Some comrades complain that if the basic method of organisation of the Party is democratic centralism, then why mass democratic method? “Don’t you think it unnecessarily creates contradictions in the Party?” By using mass democratic method inside and outside the Party, you are merely causing disruption and putting off those individuals who can be, otherwise, won over to the side of the Party, they say.
The question of mass democratic method is very much tied up with one’s outlook. Which class does an individual serve? It has been the experience of the Party for several years, that invariably those who wanted to split and divide the Party attacked the mass democratic method of handling contradictions at various levels of the Party. For example, the “Left”-sloganeering front of Khrushchovite revisionism hated it and bitterly opposed it, reducing themselves to petty gossip-mongers and experts in gutter bourgeois politics. Why did they hate it? They despised mass democratic method because through this method we won’t permit their Khrushchovite political and ideological line to become the dominant line of the Party. Whenever they attempted to use organisation committees at their level, they were resolutely opposed. For example, the leader of this front came to attend a meeting of the Party in March 1971, commemorating the Eighth Anniversary of the Founding of the Internationalists. He peddled his Khrushchovite ideological line there and suggested that we should deny the historical experience of the internationalists. He was opposed there and called upon to explain himself, why he was pursuing such anti-Marxist-Leninist theories. When he found that he couldn’t justify his idealism in front of the membership, he started propaganda against the mass democratic method in a secret way. He left a hint here and an innuendo there. He wouldn’t stand up and present his ideas like a straight-forward revolutionary, instead, he began crawling and searching for allies in the gutter. He dished out his revisionist theories: that form is not important, it is not in dialectical relationship to content and that under socialism, the contradiction between form and content simply goes away, and so on and so forth. This revisionist cur knew quite well what Comrade Lenin had said long ago: “15) the struggle of the content with form and conversely. The throwing off of the form, the transformation of the content.” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 222, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1963) He was trying his best to throw off the form in order to introduce his revisionist content. The only way he could throw off the form was to conspire and intrigue, launch whisper campaigns, fill the entire Party circles associated with him with these rumours, and cause maximum confusion. This is what he did. After several months of conspiracy and intrigue, and gathering around himself the excreta thrown out by the Party, he mustered some “courage” and formed his own secret, underground group (which to date, he has not yet publicly announced). From this experience as well as the inner-Party struggles launched on several other occasions, it is quite normal that revisionist elements would attack the form, “the way we organise”, etc.
The leader of this front has been a past-master of these revisionist tricks. He had been arguing for months in 1971, that form was not decisive and was not important while throughout this period and in 1972, the only criticism we have received of our Party from these worthies has been of “form” and not of content and that, also, in the form of gossip and slanders. One of his so-called criticisms was typical anti-communist slander: “One day, he (referring to Comrade Bains) treated me like a a slave.” What kind of criticism of content is this? Is it not the same kind of criticism which every revisionist and opportunist gives against all levels of leadership from the lowest secretary to great revolutionary leaders like comrades Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao? Did Mr. Khrushchov not spread such slanders against Comrade Stalin?
The basic motivation behind using mass democratic method in handling contradictions amongst the masses is to arm our comrades against the revisionist and opportunist splitters and disrupters, inculcate the minds of the comrades with revolutionary principles and encourage them to dare to speak their minds and oppose revisionism and opportunism. That is the only motive and nothing else. Without mass democratic method, we will have no supervision of each individual member by other individual members of his unit or branch and will have the rise of personal fiefdoms and degeneration of the Party. Supervision of each individual by the members is very important in building unity and solidarity and fighting the class enemies.
Under the conditions we have, in Canada, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and when this dictatorship is armed, while the proletarians, people and the Party are disarmed, then not to guard against alien class elements and build a method by which these elements can be wiped out is not to be serious about organising revolution. During the Regina Conference, we waged a vigorous class struggle against bourgeois individualism. The form which this class struggle, in the main took, was that a section of the Conference simply wouldn’t participate in collective discussions to arrive at correct political and ideological line. At every step, these elements were silent or they would ask some question and stop there or simply divert the discussion to side-line bourgeois intellectualism. What should we do? The conference Committee pondered over this matter and reached the conclusion that this attitude of theirs reflected what they had been doing before they came into the Conference. On investigation, we found that, in the main, all those who did not participate in discussion to deal with the questions concerning revolution, were not involved in practical work in their own areas and that there, also they have been paralysing the local activities through this attitude. So the Conference Committee decided to mobilise everyone against them and destroy their lines as vigorously as possible and not cooperate with them in their local areas. After the Conference, when decisions were made, it was the universal experience of the local branches of the Party that a section resolutely began implementing the decisions while the others converted these into a matter of definition and discussion and still others declared that it is impossible to put these decisions into practice. Since the Regina Conference, all the local groups and committees have experienced the same class struggle which is: 1. Non-participation in developing the line, and 2. Non-participation in executing the line. It is the universal experience of the Party that only through several mass democracy meetings and the waging of careful, systematic and persistent class struggle against this line that we get the local groups m6ving and the health of the organisation developing. Without mass democracy inside the locals, the organisation simply stagnates.
Whether or not to use the method of mass democracy in handling contradictions amongst the Party members at various levels is not a question of form but one of content. In order to maintain the proletarian revolutionary spirit and the correct Marxist-Leninist political line, it is most important to use mass democratic method in handling contradictions at various levels of the Party. It has been our experience that mass democracy is an essential tool in building the Party on the democratic centralist basis. Apart from revisionists and opportunists hating it, the most scared are the police agents and collaborators. They despise being asked to explain themselves and to justify their actions in full view of their particular membership.
Mass democratic method is a tool in the hands of the genuine Marxist-Leninists to advance the proletarian revolutionary politics inside the Party and amongst the masses.