Integration with the masses of toiling and oppressed people is a key task for revolutionaries-in-formation. For comrades of all class backgrounds, but particularly those of bourgeois and petty bourgeois class backgrounds, it is vital that there is active integration with the masses in their areas and sectors of work. This necessary task for effective revolutionary work was expressed by the Communist Party of Peru in the method called the three withs: “live with, work with, and struggle with” the masses. It was Chairman Mao who compared the revolutionary guerrilla to a fish, which to survive and function properly must swim among the sea of the masses. The guerrilla has many tasks and duties, but Chairman Mao emphasized this political quality as essential because without the masses the guerrilla is nothing but an isolated fighter. Similarly, without the masses the organizer is nothing, just an activist shouting into the void.

Integration with the masses is an essential principle for all comrades because to lead the masses and organize them for victory, there are various qualities we must have which can only be achieved through integration with the masses. We must be able to explain our revolutionary ideas in the common language and with the common cultural understanding of the masses. We must know the struggles and lives of the masses intimately, not as abstract ideas but as struggles of our own. We must have an ear to the ground and be able to read the mass movement and lead as an advanced detachment of the multinational proletariat, who are the leading and main force of the masses in the United States.

This is why the great leader of the Indian Revolution Charu Majumdar highlighted that “As Chairman Mao has said, there can only be one criterion by which we should judge whether a youth or a student is a revolutionary. This criterion is whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants, does so in practice and carries on mass work.” We encourage our readers to take up and apply the three withs, as they provide a correct and simple method for accomplishing this basic principle:

• By living with the masses revolutionaries are immersed in neighborhoods of the working, poor, and nationally oppressed masses, become of aware of the struggles and problems in these neighborhoods, are immersed in the language and culture of the masses, and if they do all this well they become known by the masses locally as a familiar and positive figure. Revolutionaries should not be foreign to the masses, like academics and petty-bourgeois activists are. They should be organic to the communities of the masses and not outsiders.
• By working with the masses revolutionaries engage in production alongside the masses, forge a proletarian class stand through wage labor and production, and come to have direct perceptual experience with the conditions, exploitation, demands and struggles of the masses in their workplaces. In this way the struggles of the masses become truly known to revolutionaries, as active participants in them. To understand the class enemy, one must face the real exploitation and oppression by their hands, and take up the struggle to abolish such things.
• By struggling with the masses revolutionaries take their post as leaders of the class and leaders of the revolutionary mass movement, and fight to mobilize, politicize and organize the masses through class struggle and tireless mass work. To struggle we must both lead and be of the masses, be the advanced while also having a mass character ourselves. In struggling alongside the masses, correct principles are both learned and applied more broadly, and the masses become better at struggling collectively.

This political principle, although formulated as the “three withs” by the Peruvian comrades, has a long history. Stalin explained the principle for revolutionaries in his invaluable text Foundations of Leninism:

“But the Party cannot be only an advanced detachment. It must at the same time be a detachment of the class, part of the class, closely bound up with it by all the fibres of its being. The distinction between the advanced detachment and the rest of the working class, between Party members and non-Party people, cannot disappear until classes disappear; it will exist as long as the ranks of the proletariat continue to be replenished with former members of other classes, as long as the working class as a whole is not in a position to rise to the level of the advanced detachment. But the Party would cease to be a party if this distinction developed into a gap, if the Party turned in on itself and became divorced from the non-Party masses. The Party cannot lead the class if it is not connected with the non-Party masses, if there is no bond between the Party and the non-Party masses, if these masses do not accept its leadership, if the Party enjoys no moral and political credit among the masses.”

As we have explored in a prior entry in this series, the masses alone make history, and to lose or lack a strong connection with the masses means to lose our ability to make history by waging revolution. Furthermore, a simple tenet of Marxism is that everything in society has a class character. If revolutionaries are not among the masses like fish in water—are not living, working, and struggling with the class—then they lose their class character and thus their revolutionary capacity. Furthermore, without integration with the masses, many central tasks, processes, and methods of the class like the mass line, people’s war, and reconstitution etc. become impossible.

Integration with the masses is not a task that can be put off, but is something which must be applied and put into practice now, both politically by the class conscious mass organizations, and individually by the revolutionaries-in-formation themselves who either: 1) understand the need for such integration and have the will to remold themselves in the image of the class, or 2) who already have a working-class background and simply must deepen and further their already existing integration in among the toiling, poor and nationally oppressed communities in our country. As Mao and Majumdar both said, this is one of the select criteria by which we can judge if a comrade is truly a revolutionary: whether they are willing to live, work, and struggle with the broad masses of workers in the United States.

Suggested Readings:

1. To the Youth and the Students, Charu Majumdar.
2. Mass Line – General Political Line of the Communist Party of Peru
3. Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, Mao Zedong.
4. Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Mao Zedong