggle from their spontaneous tendency to remain confined within the existing bourgeois framework. It must step by step transform them into a raging revolutionary flood-tide against the system as a whole. (How the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA carries out this work is discussed further in the appendix “Create Public Opinion, Seize Power! Prepare Minds and Organize Forces for Revolution. The Central Task of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.”)

2changetheworld.info/docs/part2-01-party-masses-en.php#a01tml

[redstar2000]

The RCP Draft Programme says: The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses. To apply the mass line means to seek out and learn from the ideas of the masses and to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to concentrate what is correct in these ideas, distilling and synthesizing them into a more all-sided and correct reflection of reality and what must be done to change it. The party then takes this back to the masses in the form of line and policies, works to win the people to take these up, and unites with the masses to carry them out...summing up the results and then repeating the process.

This is so vague that even I can find nothing to object to...it's what anyone with any Marxist pretensions and common sense would do automatically.

What is controversial is a specific "mass line" in a specific country with a specific history.

What is this particular party telling people in this particular historical context?

Is it true? Is it accurate? Is it really "raising revolutionary consciousness"?

The Draft Programme simply assumes that "of course", the party's current "mass line" is correct.

But what if it isn't?

Who is responsible, if not the leadership?

And how can it be corrected (you would say "rectified") if the leadership resists that?

Or, suppose the "mass line" is correct and is making (slow) progress and the party leadership becomes impatient...and changes it into an incorrect line?

Then the struggle for "rectification" becomes, perforce, a struggle against the leadership...and we know how those turn out, don't we?

In addition, there is the question of implementation...which the Draft Programme also simply assumes will be done in a thoughtful and conscientious way.

But that's not always is the case, is it?

A "good line" can be implemented in a wide variety of ways...good and bad.

I offered this conjecture once before (without response) so I will repeat it: Maoists seem to assume that a correct "mass line" is "all you need" -- and "good practice" will automatically follow.

Do you think that's true?

I did read the threads that flyby linked to...and there did seem to be some "undercurrents" there -- suggesting perhaps a disagreement in its very earliest stages (when people are still reassuring one another that they agree even though they really don't).

But the only specific example of a "mass line" was that of China in 1937-45...which even the participants in those threads conceded was irrelevant to the situation now in the U.S.

So, in the absence of details, we end up discussing abstractions.

Should communists publicly be communists? I would certainly hope so.

Should communists push a "communist take" on current "spontaneous" struggles -- both learning from and criticizing them? How could anyone disagree with that?

Should communists participate in such struggles? Sure...unless they are forced to abandon communist ideas in order to do so.

Are there "stages" of political consciousness that people "must" pass through? Almost certainly not. And even if there are, it's not something that communists can or should "use". If people "must" pass through bourgeois liberalism, reformism, etc., then that's the task of bourgeois liberals, reformists, etc. to perform, not us! We should be attacking liberalism, reformism, etc. and not joining in the muck fest.

So, flyby, what do we have to "wrangle" about here?#nosmileys

[RosaRL]

here are parts of the threads that Flyby mentioned - I'm not going to repost the whole exchage here

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Subject: Mass Line or Stagism?
Posted by: ox

Lurigancho raised an important line issue when writing: "I think this question is basically one of deciding when to push the mass line and when to push the maximum program."

One of the things i noticed about the RCP's draft program is that it does not to have a formalized "minimum program" of immediate demands and a distinct "maximum program" (of revolutionary demands, i.e. socialism and communism). Clearly the RCP has decided not to make that kind of a distinction.

The RCP programme is about "create public opinion, seize power." The Party develops principled "bases of unity" that it unites with others to combat the system and its effects, but its programme is about revolution for communism.

I think of "mass line" in a way very different that Lurigancho does, since the quote from Luri that I gave above basically re-invents the "minimum programme" idea and just calls it "mass line."

To me the mass line means several things:

Mass line means first and foremost the idea that the masses make history, and that nothing can be accomplished without the masses. So it is a method of relying on the masses.

It is also used to describe a style of work, that learns to understand the masses (their current consciousness, experience and their felt needs) and then proceeds to promote the revolutionary communist project.

I would agree that part of any serious and practical style of work is understanding that not all things are important all the time. And also that some things are important dividing lines and some things are not.

But I would warn against slipping into the notion that there is some stagist "minimum program" that reds should be fighting for among the masses, and that the hard core ideological and political issues of world revolution, communism and MLM generally are for some other time and place.

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Subject: Re: Mass Line or Stagism?
Posted by: repzent

Lurigancho wrote (in what was perhaps an unfortunate choice of example): "The key to bringing forward broad masses into struggle (and allying with other organized forces) is the mass line. For example, during the struggle against Japan, the Chinese Communist Party brought masses forward on the basis of opposition to Japanese imperialism, not on the basis of the full programme of the CCP."

The example of China fighting Japan exactly doesn't apply to the U.S. One main reason: China was a semi-feudal semicolonial country waging a two stage revolution (with an immediate anti-feudal and anti imperialist goal). And the anti-japanese united front was a further sub-stage within those two stages! Socialism was not directly "on the agenda" -- while New Democracy was (as a form of transition under the leadership of the proletariat to socialism.)

The U.S. by contrast is a country needing a single-state proletarian revolution -- so there is not a new democratic stage, and a distint program for that stage. There will be different twists and turns to that (as lurigancho correctly says), and alliances. Objectively all processes have "stages" (in the largest sense) -- but the poreltarian socialist revolution itself does not have a distinct and separate "minimum program" for its first development, and a "maximum program" for sometime later.

The RCP Programme does not seem to use the expression "maximum programme" at all. (Is my impression true?) And I'm curious where that expression comes from, and what it means etc. The terms "minimum program/maximum program" have a history within the International Communist Movement -- but I don't think they have been used by the RCP since the struggle with the menshiviks in the late 1970s.

Chairman Avakian compares the idea of a programme (meaning the plan and strategy of the party in the largest and sweeping sense) with various more immediate programs developed at specific point.

I doubt that Lurigancho actually meant to put forward a "two stage" revolution for the u.s. (by using china as an example) -- certainly the revolutionary process in the U.S. today does not have a "substage" with its own program (comparable to the united front against japan in the 1930s.)

But I'll let lurigancho speak for his/her self.

one other point:
Lurigancho wrote: "It is a method that recognizes that people coming deeper into the struggle and some people (eventually) becoming communists is not a process whereby someone reads a newspaper or listens to a lecture and then transforms into a communist. Rather, it is a complicated process with lots of bends in the road that is based mainly on practice and summing up practice over a relatively long period of time."

This is probably true, overall. People don't become communists from one article etc. (and no one thinks they do, right?) But does this mean communist ideas should be spoon fed to people, one timid piece at a time, over a long, long time while people cautiously digest it.

I don't think it will work that way. And I don't think that is the Draft Programme's vision of communist work.

We need to be rather "out there" including with our ideology -- unfurling the red flag and "wearing our MLM hats" (both literally and less literally). Going against the tide, being bold, patient and tireless, and applying the mass line as a way of bringing communism -- the historic interests and revolutionary tasks of people -- to the forefront,to millions and millions of people who need to learn about it.

[RosaRL]

Looking at this quote from the Draft Programme and redstar2000's comments it seems that redstar2000 is seeing the lines and policies that are arrived at by applying the method of the mass line as the mass line itself and taking those 'lines and policies' as something that is dogmatically set in stone rather than as something that is constantly changing as the process itself (theory-practice-theory) is carried out through applying MLM and also in a context where the objective conditions are also in a constant process of change.

Because the conditions themselves are ever-changing it is quite possible for any line or policy that was appropriate at a previous point in time to become inappropriate in the present. But just because those policies no longer apply does not mean that the method used to arrive at those polices are also dated in any way.

However, without applying the method that is talked about in the Draft Programme (which redstar2000 finds hopelessly vague) it is impossible to correctly arrive at new 'lines and policies' that are in sync with the new conditions.

[Burningman]

I think there is a misunderstanding of what Mass Line is. It's not a "position on the issues," it's a methodology for engaging in mass work.

Flyby roughly explained what it means.

"Program" is the particular operating line of a party. Mass Line is a method for figuring out what it will be and applying it. It is not "tailoring a message." It's the opposite.

It exists in opposition to two tendencies: opportunism and dogmatism.

The opportunist repeats whatever people are "spontaneously" saying.

The dogmatist picks obscure points on which to cull people away from a movement.

Mass Line recognizes the need for leadership, and the necessary organic connection of that leadership to a social base.

There's really no other way to fight for socialism.

---------

This is also a crucial issue for the argument between dialectics and pragmatism.

[flyby]

the mass line is (first of all) the understanding that only the masses can emancipate themselves, and that without the masses (their understanding, support and activity) nothing will succeed. It is the fundamental MLM understanding that "the masses are the makers of history."

Beyond it is as the RCP Draft programme sums up: "The mass line is the method through which the party both learns from and leads the masses."

It is a method for learning and leading. Of bindingthe revolutioanry forces in a living way to the living masses of people -- of keeping the pulse of the people, and having them take up the revolutionary project their own.

This MLM view of mass line is opposed to the revisionist use of this term. To revisionists "mass line" means holding up a mirror to the masses (or other, perhaps less crude forms of tailing spontaneity).

Burningman writes there is another problem, which he describes as "The dogmatist picks obscure points on which to cull people away from a movement."

I have no idea what that means.

And i am not sure that the highest goal of every emerging revolutionary is to stay within whatever movement they were first part of.

Many new communists take up other work than just remaining activists in mass movements. And so they should. The revolurionary struggle is much more than the sum of various mass movement.

Lenin urged communists to take young revolutioanries who emerge from the proletariat and move them around, give them new tasks in new areas, train them in theoretical work, or new fields of activity. It is part of the training of real revolutionaries. And it is necessary because the role of revolutionary organization (and the revolutionary communists who make up such organizations) is not narrowly to serve this or that mass movement or struggle -- but to represent the future within the present.

[redstar2000]

Here is a website that criticizes the RCP's conception of a "mass line" from a Maoist viewpoint.

www.massline.info/

Since I don't share the premises of the author, there's not much of interest there for me.

But I thought some of you might find it instructive.

[Andrei_X]

Lenin urged communists to take young revolutioanries who emerge from the proletariat and move them around, give them new tasks in new areas, train them in theoretical work, or new fields of activity. It is part of the training of real revolutionaries. And it is necessary because the role of revolutionary organization (and the revolutionary communists who make up such organizations) is not narrowly to serve this or that mass movement or struggle -- but to represent the future within the present.

I agree with Lenin's ideas on how to train young revolutionaries not only because it helps in breaking down the various contradictions within society and helping people master many things, but also helps youth get a real sense of what the masses are feeling in certain enviroments around certain issues... which helps in understanding the world better as well as applying mass line.

But here's my question: After synthesizing these ideas among the masses, how exactly DOES the Party take these ideas back to the masses in the form of line and policies? Are there any good examples from history? Are there any good works by Mao (outside of the Little Red Book) that really dig deep into this?

[Burningman]

Guest-flyby said:

Burningman writes there is another problem, which he describes as "The dogmatist picks obscure points on which to cull people away from a movement."

I have no idea what that means.

And i am not sure that the highest goal of every emerging revolutionary is to stay within whatever movement they were first part of.

Many new communists take up other work than just remaining activists in mass movements. And so they should. The revolutionary struggle is much more than the sum of various mass movement.

What it means is, for example, specifically adopting and promoting positions for the purpose of "cutting" a movement to cherry-pick maleable individuals rather than taking responsibility for the overall development and growth of the people's capacity to resist, rebel and ultimately make revolution.

Revolutionaries work to turn resistance movement into revolutionary movments. Of course they aren't the same thing.

Mass Line is about taking the particular and felt needs of the people, what often compels any given social sector into struggle, and representing the strategic interests of the proletariat in that struggle. That's what leaders do. They lead, not through adoption of formal line per se -- but by creating possibilities and having the follow through the implement it. At best.

Trotskyites are the most notorious for "cutting." Traditionally it's called "splitting and wrecking." It's a most peculiar and counter-productive read on Lenin's call to "divert" mass movements and has more to do with the maintainance of small, isolated sects than building class consciousness broadly or the capacity of leadership organizations.

Most important for this discussion, flyby, is the RCP's recent turn back towards the cult of personality in the midst of mass disenchantment with capitalism and the current state/media structure. Making the cult a dividing line is a way of "cutting" the situation that totally fails in appreciating the strategic possibilities of the moment. It forces "sectarian principles by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement" into an unnecessary and counter-productive compact with revolutionary communism.

I'm not saying that's the only play in the RCP's book. But it's what's on the cover. And that is a misread of the people, what they want and what they need. Some do seek messiahs. Fat lot of good that's done them. We don't need to gather the weak-minded, but focus the best elements -- the vanguard element -- into a cohesive and disciplined force around the CARDINAL issues. Who has power? How do we get it?

People need leaders who lead by line and practice, not face (and more face). If the line is about face and the practice is waving the face -- then it's just fronting.

I'm not waiting for a Moses, so to speak. And those who are have been waiting for a long time. He's not coming. (And if one does show up, it won't be because an insular group of ideologues decide to manufacture one.)

"Revolution" isn't the sum of a hundred smaller movements.

[redstar2000SE]

Speaking of "face"...

Glimpsing A Liberated Future With Chairman Avakian

The implication seeming to be that "if he ain't there, she don't wanna go".

[flyby]

I think Avakian is making a radical "re-envisioning" of socialism. And one important reason for putting him out there is to actually fight for a hearing for that new vision.

It is important to look over our experience with socialism, and with capitalist restoration -- and not just "defend and repeat," but dare to think of how we would do it differently and better, and then think through what that means for how we organize, lead, unite, think now.

There are many inherited "things" from the international communist movement that need to be looked at criticially and broken with:

There is a whole pragmatic way of inventing "political truths" that are useful but not actually true.

There is a way of measuring ideas by how they fit into political needs and schema (instrumentalism) -- but ignoring or denying the basic question of whether they are true.

There is aview of "questions are a problem" or "challenging interrogation is a problem" -- which shuts down scientific, creative and critical thinking. And treats critics as "a problem" to be shut down, or ignored, or answered with pat answers.

These are all things that Avakian is working on, fighting for -- often in the face of a mountain of dogmatic "tradition" and habit. And it has everything to do with what kind of communist parties we will build, what kind of revolutionary movements we build, and what kind of societies we are bringing into being.

If we win power, will we create new societies people will want to live in? Or will we have trained ourselves and built movements in ways that (despite intentions and promises) lead somewhere else?

Will we grasp our main man's method and approach? Will we look at reality as it really is, fearlessly? Will we be open to interrogation and self-interrogation? Will we look at real world contradictions, in their difficulty and complexity -- or content ourselves will illusion, dogma, easy answers, pat formulas (and the awful results that will flow from THAT method)?

We are being challenged in a profound way.

Chairman Avakian is putting out a call, carving a path, that rejects things with are far to engrained in thinking -- in society and even among communists.

It is anti-fundamentalist in a profound way -- not just in the sense that it challenges and calls out the rightwing fundamentalists who are in power, but in a way that it challenges the thinking of communists.

That is one reason why it is so important to dig into what he represents, and what he is putting before us. It is not just that he is the leader of the RCP, and that it is important for people to know who such leaders are, and what they stand for, and to know the importance of defending them.

Chairman Avakian is (i repeat) working out a new approach to key questions of revolution, and socialism, and represents a living link between the liberated communist future we dream of and our present world where we are struggling to prepare the basis for revolution.

[flyby]

so to answer Redstar's comment.

I think the point is that if we don't fight to grasp and apply the vision of socialism that he is putting out -- if we don't really think through what it means to "expand the 'we'," if we merely think that the party automatically knows whats right, if we don't appreciate the struggle to wrangle over truth and learn to think criticially....

then WE won't want to live in the societies we create.

And we will be reduced to the lame arguments of the Soviet Revisionists "well, our society may suck, and people may be unable to speak basic truth, it may be gray, stale, rigid, cloistered, and even filled with patent injustice -- but you get a pension and free medical care."

We don't want that. And we don't want to get to power, and realize we have left ourselves no choice but to knock on that door and lead in that way.

[flyby]

I want to repost the following excerpt from
"DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY,
AND THE SOCIALIST TRANSITION TO COMMUNISM"
rwor.org/bob_avakian/new_speech/avakian_democracy_dictatorship_speech.htm

it is one place (among many many places) where Avakian points to a leap beyond even the best experiences of previous socialist societies (beyond mao, if you wanna put it that way).

In some ways, if you dig into this, then you can actually see what he is getting at in all his recent works -- the bigger project he is working on, how those pieces fit together.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
As the world exists today and as people seek to change it, and particularly in terms of the socialist transformation of society, as I see it there are basically three alternatives that are possible. One is the world as it is. Enough said about that. [Laughter].

The second one is in a certain sense, almost literally and mechanically, turning the world upside down. In other words, people who are now exploited will no longer be exploited in the same way, people who now rule this society will be prevented from ruling or influencing society in a significant way. The basic economic structure of society will change, some of the social relations will change, and some of the forms of political rule will change, and some of the forms of culture and ideology will change, but fundamentally the masses of people will not be increasingly and in one leap after another, drawn into the process of really transforming society. This is really a vision of a revisionist society. If you think back to the days of the Soviet Union, when it had become a revisionist society, capitalist and imperialist in essence, but still socialist in name, when they would be chided for their alleged or real violations of people's rights, they would often answer "Who are you in the west to be talking about the violation of human rights -- look at all the people in your society who are unemployed, what more basic human right is there than to have a job?"

Well, did they have a point? Yes, up to a point. But fundamentally what they were putting forward, the vision of society that they were projecting, was a social welfare kind of society in which fundamentally the role of the masses of people is no different than it is under the classical form of capitalism. The answer about the rights of the people cannot be reduced to the right to have a job and earn an income, as basic as that is. There is the question of are we really going to transform society so that in every respect, not only economically but socially, politically, ideologically and culturally, it really is superior to capitalist society. A society that not only meets the needs of the masses of people, but really is characterized increasingly by the conscious expression and initiative of the masses of people.

This is a more fundamental transformation than simply a kind of social welfare, socialist in name but really capitalist in essence society, where the role of the masses of people is still largely reduced to being producers of wealth, but not people who thrash out all the larger questions of affairs of state, the direction of society, culture, philosophy, science, the arts, and so on. The revisionist model is a narrow, economist view of socialism. It reduces the people, in their activity, to simply the economic sphere of society, and in a limited way at that -- simply their social welfare with regard to the economy. It doesn't even think about transforming the world outlook of the people as they in turn change the world around them.

And you cannot have a new society and a new world with the same outlook that people are indoctrinated and inculcated with in this society. You cannot have a real revolutionary transformation of society and abolition of unequal social as well as economic relations and political relations if people still approach the world in the way in which they're conditioned and limited and constrained to approach it now. How can the masses of people really take up the task of consciously changing the world if their outlook and their approach to the world remains what it is under this system? It's impossible, and this situation will simply reproduce the great inequalities in every sphere of society that I've been talking about.

The third alternative is a real radical rupture. Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto that the communist revolution represents a radical rupture with traditional property relations and with traditional ideas. And the one is not possible without the other. They are mutually reinforcing, one way or the other.

If you have a society in which the fundamental role of women is to be breeders of children, how can you have a society in which there is equality between men and women? You cannot. And if you don't attack and uproot the traditions, the morals, and so on, that reinforce that role, how can you transform the relations between men and women and abolish the deep-seated inequalities that are bound up with the whole division of society into oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited? You cannot.

So the third alternative is a real radical rupture in every sphere, a radically different synthesis, to put it that way. Or to put it another way, it's a society and a world that the great majority of people would actually want to live in. One in which not only do they not have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, or if they get sick whether they're going to be told that they can't have health care because they can't pay for it, as important as that is; but one in which they are actually taking up, wrangling with, and increasingly making their own province all the different spheres of society.

Achieving that kind of a society, and that kind of a world, is a very profound challenge. It's much more profound than simply changing a few forms of ownership of the economy and making sure that, on that basis, people's social welfare is taken care of, but you still have people who are taking care of that for the masses of people; and all the spheres of science, the arts, philosophy and all the rest are basically the province of a few. And the political decision-making process remains the province of a few.

To really leap beyond that is a tremendous and world-historic struggle that we've been embarked on since the Russian revolution (not counting the very short-lived and limited experience of the Paris Commune) -- and in which we reached the high point with the Chinese revolution and in particular the Cultural Revolution -- but from which we've been thrown back temporarily.

So we need to make a further leap on the basis of summing up very deeply all that experience. There are some very real and vexing problems that we have to confront and advance through in order to draw from the best of the past, but go further and do even better in the future.

[flyby]

Just one more example:

Bob Avakian is arguing that it is deadly for us to follow an "all to familiar" logic -- that "we represent the people, so what we do and say must represent the people."

That view ignores all kinds of contradiction -- including the contradiction between leaders and led, between the party and the masses, and between the state under socialism and the people. And history has shown that these contradictions can give rise to new oppression -- and so we ignore those things at the cost of our very nature.

So how do we deal with that? Rule out having parties, leaders, and states? Obviously not.

Part of the main man's theoretical project (and method) is to look at these contradictions fearlessly -- examine what is objective about them, and how the dynamics of those contradictions give us ways to transform them and society (and ourselves).

Here is one example, it is the essay called:
"Expanding and Transforming the "We" Who Holds State Power"
rwor.org/a/1201/bareach6.htm

(there is more, but I will leave it there for now)