By Vincent Roberts

Yesterday, March 15, an online “Maoist” by the name of Lucas published a polemic against the People’s Defense Committee entitled “Cart Without a Horse.” The polemic itself is silly, and would not be worth responding to if it did not represent an extreme example of a growing Menshevik anti-Party line often expressed by many chronically online “Maoists”; the line of public Party reconstitution. While it is often expressed by mostly amateurish newer friends, or those on the margins of the revolutionary movement, this should not obscure the reality that the line of open, instead of closed, Party reconstitution is an extremely serious deviation and represents a reversal of decades of hard won positions and protocols regarding security and clandestinity.

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” This was the infamous line of line of questioning posed by the reactionary House Un-American Activities Committee during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s. This question and others similar to it have been used as cudgels by the capitalists and their running dogs for centuries in a tried-and-true tactic commonly known as red-baiting. It is a line of questioning quite literally stained with blood, an evil tactic used by reactionaries around the world, in India, Turkey, the Philippines, Peru, and elsewhere, to try and imprison revolutionaries and crush legal organizations of the masses.

Now, in 2026, a sect of internet Maoists in the imperialist countries have gotten it in their head that these types of questions are actually a good and helpful test of how “correct” or “revolutionary” an organization and its membership are. For many months now, activists in revolutionary mass organizations around the country have reported to writers at The Partisan that while most on-boarding or orientations go smoothly, there are some where questions like “what is your organization’s relationship to Party building” are brought up. When told that the organization is a legal mass organization which is not connected to such processes, most of these contacts understand and move on. However, there is a small set of contacts (largely drawn from social media and the internet) who press on these questions and or even go farther, asking questions about militarization and the concentric construction of the three instruments.

While those contacts who persist in these lines of questioning are most likely just amateurs, confused because of some line they saw on a Discord server or a post they read on a blog, they are—either purposefully or not—doing police work and attacking that which they claim to uphold: the ideology and Party of the international proletariat. Chairman Gonzalo, leader of the Peruvian revolution, wrote that either the Communist Party is clandestine or it is not a Communist Party. That is because, according to the theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it is the task of the Communist Party to lead the proletariat and its allied masses to victory over the Old State through revolutionary violence, thus seizing political Power for the workers and taking a major step on the long march towards communism, a society without classes. This task is obviously an illegal task, and thus requires a strong and solid clandestine structure to carry it out. According to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it is the job of the Communist Party and its antecedents to forge the best children of the working-class, its members, in the ideology, to elaborate a general program of socialist revolution as well as particular class lines in the different sectors, and lead in the carrying out of the essential tasks of the revolutionary process in all periods.

Many who are in online “Maoist” spaces read this theory and feel an urge to be involved in the task of Party reconstitution. They read works by Chairman Gonzalo, Comrade Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao and feel like they have gained relative expertise in the ideology. Egged on by revisionist lines regarding Party construction put forward by some opportunistic organizations and their publications, they approach legal organizations of masses with the same questions federal agents would ask. This comparison is not a hypothetical; agents of the State are already currently operating within our revolutionary movement, and as the movement grows their number will grow as reaction seeks to crush the nascent revolutionary forces. Those people in online “Maoist” spaces are sometimes not humble or patient because of a petty-bourgeois individualistic standpoint where they feel entitled to participate in tasks of Party reconstitution even if they are by all criteria not qualified to engage in such tasks (unless those criteria are Menshevik ones!).

It is not the responsibility of legal mass organizations to elaborate a line regarding Party reconstitution, nor should they since our theory tells us such a process is to remain a select and closed process. That is the duty of the Communist Party and its antecedents; for a mass organization to do so would constitute what is called “backwards” construction, where the United Front builds the Party. To be a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist one must not only adhere to, but also practice, the ideology—which means actively carrying out work such as militarization and concentric construction. This means that politically-organizationally there are no “Maoist” members of the mass organizations, only activists who are students of the ideology. Similarly the task of establishing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as the command and guide of the entire revolutionary movement is lead by the Communist Party and its antecedents, not the legal mass organizations who should embrace within their membership all those masses who can do work and submit to basic class-conscious principles, including those masses who are not Maoist or who have not even heard of Maoism before.

Newer people such as comrade Lucas, who hold this line, likely do not recognized the nefarious Menshevik quality of it because they have not reflected on its basic implications given the realities of revolutionary work in the era of imperialism and socialist revolution. This was the fundamental line of demarcation between Lenin and Stalin’s Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: the question of the open mass “socialist” party of the Second International, or the closed vanguard Party of a New Type. The idea that every revolutionary organization must elaborate in public documents its relationship to Party reconstitution and every task of socialist revolution is not only absurd, it is a revisionist attack on basic principles of Party construction. The idea that every mass organization in every country, in every period, must identify itself as “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” in its program and statutes is similarly absurd, dangerous, and directly contradicted by the history and practice of the current and historical international revolutionary movement.

If you ask a Filipino National Democratic organization these kinds of questions right here in the US, you would be rightly viewed as an agent of the Old State. If you go to India and ask a mass organization these kinds of questions, you would be rightly viewed as an agent of the Old State. These are the exact accusations used to justify fake encounters, bombing, imprisonment, and torture, not just in these countries but in many parts of the world. The same attitude towards the danger of these questions must be taught and spread within the entire US revolutionary movement. Red-baiting is alive, well, and worsening as the process of fascistization in the United States continues.

There is nothing wrong in and of itself about learning about the ideology of the proletariat in online spaces, however there is something wrong about not being humble and patient when first making the jump to revolutionary work, and falling back into the swamp of capitalist ideology as a result. In fact, in order for the movement to be truly guided by Maoism, it is vital that such unqualified amateurish forces discard their pretenses about Party reconstitution, and by submitting to a revolutionary mass organization, embrace the three withs (“live with, work with, and struggle alongside with the masses”) and began the long but heroic path towards forging themselves as real proletarian revolutionaries.