Several months ago, an individual representing themselves as a member of the “Maoist Labor Group of Austin” contacted our Editorial Board requesting that we publish a document they had prepared which aimed to criticize the political line of the Mt. Tai Study Circle. We found the document (which has since been published on the author’s substack) to fail to meet our basic editorial standards, and to differ significantly from our orientation—both as regards its assessment of the comrades in Mt. Tai and in its general approach to the burning questions of our period—and thus responded to the submission request in the negative, laying out the content of our disagreement while expressly remaining open to publishing a revised version in the future (going so far as to offer to support its author with line-by-line editorial feedback).
The response to this from our interlocutor at the MLGA has been to issue a polemic on the problems of “unity within the American Maoist movement.” While we are not interested in responding to that document in full at this time, it makes claims regarding our initial response to their communications and thus makes public issue of what we had understood to be a private correspondence. We have consequently made the decision to publish that response publicly, to “correct the record” and because it articulates our outlook on certain positions relevant to the broader movement.
Lal salaam!
We appreciate that your group took the time to reach out to us with with your article on certain trends of in the movement, trends which you have identified as “rationalism.” Struggle between communists on questions such as these is, from our perspective, one of the main tasks of the present period, and consequently we are grateful to your contribution to the struggle for rectification of the general line of the communist movement.
However, despite some points of unity we share with the argument you have advanced here (and an admitted sympathy for your antipathy for scholasticism), we found that your diagnosis of ‘rationalism’ (and general account of the state of the Maoist trend) diverges radically from our own assessment, verging in the direction of practicalism, an error we find both decidedly more widespread than those errors you ascribe to Mt. Tai’s style of work and far more dangerous to our movement. Additionally, we found the tone and style of your document to undermine the many important observations which you do draw, muddying the waters with a number of unnecessary (and incorrect) generalizations from personal anecdotes as well as errors in argumentation.
At the highest level of description, our concern is that your document seems to overemphasize one aspect of Mt. Tai’s line (their emphasis on study) to the exclusion of others, resulting in both a cascading misrepresentation of their positions and a series of erroneous political arguments. The consequence of this is the articulation of a position which overcorrects from the misrepresentation of Mt. Tai’s line by moving away from what we understand to be the correct position (that the main task today is the rectification of the general line of the communist trend) and towards a conception of Marxism reduced to a pragmatism in which theory exists in mere service to practice, rather than as a self-sufficient body of scientific knowledge with its own set of truth procedures.
In our own documents, we emphasize the work of ideological construction because unity around a correct grasp of our ideology is necessary for the development of the more sophisticated political-organizational work towards which we aspire.
In the Iskra declaration—from which we quote at length the same passages to which we point in our own declaration—Lenin argues, quite forcefully, that
“The principal feature of our movement, which has become particularly marked in recent times, is its state of disunity and its amateur character, if one may so express it. Local study circles spring up and function independently of one another and—what is particularly important—of circles that have functioned and still function in the same districts. Traditions are not established and continuity is not maintained; local publications fully reflect this disunity and the lack of contact with what Russian social-democracy has already achieved.
Such a state of disunity is not in keeping with the demands posed by the movement in its present strength and breadth, and creates, in our opinion, a critical moment in its development. The need for consolidation and for a definite form and organisation is felt with irresistible force in the movement itself; yet among social-democrats active in the practical field this need for a transition to a higher form of the movement is not everywhere realised. On the contrary, among wide circles an ideological wavering is to be seen, an infatuation with the fashionable “criticism of Marxism” and with “Bernsteinism,” the spread of the views of the so-called “economist” trend, and what is inseparably connected with it—an effort to keep the movement at its lower level, to push into the background the task of forming a revolutionary party that heads the struggle of the entire people.
It is a fact that such an ideological wavering is to be observed among Russian social-democrats; that narrow practicalism, detached from the theoretical clarification of the movement as a whole, threatens to divert the movement to a false path. No one who has direct knowledge of the state of affairs in the majority of our organisations has any doubt whatever on that score[…] We do not desire to exaggerate the gravity of the situation, but it would be immeasurably more harmful to close our eyes to it.”
To our view, the twin errors Lenin observed in his period are similarly dominant now: narrow practicalism and ideological disorientation are the main dangers in the present moment, while the scholastic retreat into protracted study (which we acknowledge does exist in some isolated bands of our trend) is of considerably less concern. Additionally, we note that, given the predominance of theoretical and political-ideological impoverishment in the trend today, circles dedicated to a narrow theoreticism are potential allies to those who, like us, see the pressing task of communists to be the struggle to rectify that impoverishment, so long as we attend to the significant disunity between our conception of party-building and theirs (a disunity rooted chiefly in questions of the level of emphasis necessary on practical intervention in the mass movement in the current phase).
We found that your document correctly points out that the phase of ideological construction should not be characterized as “ideological development and struggle to the absolute exclusion of practice” (a position which, notably, Mt. Tai does not take up either) but rather than drawing out the necessary conclusions regarding the relationship between ideological construction and practical work in the present phase, it instead strikes out at an imagined enemy to defend the honor of practical work in general against an opponent who doesn’t seem much to care either way, and does so entirely by way of an emphasis on the relationship between “theory and practice” to the exclusion of concrete discussion of the real strategic content of practice.
To our chagrin, the abortive discussion of such questions that does occur here is also very circumscribed. For example, we wonder, in your account of the tasks of the present moment, how we are to
“convince the rest of the movement to join us in our efforts by challenging them ideologically, by being able to honestly and aptly lay out the reasoning for Maoism as the highest advancement of Marxism and the importance of the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and by being able to offer concrete practical tasks instead of merely posturing like an intelligent and enlightened bunch, who only have to offer an endless waterfall of words [or] take from the rich experience of over 150 years of class struggle and be modest and humble, be honest and aboveboard”
without first mastering that ideology, that rich experience of class struggle, in a firm and all-sided way. And while it is true that such mastery requires participation in the struggle, it is similarly true that before one can meaningfully do so, one must take up the task of intensive study. We find your polemic to fail to reflect its own call to be honest or humble, precisely because it assumes from the onset the level of ideological and political development which would justify its claims without self-reflection.
More concerningly, we find your characterization of the following description of work as a “higher stage of concrete revolutionary practice” to be problematic:
“[P]asting flyers around workplaces, working-class neighborhoods, bars etc., that contain agitational language and material attached to them—via qr codes or something similar for easy access—that directly point out company or industry specific grievances from a Maoist point of view, connecting the economic to the political, like a poster which hits on the working conditions in logistics warehouses in a few words thereby effectively attracting logistics workers to it. Or, coming to terms with our objective lack of knowledge of the workers, we can create an in-depth questionnaire which aims to gain a rich collection of raw data given to us by workers through their own words, while simultaneously gaining their trust in the process. Moreover, in our day and age we have the ability and the technology to do something like this en masse with relatively few numbers at present (e.g. printing hundreds of flyers at a time for low cost, putting digital access on each flyer for workers to gain more information instantaneously, etc.) which makes complaining about a lack of forces rather superfluous.”
At risk of being too blunt, this is the bare minimum level of political work which even the most amateur organization should be capable of accomplishing. That you believe access to, for example, large scale printing overcomes the very real problem of dispersal of forces indicates a clear lack of meaningful experience with substantive attempts at serious political work, and your apparent naivety as regards the efficacy of the tactics you’ve described—tactics which, we emphasize, are commonplace among forces as varied as the revisionists of FRSO to the labor bureaucrat lackeys of the Democratic Party—demonstrates to us the substance of Mt. Tai’s claim which you cite derisively earlier in the document: that we oughtn’t emphasize practice before we are equipped to evaluate that practice.
In that paragraph, you argue that
“[T]he duty of any “professional scientist” is to not only formulate a hypothesis but to test it in practice. We must always remember that: “The basis is social science, class struggle. There is a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie…It is only starting from this viewpoint that Marxism appeared. The foundation is class struggle. The study of philosophy can only come afterwards.” Instead, these rationalists preach, putting it plainly for us “simpletons”, that the tasks for our movement are straightforward: “win over as many sympathizers and Marxists to study as…possible [again, only those predisposed”, “keep [our] priorities straight”, and “don’t emphasize practice at a stage where we don’t even know how [author’s emphasis] to evaluate practice.” I guess merely studying the pear, inquiring feverishly about the pear, will have us know its flavor far better than those who consume it.”
The conclusion you’ve drawn here is inconsistent with the last of the quotations you’ve selected, and your reductio ad absurdum as regards the example of the pear is clearly an inappropriate comparison; Mt. Tai are correct to point out that the leap to practice without a firm basis in theory is inappropriate, as anyone with even mild experience in the struggle ought to be able to tell you (and which our many years of work in the movement have made perfectly clear to us). Those activists who leap to work without understanding what kind of work they ought to engage in, where or how to engage, or how to ascertain what it means to intervene successfully will simply burn themselves out in repeated cycles of dead-end projects.
We re-emphasize this claim because to our view this error is the main danger common among groups of new communists and decidedly not the alternative. Frustrated with the dead-ends of movementist organizing, and having encountered Maoist ideas in a circumstantial way (almost always online), these groups decide, correctly, that something must be done, and urgently! With the boundless initiative and confidence of people who believe they now have all the answers—having at best perhaps studied the popularizer texts of movements past and skimmed one or two of the Marxist classics—they see the need to leap directly into the class struggle, and “agitate and propagandize” immediately! And thus begins a spiral of shallow and meandering practicalism, flyering and holding “mass meetings” of a handful of contacts who inevitably drift away, “mass organizations” which are little more than social media pages, half-hearted ‘political education’ sessions that may have begun with zeal but, by the end, are nothing more than rote discussions of misunderstood ideas by a group too tired to figure out why their approach has failed. Eventually, the core members drift apart, abandoning politics or sliding rightward, until ultimately the “organization” joins its fellows in the graveyard of inactive social media accounts and unread pamphlets. We have seen this exact pattern repeated time and time again in cities and towns across the country over more than a decade of political participation in the current phase of anti-revisionist party-building efforts; we have ourselves fallen error to it, and this is why we speak so directly towards the need for its rectification. Nothing in your document indicates success at moving beyond precisely this orientation towards political work.
Against this, we perceive the line of march for new organizations of burgeoning communists to begin with a protracted period of study of the classics and preliminary social investigation in order to consolidate a solid nucleus of revolutionaries around a firm grasp of the Marxist method. Only upon the consolidation of such a nucleus can meaningful political work begin, and even then, such work should take the form of patient and careful attempts to build durable links with a specific layer of the masses.
We appreciate that your document indicates in provisional form an attempt at taking this task seriously, but because of your attempt at a full-frontal assault on the line of Mt. Tai, the result is an overcorrection towards exactly the practicalism about which we are concerned.
As regards the publication of this document on LONG MARCH, while the sharp differences we perceive between your orientation and our own are not necessarily sufficient cause to decline to publish it, we found the writing itself to fail to meet the standards for professionalism and polish we expect for our platform; some serious revision is necessary, which we suggest likely entails the removal of the editorialized interjections (“But I digress” etc.) which distract from your line of argumentation and obscure a number of insightful points through clumsy language. We encourage you to attempt to revise this document, and respond to our criticisms here, because we see value in continuing this exchange. We would be more than happy to provide additional feedback (including line edits) on a future draft and emphasize again that while we do not see this current form of your document as particularly ready for publication (on our platform or elsewhere), a revised version could be a valuable intervention into the growing struggle to rectify the general political line of our trend.
At the level of politics, to our view, a revised document should emphasize that while communist work in the current period means fighting for political gains for the mass movements in their day to day class battles, our strategic emphasis cannot yet be on the role of our interventions in expanding the influence of Maoism or developing the capacity of the masses for combative struggle. Instead, strategic emphasis must be placed on the maturation of communist forces and the development of our political-ideological outlook, without which those gains and that influence over the mass movement lack real historical significance. Such maturation which is necessary in order to engage in the mass movement effectively and at scale.
This should be emphasized in the context of its proximity to the position of Mt. Tai regarding the primacy of ideological construction, and in order to help draw out the real lines of demarcation between your position and theirs, which are obscured by the current argumentation (and overly polemical tone) of the document in its present form.