Recently, The Partisan has received questions from many readers regarding a new push by some in the revolutionary movement in the US—in particular, the publication The Worker that “the principal task of revolutionaries in the US” is to achieve “Maoist unity” or to “unite under Maoism.” To provide our perspective on this push, we first pose the obvious question: what is “Maoist unity,” and with whom and by whom is it forged? And which slogans, like “unite under Maoism” are appropriate at which levels of revolutionary work?
To begin exploring what “Maoist unity” would look like in practice, The Partisan asks its readers, is it possible to have unity with opportunists, even if they refer to themselves as Maoists? When considering this question, it becomes clear that this call is not as straightforward as it initially appears. We at The Partisan study and propagate Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and uphold it as the ideology of the proletariat. In particular, we uphold the definition of Maoism put forward by Chairman Gonzalo and the Communist Party of Peru. We refer to documents such as Fundamental Documents, Report: On Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and the Political Declaration and Principles of the International Communist League as our ideological guideposts in defining Maoism in the modern era. And yet, we oppose unity with opportunists (even if they refer to themselves as Maoists) on the basis of our understanding of Maoism, not in spite of it.
Furthermore, to us the question of Maoist unity is not just a question of words, but also of deeds. A question of whether or not one’s Maoism is defined by proclamation, or by their concrete positions, actions, and leadership taken during the period of concrete class struggles; or whether or not it makes sense to unite open mass organizations and circles under Maoism in an open and online process. These are the sorts of questions that real revolutionaries should be asking themselves as they stem from real problems, like what the limits and implications of this slogan are, and how it should be used in the actual movement. Should we be uniting Discord servers under Maoism? Is someone united under Maoism just by being friendly with or recognizing the leadership of The Worker, or is Maoist unity something deeper, something which cannot and should not be imposed via online polemics, public forums, and Signal messages?
The answer, according to Maoism itself, is that unity and politics are proven in practice. Only with a correct line and its implementation will the masses come, will the vanguard quality of a true Maoist formation be achieved. There are many opportunists and revisionists in the history of the International Communist Movement who have trafficked under the name of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism, waving the red flag to oppose the red flag. For example, to go back to our “friends” at The Worker, what is their practice? From what we can tell, they are functionally social democrats. Their line on labor seem to be on par with or even to the right of the DSA, in their calls and analysis tailing the labor misleaders in the US even more than Jacobin, in violation of their own stated “adherence” to anti-electoralism and anti-reformism. Take away the sloganeering and groups like these become practically identical to your local Trotskyite sect; communist papers and capitalist practice. As our Turkish comrades say, it doesn’t matter how many times you say the word cake, it doesn’t make your mouth sweet.
Two-line struggle is not a muddled process. It must be sharp, clear, and precise, based on concrete positions taken in class struggle. It is not a question of “Maoist unity” divorced from actual positions and practice in actual class struggles and conditions in a given country. Comrades who use “unite under Maoism” in this way inherit a tradition of opportunism starting with Bernstein and co., embracing those who hide actual, life-and-death differences in question of revolution under a “kumbaya” Maoism. We don’t need another tired run of left-refoundationism but now under the name of Maoism.
To forge unity in this way is stereotypical postmodernism as it is entirely based on self-affirmation. Speaking of self-affirmation, The Worker has been keen to defend the opportunist leadership of a prior period of the US revolutionary movement represented by failed publications such as Struggle Sessions, Tribune of the People, and Incendiary News. In defending these publications and their leaders, let’s look at what positions our friends put forward. Struggle Sessions wrote that non-binary people are a product of “postmodern” “degeneration.” Tribune of the People wrote our comrades in the Communist Party of the Philippines are not Maoist Communists but a “Mao Zedong Thought-influenced organization.”
A line our friends continue from these opportunists in private is that they reject the just and correct Comintern resolutions of 1928 and 1930 outlining the existence of a Black nation in the US South, instead limiting the national struggle to a question of racial “integration” and “Black equality.” This is a dubious honor that our friends hold together with arch-revisionists such as Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, and the modern day “CPUSA”. Of course, while they are not smart enough to come to a correct position on the national question, they are smart enough to largely hide this line from the masses as best they can, who as have shed their very blood in the struggle for national liberation and will confront these opportunists with righteous anger. The closest they come to saying this in a public text is the line of attack that in the transition from the prior existence of a Black Nation until now “there can be progressive assimilation into one white and black nation. This is yet another point which will make the postmodernism-inclined squirm in their armchairs.” Again these positions are the exact same taken by Foster and Browder in the 40s and 50s and the modern false “CPUSA” meant to attack the revolutionary national position the CP briefly upheld in the 1930s. If The Worker no longer upholds these positions, they can criticize them and affirm revolutionary positions. So far they have failed to.
We are not dogmatists, and understand that in practice and the course of struggle our positions will be shown to be either correct or incorrect. However given that the Black/New Afrikan national struggle reached its highest peak of armed struggle in the 1970s, not the 1930s, and no Communist formation has lead significant struggles in the Black Belt since the 1980s, it should raise eyebrows that on the basis of nothing The Worker aligns themselves with the worst revisionists and traitors of our movement on this and other questions.
It was Lenin who said, “unity with opportunism means unity between the proletariat and its national bourgeoisie, i.e., submission to the latter, a split in the international revolutionary working class.” That’s not just because of differences of position, but because in principle and practice, opportunists have always had a demoralizing, wrecking effect on the revolutionary movement, acting in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
As an example of this, under the banner of this new fad slogan, police tactics have suddenly become the norm of a section of the revolutionary movement in the US. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could hope for no better allies than these friends. Why need to surveil revolutionaries, when these “revolutionaries” expose themselves by publicly outlining a process of Maoist unity in the open, explicitly tying their very public unity process in legal online publications to “the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the USA as a militarized Maoist Party,” throwing operational security to the wind by publicly associating their open organizations with lines and processes that are actively the subject of immense repression, during a period of intensifying State intervention no less. We at The Partisan understand the principle of clandestinity is at the heart of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and that to unite under Maoism in any meaningful way must be a clandestine process, uniting under the leadership and line of a clandestine Maoist organization. Attempts to reveal this process, to bring it not just into the open, but onto the enemy’s own terrain online, do the work of the State for them.
For all their hemming and hawing about public criticisms of their public documents, written under public pen names, these supposed “enemies” of liquidationism have surprisingly found the tactics of liquidationism quite convenient, revealing private exchanges, meetings, and organizational affiliations—such as those of New York Revolutionary Youth—mixed with lies, thus working hand in hand with the right-liquidationists. Those who do police work and propagate the tactics of the enemy stand in the ranks of the enemy. In their own words, for lack of a clean principled weapon, they snatch at a dirty one.
While these opportunists have shown there’s no limit to how far they will sink in pursuit of their factionalist goals, all comrades nationally who liberally traffic in unprincipled peace with these and other opportunists should self-reflect and self-criticize on the part they play in allowing opportunism to fester within the ranks of our movement, weakening and splitting it. This is not the path to reconstitution, this is the path to liquidation.
Our friends don’t even seem to grasp the implication of their own slogan. They give criteria that are simply the following “points of demarcation” issued by the International Communist League in their call for Maoist unity among international Maoist Communist Parties: “1. acknowledging or not acknowledging Maoism as the third, new and higher stage of Marxism and the necessity to combat revisionism and all opportunism; 2. acknowledging or not acknowledging the omnipotence of revolutionary violence in order to make revolution; 3. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity to demolish the old state apparatus and replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the dictatorship of the proletariat; 4. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity of the revolutionary party of the proletariat; 5. acknowledging or not acknowledging the necessity of proletarian internationalism, and finally; 6. acknowledging or not acknowledging the specific type of revolution applicable to imperialist countries such as the US as the socialist revolution.”
What our friends fail to recognize, is that if they insist on applying this slogan like a shotgun onto everyone in the US revolutionary movement, even out-and-out revisionists like the Maoist Communist Union will fall within such a unity. If the criteria is simple verbal or written “acknowledgment” of those 6 things, the Maoist Communist Union recognizes all of them, in words if not deeds. Do our friends believe in an immediate possible unity with this camp, and that they do not constitute opportunism or revisionism? Similarly, what about the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries? What is the line our friends draw in how these “acknowledgments” are judged in practice?
While we patiently await their response, for anyone paying attention the answer should be plain: it is whoever is willing to acknowledge their factionalist leadership. If tomorrow the MCU starts praising The Worker, their peddling of revisionism and their actual reformism and opportunism among the masses will be instantly forgiven. Again and again, our friends embrace the worst traditions of international revisionism, which great leaders like comrade Stalin, Chairman Mao and Chairman Gonzalo struggled tirelessly to eradicate. Do our friends uphold these leaders, or is this all simply a show? Before we can unite, we must first demarcate, and if this unity involves demarcation on questions of party reconstitution it must be mainly closed by necessity and principle.
Instead of justifying or explaining these positions, our friends appeal to the authority of international comrades in order to explain away the obvious contradictions within their own opportunism, complaining that revolutionaries “refuse to do” the “things” they interpret international documents as telling revolutionaries to do, i.e. uniting with them specifically. This is a revisionist argument. This is the line of “father Party, son Party” that Maoism stands as a pillar against. In our last article, we quoted Chairman Gonzalo in his “Interview of the Century,” in which he says (and we quote at length):
“… in the International Communist Movement it became the habit to obey commands. Khrushchev was a champion at issuing commands, as is Gorbachev today, or that sinister character Deng. Independence, because each Communist Party must decide for itself since it is responsible for its own revolution, not in order to separate it from the world revolution, but precisely in order to serve it. This allows us to make our own decisions, to decide for ourselves. Chairman Mao said it like this: we were given a lot of advice, some good, some bad. We accepted the good and rejected the bad. But if we had accepted some erroneous principle, the responsibility would not have belonged to those who gave the advice, but to us. Why? Because we make our own decisions. That comes with independence, and it leads to self-sufficiency, to self-reliance.
Does this mean that we don’t recognize proletarian internationalism? No, on the contrary, we are fervent and consistent practitioners of proletarian internationalism. And we are confident that we have the support of the international proletariat, the oppressed nations, the peoples of the world, the parties or organizations that remain loyal to Marxism whatever their degree of development, and we recognize that the first thing that they give us, their primary support, is their own struggle. The propaganda or celebrations that they carry out are a form of support that is creating favorable public opinion and this is an expression of proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism also underlies the advice they give us and the opinions they express. But, I insist, we are the ones who must decide whether we accept these or not. If they are correct, we welcome them, obviously, because between Parties we have the obligation to help each other, especially in such difficult and complex times.”
Are our friends willing to acknowledge their revision of Chairman Gonzalo’s positions and principles on self-reliance, autonomy, independence and proletarian internationalism? Do they think the conditions in the US are so unique, that this wisdom does not apply in our national conditions, that revolutionaries of a given country cannot “make [their] own decisions”?
All comrades should closely consider advice and guidance from international comrades of any Party. This doesn’t mean we cast aside all critical thought and our own judgments based on the analysis, practice, lines and concrete conditions of our context. Any real proletarian internationalist knows that our first duty is making revolution in our own country, and that means eradicating opportunism within our movement, and isolating those who continue to peddle the dirty wares of the bourgeoisie. The left does not merge itself with the right, it imposes itself on the right. This is basic, friends. How do you expect to “unite under Maoism,” if you do not understand its ABCs?
Every great theorist has said time and time again there’s no room for unity with opportunists in the revolutionary movement. There is room for their rectification and transformation, but only on the condition of their submitting to revolutionary organization and leadership. The Partisan works with dozens of organizations and areas on the basis of shared revolutionary principles, program, and practice, and is proud to champion that non-sectarian criteria. But we will never call for nor encourage that opportunists, misleaders and revisionists be “united under” in our movement for the sake of personal friendship, middle-class diplomacy, or a sense of short-term achievement that leads to long-term retreat. Unity under Maoism in the United States will be achieved, and the forces of World Proletarian Revolution will win in our country. Those are historical inevitabilities, and the processes of unity, reconstitution, and revolution that encompass them will be lead clandestinely and correctly, taking no short cuts and ceding no ground to opportunism and the class enemy at any point.
