“Chairman Gonzalo reaffirms himself on the powerful Marxist principle: “The masses make history” and teaches us to forge our Communist conception in struggle against the bourgeois conception which is centered around the individual as the axis of history.” – General Political Line of the PCP, Mass Line
In the first entry in our Basics for Revolutionaries-in-formation series, we talk about how while Marxists are materialists (i.e. they view the world as really existing independent of our thoughts), they are not mechanical materialists or bourgeois materialists. Newer comrades, when they read that, might rightfully ask: what does that mean, though? Is the difference between “bourgeois” versus “dialectical” materialism a real thing, or just a bunch of buzzwords?
To explain the wide gap between dialectical materialist philosophy, the philosophy of the working class, and the type of materialism used by some capitalist philosophers and institutions, we need to explain the central role the masses play in a Marxist understanding of our world and our society. Right from the start, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously wrote:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
This is the central idea underpinning all of modern revolutionary thought: that the driving or motor force of social change is the struggle between classes, the struggle between the exploited and their exploiters, between the oppressed and their oppressors. This idea is expressed succinctly in the principle of “the masses make history,” because fundamentally the biggest changes and transformations in our society are caused by the struggles and efforts of the majority of humanity, by the literal billions of oppressed and exploited people around the world. While singular heroes and exceptional people obviously rise up and help the masses, at the end of the day it is us the members of the modern working class, the oppressed nations, and our class allies who make social transformation possible. Feudalism was not ended by a few brilliant capitalist intellectuals, but by the millions of peasants and artisans who rose up against feudal rule.
This view of history stands in contrast to old bourgeois philosophy, which thinks that social transformation is caused by either by changes in the “marketplace of ideas” (if it is idealist capitalist philosophy) or the inventions and technological changes created by a select layer of genius scientists (if it is mechanical-materialist capitalist philosophy). While obviously scientific experiments or important individual leaders and heroes play a role in history, when it comes down to what is the main force behind these changes (and indeed behind most of the mechanisms of our entire society) the answer always comes down to class struggle and the masses that participate in that class struggle.
When it comes to the implications of this principle, there are a few universal things that all revolutionaries and revolutionary-minded people and organizations should do in order to uphold “the masses make history”. Firstly, this means that mass work and participation or leadership in class struggle is not optional, but rather is a requirement of any group or organization that considers itself revolutionary. Although there are those who go too far in this direction and think of mass work as the only thing that matters, even in 2025 there are still so many “revolutionaries” and “revolutionary organizations” that think about conducting correct and successful mass work as a kind of side-show or optional activity. Study, organizational construction, and theoretical work: all of these things lose their class content if they are done without any connection to the masses or outside of their struggles.
The second main implication of this principle is that when we think about any single part of the revolutionary process (two-line struggle, making reports and plans, etc.), we must never lose sight of the role of the masses in that process, or think about the process as somehow outside of or removed from the masses. Even if the masses are involved in different ways according to the task at hand. They should always play a role in everything we do. Finally, synthesizing these two implications, all comrades should study and practice what is called the mass line method of leadership in order to truly uphold the principle “the masses make history”. While fully explaining what the mass line is would require a whole separate article, the mass line is perhaps best summarized by Chairman Mao in his article Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership:
“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.”
For further reading on this topic, we suggest:
- Quotations from Chairman Mao, Section 11. Mass Line
- The Masses Are the Makers of History, Peking Review
- General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru, Chapter 6 – Mass Line
- Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1
