# Manual for Revolutionary Leaders/Part 2

II
RISE TO LEADERSHIP
​The continually changing response to continually developing productive forces moves without leadership toward chaos and anarchy. Rebellions are spontaneous and undirected. That is, they are closer to being riots than they are to being insurrections. Rage fades and is replaced by that much-deplored "carnival atmosphere." —This is very serious for at least two reasons. One, that the development of leadership in the struggle is fundamental to victory. It is as necessary as it is difficult for the working class to bring forth leaders from its ranks who stay with the people and sum up the experience of struggle, learning from mistakes to refine the tactics and strategy of the struggle. There is a contradiction between leadership and the people, but this contradiction has to be resolved by the supervision of leadership by the people and by their criticism. It cannot be glossed over simply by an anti-leadership neurosis; rather it needs patient and prolonged training of leaders through the many twists and turns, the victories and setbacks, of the mass movement Secondly, an anti-leadership policy will not really prevent the creation of leaders; it will only guarantee that the leadership is always superficial and quixotic. Without leaders developing over a long period of struggle, there can be no theoretical growth, and every struggle is ad hoc—unrelated to past or future development—and the strategy and tactics of victory remain undiscovered. —Organizational leadership must run fast to keep up with the troops. That leadership seeks to accomplish this is a positive development, though merely trying to keep up with the followers is not a political virtue.
What develops under the hegemony of the dominant form of behavior, at the centers of production of Capital, is not a consciousness, an ideology, or even an organized revolutionary movement, but rather a practice. Marx was clear about the fact that revolutionary consciousness did not rise spontaneously among the workers, but had to be imported from the outside, chiefly by intellectuals: —Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without. —It is also unlikely that a revolutionary party will develop strictly as a result of the day-to-day struggles of the working class. —Mere spontaneity will never suffice. —It is not possible for U.S. workers, in their great majority, to join the fight unless their class consciousness is heightened through the political work of revolutionaries. —The notion of control and the idea of community are central to the radical program; however, people will not naturally organize ​to gain control and create community unless radicals describe the possibilities. —To create a new generation of radicals means to be the arena in which they, as individuals, can grow to become that new generation. —The socialist movement must be able to define and articulate the goals of the immediate post-revolutionary period because these goals cannot be developed through spontaneous activity.
The potentialities of the productive forces which are reflected by revolutionary consciousness are the potentialities that have been historically realized. The world revolutionary movement has produced a body of ideas drawn from objective reality and tested in political struggle. —Neither that experience nor its language should be rejected out of hand. Those phrases are laden with the historical experience of the revolutionary socialist movement —Every revolution is different, because every country has a different history and different sets of conditions. But some revolutionary principles are valid beyond the bounds of particular countries. —In short, the function of a revolutionary is to understand the direction and 'laws of motion' of society in order to change it —All great movements, whether they be of religious or of political character, have to ascribe their enormous successes only to the realization and to the application of these principles, but especially all durable successes are unthinkable without considering these laws.
The key issue is the development of consciousness, confidence and leadership. However, at a high level of development of productive forces, responses to the social order have not been conducive to the application of the modern revolutionary model, they have not given rise to leadership and the struggle for state power, or even to minimally defined revolutionary organizations. That is slow and difficult when you are working with people who are not radical intellectuals. —We need to come to grips with our historic function. —Our contribution to the general popular movement is that (1) we name the system; (2) we explain why the capitalist system needs wars of intervention to survive; (3) we point to the necessity of a revolutionary transfer of power in all capitalist institutions; (4) we discuss openly the road to power, including the shape of the alternative society we wish to build, (5) we build our independent forms of organization which can present our views. —To make a revolution in the U.S. you ​can't be just good guys who want to relate to people. You need a correct analysis. —There is a role for leadership, for those best able to foresee the course of events, to articulate the general principles of a movement. —The task of building a revolutionary alternative in the heart of the empire is not an easy one. It means the presentation of a clear alternative which can win the vast majority of the American people to our side. Part of that task is proving to them that we have a new life to offer and a new future to build. —We become increasingly the only people who have political, economic, social or human answers to the questions that are increasingly going to confront the great masses of students, the great mass of middle class and professional people, the mass of poor and working people. —The success of the revolution depends to a great degree upon the quality of the revolutionary leadership.
Revolutionary theory is not spontaneously generated by political practice. Considerable human effort is required, particularly the efforts of those immediately involved in political work. Waiting for theory somehow to emerge from the grass roots (or descend from the heavens) amounts to little more than an antitheoretical copout. Administrative and ideological activities—organization and theory—are the modern forms of revolutionary activity, archetypes of political engagement, synonyms of radicalism and movement. —The duty of the revolutionary historian is to keep alive a relevant revolutionary tradition, and to tell us what went wrong in the past so that old mistakes need not be repeated. —Revolutionary theory is not the source of truth, but an approximation of reality serving as a guide to action. This can be clarified by an analogy. A roadmap can be seen as an analytical description of a given historical reality—the transportation network in a given geographical area at a certain time. It also serves as a guide to action; you can use it to get from one place to another without getting lost. —There are times when the only protection available to a nascent revolutionary movement is the ability to stay one step ahead of its class enemy—through its understanding of the dialectics of its own development to foresee and thus hasten the transition to new forms of action. These tasks can no longer be left to spontaneity, to the undirected activity of independent individuals. The current historical tasks are the proper tasks of leadership, organization, ideology. —An organizer's ability to sustain his work over seemingly unrewarding periods often rests on his having a developed ideological perspective. —If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their ​historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. —Ideology, then, should not be a mechanical thing—but flexible, able to change with conditions: and the product of study, analysis, and re-analysis of the actual situation. This is what needs to be done—the development of an analysis and theory to give us a basis for understanding what is happening in society, why it is happening, and what are the best methods to bring about change. We must begin to talk about short and long term strategy and the development of a political theory on which to base our actions.
Very few activists besides utter neophytes and a few sundry anarchists doubt the eventual need for a Radical Ideology. If none were evolved, what strategy could ever be worked out for social change? How could we tell people the 'why' of our activism? Most important, what real alternative could we offer to those, present and future, who are fed up with the emasculation and depravity of the present system? —Underlying all our work should be the intensification and growth of the consciousness of unfreedom and the desire for liberation among millions of ordinary Americans. Our job is to destroy the false consciousness of the U.S. middle-class ethos, to remedy the failure of most Americans to perceive their situations in terms of oppressive class relationships. —Radicals should seek to develop programs and activity that increase people's awareness and build a vision of a better society. —People up to now have always formed a concept of man, and then won freedom for themselves to the extent that was necessary to realize this concept; the measure of freedom that they achieved was determined each time by their idea of the ideal of man at the time. —People must find their way out of the restricted perspectives imposed by their condition and toward the light of overview, of understanding. —It is necessary to begin the theoretical work on which such a movement can be based.
We have to expose the American forms of alienation from the dominant values and ideas of corporate society, and translate these into class struggle terms so that —the idea, the conception of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force which controls and determines their practice. —What we need to be doing at this stage of the game is building radical or revolutionary consciousness. —Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, ​about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimaeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; to take up a critical attitude toward them; to knock them out of their heads; and existing reality will collapse. —There is no socialist perspective for our country without the clear understanding that a socialist-conscious working class is an essential precondition for fundamental changes in the social relations. —Consciousness can be important in bringing about new materia! conditions that might be more conducive to more basic and far-reaching social change. —Life is determined by consciousness, not consciousness by life. —The struggle for mass democracy against the illusions of representative government and benevolent bureaucracy cannot be abandoned if the transition from reform to revolution in popular consciousness is to be secured. —Since the New Left considers conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Left declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the New Left has to fight only against these illusions of that consciousness. Since, according to their theory, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the New Left logically puts to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or revolutionary consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation.
strategy can no longer be based on material demands alone. Rather, it must be based on a more encompassing projection of the social and economic alternatives to the status quo. Briefly, we propose a strategy that posits, on the one hand, a critique of the reality of meaningless jobs, manipulated consumption and growing maldistribution of wealth, and on the other hand, a vision of the liberating potential of a fully automated, fully communist society. —The point here is not that the vanguard shall realize the impossibility of preserving the old order of things and the inevitability of its overthrow. The point is that the masses, the millions, shall understand this ​inevitability. But the masses can understand this only from their own experience. —We must devise mass programs which have meaning and make people more radical. —The march can best be used if it is seen as a tactic to involve people more extensively in the Movement; the demonstration as a tool for organizing. —The task is to enable the vast masses to realize from their own experience the inevitability of the overthrow of the old regime, to promote such methods of struggle and forms of organization as will make it easier for the masses to learn from experience to recognize the correctness of the revolutionary slogans. —The alternative to liberalism is showing people the necessity to join our struggle —involving people in experiences which develop a new understanding of the society which denies them opportunities and rights; and which will open possibilities for more insurgent activity in the future. —This requires connecting the immediate local issues with the major political issues so that people have something worth fighting for. We must confront the questions of power and violence head-on to initiate a level of tactics sufficient to generate concern and recognition of our seriousness —through a serious national program designed to eliminate gaps in political consciousness. —Although we recognize value in the publicity our movement receives in the commercial media, since all publicity, even negative, at least gets part of the message across and to that degree is propagandistic, we also understand the very distinct limitations —In spite of the fact that we expect to get screwed by any and all parts of the establishment press system it is possible to use TV coverage to the advantage of the Movement. —We must see films, hear radio programs, and read newspapers produced by people whose interests, experiences, and objectives are roughly similar to our own. Unless this common understanding is established between audience and producer, we will continue to have a dangerously partial and distorted idea of the way things are. —The existence of constituencies of people with radical consciousness would be important in using those conditions for democratic and revolutionary ideals.
There exist incredible opportunities to build power out of the rebellions if organizers can find ways to reach leadership that is drawn from the snipers, the gang cats, and looters. Hundreds of people who get a 'piece of the action' were never involved in organization but are now searching for next steps. They will flock to organized activity that is directed towards gaining permanent bases of power. They can speak with a new legitimacy within the community and beyond because of the potential power we all know they have. The ghetto rebellion constitutes a new source of power which makes possible new organizing. Despite the fierce response of the Establishment ​we should not permit ourselves to be placed on the defensive. We should recognize that repression itself will bring us new allies offended by the erosion of accustomed freedom, and that the urgent task of our movement is to work directly with those who have rebelled. —If any such movement is to succeed, it must develop a long-range perspective that will aid in building a constituency.
For us being a revolutionary means working to build radical constituencies acting in their own self-interest This is the basis, the possibility, for creating major social change here in America, and providing breathing room for revolutionary movements around the world. —But the beginning constituency for such a movement is among those who have no real organization to define them politically. —We see two general types of potential constituencies that should be analyzed and explored as potential components in a new radical coalition, or ideological center. First are class or social groupings: students, industrial workers, urban poor whites and working poor, the aged. The second type of constituencies are those built around issues or areas of social concern. —Workers and lower middle class people are the groups that need to be 'radicalized' and brought around to our viewpoint. Why is it important for professional radicals to consider these people? —The most sublime theoretical insight has no value and no purpose unless the leader moves the masses toward it. —Pragmatically, the reasons are very clear: They are the common Americans, and without at least their support we cannot build a democratic movement —We do not know that all, or any, of these groups will be sources of radical consciousness. Certainly they will not be if left to chance. Before such groups are abandoned to continued manipulation and use as producers or consumers in our welfare state, we should at least examine the possibilities for organizing them and developing a radical consciousness among them.
The problems the middle class faces are distinguished by alienation, powerlessness, psychological repression, and their being manipulated by forces which too often seem (but never really are) impersonal. The key concept here, I think, is powerlessness and the lack of a feeling of integrity of one's self. Our task is to organize these people around these issues for two reasons. First, because to a great extent they are the future society—the wave of the ​future, if you will—and we believe in changing the lives of everyone, and in participatory democracy for everyone. Second, because that is the social class or psychological pattern from which we come and which we best understand. —The social importance of students is increasing at a much greater rate than indicated simply by their numerical growth. In our highly industrialized society, the rate of scientific knowledge and technological innovation is growing at a logarithmic rate. These statistics not only demonstrate the present (absolute) growth of the new working class (the new, highly-educated, technical state) but also demonstrates that the rate of growth in this direction is rapidly increasing. The powers of average offices become as infinitely divisible as money. Students, in that they will by and large constitute this new working class are becoming the most structurally relevant and necessary component of the productive processes of modern American capitalism. —There is a student movement. Something is afoot on the nation's campuses. What can we do with it? —The purpose of student confrontation is to force the administration to make 'blunders' which can be used to move students into action. —Educational work, petition campaigns, dorm canvassing, films, rallies, demonstrations , a pie in the face of the director, a disruption—all are important in raising critical issues. —Once the students are organized, connections are pointed out between campus issues and the revolutionary ideology. —Questions concerning the nature of the university and society are asked, and we are present to supply some answers. In this manner, through radical education, we begin to build a movement including others like ourselves who better understand America.
Radicals have the responsibility to explore the possibilities for the development of mass radical consciousness and attempt its organization among several other groups in the society. —For the activist concerned with organizing a massive opposition movement, draft counseling really has two purposes: to reach people and politicize them. We must not simply act and react (becoming slaves to spontaneity). We must build a movement which sees the draft as one part of its perspective, a movement which can alter our own political effectiveness by organization and strategy and our understanding by analysis and education, a movement which sees the draft in relation to both larger and smaller problems. At that point draft counseling becomes an effective too! for a resistance movement. —The issue of the draft suggests a whole range of possibilities for direct action. The induction center is an ideal and logical focus for ​discussion , leafleting, picketing, rallies, teach-ins, and general disruption. Furthermore, our experience has indicated that the point of pre-induction physicals and/or induction is a time when inductees are most open and receptive to critical discussions of the draft, the war, and U.S. foreign policy in general. Draft resistance (among other issues) is certainly a relevant political program. Its implications, in terms of developing radical consciousness and reaching into vita! constituencies, go far beyond the issue of the war and the draft themselves. —We must learn how to organize the victims of the war around a program. —We must encourage people whose distaste for military service has not been transferred to broader forms of political protest or acts of resistance to engage in those acts. —Whether the military operates on or off the campus should not be the primary focus of our concern. What is more important is the kind of consciousness raised in the process of the struggle.
Other battlefields we have chosen as organizers, and organizers of organizers, are the communities of the under-America: cities and towns and rural spreads where people live materially deprived, politically alienated and used, and victimized by social and economic institutions beyond their comprehension and reach. —Working with people around their own self interests is important because it creates consciousness and an understanding of power relationships. —In addition to touching people's moral sensibilities, the issue should appeal to their self-interests. —The approach is one of helping people, with clothes, food, problems concerning the police, welfare, housing, employment or schools. At the same time, however, questions about the nature of problems, the structure and control of the society are raised. Organizers concentrate on specific issues or individual problems, in an effort to raise questions about the overall society, and in the hope that by helping people out they would start to trust the organization. —Included in this organizing should be organizing of poor communities in terms of their own exploitation. —The poor know they are poor and don't like it. Hence they can be organized to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order. —The idea is for radical organizers to create local movements of poor people by raising those issues most salient, day-to-day, to the people concerned. As for the reputed marginality of slum institutions: it is not a question of which elements of the American system are central and which auxiliary, but a question of which elements are at this point in time most vulnerable to the movement ​that lies within our means. In fact, the critics who make these points are unable to recommend any more promising direction. —The point is what aspects of American economic and political life give organizing and educational space to radicals. —Jobs are not the best issue around which to organize. The continuing development of society's productive forces has become a fetter to the social relations sought by radical organizers. Therefore organizers turn to the more-or-less permanent underclass whose abrasive contacts with the ruling elites are less at the point of production than outside it —The key importance of Appalachia as an area for organizing is its character as a technological backwater, and the consequent gap between the promise of opportunity and Appalachia's ugly reality. —When the rhetorical glow fades and we stand judged by our own lights, as activists, this is how, so far, we must be judged: as organizers of the poor.
We may as yet know little about building a resistance or liberation movement; the one thing about which we can be certain is that it grows when individuals stand up and say 'No' the moment repression occurs. —Protests are valuable only insofar as they advance the process of creating radical cadres and of politicizing. —An essential ingredient is a demand which will probably be denied. —This type of politics weighs the value of campaigns by their success in building a movement with a radical analysis of society and a strategy for changing it. —If our community activity is to have any real value, we have to relate to issues within a radical perspective. This means radical leadership and politics no matter how small the beginning. Some can relate to that, and those are the people with whom we will be working. —The problem is how to engage in a struggle around reforms in such a way as to develop revolutionary class consciousness. —Surely, one does not make a revolution without offending people. The question is whether we have the political capital that enables us to afford this cost right now. —Part of the process of developing a strategy is learning the crucial lessons of the movement's past, understanding its failures and successes in the light of several criteria: Did the strategic line build the movement—that is, were new people recruited for organized struggle, did many others accept left leadership, was the enemy weakened, were the class relations hidden behind slogans unmasked? —While we share the same reasons for political involvement as all the new left groups, this burning moral thing, we have adopted a realistic means of changing society.
​The old methods of work and forms of action fail to capture the imaginations of the comstituencies we are trying to reach. Why advocate an intermediate strategy, a transitional analysis of how we should fight? Primarily because of the character of the times. —Should we continue demonstrations and teach-ins? Organize the poor? Fight for student power? Organize within the working class? Resist the draft? Run radical candidates in the elections? Turn the hippies into Provos? The answer to all these questions is 'Yes' (No little doubt remains that America needs to be fundamentally changed.) We need to move from protest to resistance; to dig in for the long haul; to become full-time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution. —Had we been organized along continuous lines since our beginning we may not have lost 100,000 members over the years. With the political situation in America today we cannot afford to lose people because we do not treat their needs organizationally. On this point, at least, Mao is relevant to our movement: there can be no revolution without a revolutionary organization. —We should be leading large numbers of young people on the campuses and in the streets in struggles that focus on fighting for power. —If modern history demonstrates little else it is the absolute need for a broad, anti-imperialist and anti-racist organization of the radical left, a grouping which would develop a long-range strategy for taking power in America and would devise tactics within such a strategic context-tactics, needless to say, which would not always be dictated by the vicissitudes of the day. —Clearly the missing ingredient is a broad, radical organization which would include many thousands of individuals and some organizations of the left who are isolated or so fractured as to have no impact The organization we have in mind would provide independent radicals with a base to work from, a grouping within which to find revolutionary relevance. Since we are far from the answers which must be attained before being in a position to say, 'we have the theory, the practice, the strategy, the tactic,' we do not envision a revolutionary party at this point. But we can envision an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organization, at first containing many already existing elements of the left, broadening to include a diversity of Americans-workers, students, blacks, minorities, the poor. Although it is hardly likely all independent radicals would fit comfortably into a multi-issue movement, we are convinced a great many could do so with ease-and profit for the movement for revolutionary change. —It should be understood that a resistance movement is by no means a coherent and consistent totaltiy. It is not a revolutionary party, nor does it see itself as such. A resistance strategy would emphasize constituency organizing as a prior and ​tansitional phase to organizing for struggle as a class. However, all one's efforts would be predicated on the eventual necessity of linking various constituencies in common struggles against the common enemy—waging a self-conscious class struggle. On the other hand, when organizing within a constituency, an intermediate strategy would attempt to engage people in struggles around issues aimed at certain specific goals. First, issues should be chosen that clearly reveal the corporations and the government as the enemy. —Any issue around which we organize a national program should be seen and felt as a critical problem by a great number of ordinary people. The issues should enable us to broaden and/or deepen our base in the student, poor, and/or working class communities.
Should we not recognize that almost no one in the Movement has a constituency or 'base' off the campus, almost no one belongs to a community which has mandated leadership to him? and that hence the patient building of regional structures from below remains our first task? The peculiarity of a resistance movement is to combine life-and-death struggle with reaching-out to new constituencies. —An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community must speak in the tone of that community. —To be effective the organizer can and must minimize certain traits that make it easy for new acquaintances in the neighborhood to write the organizer off as a kook or hippy (a label bestowed for many ways of being different other than just hair style or clothes). There will be many things in common, many pleasures, hardships and achievements shared between the 'radical organizer' and the radicalized or organized, but it will not happen overnight. Very simply, it takes time, care, thinking , re-thinking, a lot of feeling silly; ignorant, lonely, isolated, and self-conscious to grow into a community and have a whole lot of people know you and trust you. —Our activities and our ideas in meetings with other community groups raise movement questions about the direction that community organizing should take. —The questions asked by the better new left tacticians are: Did the action (and its tactics) expose power? Were the activists divided from their constituents? Did the action achieve a conscious polarization between the enemy and the constituency? Was the enemy's authority and respect in the eyes of those we want to reach decreased? Was ours increased? Were other groups which might be our future allies alienated from the action? Neutral? Turned on? Was sufficient propaganda work done prior to the action? Did our constituency grow, either in numbers or in depth of radical understanding? Did the action enhance —our ability to be seen as an alternative force for change?
​If we are serious about power, we must recognize that organization is necessary not only to assist people, but to organize around and give political content to all the alternatives. —Style and methods of organizing must always flow out of ideology and political strategy. If we don't keep that clearly in mind, we'll tend toward reformism or mere populism. —New Left resistance federations in urban and regional areas across the country would solve many of our problems of isolation, communication, coordination and the need for collective forms of work. One could find the discipline of collective work concurrently with the autonomy of a federated form. If certain organizers or their constituents find irrelevant or disagree with a certain program or action agreed on by others within the structure, they simply do not associate themselves with it. Since the structure is transitional rather than permanent, the whole apparatus would at some time dissolve itself with many of its constituent parts forming the basis of a revolutionary party. —At this early stage, the organization exists primarily to exchange information between groups and individuals already engaged in organizing. Our eventual goal is to assist in creating a revolutionary mass organization with a working class perspective which will at the appropriate time join with similar organizations to forge a revolutionary party in this country. To move toward this goal, we must form collectives organized around a revolutionary program and series of demands. —What kind of relationships should exist between the collectives? At first the relationship will involve little more than exchange of information and experience, and perhaps some joint regional political activity when it seems useful. Eventually, however, the collectives should relate to each other on the basis of democratic centralism.
Ihave tended to regard national demonstrations as relatively insignificant in comparison to the task of creating permanent local organization. I see us moving from strong local projects to regional structures to some kind of functional equivalent to a radical national party. —A new kind of organizer and a new kind of project must be supported: an organizer who reinforces existing organizers; a project the purpose of which is to serve existing projects. There is a need for city, county, and regional institutions which create an atmosphere sensitive to the needs of organizers, help them to break down their mutual isolation, enlarge the range of ​alternative strategies and programs; and encourage organizers collectively to come to grips with their problems; for example, a union of organizers. Besides providing organizers a common forum to share problems and techniques, the union spawns other institutions. One, a school for community organizers, represents a collective attempt to respond to the critical shortage of effective organizers. —As organization develops, not only do the tasks of the administration become more difficult and more complicated, but, further, its duties become enlarged and specialized to such a degree that it is no longer possible to take them all in at a single glance. In a rapidly progressive movement, it is not only the growth in the number of duties, but also the higher quality of these, which imposes a more extensive differentiation of function. —The rearguard, in a sense, is just as important as the vanguard and should not be seen as a caboose or as a group of lesser or inferior people. In any guerrilla war the rearguard is as important as the vanguard, and the rearguard in this case is the people who do the door to door organizing, the explaining, the interpretation through writing, speaking, appearances before the mass media.
It should be clear that the aim of the resistance strategy is to transform itself into a class-conscious revolutionary socialist movement—a state of things in which relationships become independent of individuals, in which the persona! relationships of individuals are subordinated to general class relationships. —Students, teachers, factory workers, welfare recipients, case-workers, migrant workers and tenants are only a few examples of the constituencies open to creating a base of resistance and radical struggle within the institutions of power in this society. —How are we to transform today's radical movement into a revolutionary movement? History shows that revolutionary movements are successful only when they are guided by highly-organized well-disciplined revolutionary parties. History also shows that revolutionary parties are only successful when there are revolutionary masses. The people need the party and the party needs the people: neither can succeed without the other. —Every movement with great aims has anxiously to watch that it may not lose connection with the great masses. It has to examine every question primarily from this point of view and to make decisions in this direction. Further, it has to avoid everything that could diminish or even weaken its ability to influence the masses; perhaps not for 'demagogic' reasons, no, but because of the simple realization that without the enormous power of the masses of a people no great idea, no matter how sublime and lofty it may appear, is realizable.
​Usually people who are brought political awareness initially through a confrontation with the System sink into political inactivity because there is no organization into which they can be integrated which has a total analysis of America. The further an individual's daily activity is removed from society's productive forces, the less the individual's response depends on the level of development of the productive forces, the more it depends on organization, leadership and ideology. —The left cannot effectively operate without a coherent ideology capable of explaining our own country. From this ideology should flow a program of action to build a constituency capable of forming an alliance with the most radical sections. —The degree of unified class consciousness among the oppressed necessary for engaging in organizing efforts based on a revolutionary class analysis does not yet exist —The anti-imperialist organization we envision would see as one of its major functions the development of radical political consciousness on a broad scale. This means that independent radical forces would have to deaf with socialist political theory and elevate theory to the respectable position to which it is entitled. Without a theory of social change events are perceived in a vacuum, unrelated to other events. —The socialist movement must struggle against those things that continue to divide the proletariat. —Who are our friends and who are our enemies? This is the question of fundamental importance to the revolution. —What is needed is a theory of imperialism. —It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause. —Proceeding from this assumption, the logical starting point for any discussion of American foreign policy is the classical Marxist interpretation of imperialism, as formulated by Lenin in 1916. —The principal contradiction in the world today is that between U.S. imperialism and the nations it oppresses. —The name of the system we live within is imperialistic monopoly capitalism. We have labeled the official rhetoric of that system 'corporate liberalism.' —U.S. imperialistic ventures have served to radicalize the dissenters. —It is essential to translate 'anti-draft consciousness' into an understanding of the social and political manifestations of imperialism. —The function of a revolutionary in a pre-revolutionary period is to move people into action, to raise their revolutionary and class consciousness, to move them into new forms of action besed on a new consciousness. —For to lead means: to be able to move masses. —Here we need to be clear: dogmatism is not a matter of rigidly and aggressively fighting for a particular political analysis or position. —The efficiency of the truly national leader ​consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. —This is both necessary and often helpful in developing a correct understanding of contested political problems within a mass organization. —The base-building approach argues that before militant action can be taken, lots of educational work and organizing should be done to get the majority on our side. Then we should hit hard. —The more uniformly the fighting wilt of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow.
Unless the movement seeks to elevate the political consciousness of the mass of its supporters, it faces the continual danger of the withering away of numbers when the moral basis of protest has been undermined. —If a movement has the intention of pulling down a world and of building a new one in its place, then there must be absolute clarity about the following points in the ranks of its own leaders: Every movement, at first, will have to divide the human material it has won into two great groups: into followers and members. —The central theoretical task of revolutionary collectives is to analyze the economic and political status of U.S. classes and their attitudes toward the revolution. —If a significant movement is to be built it must be around a coalition large enough, at least in theory, to contest for political power. Every group of potential allies should be explored. Programs of action should be developed to facilitate connections between the various components, including the poor, when they become sufficiently conscious to engage in explicitly political action. —The key to social change in America is a concrete examination of the forms of oppression which are specific to this country. —Because the goals of a socialist movement in advanced industrial capitalism are to redefine the purpose of production, to develop new social relations, they require deep understanding of the needs of various sectors of the proletariat.
The job of radicals is to find leaders, and help make them radical. —The task of propaganda is to attract followers; the task of organization to win members. —These should accept a collective discipline, carry out criticism and self-criticism of their political work, and apply the most advanced revolutionary concepts to all their common efforts. —A follower of a movement is one who declares himself in agreement with its aims; a member is one who fights for ​it. As followership demands only a passive appreciation of an idea, while membership demands an active presentation and defense, there will be ten followers for every one or two members at most. The follower is inclined to like a movement by its propaganda. The member is induced by the organization to help personally towards acquiring new followers who then, in turn, can be trained to become members. —The new role is made explicit by calling for members to develop themselves as organizers of a mass movement for change. —Therefore propaganda will have to see to it that untiringly an idea wins followers, while the organization has to watch most sharply that from the followers only the most valuable ones are made members. —The members have to develop a greater political consciousness and sophistication if they are to help provide leadership to the movement. —By doing this, we hope to move toward the development of a revolutionary party. We encourage revolutionaries in other areas to build collectives for this purpose.
The antitheoretical and pragmatic period of the movement's development—the idea of libertarian socialism which requires small, autonomous councils 'doing their own thing' without centralized controls—has ended. During that time many organizers believed that revolutionary theory would 'grow out of' practical struggles. —Those projects that remain and go forward are no longer experimental 'projects' but organizations with roots in their communities, a substantial measure of local support, and a fairly stable kernel of hard-core community people who share a radical analysis with the ex-students. —Mass meetings provide a place for new people to come and be organized (initially, at least) into cells. A second place for organizing new people and providing a positive presence are external educational meetings which deal with a wide range of subjects. —The answers constitute ammunition. —Most of the speakers need money for travel expenses and some want honorariums. These needs are created by the level of development of the productive forces and by the form of the social relations. In specific instances the weight of the productive forces or the social relations in conditioning an individual's needs depends on the individual's daily activity within the social division of labor. Don't be turned off by these facts. It is not difficult to get most schools to pay honorariums to speakers sponsored by campus groups, so don't be hesitant in asking. At any speech, large audience or small, someone should pass the hat. —For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a ​shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood. —Money collected from cocktail parties and hat-passing can be used to pay for publicity, travel expenses and/or saved for future speaker expenses. —Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. —Our legitimacy as revolutionaries need not depend on our ability to create lasting organizations in communities which we set out to organize. Instead, we should be content for the time being to create close-knit organizations of movement people which can reach out to new individuals and create more organizers in these communities. —The cell structure leads, then, to three effects: the formation of democratic chapter structures with a leadership totally responsive to a constituency; a constituency which is politically sophisticated in both theory and practice; and an organizational form which can function in a non- target vacuum and which likewise provides for the more or less total involvement of chapter people in political struggle on a long-term basis. —The only limit to participation in the total democracy of the revolutionary organization is the recognition and self-appropriation of the coherence of its critique by all its members. —Such an organization needs a common view of the existing society, common programmatic demands (or at least complementary ones), a common vision of a new form of social organization designed to satisfy human needs.
Organizing in factories, neighborhoods, prisons, high schools, day-labor centers, and the army is generally aimed at doing three things: building consciousness; planting the seeds of organization, and beginning to build cadre. —All of these developments combine to point us in a particular direction. They point toward the creation of different organizational forms than we now employ. They indicate the necessity for developing cadre organization, a mass base—and theory as a pre-requisite for both. Without such an organization we shall be rapidly isolated, and anarchism and opportunism will be the ONLY alternatives for the next period. All that exists in between will be crushed. —We have bits and pieces of a theory of society and of an analysis of our contemporary situation. But we lack a synthesis adequate to the organizing of a mass revolutionary party. So the present period must be viewed as a time of building bridges to workers and other strata. It is a period of education and agitation, to secure the left's position in mass movements—to build an organization that can build mass consciousness and prepare the way for fundamental, necessary changes. —What the U.S. left has never been able to do is to build a revolutionary organization that can put its ideologies ​into practice. The ideological officials are not as efficient as they were thought to be. The ideological superstructure loses contact with its base. —One of the challenges to organizers is how the enormous energy and numbers of people who are opposed to the war can be directed towards building organization which has permanency, power and radical posture. —About majority support: We need to analyze comparatively the resistance movements which took power. —The next historical stage which develops in the next 5 to 10 years out of what will be a blossoming movement at that time is the necessity to move from a Protest to a new Political Party. A party that completely severs from the two capitalist parties and provides a socialist alternative to the American scene. At this point we should not just confine ourselves to talk of building a movement—but also of integrating this with our perspective of building a party which will give meaning and coherence to the grassroots organizing we must do day by day. It is important that we begin to talk in terms of 5, 10, 15 years because that is the time and energy it will take to build a revolutionary movement and socialist political party able to take power in America. —We have begun to reach a period when this can be done only with coordinated, national, cadre organization. —In such a movement, the hard, unromantic work of organizing people as radicals would become as important as periodic demonstrations. Members of this movement would define themselves as organizers—whether on the job, in schools, the army or communities. —Propaganda, therefore, needs not to rack its brain about the importance of each individual it enlightens, about his ability, achievements, and understanding of his character, while the organization has most carefully to collect from the masses of these elements those who really make possible the victory of the movement —In a sense, we are at the beginning of a new era; we are changing from a militant minority to a political force drawing its strength from a variety of social groups. —It is increasingly clear that to make the revolution we must share the socialist goal of developing a shared revolutionary consciousness and a sustained movement (organization) embodying that consciousness.
Participatory democracy is no solution for the problems of a large, complex society. Democratic assemblies are particularly ill-equipped to receive and utilize complex information in an efficient or even useful way. —While we oppose anarchism ideologically, and consider that, all in all, it does a disservice to the revolution and objectively aids the enemy, we are not alarmed by it It has picked up no base in the working class, so that its harm is minimized. And even in the student movement, most activists are past that stage, and are ​searching for concrete answers to what they recognize as the protracted nature of the struggle. The healthy development of the movement over the last decade indicates the growing capability to overcome error and, through struggle, achieve a more correct strategy and tactics, and a higher level of theory. —If the small and scattered movement of today can become a mass revolutionary party, unity between the best elements of Old and New Left is ultimately assured. —It is no surprise that there is a great deal of romantic anti-leadership sentiment, though the majority consistently vote for a national organization with a national program and leadership. —People have a pretty good idea of some of the things they want, but whether they are willing to work out the means to achieve their ends is another matter altogether, especially if it becomes apparent that they can be assisted by people more knowledgeable and experienced than themselves. —Hence the need for delegation, for the system in which delegates represent the mass and carry out its will. —Most people at most times are willing to delegate authority to someone who they believe shares their views and who is competent at putting them into practice. —The failure of the left in the last 100 years to unite the majority of the population in a successful struggle for socialism and the success of the capitalist class in maintaining its power and extending its ideological hegemony have been due to the errors of socialist leadership and to the powerful resources and cleverness of the ruling leadership. —The fact that we have often had irresponsible political leadership is not necessarily an adequate reason for attacking the idea of leadership itself. —The leadership is represented by the central committee (or steering committee) which is formed by electing one member of each cell to the committee. The Central Committee has two primary tasks: first, to function as a decision-making body in emergency situations and to serve as an information channeling center between cells. The coordinating function gives continuity to cell operation. In some cases, it may be the Central Committee's task to suggest things for cells to do, like catching up with other cells. The decision-making process within the cell structure would probably best be named participatory democratic centralism.
In a polemic against Proudhon, Louis Blanc asked whether it is possible for millions of human beings to carry on their affairs without accepting what the pettiest man of business finds necessary, the intermediation of representatives. He answered his own question by saying that one who declares direct action on this scale to be possible is a fool, and that one who denies its possibility need not be an ab solute opponent of the idea of the state. —If we took seriously the task of imagining how we, had we the power, ​would manufacture automobiles and settle priorities concerning allocation of resources and synthesize local and national decision-making, I believe it would help us find our way through current organizational dilemmas. And it might just help to persuade other Americans that we are capable of governing. —We are now a major campaign issue and we must see ourselves accordingly. —Leadership articulates the goals of the revolution, the methods by which those goals will be attained, while at the same time embodying the ideals of the revolution itself. —What would be the meaning of all leader genius and of all leader impetus unless the brainy theorist were to establish the goals for the human struggle? The combination of theorist, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing to be found on this globe; this combination makes the great man. —A revolution cannot surpass the quality of its leadership. —The most sublime theoretical insight has no value and no purpose unless the leader moves the masses towards it. —Those upon whom the revolutionary leadership falls assume an awesome responsibility. The office of the leader is experienced as a personal power, particularly if the entire magnitude of the organization is personified by the leader. —The words and actions of the revolutionary leader must always advance the revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary effectiveness of the people. As the organization grows, its history becomes less the history of anarchic rebellion, and more the familiar history of the party and the leader. —To coin a phrase, 'our day will come.' But it will only come when a great amount of the population see us and themselves as part of a serious alternative to existing American institutions. That will be our second coming. One of the key problems of a revolutionary movement in a situation that at best is pre-revolutionary becomes that of our rhetoric versus the reality that we are nowhere near taking power anywhere. (Not to mention united goals, strategy and tactics.) —We speak as a new American left, committed to the achievement of political power in our time. We seek political power so that men may at last prevail over the arrangements of society in which a few control the destinies of all.
An organization of socialist intellectuals is historically incomplete. By right it should be a section of a party in alliance with other forces, including working-class organizations. The organization must represent not only the power of community, but also productive power, living creative energy. —Our base is so small that all working people must be considered potential allies. —Although there are individuals and groups in the United States playing a revolutionary role, there is no revolutionary party which actually has a ​base among working people. —The most valuable lesson for us is that our real allies will always be in the rank-and-file, and among the unorganized workers. Committed to a Marxist position, we should give ourselves all the room possible to make our developing ideology responsive to the needs of the people. —We come on hard about our politics, telling guys that the organization is interested in workers taking power, the right of workers to control the production process and the state. —Power comes to the people when we have done our work to get the people ready to take it. —It is therefore the primary revolutionary duty of the people of the U.S. to build a militant united front against U.S. imperialism. The main force and leader of the united front must be the working class. —We will never be able to destroy U.S. imperialism unless the proletariat is brought solidly into the anti-imperialist movement. —We grant that their condition will have to deteriorate much farther before that will happen on a large scale, but we must be laying the political groundwork now for that possibility if it is ever to be actualized. LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE, SERVE THE PEOPLE, BECOME ONE WITH THE PEOPLE.
We will build a socialist U.S.A., with all power in the hands of the working people and their allies; build a revolutionary organization with the participation and support of millions of working men and women as well as those students, artists and intellectuals who will join with the working class to end the profit system. —Marx and Lenin both contended that working-class consciousness was measured by the degree of hegemony of revolutionary socialist parties over the majority of workers. —The working class is absolutely necessary in order seriously to challenge capitalist power. Recognizing just how far this class is from political consciousness, it would seem wise first to develop a base among constituents already in motion. —We think it necessary for individuals with a revolutionary perspective to form collectives which link up with working people and serve their class interests. —The opportunity is that we will see that the liberation movement has succeeded in infusing its energy into the labor movement, and has thus created a force in embryo which, if we understand how to relate to it, can serve as the real base for the transformation of the character of the whole Labor movement in our country, an indispensible prerequisite for making the Revolution. —Although our work is with the working class, we recognize the crucial importance of a revolutionary student movement and of linking this movement up with the working class. Our experience has shown that this can be done and that far from ​retarding the development of revolutionary struggle and ideology among workers, it can help to push that development forward. —Just as on campus we must do the hard work of base-building, so radicals in factories will develop an anti-imperialist base through day-to-day struggles. The point is to develop a student movement rooted in struggles against the ways Imperialism oppresses students, increasingly pro-working class, more and more consciously allied with workers in a struggle. —The student movement is in a position to begin carrying anti-imperialist ideology to the working class. —On-the-job organizing begins in a variety of ways. Some organizers simply take jobs in strategically chosen factories. Once on the job, among the blue-collar industrial working class, they work to engage themselves in and eventually lead struggles. —Yet going into the shops requires discipline, a strong sense of goals, and adjustment to boring, repetitive and often dangerous work. —It would be foolish to expect that workers will be open to the same actions which attracted middle class college hippies, but their interests can be made into political issues. —Working-class youth do not have the options of dropping out of work or of remaining permanent students. But if they can be socialized into a new ideology, the makings of a radical industrial working class is both theoretically and practically possible. —If nothing else is gained, many workers learn to respect the students. Out of wildcats emerges a cadre of revolutionary workers who see their role as organizers laying the ground work for a mass-based working class movement. —Bringing young working people into the new left would change the 'middle class' character of the movement. This expanded and more class-conscious movement could then be a critical political force, not only on the campus but in the community and trade union struggles as well. —A few categories change. Very few activists talk about organizing 'the poor.' The discussion shifts to 'the working class' (or 'the underclass,' the unemployed or underemployed sector of the working class). The term 'middle class' likewise becomes taboo and is replaced by a variety of conceptual categories such as 'new working class,' 'university trained workers' and 'radicals in the professions.'
As with all institutions in class society, the class that holds state power determines the nature of that institution. We want to lead workers and their allies in overthrowing the bourgeois state that controls, exploits, and takes our people's lives, and we say so openly. We want socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to destroy and bury imperialism. —True revolution in America is concerned with running this country and having programs to turn over the wealth and resources of the U.S. to the creative energies of the masses of the people. And until we are ​able to see ourselves, or some of us, governing this nation and having the capacity and the skills to do it, then no one else will either. As a form of personified power, the Movement finds it necessary to reconstitute the personified power of community, the State, and to magnify this power by enriching it with productive power. —Many are becoming conscious of the need to transform the protest movement into a revolutionary movement—a movemant that would be more than a thorn in the side of the ruling class; a movemant capable of destroying that class and creating a new society; a movement that is not primitive, fragmented and directionless, but one guided by a revolutionary party based on Marxist-Leninist principles. —Marxist-Leninist principles are phrases laden with the historical experience of revolutionary parties based on Marxist-Leninist principles. These principles do not belong to the period when scientific communism was being evolved, the period when Marx wrote his works on alienation, division of labor, commodity production and ideology, the period when Marx wrote that "the conditions of life which different generations find in existence decide whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand, the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then but against the very 'production of life' till then, the 'total activity' on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves." These early works only represent an important stage in the development of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the Marxist party; they come before the fully mature works of Marx and Engels. The Marxist-Leninist principles are based exclusively on the fully mature works, which treat Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism, which deal with Revolutionary Ideology, and which point out the necessity and historic inevitability of the party's seizure of state power. These fully mature works are the source of the phrases laden with historical experience that constitute Marxism-Leninism; they provide the foundation for the insight that —conditions are never premature for a revolutionary party, if it has the right political and organizational strategy. —These conditions for the development of a revolutionary party in this country are the main 'conditions' for winning. —A popular radical party should be organized in this country with a distinct anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist point of view.
​As the peoples of the world increasingly seize the initiative in their global confrontation with U.S. imperialism, the ability of monopoly capitalism to resolve its contradictions with the U.S. working class becomes progressively limited, setting the stage for the seizure of state power by the working class. —Perhaps the central problem of Marxists in the 20th century, from Lenin's time to the present, is how to make a revolution when the historical Marxist revolutionary force, the working class, is clearly not a revolutionary agent. —There could not yet be revolutionary consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness. —Look at organized labor: it is still a force in the society, although probably a reactionary one. —We cannot end racism, capitalism, colonialism and imperialism unless state power is in the hands of those people who understand that the wealth, the total wealth of any country and the world, belongs to all people. Those who understand can speak for and decide for the entire community only when the state is accepted as the equivalent of the community. —Unless liberation movements from the very beginning are dedicated to socialist principles or evolve into movements with socialist principles while the fighting is going on, we cannot assume that those who fight will assume state power and implement decisions that appropriate the wealth of countries for the entire people.
The control and use of the wealth of the Empire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country. —The most important aspect to grasp and grasp firmly is the VANGUARD ROLE played by oppressed peoples in general and the most oppressed sectors of the international working class in particular. —The principal contradiction in the world today is that between U.S. imperialism and the nations it oppresses. The sharpest blows against U.S. imperialism are being dealt by the nationally oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America and within the U.S. —The Liberation Fronts are a vanguard force that is leading this struggle. The role of others is to join with the vanguard. —It is possible and necessary to build an anti-imperialist, working class movement in the mother country; a movement that allies with and provides material aid to all oppressed people of the world. —The main task for our organization is to unite the struggles ​of oppressed and exploited people. The anti-imperialist movement must serve the people. Only in this way can we bring the mess of people in this country to oppose U.S. aggression and fascist repression. —The struggle for women's liberation represents a major and integral part of the overall movement for the defeat of U.S. monopoly capitalism and its replacement by a socialist America. Within the revolutionary movement, the women's liberation struggle will be led by working women. —Combine this with the special oppression of black and brown women, the relation of their oppression to the oppression of white women and whether a 'united front of all women' can be formed. First, while all women are oppressed by all men, cutting across class and national lines, the principal oppression of black and brown women is their oppression as black or brown people. Thus, before there can be unity among all women, black, brown and white, in the struggle against male supremacy, white women have to establish as a first principle of unity the struggle against white supremacy and the repudiation of the white-skin privilege. —And more. We must build struggles not only because they are the way to build our own movement, but also because they are the only concrete way to relate to the vanguard struggles of black and brown people in this country, and of colonized people throughout the world.
The sharpest struggles in the world today are those of the oppressed nations against imperialism and for national liberation. A nation is an irreducible plural. The liberation of a nation is a known social relation. Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the colony for its liberation; it is a struggle which by its very nature is anti-imperialist and increasingly anti-capitalist. Within the liberation movement the vanguard force is the Party. Its development of an essentially correct program for the community, and its ability to organize around this program has brought it to this leadership. The fundamental reason for the success of the Party is that it has a correct analysis of American society. —The power of wealth will thus be overthrown and replaced by the power of the people, led by the working class, led by a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party.
UNITE WITH REAL FRIENDS AGAINST REAL ENEMIES! U.S. GET OUT OF THE COLONY, RECOGNIZE THE PARTY! END FASCIST REPRESSION OF THE OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES! FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
SUPPORT FOR LIBERATION! FREE THE LEADER AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS! NO MORE SURTAX! INDEPENDENCE FOR THE COLONY! SOLIDARITY WITH THE CONSPIRACY 8! LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE, SERVE THE PEOPLE, BECOME ONE WITH THE PEOPLE!
As Lenin writes, a revolutionary party can be formed as soon as a revolutionary line has been developed. But not before. The time has come for conscious application of energy toward the development of that line. Now. Without it, the despair of many in the movement will increasingly be felt in the separation of politics from struggle. Militancy without politics will move us away from the conscious direction of our movement. —To have a unified centralized organization it is necessary to have a common revolutionary theory which explains, at least generally, the nature of our revolutionary tasks and how to accomplish them. It must be a set of ideas which have been tested and developed in the practice of resolving the important contradictions in our work. —In order for this fighting force to grow from an agitational movement to a movement capable of destroying imperialism it is essential that the movement develop an international ideology which holds as its essential principles the fight against anti-communism, the fight against white supremacy and male supremacy, and the fight for the key role of the proletariat —One of the most glaring deficiencies is the gulf between leadership and membership, a circumstance which creates a danger that even if a theoretically correct revolutionary communist ideology is developed on the national level, there may be no membership to put it into practice. —Putting forward our politics in an aggressive way is the ONLY way to organize the masses of people in this country. Only by challenging the consciousness of the people could we ever develop a movement capable of helping topple the imperialist state. —The most striking success of the revolution of a view of life will always be won whenever the new view of life is, if possible, taught to all people, and, if necessary, is later forced upon them. In every really great revolutionary movement propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. That means, it will untiringly try to make clear to the others the new train of thought, to draw them over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous conviction. Since the propagation of a doctrine—that means this ​propaganda—has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more quickly, the more intensively propaganda is carried out, and the latter in turn is able to work the better, the stronger and the more vigorous the organization is that stands behind it. —In addition to exchanging information, the organization will focus on two areas: study and action. A steering committee prepares a reading list and several study plans for use as each area needs—focusing on the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao. —'Politics'—revolutionary socialist politics—becomes a question of using the right words, it is not enough that one be outraged and passionate and effective: one must also cite the correct texts.
Ideologies, whether bourgeois or proletarian, serve the interests of their respective classes, but that is as far as the similarity goes. Proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, is true social science; it is both partisan and, at the same time, an objective, true reflection of the real social process. It cannot become a new exploiting class, and it has, therefore, no interests which are ultimately directed against any section of society, its ideology must be 'objectively true' or it cannot liberate itself. —Hereby the following realization must never leave us: since the so-called program of the movement is certainly absolutely correct in its final aims, but as in its formulation it had to take psychological momenta into consideration, there can well arise, in the course of time, the conviction that in individual instances perhaps certain leading propositions should be framed differently, or should receive a better formulation. But every attempt in this direction has, in most cases, catastrophic effects. For thereby something that should stand unshakably firm is given free to discussion which, once a single point is deprived of Its faithful, dogmatic determination, does not result immediately in a new, better, and above all a uniform determination, but which will rather lead to never-ending debates and to general confusion. In such a case there remains always the reflection of what is better: a new, more fortunate formulation which causes a dispute within the movement, or a form which at the moment is perhaps not the best one, but presents an organism that in itself is complete, unshakable and entirely uniform. Every examination will show that the latter is preferable. —You cannot eliminate even one basic assumption, one substantial part of this philosophy of Marxism (it is as if it were a solid block of steel) without abandoning objective truth, without falling into the arms of the bourgeois-reactionary falsehood. —With a doctrine that in great ​lines is actually correct, it is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if in reality it were no longer quite up to date, than to deliver, by its correction, to general discussion and all its most evil consequences, a principle of the movement that so far has been looked upon as made of granite. This is impossible above all as long as the movement itself is still fighting for victory. For how does one think to fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine if by continued changes in its outward construction one spreads uncertainty and doubt? —This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content —The point here is not that the vanguard shall realize the impossibility of preserving the old order of things and the inevitability of its overthrow. The point is that the masses, the millions, shall understand this inevitability. But the masses can understand this only from their own experience. —Therefore, if, in order to lead a view of life to victory, we have to transform it into a fighting movement, the program of the movement has logically to consider the human material that it has at its disposal. As immovable as the final aims and the leading ideas must be, just as ingenious and psychologically correct must the method be, by which the propaganda program is orientated at the souls of those without whose help the most sublime idea would forever remain only an idea. If the people's idea wants to proceed to a dear success from the unclear intentions of today, then it has to single out certain leading principles from its large world of thought, principles which, according to their nature and contents, are suitable for obligating a broad mass of people, namely, that mass which alone guarantees the fight for this idea This is the mass of workers.
We must build a movement oriented toward power. Revolution is a power struggle, and we must develop that understanding among people from the beginning. A major focus in our work is the pigs, because they tie together the various struggles around the state as the enemy, and thus point to the need for a movement oriented toward power to defeat it. —For this reason, the program of the movement is summed up in a few articles They are destined primarily to give the man in the street a rough picture of the movement's intentions. They are in a way of speaking a political creed which on the one hand campaigns for the movement and which on the other hand is suited for uniting and welding together those who have been attracted by a generally acknowledged obligation. —The task is to enable the vast masses to realize from their own experience the inevitability of the overthrow of the old regime, to promote such ​methods of struggle and forms of organization as will make it easier for the masses to learn from experience to recognize the correctness of the revolutionary slogans. —What we try to do is take stuff like Marx and Lenin and try to translate it into street language: —SUPER-PIG-CAPITALIST-IMPERIALIST-UNITED STATES! PEOPLE'S SOLIDARITY FOREVER! —UNITE WITH REAL FRIENDS AGAINST REAL ENEMIES! —Maybe they can't catch what Marx is saying, but when one of us runs it down to them, they can dig on dialectical materialism. —The question arises, what are these masses? It has already been shown that a general sentiment of indifference towards the management of its own affairs is natural to the crowd, even when organized to form political parties. The very composition of the mass is such as to render it unable to resist the power of an order of leaders aware of its own strength. —Great theorists are only in the rarest cases great organizers, and the greatness of the theorist and the program-maker lies primarily in the recognition and in the establishment of abstractly correct laws, while the organizer has to be primarily a psychologist. The organizer possesses this specific virtue or potency, this special field in which his powers are developed to the level required by the task to which he is assigned. He is able to articulate perfectly the thoughts of the movement. He is able to evaluate whether he finds himself in front of one or another of a given set of constituencies, to choose the approach suitable to the given constituency, and to correct himself if he errs. When he evaluates, chooses or corrects himself, he is not exerting his own powers but the powers of his office: his forms of evaluation, choice and self-correction are integral parts of the party program. He has to take man as he is, and for this reason he must know him. He must not over valuate him just as he must not underestimate him in the mass. On the contrary, he must try to take account of the weakness and of the bestiality equally, so that, all factors considered, he will create a formation which as a living organism is filled with the strongest and most constant force, and is thus suitable for carrying an idea and paving its way to success.
It is a fact of everyday experience that enormous public meetings commonly carry resolutions by acclamation or by general assent, whilst these same assemblies, if divided into small sections, say of fifty persons each, would be much more guarded in their assent. —The very process of massing into a movement contributes to a sense of personal power and thereby makes possible further steps in the ORGANIZING and FOCUSING of the aggregate power. —The individual disappears in the multitude, and ​therewith disappears also personality and sense of responsibility. Personifications of social power seem to animate the world. Only expected, official activity is experienced as real activity. The unofficial projects of an individual human being seem to happen in a social vacuum, cut off from the real life of humanity; they are experienced as empty intervals of inactivity. Estranged power is experienced as the only real community. Personified power is internalized as the only form of human power. —The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent to a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. The same man, in the frame of a company or a batallion, surrounded by all his comrades, would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than he would if left entirely to himself. In the crowd he always feels a little sheltered even if in reality a thousand reasons would speak against it. The community of the great demonstration, however, strengthens not only the individual, but it also unites and helps in creating esprit de corps. The man who, as the first representative of a new doctrine, is exposed to serious oppression in his enterprise or his workshop, urgently needs that strengthening that lies in the conviction of being a member and a fighter of a great embracing body. But he only received the impression of this corporation at the first common mass demonstration. If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction, if while looking around he is carried away by the powerful effect of the suggestive intoxication and the enthusiasm of three or four thousand others, if the visible success and the approval of thousands confirm the correctness of the new doctrine in his mind and waken for the first time the doubt about the truth of his previous conviction—then he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion. The will, the longing, but also the force of thousands accumulates in every individual. The man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become the member of a community. —When an organization is rooted in the needs of the people, attacks on that organization or on its leaders are understood and resisted as a more visible form of the daily oppression of the entire people. —Thus the mass defense of the Party can be viewed as an opportunity to unite fragments around support of the group which is in the vanguard. —As the movement recognizes the enemy and the serious terms of the struggle, we view our own defense as part of the people's defense—a fight for survival. —We continue to speak about repression and exploitation, all the time relating that back to the repression of the Party and oppression ​of the people. Repression, thus, can be turned around and used as an offense, as, for example, in the slogan: FREE THE 21, JAIL THE REAL CRIMINALS. —People understand the symbolism in the attack and identify with it because of their own desires, often latent, to strike back. This is in symbolic miniature form the dynamic of militant action by a vanguard and then mass identification. It is not a hallucination but a fact of modern life that individuals relate to each other and to the material environment through the mediation of personified powers. —It becomes dear that setbacks to the vanguard are tremendous setbacks to the people's movement as a whole.
There is a burning need for a revolutionary socialist party which has absorbed the key lessons. —The fundamental political question of the day is: which class is to hold state power, how is it to achieve it, and what ideology will guarantee victory. —There is a general consensus amongst us that what comes next is the creation of a functional equivalent to a revolutionary party, or to say the same thing differently, the creation of a long-term strategy for achieving a socialist America which disciplines and coordinates the work of individuals and local groups. —We must take seriously the job of helping to build the party which both represents the interests of the proletariat and has a mass base among the proletariat—a governmental party, that is to say, a party which, organized itself like a government on a small scale, hopes some day to assume the reins of government upon the large scale. The revolutionary political party is a state within the state, pursuing the avowed aim of destroying the existing state in order to substitute for it a social order of a fundamentally different character. —The primary reason for such an organization is our responsibility as radicals and as revolutionaries to organize for the overthrow of the capitalist system and to replace capitalism with a socialist system.
We recognize the need for organized armed struggle against the power of the state, and assume the responsibilities of revolutionaries in the preparation of that struggle. —The movement can play a role in the development of the party by fighting anti-communism, developing communist ideology, and taking communist ideology to the mass of the people. —The people must be armed, organized and under the direction of a revolutionary party serving the working class. —The Movement must lead to the effective ​organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution. A revolution is a war; when the movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war. —Out of this movement, revolutionary cadre must develop which will aid the development of the vanguard party necessary to lead the struggle for socialism. —This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self-reliance among the cadres, and an integrated relationship with the active mass-based movement. Most important, there must be the same revolutionary mass base mentioned earlier, or (better) revolutionary mass movement It is clear that without this there can't be the practical experience to know whether or not a theory, or a leader, is any good at all. Without practical revolutionary activity on a mass scale the party could not test and develop new ideas and draw conclusions with enough surety behind them to consistently base its survival on them. Especially, no revolutionary party could possibly survive without relying on the active support and participation of masses of people. —The revolutionary principle must be that the majority of the American people can be won to the revolution—not suddenly, but if they can be brought to see an alternative to their layers of privilege. —Propaganda tries to force a doctrine upon an entire people; organization embraces in its frame only those who for psychological reasons do not threaten to become a brake to a further spreading of the idea. Propaganda works on the community in the sense of an idea and it makes it ripe for the time of the victory of this idea, while the organization conquers victory by the permanent, organic and fighting union of those followers who appear able and willing to lead the fight for victory. —That principle must not be obscured by a smug and incredibly elitist assumption that the movement is already the revolution—an assumption which contains contempt for the people who are presumably to fight a people's war. —When propaganda has filled a whole people with an idea, the organization, with the help of a handful of people, can draw the consequences.
In carrying out propaganda and trying to move the struggle to a higher level we are guided by Mao's strategic advice: The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate, and the relatively backward. —Great respect must be paid, not only to new members, but also to possible adherents, to those who in Germany are termed mitläufer, in Italy simpatizzanti, in Holland geestverwanten, and in England sympathizers. —The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over ​the backward elements. —Propaganda and organization—that means followers and members—have thus a definite mutual relationship. The better propaganda has been working, the smaller may be the organization, and the greater the number of followers is, the more modest can be the number of members, and vice versa: the worse propaganda is, the greater must and will be the organization, and the smaller the host of followers of a movement remains, the greater must be the number of members, if it still wishes to count on success at all. —Our strategy is to carry on propaganda that will help unite the greatest number of forces against imperialist companies, while at the same time, appealing especially to the more advanced workers. —The first task of propaganda is the winning of people for the future organization; the first task of the organization is the winning of people for the continuation of propaganda. —The task of revolutionaries is two-fold: spread the anti-imperialist movement to the working class, and develop Marxist-Leninist cadre who can integrate with the most exploited sector of the working class, the industrial proletariat. In both these ways, the movement can aid in the development of a revolutionary united front against imperialism, led by the working class, and of a vanguard Party based on the most oppressed and exploited. —The second task of propaganda is the destruction of the existing condition and the permeation of this condition with the new doctrine, while the second task of the organization must be the fight for power, so that by it, it will achieve the final success of the doctrine. —This will involve organizers consciously organizing among the lowest tracked. It will involve organizers consciously developing bases in communities. And it will involve disciplined cadre entering the armed forces and work places as organizers. —The victory of an idea will be the more possible the more extensively propaganda works on the people in their entirety, and the more exclusive, the stricter, and stiffer the organization is which carries out the fight in practice. From this ensues the fact that the number of followers cannot be too great, whereas the number of members can more easily be too large than too small. —Real revolutionaries have a sense of true discipline combined with gentleness and enormous toughness. They are about a revolution which can give more of what is noble to their people. This call to a sense of honor and to the highest moral principles is the source of their invincible strength. —The followership is rooted only in recognition membership, in the courage to present personally, and to spread further what has been recognized. Recognition in its passive form corresponds to the majority of humankind, which is inert and cowardly. Membership requires an effective mind and thus corresponds only to the minority of men. —Thus the strategy of the Movement for developing an active mass base, tying the city -wide fights to community and city-wide anti-pig movement, and for building a party eventually out of this motion, fits with the ​world strategy for winning the revolution, builds a movement oriented toward power, and becomes one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to those which will dismember and dispose of U.S. imperialism. LONG LIVE THE VICTORY OF PEOPLE'S WAR!
It has been remarked that in the lower stages of civilization tyranny is dominant. Freedoms and privileges, and among these latter the privilege of taking part in the direction of public affairs, are at first restricted to the few. Democracy cannot come into existence until there is attained a subsequent and more highly developed stage of social life. Recent times have been characterized by the gradual extension of these privileges to a widening circle. This is what we know as the era of democracy. —Originally the chief is merely the servant of the mass: —'We are camels to be ridden upon by the people.' —The organization is based upon the absolute equality of all its members. At the outset, the attempt is made to depart as little as possible from pure democracy by subordinating the delegates altogether to the will of the mass, by tying them hand and foot: —'Why do you come to us? Why don't you ask the people? They're the ones that are making this movement. We can't speak for them.' —Nominally, and according to the letter of the rules, all the acts of the leaders are subject to the ever vigilant criticism of the rank and file: —'The revolutionary collective serves the working people: both their immediate and long term interests; it does this by linking up with them, learning from them, fighting in their ranks for better conditions or in resistance to an attack upon them.' —But in actual fact, as the organization increases in size, this control becomes purely fictitious. —In working with these guys, and with the workers as a whole, we try to keep in mind Mao's basic instruction on how to become one with the people without getting lost among them. —We may observe that as democracy continues to develop, a backwash sets in. With the advance of organization—by helping to develop a more advanced revolutionary theory for the advancement of the struggle to a higher stage—democracy tends to decline. Democratic evolution has a parabolic course. At the present time, at any rate as far as party life is concerned, democracy is in the descending phase. —To win a war with an enemy as highly organized and centralized as the imperialists requires a (clandestine) organization of revolutionaries, having also a unified 'general staff'; that is, combined with discipline under one centralized leadership. —Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective will, soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its ​control. —There is one enemy, monopoly capitalism, and to defeat it we need a unified general staff. —It is indisputable that this is a matter of technical and practical necessity. It is the inevitable product of the very principle of organization. Not even the most radical wing of the various socialist parties raises any objection to this evolution, the contention being that democracy is only a form of organization and that where it ceases to be possible to harmonize democracy with organization, it is better to abandon the former than the latter. Organization , since it is the only means of attaining the ends of socialism, is considered to comprise within itself the revolutionary content of the party, and this essential content must never be sacrificed for the sake of form. —It may be enunciated as a general rule that the increase in the power of the leaders is directly proportional with the extension of the organization.
The principle of division of labor coming more and more into operation, executive authority undergoes division and subdivison. There is thus constituted a rigorously defined organization. The individual becomes a more or less efficient instrument of the organization. —The army itself is the working class, defined in terms appropriate to advanced industrial society. This class alone has the power to transform this society. The key to its organization is the party, which represents the ideological alternative to capitalism. —In this way there is constructed a powerful and complicated edifice. —Initiative and capacity for decision thus become what may be called a professional specialty, whilst for the rank and file is left the passive virtue of discipline. —The strength of a political party lies by no means in a mentality, as great and as independent as possible, of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow their intellectual leadership. —The ability of the working class of the U.S. to carry the struggle against U.S. imperialism through to the end and win its own freedom depends on its recognition that the U.S. is one thing and the nations oppressed by it are another, and its ability to link up its struggles with those of the oppressed peoples. The organization and its leaders become legitimate only when the authority of the organization is internalized by all other individuals. —The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed. As soon as individuals delegate ​their self-powers to the organization, the individuals become instruments or media through which the powers of the organization are exercised. —The decisive factor is the leadership proper. If two bodies of troops battle one another, not that will be victorious in which each individual received the highest strategic training, but that which has the most superior leaders and at the same time the best disciplined, blindly obedient, best drilled troop. —In order to establish this, U.S. workers must adopt as their own the slogan of the right to self-determination for the nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism, which means the right to secession and the formation of an independent national state. —Correct strategy is based on an understanding of the class nature of this society; on an understanding that the sharpest struggles against the ruling class are being waged by the oppressed nations against U.S. imperialism, and that all our actions must flow from our identity as part of an international struggle against U.S. imperialism. —The Party will win and we will support whatever they want us to do. We owe them our best effort because as long as they fight they give us an example of the best and most passionate all over the earth.
The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership. —Because war is political, political tasks—the international communist revolution—must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a 'Marxist-Leninist' party. —Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone. —The Marxist-Leninist Party is the general staff of the working class struggle. The individuals who occupy the offices of the Marxist-Leninist Party collectively personify the entire spiritual life of modern industrial society. —The whole of historical development consists in those theoretical abstractions which originate in the heads of all the revolutionary leaders of the age, and since it is impossible to put all these heads together and induce them to take counsel and register their votes, there must of necessity be one central head, the spearhead, in a word the speculative unity of all these heads, the leader. —The organization applies Marxism-Leninism, as it has developed through Mao, to the concrete situation within the United States, in order to prepare the conditions for the liberation of working people and mankind.
​The triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union in 1917 was the beginning of the end of world imperialism . The fight for smashing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and the establishing of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is what distinguishes communists from others who may claim the honor of being communist. This battle is the essence of Marxism-Leninism—which class will hold state power? —When imperialism is defeated in the U.S., it is replaced by socialism—nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power—the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage. —The recognition of class struggle leads inevitably to the recognition of the necessity for violent revolution and the political rule of the working class. The organized repressive violence of the state is met with the organized revolutionary violence of the people. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
The new democratic revolution and new democratic state consist of a united front—an alliance of all revolutionary classes that can be united against imperialism, including the patriotic bourgeoisie but led by the working class. —It is the task of the revolutionary party of the working class, guided by Marxism-Leninism, to lead the people to victory. —The party is neither a social unity nor an economic unity. It is based upon its program. In theory this program may be the expression of the interests of a particular class. In practice, however, anyone may join the party, whether his interests coincide or not with the principles enunciated in the party program. The socialist party is the ideological representative of the proletariat. This, however, does not make it a class organism. From the social point of view it is a mixture of classes, being composed of elements fulfilling diverse functions in the economic process. But since the program has a class origin, an ostensible social unity is thereby conferred upon the party. All socialists as such, whatever their economic position in private life, admit in theory the absolute pre-eminence of one great class, the proletariat Those non-proletarians affiliated to the party, and those who are but partial proletarians, 'adopt the outlook of the working class, and recognize this class as predominant.' The internalization of the party program is best exhibited by individuals whose daily activity separates them ​from the social means of production, who do not have daily contact with society's productive forces. —It is tacitly presupposed that those members of the party who do not belong to the class which the party represents will renounce their personal interests whenever these conflict with the interests of the proletarian class. On principle, the heterogeneous elements will subordinate themselves to the 'idea' of a class to which they themselves do not belong. In practice, the acceptance of the program does not suffice to abolish the conflict of interests between capital and labor.
The tasks of the national democratic revolution can be fulfilled only through long and tortuous struggles. In the struggle against imperialism and its lackeys, it is necessary to rally all anti-imperialist patriotic forces, including the national bourgeoisie and all patriotic personages. All those patriotic personages from among the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes who join the anti-imperialist struggle play a progressive historical role; they are not tolerated by imperialism but welcomed by the proletariat. —It was Lenin who first advanced the need, and carried out the policy, of bribing the petty-bourgeois group of administrators, technicians and specialists to work for socialism. —Or as Mao put it, 'In wars of national liberation, patriotism is applied internationalism.' The principle at stake is socialist internationalism. Revolutionaries in oppressor nations especially must uphold the principle of equality among nations and the right of self-determination and full equal rights of nationally oppressed peoples. They do this particularly among the working class of the oppressor nation, as the precondition for international proletarian unity and as the key weapon in the struggle against opportunism in the ranks of the working class. On the other hand, revolutionaries in oppressed nations have the obligation of struggling against and isolating reactionary nationalism in their ranks, while supporting progressive nationalism. They must fight for solidarity with other oppressed nations and class solidarity with the working class of the oppressor nations. —We commence from the concept of the Nation, which is for us a fact which cannot be cancelled or surmounted. We are therefore antithetic to all the internationalisms. The dream of a great humanity is founded on a Utopia and not upon reality. Nothing gives us the authority to affirm that the millenium of universal brotherhood is imminent. In spite of the dreams of the internationale, when the great hours strike—PATRIA O MUERTE!-those who deny their ​country die for it. Starting from the Nation, we arrive at the State, which is the government in its tangible expression. But we are the State: by means of a process we wish to identify the Nation with the State. —The revolutionary is characterized by an analysis of the state, which differs from the radical's view of the 'power structure,' which differs from the liberal's notion of the 'power elite,' and posits the seizure and maintenance of that power as necessary to destroy it. This differentiation of consciousness is fundamental to every political question we face. —It is not the nation which generates the state; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept. Rather it is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. Indeed, it is the state which, as the expression of a universal ethical will, creates the right to national independence. —In wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism. To be a revolutionary nationalist, you must of necessity be a socialist. —This distinction became even more important after the victory of socialism in several countries, which changed the nature of national and class relationships all over the world and particularly underlined the importance of national liberation struggles in colonized countries. Before the victory of socialism, Marxists considered anti-imperialist, national-democratic revolutions in oppressed nations as part of the bourgeois revolution, although they supported many of them as progressive. The victory of socialism ushered in a new era. Anti-colonial, national-democratic revolutions are now seen as part of the new world revolution, the proletarian socialist revolution. The link between national-democratic revolutions and socialist revolutions in oppressed nations was developed in its dearest form by Mao Tse-tung's theory of the 'new democratic' revolution and by the example of the Chinese revolution itself. —It is a movement diametrically opposed to the elitist idea that only leaders are smart enough or interested enough to accept full revolutionary conclusions. It is a movement built on the basis of faith in the masses of people. —The first foundation for forming authority is always offered by popularity. However, an authority that is based solely on this foundation is still extremely weak, unstable and vacillating. Any supporter of such an authority, resting purely on popularity, must therefore endeavor to improve and to safeguard this authority by creating power. In power, therefore, that means in force, we see the second foundation of all authority. This is far more stable, more secure, but not always more vigorous than the first one. If popularity and force unite, and if thus combined they are able to fast over a certain period of time, then an authority on an even more solid basis can arise, the authority of tradition. If finally popularity, force and tradition combine, an authority may be looked upon as unshakable.
​Capitalist society, divided into classes, has need of the state as an organization of the ruling class, whose purpose is to maintain the capitalist system of production in its own interest in order to effect the continued exploitation of the proletariat. —Hence, the strategic goal of the U.S. proletariat can only be to destroy the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and replace it by the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the pre-condition for building socialism. —The U.S. working class with its allies from other classes, together constituting a vast majority of the people and led by a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party smashes the existing state apparatus (in fact a dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class) and sets up its own form of state: the dictatorship of the proletariat. —Generated to overthrow the centralized power of the state, starting from the idea that the working class need merely secure a sufficiently vast and solid organization in order to triumph over the organization of the state, the party of the workers has ended by acquiring a vigorous centralization of its own, based upon the same cardinal principles of authority and discipline. —The proletariat is the class which has the power to defeat the imperialists, to carry the fight through to the establishment of socialism and to guard against the resurgence of capitalism. It is the only class which in ending its own exploitation ends the exploitation of all classes. The proletariat leads with a party that represents the interests of the proletariat and has a mass base among the proletariat—a Marxist-Leninist party. —To put the matter less euphemistically, there exists a dictatorship in the hands of those leaders who have been sufficiently astute and sufficiently powerful to grasp the sceptre of dominion in the name of socialism, and to wrest it from the hands of the expiring bourgeois society. —Revolutionary warfare or armed struggle resulting in state power is the logical, inevitable, answer to the political, social, and economic situation which confronts us. The solution to our problem is total control of the politico-military apparatus of this country. We do not have the luxury of an alternative, for we are faced with dire necessity. —EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE; NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE; NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE. —The People's Liberation Army triumphantly sets up the People's Revolutionary Government, proving that it can be done here in Amerika—establishing a people's party and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. —Political organization leads to power.
​The key is the party, which represents the ideological alternative to capitalism. —The Party is the mirror of the new society. The Party represents the politics of modernization, —In order for the U.S. proletariat to play its historic rote, it is led by a party of revolutionaries, organized on the basis of democratic centralism, guided by the science of the proletariat, the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. The party is able to apply these teachings to the specific conditions of the U.S in order to import class consciousness into the spontaneous struggles of the proletariat —No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement. —Lenin fashioned concrete principles for the nature and functioning of the vanguard party as a disciplined detachment of the proletariat, practicing criticism and self criticism. —In the land where the dictatorship of the proletariat is in force, no important political or organizational problem is ever decided by our councils and other mass organizations without directives from our party. In this sense, we may say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is substantially the dictatorship of the party, as the force that effectively guides the proletariat. —Socialism means political power in the hands of oppressed people. We who constitute the vanguard social force in this country possess the necessary governmental machinery to express our needs and aspirations.
The organization of the idea, that means the movement, has to embrace only so many people as are absolutely necessary for the occupation of the nerve centers of the State involved. —To have a centralized party requires a centralized leadership tested in practice, specific individuals with the understanding and the ability to unify and guide the movement in the face of new problems and be right most of the time. —The leadership develops the organizational forms that have made the people and their armed forces the most invincible fighters against imperialism. The leader knows when to seize an opportunity and when to forego an advantage. He has a long view of the struggle that can help him set priorities for a current moment. His is also the ability to separate a 'main enemy' from a future or past one and often make them hostile to each other to the ​advantage of the people. Most important, he builds a cadre of men who share those beliefs and principles and who are the new helmsmen. —Therefore, it is very necessary that out of pure instinct of self-preservation the movement—as soon as it is crowned by success—immediately limits the admission of members , and further carries out the enlarging of its organization only with the utmost caution and after the most thorough examination. Only by this will it be able to preserve the nucleus of the movement unspoilt, fresh and sound. —The Party is part of the working class, namely, its most advanced, class-conscious, and therefore most revolutionary part. —It has to see to it that solely this nucleus continues to lead the movement, that means directs the propaganda which is to lead to its general recognition and which, as the incorporator of power, carries out those actions which are necessary for the practical realization of its ideas. —The Party is formed of the best, most intelligent, self-sacrificing and far-seeing workers. The Party is the organized political lever by means of which the more advanced part of the working class leads all the proletarian and semi-proletarian mass in the right direction. By internalizing the power of the party, by conferring on it the legitimacy of authority, human beings simultaneously internalize their own powerlessness. Every act which lies within the sphere of influence of the party is out of bounds for an individual. Individuals not only view the wielding of their own powers over the environment as illegitimate; they come to feel themselves unable to wield these powers: the party is able to do everything, the individual is unable to do anything. —Only a cadre form of organization can maintain the discipline necessary for political work under present conditions while simultaneously developing creative new approaches to struggle. —Out of the basic stock of the old movement, the party has to fill not only all the most important positions of the conquered structure, but also to form the entire leadership. And this has to be continued until the previous principles and doctrines of the party have become the foundation and the content of the new State. —Exactly that is what Lenin called for in What is to be done? (a centralized party of professional revolutionaries and anti-autocratic agitation among all classes). —Now it is manifest that the concept of dictatorship is the direct antithesis of the concept democracy. —The dictatorship of the proletariat, whose theoretical foundations were laid by Marx and Lenin, rapidly becomes a dictatorship of the top group of the Party leadership. —Leadership depends upon what we may term the PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION ITSELF, that is to say, upon the tactical and technical necessities which result from the consolidation of every disciplined political aggregate. —A revolutionary (read negation of the negation) understands not only the pattern of social oppression, and recognizes the evil, but also has defined more carefully the way to overcome it.
​The power of the Marxist-Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation, to understand the inner connection of current events, to foresee their course and to perceive not only how and in what direction they are developing in the present, but how and in what direction they are bound to develop in the future. —Before key decisions are made the best minds in the organization are brought together. —The same can be said of the deputies who are elected to the Supreme Council, and take part in its sessions. They attend the sessions, and make speeches on problems which have previously been posed and decided on by Party circles. Their mission is to support the powers that be and use their eloquence in applying the decisions in their territorial or professional spheres. —Top decisions and organizational objectives are made in close cooperation with all important organization members. —Every branch of labor is directed by the most skilled worker, who himself takes part in it, and in the realm of enjoyment every branch is guided by the merriest member, who himself participates in the enjoyment. But as society is undivided and possesses only one mind, the whole system is regulated and governed by one man—and he is the wisest, the most virtuous and the most blissful. —Mao Tse-tung occupies the same relation to the revolutionary movement that Lenin did in his day: Defender of the revolutionary essence of Marxism-Leninism, and Leader in summing up the revolutionary experience and developing the military, political, economic and ideological strategy that finishes off world imperialism. —Every movement of world importance exists in the head of some chosen being, and the fate of the world depends on whether this head, which has made all wisdom its own private property, is or is not mortally wounded by some realistic stone before it has had time to make its revelation. —The Party, guided by the thought of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, is the center of world revolution. This is true not because I say so, but because hundreds of millions the world over say so.
This status of the leading stratum finds its expression in the revival of the system of the nomenclatura—that is, the establishment of lists of selected individuals, invested with the supreme confidence of the Party, for whom are reserved all responsible positions in the Party and the State. To the extent that an individual becomes one with an office, identifies the powers of the self with the powers of the office, to that extent the individual becomes a ​personification of certain social powers. —The preponderant elements of the movement, the men who lead and nourish it, end by undergoing a gradual detachment from the masses, and are attracted within the orbit of the 'political class.' —On the one hand there are ordinary employees, members of the Party, who are not invested with any power, who govern nothing and nobody, who cannot give orders or make decisions which have the force of law. On the other hand, there are functionaries who are invested with authority and who rule enterprises, institutions, whole branches of the economy, politics, culture, daily life and the State itself in its internal and external relations—not to speak of the Party which directs and organizes all these. They can give orders and make decisions which have the force of law. They form the ruling stratum of this socialist society, which leads every domain of life and monopolizes the totality of power. A portrait of the Leader adorns every government office and industrial enterprise. —Marx and Lenin both contended that working-class consciousness was measured by the degree of hegemony of revolutionary socialist parties over the majority of workers.
Without a revolutionary vanguard, capitalism may gain a new lease on life by default. —This implies real confidence in people. —The revolutionary vanguard is able to analyze objective conditions correctly, engages in revolutionary as well as parliamentary politics and is able to lead workers to the left. —These phenomena would seem to prove beyond dispute that society cannot exist without a 'dominant' or 'political' class, and that the ruling class, whilst its elements are subject to a frequent partial renewal, nevertheless constitutes the only factor of sufficiently durable efficacy in the history of human development. According to this view, the government, or, if the phrase be preferred, the state, cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority. It is the aim of this minority to impose upon the rest of society a 'legal order.' The state is the personification of the power of community, the estranged power of individuals to decide collectively the methods, means and purpose of their social activity. It is the specific office of the state to use all available means to ensure that the power of community remains estranged. —As with streams and their sources, it is axiomatic that the political level of a movement cannot rise above that of its leadership, in this case, the radical vanguard. It devolves upon them to educate and organize, to instill class consciousness in the others and to bring them to life, so to speak, in the political-historical sense, as a self-conscious part of the class struggle. —The majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government. Even when the discontent of the ​masses culminates in a successful attempt to deprive the bourgeoisie of power, this is after all effected only in appearance; always and necessarily there springs from the masses a new organized minority which raises itself to the rank of a governing class. The power conferred on the vanguard is the power to decide, and to order or decree, everything that is done with the productive forces which it personifies. Since what is done with these productive forces determines the shape of the environment in which contemporary human beings live and the activities in which they engage, the power of the vanguard is virtually absolute. —Thus the majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of a vanguard. —In all times, in all phases of development, in all branches of human activity, there have been leaders.
The program for revolutionary administration has three equally important aspects: Political—in order to spell out the aims and methods of the struggle; Economic—in order to meet people's material needs; Military—in order that the gains can be protected against hostile forces. —Both anarchism and opportunism are characteristics of this transitional period. They are two sides of the same coin, polar expressions for the same mis-understanding of the nature of the state. —Theophrastus noted long ago that the strongest desire of men who have attained to leadership in a popularly governed state is not so much the acquirement of personal wealth as the gradual establishment of their own sovereignty at the expense of popular sovereignty. —This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. —-The anarchists, who by definition have no organization, have no people that are reliable enough as far as the mass of the people are concerned to replace the government. The anarchists are unable to offer a structural program to replace the government. The anarchists feel they can just go from state to non-state, from a capitalist state to a "communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, where society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, ​rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic." —So pervasive is this bourgeois notion of individualism that most of the workers have not experienced collective work. —In this country the anarchists seem to feel that if they just express themselves individually and tend to ignore the limitations imposed on them, without leadership and without discipline they can oppose the very disciplined, organized, reactionary state. This is not true. They will be oppressed as long as imperialism exists. You cannot oppose a system such as this without organization that's even more disciplined and dedicated than the structure you're opposing. —World history is made by minorities whenever their numerical minority incorporates the majority of will and determination. —Socialists might conquer, but not socialism, which would perish in the moment of its adherents' triumph. We are tempted to speak of this process as a tragicomedy in which the masses are content to devote all their energies to effecting a change of masters.
The organization of the Party takes the place of the Party itself, the Central Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the leader takes the place of the Central Committee. —The Bureau makes political decisions, moves in a political way, and moves for victory, and it would be insane for anyone to expect leadership to organize around mandates and drop their own politics. —The principle that one vanguard inevitably succeeds to another, and the law deduced from that principle that leadership is, as it were, a preordained form of the common life of great social aggregates, far from conflicting with or replacing the materialist conception of history, completes that conception and reinforces it. There is no essential contradiction between the doctrine that history is the record of a continued series of class struggles and die doctrine that class struggles invariably culminate in the creation of new vanguards which undergo fusion with the old. —History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life is primeval history, while the truly historical is separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this die relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have consequently been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States.
​To be good at translating the Party's policy into actions of the masses, to be good at getting not only the leading cadres but also the broad masses to understand and master every movement we launch—to be good at making the ideas of the ruling class the ruling ideas—this is an art of Marxist-Leninist leadership. —The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore , the ideas of its dominance. —In order for the Party to succeed at this task it will take tremendous self-consciousness and discipline from the membership. —The Party is a disciplined organization in expecting members to participate in study and self-defense and be responsible to the organization for carrying out decisions made by the entire body. —From the very beginning, it is important to introduce blind discipline into our meetings and absolutely to safeguard the authority of the meeting's leaders. —The Party can no longer have a double standard , making major political demands outside its ranks which are not only not supported, but attacked by persons within its ranks. The existence of that contradiction within hamstrings the organization. While the battle remains to be fought out across the country, the organization should now be able to move forward in the fight against imperialism.
We must be able to distinguish between bureaucracy and administration. Successful revolutionary struggle depends to a large extent on good administration—on better organizational ability and a superior use of intelligence. —If it is true that important decision-making should be concentrated, then the execution of those decisions should be decentralized. —The division of labor, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists), while the others' attitude to these ideas is more passive and receptive. —The development of revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective formations which undertake the application of the lessons of our work ​is the responsibility of every revolutionary. Those collectives which prove themselves in practice to have the correct understanding contribute to the unified revolutionary party. As soon as revolutionaries acquire correct understanding, those who do not possess correct understanding become counter-revolutionaries. The acquisition of correct understanding is not a historical event; it takes place whenever individuals contribute to the unified revolutionary party.
Yesterday's dreams are today's revolutionary laws. —The Party has full control over state power. After long investigations and criticism sessions, party members are nominated by their co-workers. The party itself makes the final choice. Party members hold practically all leadership positions. There is one indisputed leader of the Party and the country. The Central Committee makes basic policy decisions according to their understanding of what the people want, and the economic and political necessities of the country. —As a state designed to end the exploitation of man by man and representing for the first time a majority class in society, it differs from all other states, which perpetuated the exploitation of man by man and were based on the rule of a small minority divorced from production and living off the labor of others. —The class making the revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society. —The notion of the representation of popular interests is an illusion engendered by a false illumination, is an effect of a mirage. —Out of this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community, the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration, and especially on the classes, already determined by the division of labor, which in every such mass of men separate out, and of which one dominates all the others.
Yet it might happen that the centralization in the hands of a few leaders is no more than a tactical method—('We are not raising a banner and saying, "Follow us!" We want to join with others to create an instrument that will not be our plaything, or anyone else's plaything, but a useful tool for the people.')—a tactical method adopted to effect the speedier overthrow of the adversary; that the leaders fulfill the purely provisional function of educating the masses ​for the revolution; and that organization is after all no more than a means employed. This development would conflict with the nature of the party, with the endeavor to organize the masses upon the vastest scale imaginable. —Nothing could be more anti-scientific than the supposition that as soon as socialists have gained possession of governmental power it will suffice for the masses to exercize a little control over their leaders to secure that the interests of these leaders shall coincide perfectly with the interests of the led. —In the State, personal freedom exists only for the individuals who develop within the relationships of the vanguard, and only insofar as they are individuals of this class. However, the other side of the picture is a truly revolutionary democracy in which each individual is able to participate in at least a fragment of the personified power of society. This democracy is made possible by two characteristics of the universal representative of society's productive power: it is liquid, and thus can flow from hand to hand regardless of rank or social office, and it is infinitely divisible, enabling everyone to have it. Thus while everyone is deprived of self powers over the social environment, no one is excluded from a share in the personified powers.
THE PARTY'S STRUGGLE IS THE PEOPLE'S STRUGGLE. —Each new vanguard which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. —This vanguard with its 'nomenclature- leadership' governs the country not through the Councils, but through the Party institutions: the Central Committee, the regional committees, district and area committees and their departments. All these state institutions are called Workers' Councils and are assumed to be Councils, but the power exercised by them is 'Council power' only by virtue of the fact that those who lead these institutions, the representatives of the top echelons of the Party leadership, are simultaneously also deputies of the Councils which have been elected by the whole population in 'direct, secret and equal' elections. But all of them were put into their positions not by the population, not by the social organizations of the people, not by the public opinion of the working people, but internally through Party leadership channels. The population is obliged, however, to support them and vote for them. What the individual can no longer do, the Party can do. And what the individual can no longer do includes everything that has become the prerogative of a special office: a profession, a specialized field, a ​discipline, a qualification, a licence. —-This combination of concentration and decentralization does not solve all organizational problems. But it emphasizes base-building and fresh thinking and moves our groups beyond hollow bureaucratic shells. —The social power, the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labor, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these. Wage laborers reproduce the state, commodity production and the division of labor in the very act of reproducing themselves. —'Workers' Council power' exists therefore in our country in the sense that the Party leaders govern the country in the name of the Workers' Councils.
It is not enough merely to destroy the institutions of monopoly capitalism. Pernicious ideas—(“The aim of the revolution is the well-being of the greatest number; therefore, if this goal has not been achieved, if the people have not found the better life that they were seeking, then the revolution is not over, even though those who want only to substitute their own rule for somebody else's say that it is over, as you would expect them to. If the revolution is really over, then it has been nothing but a great crime.")—pernicious ideas and habits engrained in the culture, after centuries of life under capitalism, must be struggled against, defeated and struggled against once more. To do otherwise—for the people to relax their vigilance—is to surrender the people's revolution to the control of class enemies in whatever guise. —To say that 'all nationalism is reactionary'—("It is, incidentally, true of every nation that obstinate nationalism is now to be found only among the bourgeoisie and their writers.")—is objectively to ally with imperialism in opposition to the struggles of the oppressed nations. —One of the most disastrous consequences of the political line of this faction has been their refusal to join in and build a united front against imperialism's aggression. Disastrous for several reasons, the most basic being failure to understand the tactics and responsibilities of socialist internationalism, the responsibility to fight for the leading role of the anti-imperialist working class organizations. —Here is the poison that makes their ideas so dangerous and serves the ends of everything standing in the way of revolutionary nationalism and the triumph of ​people's liberation struggles around the world: —"Communism is only possible as the act of sovereign populations 'all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world historical' existence—existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history." —This denial of the class struggle has led and will lead them time and time again to oppose the people. This is a strategy of imperialists and their miserable tools; not of revolutionaries. —The theoretical basis for the expulsion of this faction has its roots in the difference between the statements above. Some may think it is a small matter or a technical point; it is not For what a revolutionary movement holds to be the 'principal contradiction in the world today' determines not only the direction and content of its theoretical work, but shapes all aspects of its program, organization and practical activity. It determines how one assesses and relates to revolutionary struggles; both international and local. —The collective understands that it has a primary responsibility to the Bureau, that its job is the implementation of those politics. And the people who don't believe that, or can't understand that, are fired, because we're building a movement of revolutionaries, and we have to do that in a coherent way. —The revolutionary movement, the liberation struggle, the working class, and the whole international struggle against imperialism wins a victory and takes a step forward by expelling from the organization all members of the faction and all others who share their betrayal of the struggle of the Party. This action is a direct outcome and consequence of the great advances made on all fronts against imperialism. —We expel factions from our organization because we can not tolerate within our organization those who in practice work against that struggle to which we are trying to win people. In regional and local struggles we must begin to take the same attitude.
Proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, is true social science. The bourgeoisie needs to infuse into the 'radical' movement, the working class, and the Marxist-Leninist Party: contempt for theory, pragmatism, anarchism, revisionism, corruption of individuals, bombastic left phrase-mongering, and bourgeois liberal reformism. This contempt, pragmatism, anarchism, revisionism, corruption, bombast and left phrase-mongering describes revolutionary ​leaders in the following terms: "The Idealistic Dalai Lamas have this much in common with their real counterpart: they would like to persuade themselves that the world from which they derive their subsistence could not continue without their holy excrement. As soon as this idealistic folly is put into practice, its malevolent nature is apparent: its monkish lust for power, its religious fanaticism, its charlatanry, its pietistic hypocrisy, its unctuous deceit. Miracles are the asses' bridge leading from the kingdom of the idea to practice." —Those spreading such lies, for the purpose of creating splits within the anti-imperialist movement thus weakening the world revolutionary movement, must be seen as enemies of that movement and working objectively in the interests of the imperialists. —Anarchism inhibits the development of coherent ideology. —One of the most vital principles of anarchism, a principle which distinguishes it from all revolutionary ideology, is its empiric view "that differences of brain and of intellectual capacity do not imply any differences whatsoever in the nature of the stomach and of physical needs; therefore, the false tenet, based upon existing circumstances, 'to each according to his abilities,' must be changed, insofar as it relates to enjoyment in its narrower sense, into the tenet, 'to each according to his need'; in other words, a different form of activity, of labor, does not justify inequality, confers no privileges in respect of possession and enjoyment. The prophet cannot admit this; for the privileges, the advantages of his station, the feeling that he is one of the elect, these are the very stimulus of the prophet." —Thus the anarchists' 'anti-elitism' easily degenerates into opposition to the development of leaders, into an anti-leadership neurosis. —The anarchists feel they can just go from state to non-state; they feel that —"the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present) namely, labor. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals of whom society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State." —This is an attempt to destroy the faith and respect which the revolutionary leadership has earned from the people. To perpetrate such lies in an attempt to divide the struggle is counter-revolutionary at best, and can only serve the interests of world imperialism. —The Party exemplifies proletarian discipline; what THEY call democracy is in reality ultra democracy, practiced by anarchist, cultural nationalist, capitalist and all other counter-revolutionaries. —The mass will never rule except in abstracto. —Leadership articulates the goals of the revolution, the methods by which these goals will be attained, while at the same time embodying the ideals of the revolution itself. —Secrecy assures this leadership isolation from the external world and stability ​internally, so that its personnel can be sheltered from accidents, fluctuations or intrusions deriving from uncontrolled or unreliable elements.
But there exists yet another danger. The leadership of the socialist party may fall into the hands of persons whose practical tendencies are in opposition with the program of the working class, so that the labor movement will be utilized for the service of interests diametrically opposed to those of the proletariat. —How can we let the mass movement against imperialism fall under such elements? We can't. We won't. We will not place our fate in the hands of 'leaders' who ignore the mass of working people and who pursue a line guaranteed to exclude proletarian organizations and individuals from even participating, much less leading the anti-imperialist movement. We cannot follow 'leaders' who bend every effort toward preventing the development of that movement. —Every effort would be made to eliminate potentially 'disruptive' elements. The point is that they're independent of the group which is in control, and because they, too, may grow in strength, they could pose a long-term, even immediate threat. —A party is part of a class, its most advanced part. Several parties and, consequently, freedom for parties, can exist only in a society in which there are antagonistic classes whose interests are mutually hostile and irreconcilable. Here there are only two classes, workers and peasants, whose interests—far from being mutually hostile-are, on the contrary, friendly. Hence there is no ground for the existence of several parties, and, consequently, for freedom for these parties. —The offensive mounted by capitalism against Marxism-Leninism forms the backdrop for all the reasons commonly given for opposing a Marxist-Leninist party: —"We do not know the exact extent of the practical demands which the leader makes. But we do know that his doctrine is a dogma fundamental to all spiritual and temporal craving for power, a mystic veil which obscures all furtive, hypocritical pleasure-seeking, we know that it serves to extenuate any infamy and that it is the source of much mental derangement." —To say that this—anti-leadership neurosis—is counter-revolutionary is not enough, because we overuse those words. It is 'the enemy within,' a destructive, wrecking force within the movement that uses revolutionary phrases to confuse, misdirect and slander people working for causes that serve people's needs. To potential revolutionaries and radicals we say BEWARE!
​The fundamental reason for the success of the Party is that it has a correct analysis of society. —The country is led by an ideology which precludes and suppresses all others. The entire Press and censorship serves exclusively the Party, and is in the hands of the state. —You cannot eliminate even one basic assumption, one substantial part of this philosophy of Marxism (it is as if it were a solid block of steel) without abandoning objective truth, without falling into the arms of the bourgeois-reactionary falsehood. —To belittle socialist ideology in any way, to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology. —Criticism and research are therefore lacking in the revolutionary ideology. All that may be criticized is individual facts and persons, and then only if they do not hold a high position. Criticism of the foundations of the existing social order, the principles governing the organization of power and the leadership of social life, is prohibited under threat of severe penalties.
Recognizing that imperialism is the most voracious beast that ever stalked the earth, that it is engaged in crimes of blood against humankind, and that it can only be destroyed by the people of the world picking up the sword and fighting it, we affirm the right and duty of all revolutionary peoples and classes to wage armed struggles for liberation, we commit ourselves to give concrete aid to these struggles wherever they arise, and we undertake to educate the people and prepare them and ourselves to wage a determined struggle with arms in hand to destroy imperialism in its lair. —The lack of a great, new, creative idea means at all times a limitation of this fighting power. The conviction of the justification of using even the most brutal weapons is always dependent on the presence of a fanatical belief in the necessity of the victory of a revolutionary new order on this globe. A movement which does not fight for such highest aims and ideals will therefore never take the ultimate weapon. —It is an important task of the movement to wage internal struggle against so-called revolutionaries who argue that—"In the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all." —These so-called revolutionaries counterpose the struggle for socialism to the struggle for self-determination of oppressed people by arguing that—"Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals only when controlled by all. This appropriation is further ​determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union which by the character of the proletariat itself can only be a universal one, and through a revolution in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organization is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character of the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society. Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. This revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew." —These so-called revolutionaries are neither revolutionaries, nor are they struggling for socialism. All these are guilty of chauvinism which amounts to putting the interests of the ruling class ahead of the interests of the working class and the oppressed peoples of all countries. —We'll beat those little sissies, those little schoolboys ass if they don't try to straighten up their politics. So we want to make that known to them and the first motherfucker that gets out of order had better stand in line for some kind of disciplinary actions from the Party. —A key part of such a strategy is the building of a strong youth movement which must be in the forefront of the struggle against imperialism. —The management of meetings is different with us. We do not ask anyone graciously to tolerate our lecture, and no one is guaranteed an endless discussion, but it is simply stated that we are the masters of the meeting, that consequently we have the authority, and that everyone who would dare to make only so much as one interrupting shout, will mercilessly be thrown out by the same door by which he came in. If there remains time enough and if we deem fit, we allow a discussion to take place; if not, then there is no discussion, and now the speaker, party member Blank, has the floor. —Our main task is to develop a youth movement which can attack the main enemy of all oppressed people. —At the very beginning of our great activity I commenced the organization of a protective detachment as a supervision service that in principle consisted of young people throughout. Partly they were comrades whom I had known since my military service, others were recently won young party members who, from the very beginning, were instructed and trained to the effect that terror can be broken only by terror; that on this earth a man who is courageous and determined has always had success on his side; that we are fighting for a powerful idea, so great and sublime, that it very well deserves to be protected with one's last drop of blood. They ​were saturated with the doctrine that once reason is silent and force has the ultimate decision, the best weapon of defense is found in the attack; and that our troop of supervisors has to be preceded by the reputation that it is not a debating dub but a fighting community, determined for the utmost. —The building of such a movement requires an all-out, ruthless and determined struggle against both the opportunists-revisionists who would lead the movement away from revolutionary struggle down pacifist lines, and against the populists who would lead it away from struggle by scorning the masses.
Now that we have technically well-trained Bolshevik cadres, the role of wrecker is played not by openly alien people, but by people who possess party cards and enjoy all the rights of party members. People who have accidentally acquired party cards publicly ask,—"Was not our original intent to give a new meaning to life? Did we not begin with a sense that bourgeois history and bourgeois interpretations of life had to be transcended? Is not the basic proposition of revolutionary socialist thought that something new is necessary, possible, desired and achievable? Did we not discover ourselves to be radical—then 'revolutionary'—because the tragic limits set for man by capitalist civilization, by capitalist society, could indeed be done away with, gone beyond? Was not the core of our revolutionary experience the discovery that a new life (within us) and a new world (with others) was concretely realizable?"—Now the weakness of our people consists not in technical backwardness but in political carelessness, in blind trust of people who have accidentally acquired party cards, in the absence of check-ups on people not just on the basis of their political declarations but according to the results of their work. Now the key question for us is not the liquidation of the technical backwardness of our cadres, for this has basically already been liquidated, but the liquidation of political carelessness and political trustingness toward wreckers who have accidentally acquired party cards. —The Party must take the lead in building support for the people and their revolutionary leadership and deal with all those who oppose their struggle, even if it be tendencies within our own movement, by any means necessary. —Whether 'right' or 'left' in form, these Trotskyite organizations act as wreckers. They do not put the needs of the people in first place, do not serve the people, but parasitically attach themselves to people's movements to promote their organizations at the expense of the struggle. Marxist-Leninists should not be confused with wreckers. —The Trotskyites and Bukharinites, that is to say, the 'bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,' the leading lights of which are now in the prisoners' dock, is not a ​political party, a political tendency, but a band of felonious criminals, and not simply felonious criminals, but of criminals who have sold themselves to enemy intelligence services, criminals whom even ordinary felons treat as the basest, lowest, most contemptible, the most depraved of the depraved. —It is this increasing use of state power as an instrument of war against the enemy which both perfects state power and forces us to understand the necessity of its seizure. —Thereby, the young movement upholds the view that its idea can be represented spiritually, but that the protection of this representation has to be secured, if necessary, by means of physical power. Faithful to its conviction of the enormous importance of the new doctrine, it appears a matter of course that for achieving this aim no sacrifice must be too great. —It is a simple question of survival for the socialist revolution and proletarian state. Anyone or anything that stands in the way, that imperils this survival, has to be pushed aside, ruthlessly if necessary. —All wisdom in this world will remain futile if force does not enter its service, defending and protecting it; the mild Goddess of Peace can march only side by side with the God of War, and every great deed of this peace needs the protection and the help of force! How vividly does the idea of service dawn! Not in the calcified meaning of old hardened officials, in the service of the dead authority of a dead State, but in the living knowledge of the individual's duty to stand up for and to devote his life to his people in its entirety, always and at any time, anywhere and in every place.
The power in possession of the working class must, in the interest of the shaping of socialism, the oppressing of class enemies and the defense against imperialism, be still more decidedly and severely exercised than it has been up to now. 'Dictatorship' also means the exercising of force in oppressing enemies. —It is known that all bourgeois intelligence services use methods of physical influence against the representatives of the socialist proletariat and that they use them in their most scandalous form. The question arises as to why the socialist intelligence service should be more humanitarian against the mad agents of the bourgeoisie, against the deadly enemies of the working class and the farm workers. —Was there ever a government in history that was based exclusively on the consent of the people and renounced any and every use of force? A government so constituted there never was and there never will be. Consent is as changeable as the formations in the sands of the seashore. We cannot have it always. Nor can it ever be total. No government has ever existed that made all its subjects happy. Whatever solutions you happen to give to any problem whatsoever, even though you share ​the Divine wisdom, you would inevitably create a class of malcontents. How are you going to avoid that this discontent spread and constitute a danger for the solidarity of the State? You avoid it with force: by bringing a maximum force to bear; by employing this force inexorably whenever it is rendered necessary. Rob any government of force and leave it with only its immortal principles, and that government will be at the mercy of the first group that is organized and intent on overthrowing it. No, this is not terror, it is hardly rigor. Perhaps it is only social hygiene, national prophylactics. These individuals are taken out of circulation as the doctor removes an infected person from circulation.
The attempt of individuals to realize their self-powers to the level made possible by contemporary productive forces is a threat to the stability of the dominant social order, which tries to purge itself of the rebellious elements, because "the appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments of production is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves." —The Party criticizes the conception that the class struggle's objective includes the oppressed destroying the instrument of oppression, the state—(a conception expressed in formulations such as: "Let it come to an end at last, this great scandal that our posterity will never believe! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, governors and governed.")—The real theoretical discovery of Stalinism is that in our age the political authority—the state—has become strong enough to reshape the social order. Stalin took over, without public acknowledgement, the fascist idea of the state as the decisive factor in terminating the class struggle and instituting a new social order controlled from the top. —Stalin defined socialism not in terms of workers' control, but as state ownership of the means of production combined with planning. —The socialist state eliminates the exploitation of labor by taking away from the monopoly capitalists ail the means of production, distribution and communication; all banks and financial institutions; and all large holdings in land and housing. —The power of the state is concentrated in the hands of the top leaders of the Party. Political conditions are concealed from the working people. Neither the trade unions nor other organizations have any part whatever in the administration of production. The working people mechanically vote at the elections for the previously elected Council deputies, and the ​Ministers and chairmen of the executive and factory committees appointed by the Central Committee and the Regional Committees govern in the name of these deputies. —The socialist state carries out democratic economic planning and guarantees the right of everyone to a secure job. It ensures basic human needs of food, clothing, housing and education. It guarantees the right of self-determination to oppressed nations—including self-governing territories if so desired. —Social consciousness is dominated by official concepts which have been imposed from above and which are not subject to any critical examination. —The system of democratic centralism, the basis of the life of the workers' society, perforce has to affect also the character of its ideology: —'In communist society, all means of production are common property. There are no classes and no class struggle. The consequences of class-divided society—racism, national chauvinism, male supremacy, the monogamous family based on property, etc.—all have disappeared. There are no wars, no armies, and no need for weapons of war, which have become historical curiosities. There are no distinctions between mental and manual work.' —This ideology is offered day after day in the Press and in the public declarations of the leadership and is taught to young people at the higher educational institutes and in the Party schools.
The Organization is a revolutionary vanguard, and as such we believe that the whole world must be freed. —The socialist revolution must have the specific content of serving the needs and interests of the oppressed people of the whole world. —We are one with all liberation struggles, we are one with all revolutionary movements, on the moon if necessary. —Socialism continues to spread across the face of the earth.