Marx stated that religion acted as the opium of the people. What is the context for this statement? By the above we can see religion as an expression of pain, correlating with the usage of opium for the treatment of pain which was common when Marx wrote this. In that sense we can see religion as the idealistic escape for the people, a people who are stripped of their dignity and power in this world and as such are promised dignity and power in the next world in exchange for servitude. It is the Marxist position that if you remove the horrific conditions which necessitate such a need for an escape such as religion, you will obviate the conditions which foment reactionary religious ideals in the first place. In other words, you attack capitalism (and therefore the “real suffering”) and the expression of that suffering (the opium) will be unnecessary.
Of course there is another meaning for an opiate of the masses. That would be the nature of a drug capable of altering consciousness, of taking the user to another mental state. In this sense all idealisms, whether they be religious or utopian-Trotskyist currents common in FW communist circles, are indicative of such a use of opium.
The political superstructure is everywhere and is everything. When someone pays for sex with money, it is called prostitution. When the capitalist superstructure necessitates spending money on a date with the expectation of sexual favors, it is called date etiquette. Both are a side consequence of the commoditization of human interaction, in this case between a man and woman (whose sexuality is being commoditized). When a socialist society seeks to create music which reinforces a proletarian spirit, it is called propaganda. When a capitalist society churns out countless acts which emphasize the same individualist forms of freedom, reduce all artforms to a commodity, and even reduce musicality to a set number of musical modes and patterns… it is called pop-culture. This, too, is a part of the political (bourgeois) superstructure. When the history in school is the history as taught through the eyes of oppressors… this too is political. When the nature of education is to churn out human capital (in other words, preparing worker bees for their careers) for bourgeois society this too is political. The way we speak to one another, the way labor is valued, the values society propagates… all these are political. Most importantly, without exception, every single one of these qualities is bourgeois (in the first-world). The bourgeois dictatorship, which has existed and solidified itself well over a century in the first-world is more totalitarian than any socialist system today. Is it any wonder that in a world of bourgeois art, bourgeois social relations, bourgeois means of production, and bourgeois culture that more than ninety-nine percent of the voting electorate favor liberal-democratic politics? Is this freedom? Or is this the natural result of the dog which is trained to sit then sitting and chalking that up to “free will”? More importantly… what do first-world communists who get less than 1% of 1% of the vote expect to do under these conditions? Will a communist candidate be elected from within a bourgeois superstructure in the 2008 elections? The Trotskyists of course would assert such a position… not realizing that to apply liberalist/pluralist standards towards non-liberalist/communist ends is absurd. You can’t defeat the bourgeois by playing by bourgeois standards.
Of course there is enough criticism to be labeled at us Maoists as well. Even self-described Maoists, while technically well-read on Maoist abstracts, cannot divorce themselves from the bourgeois reality they are submerged in. Their interests in historic Maoism may even be strong… but living in a bourgeois world with bourgeois superstructure around them may blind them to a Maoist reality in practice. This bourgeois superstructure is the true opium… one so strong and so totalitarian that the drug-induced haze that has lasted much longer than we have lived or that our parents have lived or their parents have lived is not easily escaped by any means. Of course this dynamic was not always present, and it took time for the capitalist dynamic to totally supplant the feudal dynamic which came before it. So too must this take place with a socialist dynamic. This was the understanding of the Maoist concept of Cultural Revolution… that socialism had to materialize in reality and not just words… in totality and not just government. To do otherwise would be like assuming that to remove armor from knights would be enough to make the transition from feudalism to capitalism. If the masses are socialist by their very nature the society can solidify a socialist reality. After all, leaders perish and governments wither. The superstructure is far more permanent. This, too, was an impetus behind the Cultural Revolution… to insure that even with the materialization of a bourgeois within the party that socialism will be strong enough to transcend the frailties of the temporary political infrastructure which governs the people. Comrade Pol Pot knew this lesson well when the Super Great Leap Forward was instituted. So did Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il when the ambitious project to imbue all of society with the Juche idea was undertaken.
This lesson is crucial to insuring that socialism does not rest merely on the upper echelons of government. After all, the frailties of the Soviet Union gave way to the revisionism of Khrushchev, who sought to betray and repudiate the vision of socialism under the guise of tearing Stalin apart on a personal level, and who sought to transform the Soviet Union towards capitalism and turn it into an imperialist rivalry to the United States rather than a socialist defender against the United States imperialists. The same can be seen in socialist Albania, where Alia dismantled the socialist state in favor of open revisionism. In both Russia and Albania full-fledged capitalism was later instituted… under Yeltsin and Berisha. It is important to remember BOTH of these men were members of the Communist Party! Kim Jong Il pointed out a great truth in asserting that socialistic loyalty shows itself not in times of ease but in times of stress, and he understood that trust should be placed in the remolded, revolutionized masses rather than an entrenched nomenklatura which can house hidden bourgeoisie at any given moment.
Nowhere were these aforementioned lessons of a necessary socialist dynamic more true than with the Peoples’ Temple in the United States, the most advanced communist vanguard in the first-world. Here we have an example of a communist group within the most hegemonic, powerful imperialist bourgeois aggressor on the planet… the USA. Under the condition of living in such a nation, scientifically and pragmatically speaking we as communists must judge the proper avenue. Is it to foment intelligentsia-based discussions on abstract Marxist humanism from a campus university? Is it to commoditize Che Guevara in order to create an individualist badge of group membership for those alienated from the system who nonetheless operate entirely from within that same system? Is it to strive to make sure the communist party overtakes the Republicans and Democrats in upcoming elections? In reality all of these make the critical error of criticism of the bourgeois dictatorship while being submerged in a bourgeois superstructure. The Marxist college professor is busy churning out degrees for students to be incorporated into the bourgeois world of commoditization. The alienated suburban youth individualist who wears the Guevara t-shirt and who seeks rebellion is living in the belly of the very culture and society they claim to oppose. The FW communists, for all their talk about the oppressed, are on average the least likely people to encounter the oppressed. The oppressed on the other hand are the most likely to embrace the “vale of tears” and the opium to escape the conditions of being oppressed, chewed up, and spit out as the pits of a bourgeois superstructure. The Peoples’ Temple, again, realized this. The Peoples’ Temple is revolutionary in that it correctly analyzed all these conditions. The conditions for where truly revolutionary potential in American society resides. The conditions for nurturing that revolutionary potential in a socialistic sense. The conditions for surviving in a hegemonic world in the belly of the beast of world imperialism. The Peoples’ Temple did all of this. As a self-criticism towards the general communist movement, we can see just how RARE this is in today's communist movement.
The conditions for where the revolutionary potential lies is dependent on circumstance. Marx saw the industrial proletariat as the oppressed who could throw off the shackles of bourgeois dictatorship. Lenin took the current conditions into account when he correctly analyzed that the World War was an opportunity for the proletariat and that the weakest link in the capitalist chain (Imperial Russia) was ripe for revolution. The orthodox Marxists,
dogmatic in their ways, accused Lenin of heresy... but Lenin was correct. Mao correctly surmised that the peasants, who were political blank slates, were the most appropriate vehicles for revolution in mid-20th century China. Despite the fact the industrial proletariat were numerically insignificant in China, dogmatists then accused Mao of heresy. Mao was correct, and the rural peasantry of China eventually encircled the anti-communist forces and created a momentous socialist revolution. Yet again we must now analyze the conditions of America. Conditions of hegemonic imperialism, bourgeois totalitarian superstructure, geopolitical domination, and a massive labor aristocracy which reaps benefit from the exploitation of the third-world. As with Lenin and Mao before him, Jim Jones correctly surmised that the revolutionary people would be of the most oppressed in this
superstructure… the dispossessed, the poor, those of the Black Nation (especially in the South), those most removed from the bourgeois superstructure. These lessons were correctly developed by the Black Panthers (under Maoist leaders such as Huey Newton) to an extent as well. Again, we can imagine the dogmatists coming to criticize. “What about the Yale intelligentsia? What about the GM employee? These are just lumpen!” Again the dogmatists will not analyze conditions, but rather take preconceived notions and apply them across the board. This is incompatible with Marxist science. This will lead to both dogmatism and revisionism.
Jim Jones not only reached out to the oppressed, and not only did he have real-world experience which is a thousand times more valuable than abstract intelligentsia posturing… but he knew the conditions under which he was operating. He knew the opiates he was fighting… both the bourgeois superstructure opiates flowing through American veins and the religious illusions which accompany them. He used knowledge of both to cultivate revolutionary consciousness. The Peoples’ Temple was a genuine vanguard of the revolutionary potential. The Peoples’ Temple correct analyzed the condition for nurturing this revolutionary consciousness. The conditions under which one was supplanting bourgeois social relations with socialistic social relations, and replacing the bourgeois family with a socialist family, and replacing individualist tendencies with collectivist tendencies. This was done not only on a theoretical but a practical level… something sorely missing as a qualification of the vast majority of first-world communists (and this includes first-world Maoists). This was materialized as reality by the time of Guyana. Which of course brings us to the last of three conditions… not only the conditions of where revolutionary potential lies and how to cultivate it but under what conditions it is being done. The answer to this of course was that Jones was operating against US imperialism, and that only by creating independent institutions of, for, and by the oppressed could the oppressed escape oppression by the oppressors. The alternative is to hope for a communist president via the ballot box. The alternative is to deny the reality of the objective conditions of American society. The alternative is to embrace dogmatism regarding the dynamic mechanics of revolution. There are only two clear choices when it comes to communism in today’s condition… to reinforce the opiates or to break free of them. The RPP stands with the momentous turn regarding the American vanguard when the Peoples’ Temple boldly strived to smash the opiate influence once and for all. The RPP stands for a future of an equally totalitarian socialist superstructure... where socialism is embraced in every facet of life, and where it is sustainable to a point where no revisionism, dogmatism, or imperialism can touch the beloved peoples' socialism.
Rural People's Party
(Marxist-Leninist-Maoist)
