The difference is between an orientation which stresses learning from the working class and an orientation which stresses self-cultivation of the petit-bourgeoisie (Some brief provocative notes).
Our main current political task is to convince agitators of the need and usefulness of the WV to advance their own specific struggles and to keep informed through honest, systematic, popularly written reports with the work of other agitators. The development of higher levels of unity between movements primarily depends on the growth of those movements themselves.
The form of the newspaper must be consistent with the political objectives.
We did not argue that the main audience of the paper should be viewed as ’agitators’. Rather, it is our view that agitators are the key link with the main audience of the paper: working people. We intend the paper to be a mass paper.
The connecting of struggles, issues by means of an editorial statement always must be based on investigations which demonstrate that the connection is practical one whose realization will be promoted in the specific circumstances by a theoretical clarification. (Some responses...).
Despite all our collective efforts, it is quite clear to the vast majority of people who read the newspaper that there’s a “pig in the poke” – and that is communism. We have actually discussed in collective meetings the games that collective members can play to cover up this “fact” when questioned about it. But let’s face it, the secret is out.
This “secret message” is a heavy cross to bear for proponents of the “mass struggle” line. At the present stage, in order to be true to its principles (increasing “class consciousness” through anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle), the WV, of necessity, develops relatively sophisticated and in-depth politics and reportage in its pages. The material is quite dense, calling for a fair degree of concentration and commitment from its readers. But the problem with the material is that it fails to state what end we are calling for heightened class consciousness, or how that end might be reached.
This problem elicits two types of response from readers which, despite their seemingly contradictory nature, often can be heard at the same time from the same person. The first is, why does the Western Voice describe everything as being so awful, difficult and grey – can’t it have material which lightens the load a bit, helping the reader feel good occasionally? ? ? Complementing this complaint is the argument that the paper spends all its time talking about specific struggles, that it fails to draw conclusions or analysis in its pages.
Given the continuing decline of our sales and relative stagnation of subscriptions, it is quite clear that promotional campaigns will not be enough to put the paper on a solid footing. How long can we continue to blame this decline on lack of commitment in our readers? ? ? If the Western Voice is to be a mass paper, how come its sales have not hit rock bottom yet, two years after the old Grape days???
The view is widely held around the paper, that a Marxist-Leninist political line would isolate the Voice even more than it is right now. A Marxist-Leninist newspaper could not be a mass newspaper, it is argued. All it could do is “consolidate communists” which would take us away from the priority of “building mass movements”.
While on the surface this argument appears opposed to high-handed posturing and manipulations of mass movements by so-called “self-defined leftists” (“There is no need to argue the importance of leadership, but it must be leadership that is rooted in struggle, not imposed from the outside according to a predetermined program.”), it is in fact the very opposite. There is a genuine communist movement emerging in this country, consisting of many serious, hard working, dedicated people. In British Columbia growing numbers are seeking forms of political organization which would make their work more effective, including study groups, caucuses within unions, research groups, etc. The Western Voice has long been known for its sectarian snobbishness towards these groupings, as is typified by X/Y’s question: “Who specifically are these other communists? How many are they? Why have we not been working with them and why have they not been working with us before now?”
What has been the most telling expression of the so-called “united front” line towards this communist movement? Last spring’s decision to refuse it access to our debates on the future politics of the sole non-revisionist working class newspaper in English Canada! This decision is symptomatic of the opportunist vanguardism of the “mass struggle” line. The Western Voice is its own arbiter, its political “allies” must remain confused and at best partially involved in the ongoing struggle over its political future. Does the Western Voice see itself as the instrument of a political movement, or do we continue to sacrifice every real or potential political gain at the altar of spontaneity?
While the “mass struggle” line claims interest in “building networks between militant and/or politically conscious workers”, it proposes no political basis for these “networks”. In fact, it is admitted that “the connecting of struggles” will “always” be “practical”, “promoted in the specific circumstances by a theoretical clarification”. The result of such forms of unity is that they dissolve at the end of the battle, perhaps to be picked up at a later date. This is the logical consequence of an ideology of petit-bourgeois intellecutals “serving” the mass movements as mendicants along the picket lines, almost grateful if someone will take the WV for free.
The “networks” that arise from such a formulation are similarly unstable. They are activated when we need to write a story or for some specific, limited project (e.g. Vietnam event). The “agitators” have no ongoing means to establish contact with each other, and no mechanism for deepening their understanding of the “secret message” underlying “class struggle”. Those who wish to struggle as communists will look elsewhere for theoretical analysis, political organization and means of systematizing and broadening their contacts with advanced elements. Those who are not communists will only “use” the paper and its facilities when it serves their needs in “specific circumstances”. Since neither the paper nor the network committees are leading them to deepen their politics in a long-range sense, why should it be otherwise?
The net result is that the Western Voice develops individualized, privileged contacts with the members of its networks and liquidates the task of building the political movement. It is the “mass struggle” line which in fact most profoundly implies leadership “imposed from the outside according to a predetermined program”.
Underlying the “mass struggle” ideology, is the view that workers are not interested in Marxism-Leninism, and that a Marxist-Leninist newspaper would go down to a whimpering defeat. “The difference is between a newspaper which stresses subjective consciousness of workers and one which stresses objective forces and contradictions.” Rank and filers are not interested in a newspaper which leads them to deeper understanding of reality and how it can be changed, except for the immediate, “subjective” issues. They may even be too stupid to understand such things, and too thickheaded to do anything about them. Theory (propaganda) is reserved for petit-bourgeois intellectuals, while workers are condemned to agitation around the day-to-day struggle. “The difference is between an orientation which stresses learning from the working class and an orientation which stresses self-cultivation of the petit-bourgeoisie.” Imagine! To prove that we’re not petit-bourgeois self-cultivators we are to examine the workers with a magnifying glass!
One response to this theoretical confusion within the collective has been a call for even further loosening up of the explicit theoretical commitments of the newspaper. It is argued that the paper should be more fun to read, have more variety, be less “dogmatic” in its criticism. While such a newspaper might in fact prove to be a gala sales success, it would do little to advance the struggle for proletarian revolution, instead adding to the general theoretical confusion of the various movements.
Our response to the “mass struggle” line on this question is, evidently, quite different. While we don't hold up a rosy picture for immediate sales success, we do argue that a newspaper which begins to provide useful theoretical tools for advanced workers can only grow over time. A Marxist-Leninist newspaper need not be dull, although certain articles will definitely be quite demanding. The commitment of the readers will be based on political unity, rather than short term utility. Advanced workers will find that it serves them, not only in confronting immediate problems, but also in dealing with the larger issues they must constantly confront. They will regularly distribute such a newspaper among their fellow workers.
We must be prepared to engage in ideological struggle, not (for example) to expose the failure of social democracy to live up to its promises, but to show how workers’ interests can only be served by abolition of the class system on which social democracy is based. We must further recognize and promote the means for accomplishing this goal, the first step of which is formation of the roletarian party.
Mao Tse-tung, following Lenin and Stalin, describes the role of advanced workers in leading the revolutionary struggle:
Experience in the 1942 rectification movement also proves it is essential for the success of the rectification that a leading group should be formed in each unit in the course of the movement, made up of a small number of activists and – with the heads of the given unit as its nucleus, and that this leading group should link itself closely with the masses taking part in the movement. However active the leading group may be, its activity will amount to fruitless effort by a handful of people unless combined with the activity of the masses. On the other hand, if the masses alone are active, without a strong leading group to organize their activity properly, such activity cannot be sustained for long, or carried forward in the right direction, or raised to a high level. The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders therefore must be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements. “Some Questions concerning methods of leadership” in Selected Readings, Peking, 1969, 288-289.
Mao refers to Stalin’s statement on the crucial role of advanced workers in the building of the proletarian party. Stalin advised the German party in 1925 that it “must be able to recruit for its main leading group the best elements of the advanced fighters who are sufficiently devoted to the cause to be the genuine spokesmen of the aspirations of the revolutionary proletariat, and who are sufficiently experienced to become real leaders of the proletarian revolution, capable of applying the tactics and strategy of Leninism. ” (“The Prospects of the Communist Party Of Germany and the question of Bolshevisation”, in J. Stalin, Works, Moscow, 1954, 39).
The only viable, effective strategy for a Western Voice which supports the real interests of the proletariat is to repudiate the strategy of merely ’serving’ the ’progressive elements’ in struggles. We must replace this with a strategy of winning backward elements to a militant position, middle (militant) elements to an advanced (pro-socialist) position, and advanced elements to Marxism-Leninism. Who are the advanced elements, how many are they, how are they to be organized, and on the basis of what programme – these are urgent, “burning” questions which are central not only for the benefit of the Western Voice’s distribution problems, but for the construction of a strong party which will be capable of leading the struggle for working class power. Some (a few) advanced elements are already known to us or to comrades in the Marxist:Leninist movement. The question of distribution is not simply how to get the Voice to these people so that they can “use” it, but how to integrate the Voice as an instrument of propaganda and agitation into the concrete organizational and programmatic work of party-building.
For not only are political intellectuals seeking new forms of struggle, so are “ordinary” workers. Rank and file caucuses in several unions, committees formed to break away from American unions wildcat strikes and strikes against the desires of the union leadership – all these are evidence of growing militance and frustration with the traditional limits of business unionism. The ever growing and continuous struggles of native people and other national minorities need no elaboration here. The question is, how can this rising consciousness be transformed qualitatively into a political movement?
Lenin refers to Marx on this question in a biographical sketch published in 1914 (in Against Revisionism, Moscow, 1959, p. 217):
At each stage of development, at each moment, proletarian tactics must take account of this objectively inevitable dialectic of human history. It must, on the one hand, utilize periods of political stagnation, or of sluggish, so-called ’peaceful’ development in order to raise the class consciousness, strength and fighting capacity of the advanced class. On the other hand, it must direct all this work towards the final aim' of the movement of this class, create in it the practical ability to perform great tasks in the great days in which ’twenty years are concentrated’.
MaoTse-tung argues that in a period such as ours, when social democratic and other reactionary ideologies run rampant in the proletarian movement, leading to confusion and error, theoretical struggle must be the primary objective (“On Contradiction”, Selected Readings, p. 116):
When it is impossible for the productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production, then the change in relations of production plays the principal and decisive role. The creation and advocacy of revolutionary theory plays the principal and decisive role in those times of which Lenin said, ’Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.’ When a task, no matter which, has to be performed, but there is as yet no guiding line, method, plan or policy, the principal and decisive thing is to decide on a guiding line, method, plan or policy. When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and cultural changes become principal and decisive.
Promoting “mass straggle” is not a political line. It is at best a tactic. So are the various individual points of unity agreed upon so far by the collective. A political line can only be arrived at by a thorough analysis of classes, economic relations, ideological forms and the political structure. Strategy deriving from such an analysis (and the analysis itself) can only be tested in practice, in their application to the class struggle. Applying political analysis and strategy to the class straggle is not a matter of being “imposed from the outside according to a predetermined program”, but of constant development in struggle against what Mao describes as the twin subjective errors of dogmatism and empiricism.
Through the organization that develops from a truly political distribution of the newspaper, and through the lessons learned the course of the newspaper’s actual intervention in concrete straggles, the political line will be developed and sharpened. At the same time a “network” will grow which is itself participating in the debate and the active, increasingly united struggle for proletarian power.