Issued by the Steering Committee of the Rural People's Party
The dogmatists of all stripes think in a linear fashion. Communists overcome this to think in a dialectic fashion. The dogmatists do not confine themselves to reactionary ideologies, though they are certainly a staple of such ideologies. This dogmatism creeps in amongst communists as well, both open revisionists who revise Marx to the point of destroying Marxism and “hard-line” communists who nonetheless traps themselves in their own dogmas.
How common it is for us to hear the anti-communist dogmatists opinions on communist historical figures! That Lenin was an opportunist in that he ignored Marx’s “law” that revolution can occur only in fully-industrialized capitalist states. That Mao was an opportunist for replacing “workers” with “peasants”. The thinking here is clearly linear… cause and effect (industrial capitalism yields socialism, workers yield revolution). What this ignores is the dialectical contradictions, relations, and interactions. Obviously the USA, which has fully industrialized, has not become socialistic. Obviously its workers have not waged revolutionary struggle. The dialectic concept is to analyze the intermediary between two factors, and what it yields, as much as it is simply make “laws” on two factors. These “laws” are the staples of the dogmatists. These are not laws at all but constrained and incorrect ideas… ones which would make as little sense as using feudal methods of analysis in a capitalist society which has little to no feudal aspects remaining in it. In all this we see that Lenin and Mao were indeed opportunists! In this respect we see Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as opportunists of the highest sort… opportunists for REVOLUTION! In a dialectic fashion Lenin transcended the petty bourgeois nationalisms which brought him to the conclusion that socialism could spring forth from a world war. In this fashion he saw Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist chain. In this fashion Mao saw the nature of the blank slate of the Chinese peasant classes… the susceptibility they had towards the necessary violent revolution that he needed to wage while the nearly non-existent workers of China had comparatively far lesser potential to wage revolution. When the leaders of the Korean revolution saw the revolutionary potential of a people’s army made of the masses who are independent of bourgeois countries, relations, and classes they saw opportunity for revolution.
It is this striving for revolutionary consciousness which we must embrace, this dialectic fashion which frees us from the linear thinking of dogmatism. This dogmatism will only confine us into rehashing the same arguments for decades at a time, something done constantly in communist circles. This dogmatism will make us as the “communists” who opposed Lenin on the eve of World War to support their own bourgeois governments on the basis of statism and false nationalisms… incapable of seeing where revolution lies and what revolution is. Revolution is neither a dinner party OR is it a process where we replace one linear reality with another. True revolution is a smashing of boundaries, physical and mental. To sustain communism in the world today requires us to break linear thinking, and analyze the situation as previous communists did, as the leaders of the Korean revolution did which ensured that the Korean revolution would survive to this today despite a horrible capitalist encirclement. In this context, as communists striving for revolution in the first-world, where is our “weakest link” in the capitalist chain? Where is our revolutionary potential? The Trotskyists would have us believe the same rural “working class” which votes the Republican party to power are revolutionary. Some Maoists would have us believe liberal intelligentsia in the belly of the state machinery of capitalism are revolutionary.
In analyzing the situation dialectically, we must reject either of these. The question is not so much “where is revolution” as it is analyzing what qualities create revolution and then analyzing the relationship between those qualities and the subjects we seek to wage revolution. Where are capitalist social relations the least ingrained? Where does the capitalist state mold humans the least? What sort of people are oppressed and directly exploited by the capitalist system? What sort of people do not reap the parasitic surplus value extracted from the Third World by US imperialism? Who has the vested interest in demolishing bourgeois superstructure? We ask all communists to ask these questions, and to draw the appropriate conclusions. We have asked ourselves these questions and have come to the conclusion that the answers clearly lie where the bourgeois superstructure has least manifested itself. Specifically, in rural locations… areas removed from the “government” of the bourgeois for the bourgeois. This, of course, does NOT mean rural people are revolutionary simply because they live around trees instead of skyscrapers. Such an idea would revert back to the linear thinking that we seek to obliterate from our minds. Instead, through studying the American situation, we see that what needs to be done is not an embracing of the bourgeois superstructure but rather a rejection of it. As comrades Kim Il Sung and Jim Jones have done in the past specifically, we must gauge where proletarian power resides and how it can be utilized. In doing so, we can draw untapped power from the reservoir that is the rural wasteland in the belly of the beast of US imperialism. Through this we can become a party that not only espouses communism but that lives and enacts real-world socialism.
(Photograph at top taken at CPC, March 2007)
The dogmatists of all stripes think in a linear fashion. Communists overcome this to think in a dialectic fashion. The dogmatists do not confine themselves to reactionary ideologies, though they are certainly a staple of such ideologies. This dogmatism creeps in amongst communists as well, both open revisionists who revise Marx to the point of destroying Marxism and “hard-line” communists who nonetheless traps themselves in their own dogmas.
How common it is for us to hear the anti-communist dogmatists opinions on communist historical figures! That Lenin was an opportunist in that he ignored Marx’s “law” that revolution can occur only in fully-industrialized capitalist states. That Mao was an opportunist for replacing “workers” with “peasants”. The thinking here is clearly linear… cause and effect (industrial capitalism yields socialism, workers yield revolution). What this ignores is the dialectical contradictions, relations, and interactions. Obviously the USA, which has fully industrialized, has not become socialistic. Obviously its workers have not waged revolutionary struggle. The dialectic concept is to analyze the intermediary between two factors, and what it yields, as much as it is simply make “laws” on two factors. These “laws” are the staples of the dogmatists. These are not laws at all but constrained and incorrect ideas… ones which would make as little sense as using feudal methods of analysis in a capitalist society which has little to no feudal aspects remaining in it. In all this we see that Lenin and Mao were indeed opportunists! In this respect we see Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as opportunists of the highest sort… opportunists for REVOLUTION! In a dialectic fashion Lenin transcended the petty bourgeois nationalisms which brought him to the conclusion that socialism could spring forth from a world war. In this fashion he saw Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist chain. In this fashion Mao saw the nature of the blank slate of the Chinese peasant classes… the susceptibility they had towards the necessary violent revolution that he needed to wage while the nearly non-existent workers of China had comparatively far lesser potential to wage revolution. When the leaders of the Korean revolution saw the revolutionary potential of a people’s army made of the masses who are independent of bourgeois countries, relations, and classes they saw opportunity for revolution.
It is this striving for revolutionary consciousness which we must embrace, this dialectic fashion which frees us from the linear thinking of dogmatism. This dogmatism will only confine us into rehashing the same arguments for decades at a time, something done constantly in communist circles. This dogmatism will make us as the “communists” who opposed Lenin on the eve of World War to support their own bourgeois governments on the basis of statism and false nationalisms… incapable of seeing where revolution lies and what revolution is. Revolution is neither a dinner party OR is it a process where we replace one linear reality with another. True revolution is a smashing of boundaries, physical and mental. To sustain communism in the world today requires us to break linear thinking, and analyze the situation as previous communists did, as the leaders of the Korean revolution did which ensured that the Korean revolution would survive to this today despite a horrible capitalist encirclement. In this context, as communists striving for revolution in the first-world, where is our “weakest link” in the capitalist chain? Where is our revolutionary potential? The Trotskyists would have us believe the same rural “working class” which votes the Republican party to power are revolutionary. Some Maoists would have us believe liberal intelligentsia in the belly of the state machinery of capitalism are revolutionary.
In analyzing the situation dialectically, we must reject either of these. The question is not so much “where is revolution” as it is analyzing what qualities create revolution and then analyzing the relationship between those qualities and the subjects we seek to wage revolution. Where are capitalist social relations the least ingrained? Where does the capitalist state mold humans the least? What sort of people are oppressed and directly exploited by the capitalist system? What sort of people do not reap the parasitic surplus value extracted from the Third World by US imperialism? Who has the vested interest in demolishing bourgeois superstructure? We ask all communists to ask these questions, and to draw the appropriate conclusions. We have asked ourselves these questions and have come to the conclusion that the answers clearly lie where the bourgeois superstructure has least manifested itself. Specifically, in rural locations… areas removed from the “government” of the bourgeois for the bourgeois. This, of course, does NOT mean rural people are revolutionary simply because they live around trees instead of skyscrapers. Such an idea would revert back to the linear thinking that we seek to obliterate from our minds. Instead, through studying the American situation, we see that what needs to be done is not an embracing of the bourgeois superstructure but rather a rejection of it. As comrades Kim Il Sung and Jim Jones have done in the past specifically, we must gauge where proletarian power resides and how it can be utilized. In doing so, we can draw untapped power from the reservoir that is the rural wasteland in the belly of the beast of US imperialism. Through this we can become a party that not only espouses communism but that lives and enacts real-world socialism.
(Photograph at top taken at CPC, March 2007)
