“There are people who stand on the side of the bourgeois intellectuals, and oppose the remolding of the bourgeois intellectuals. Do they not need to remold? Everyone has to remold, including me, including you all. The working class has to unceasingly remold itself in the course of struggle, otherwise, some people will become bad.”

—Mao, 1976

In order to grasp what makes Maoism the Marxism of our time—and therefore what Maoism adds to Marxism-Leninism—it is necessary to not only study Mao’s contributions like the continuation of the class struggle under socialism, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the mass line, Mao’s writings on philosophy, and the strategy of Protracted People’s War (in semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries), but also the Party rectification movements practiced by the CCP. The former are all essential aspects of Maoism, integral to MLM. However, the rectification movements are often overlooked. Even though both the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) have, in recent years, carried out extremely important rectification movements in their own ranks, many Maoists around the world do not grasp the importance of this key contribution of Mao’s, let alone put it into practice.

In contrast to Stalin’s view that “the theory of ‘defeating’ opportunist elements by the ideological struggle within the Party is a rotten and dangerous theory,”¹ Mao constantly emphasized the importance of ideological struggle to correct mistaken ideas in the Party. Using the method of unity-struggle-unity,² the CCP was able, in numerous instances, to win over significant sections of the Party who initially went against a correct line. This method prevented unnecessary splits. Sometimes, leading cadre, like Zhang Guotao, split off and betrayed the revolution, but by using the method of unity-struggle-unity and party rectification, it was possible to win over the vast majority of cadre who previously followed these misleaders.

Rectification movements generally came after these struggles (for example, the 1942 Rectification Campaign took place after the struggle against Zhang Guotao and after the struggle with the 28 ½ Bolsheviks) as well as after periods of growth and expansion. Inevitably, when the objective situation presents the basis for mass influxes into a communist party—during times when the revolutionary activity of the masses can, in part, make up for their lack of ideological consolidation and theoretical development³—various heterogeneous political and ideological trends will enter the ranks of the party. But this sort of growth and development is essential for a Party to take advantage of mass upsurges in revolutionary activity.⁴

Of course, participation in a mass revolutionary struggle, while it educates the masses rapidly, is no substitute for a thoroughgoing consolidation to proletarian ideology. The latter requires that one fanshen⁵ in light of communist principles and the lessons of the class struggle. This, in turn, requires significant theoretical development and a broader historical perspective, since the lessons of the proletarian class struggle concern several hundred years and are drawn from the global experiences of the class. Hence the difficulties the Bolsheviks had after their victory in the Russian Civil War. While the masses had shown tremendous enthusiasm and courage in the Revolution and in their life-and-death struggle against the counter-revolution, the vast majority were hardly consolidated to proletarian ideology. This was particularly true among the peasantry, but similar issues existed among the working class, and even in the ranks of the Party itself. Various non-proletarian trends—especially great Russian chauvinism but also syndicalism and bureaucratism—inevitably expressed themselves not only in the rank-and-file of the Party but also at its highest levels of leadership.⁶

Towards the end of his life Lenin advanced a series of novel proposals for addressing these issues in the Party and in Soviet society. Unfortunately, these proposals were, at best, only partially implemented. More often, they were misunderstood and, at times, even ignored. They included some expulsions from the Party, but also mass influxes of advanced workers in the Party leadership, broad discussion and debate among the Party, addressing the various forms of misleadership that existed in the Party and the state,⁷ the solicitation of feedback and especially criticism from the workers (through improving what Lenin called “the transmission belts” between the Party and the masses), and more. As Lenin had noted earlier in the debate arising at the end of the Civil War and in the aftermath of the 10th Party Congress, these questions concerned the fundamental “approach to the mass”:

What matters now is how to approach the mass, to establish contact with it and win it over, and how to get the intricate transmission system working (how to run the dictatorship of the proletariat). Note that when I speak of the intricate transmission system I do not mean the machinery of the Soviets. What it may have in the way of intricacy of transmission comes under a special head. I have only been considering, in principle and in the abstract, class relations in capitalist society, which consists of a proletariat, a non-proletarian mass of working people, a petty bourgeoisie and a bourgeoisie. This alone yields an extremely complicated transmission system owing to what has been created by capitalism, quite apart from any red-tape in the Soviet administrative machinery. And that is the main point to be considered in analysing the difficulties of the trade unions’ “task”. Let me say this again: the actual differences do not lie where Comrade Trotsky sees them but in the question of how to approach the mass, win it over, and keep in touch with it.⁸

This is not to say that Lenin had resolved the question of how to rectify the non-proletarian trends arising the Bolshevik Party, but rather that he was coming to some new conclusions at the end of his life which he did not have time to see through to their conclusion nor did he have time to struggle for their full implementation and which were never fully grasped by other leaders in the Bolshevik Party. And hence, Stalin’s formulation in opposition to ideological struggle against opportunism would later become the Party’s line (it should be noted that this was because Stalin’s conception aligned with the dominant conception of the majority of the Party’s leadership and expressed their views in the most clear and developed fashion).^{9 10}

Thus, at the limits of Marxism-Leninism, there existed a question of how to wage the struggle against opportunism and ideological deviations; it was actually the lack of clarity on this problem, combined with various ideological issues and theoretical deficiencies that led the Bolshevik Party, under Stalin’s leadership, to resort to large scale problems in a futile attempt to resolve this problem. This question was solved by Mao and the CCP through the method of Rectification Campaign.¹¹ In our own modest experience as a small pre-party organization in a powerful imperialist country, we have seen first hand the importance of this practice. Starting in January of 2025, after a year and half of significant growth, we launched an organizational rectification campaign aimed at Bolshevizing our ranks, raising our theoretical level, and addressing alien class tendencies in our ranks. However, before summarizing some of the lessons of our modest rectification campaign, it is necessary to clarify the general lessons of the CCP’s 1942 Rectification Campaign.

Brief Introductory Remarks on the 1942 Rectification Campaign

In the period of the tense struggle against the Japanese invaders, a Marxist-Leninist education campaign known as the Rectification Campaign was conducted throughout the whole Party under the leadership of the Central Committee and Comrade Mao Tse-Tung. The aim was to get rid of the non-proletarian ideas which had once obtained to quite a serious extent in the Party and were still hindering the implementation of the Party’s correct line and policies.
—Ho Kan-Chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, p. 375

After the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war, a large number of progressives of peasant or urban petty-bourgeois origin joined the Party. As the Party represented the interests of the whole nation as well as of the working class and enjoyed a very high prestige among the people it was both inevitable and reasonable that a large number of progressives of petty-bourgeois origin should join the party of the Chinese working class and constitute a majority of its membership. It was also inevitable that those members of petty-bourgeois origin who had not yet been sufficiently steeled ideologically and politically should attempt in various ways to influence the Party with their ideology and working style, and, in some cases, even to ‘reform’ the Party according to petty-bourgeois ideology and ways of thinking.
—ibid, pg. 376

Although the CCP officially began their Rectification movement in 1942, the plans for it were laid during the Long March, at the Tsunyi Conference. Given the wrong tendencies and ideological issues that led to the military defeat against Chiang Kai-Shek’s Fifth Extermination Campaign, it was necessary to not only win over the leadership of the CCP to a correct line (as well as the associated military strategy and tactics, all of which was done during the Tsunyi Conference), but also to address the various alien class tendencies present across all levels of the organization. This need only grew more acute after the formation of the Second United Front with the Guomindang and the associated growth of the CCP’s base areas and national influence. Growing from 40,000 Party members to 800,000 in a matter of five years (between 1937-1942) and having a base area of 44,000,000 people under their leadership presented new and unique challenges.

For example, the influxes of intellectuals and students into the base areas’ united front government,¹² and into the CCP itself, greatly aided the Party’s capacity to organize the revolution and lead such a large population. However, it also led to the growth of the bureaucratic and bourgeois style of leadership (often also inflected with pre-bourgeois ideology, given strength and ubiquity of Confucian ideology in Chinese society and among the intelligentsia in particular). Given the base that the Party had developed among the workers in peasants earlier periods, various class contradictions in the Party and the united front work expressed themselves rather sharply. Mark Selden, in his book, The Yenan Way, explains broad contours of the two line struggle in the CCP between 1937-1942:

As we have observed, since 1937 two political impulses and leadership styles were joined in uneasy coexistence in the border region. One, revolutionary, emphasized struggle and broad political participation. The other, bureaucratic, stressed stable administration and the reform politics of the Second United Front. The proponents of the latter approach, the administrators, were primarily intellectuals and students drawn to Yenan from throughout the country on the one hand and local landlords and former officials on the other. Although differing sharply in perspective and political style, both were members of the educated elite. The students had been exposed to new and alien ideas; they were deeply imbued with the united front spirit which initially motivated their participation in communist-sponsored governments. The local elite, skilled in the politics and administration of the warlord era, cooperated on the basis of adherence to united front principles and the desire to preserve the remnants of their economic and political power. In Shen-Kan-Ning these groups formed the bulwark of the regional and county bureaucracy whose powers steadily increased from 1937 to 1941. On the other hand, most county magistrates and virtually all district and township cadres were local revolutionaries; for the most part they were illiterate peasant youths who had demonstrated leadership in the course of the armed struggle and land upheaval. Their primary commitment was to a social revolution which would eliminate oppression and bring equality and hope to the poor in the desolate villages of the border region.

There was little common ideological ground uniting cadres of varying background and experience beyond anti-Japanese nationalist ideals and a vision of a strong and free China. With the exception of the highest-level party cadres and intellectuals, there had been virtually no exposure to Marxist-Leninist thought or any other systematic educational training. Modern and reformist ideas prevalent among outside cadre administrators and intellectuals, most of them new to the party, were conceptions developed in China’s coastal cities during and after the May Fourth movement. Many local cadres on the other hand, with a commitment to land revolution rooted in their familiarity with peasant misery in the border area, remained deeply imbued with certain traditional values and were bound by complex social relationships and village loyalties.¹³

The three main ideological issues that the Party had to fight against were subjectivism in the approach to study, sectarianism in the style of political work, and formalism in writing (also known as “stereotyped Party writing”¹⁴). While none of these tendencies were dominant in the Party—given that the earlier line struggles had been won against Wang Ming, Li Lisan, and others—they all posed serious obstacles to the CCP’s ability to implement its political line, which was basically correct. In the extremely trying conditions that the Party faced in 1942—which went beyond just the Japanese offensive and the Guomindang blockade and also included serious inflation and other economic and administrative problems—various forms of non-proletarian ideology and leadership in the Party threatened the success of the revolution. It was thus necessary to overcome these issues to win the War of Resistance Against Japan, prepare for the future struggle against the Guomindang (and their American Imperialist sponsors), and steel the Party for eventual nationwide leadership after the revolution. 

In three separate documents, Mao explains each of these tendencies. Reform Our Study for subjectivism in matters of theory and study, Rectify the Party’s Style of Work for sectarianism in the Party’s work, and Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing for the issues with formalism in writing. Each of these texts is extremely rich and contains many lessons, the complete summary of which is outside of the scope of this article. While some of the lessons in these texts (and of the 1942 Rectification Campaign more broadly) are particular to Chinese society at the time, many are universal. For example, in the fight against dogmatism, it was necessary to clarify a few fundamental points. As Ho Kan-Chih, in the Party’s official history, notes these included deceptively simple questions like: “What is a theory? What makes a theoretician? What is the essence of Marxism-Leninism and what is the proper attitude to studying Marxism-Leninism?”¹⁵

While these questions may seem trivial or simple, the lack of unity on them within the Party posed serious challenges. Lenin constantly emphasized that a communist Party must be guided by the most advanced revolutionary theory; however, this is impossible if, within the Party’s own ranks, confusion abounds on the very nature of theory itself. Therefore, it was necessary to wage a struggle to promote clarity on these and other foundational topics. Given the baggage that many members of the petty-bourgeoisie intelligentsia brought with them when they joined the Party, confusion on the nature of theory and knowledge was not an uncommon problem.¹⁶

It was also during this period that Mao put forward a fundamental thesis on the nature of knowledge—a thesis which he would later further refine during and after the philosophical debate during the Great Leap Forward on the relationship between thinking and being:¹⁷

What is knowledge? From ancient times to the present, there have been only two kinds of knowledge in the world: knowledge of the struggle for production and knowledge of the class struggle. (Knowledge of the national struggle is also included in the latter category.) What knowledge is there aside from this? There is none. Natural science and social science are the crystallization of these two kinds of knowledge, and philosophy is the generalization and summation of natural science and social science. Aside from these, there is no other knowledge.¹⁸

Clarification on the nature of knowledge and ultimate the source of revolutionary theory was essential to combat various idealist tendencies among the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia who had entered the Party’s ranks as well as to solidify the Party’s unity on the basis of proletarian ideology. Only thus could the problems that existed in the way the Party related to the masses and the way it handled questions internally be addressed in a systematic fashion. It was necessary to overcome these fundamental confusions—which could often hide behind nominal unity on one term or another—lest the dangerous trends of subjectivism, sectarianism, and formalism continue to impede the Party’s work. In the particular case of the confusion over the nature of knowledge and theory, a failure to address it would have deepened idealist trends in the Party’s ranks and reinforced the division of mental and manual labor not only between the Party and the masses but also within the Party itself.

For example, when a nominal unity exists on a few points (e.g. support for the War of Resistance Against Japan, overcoming feudal prejudices, etc.) it is easy to assume that there is a deep political unity. However, if, underlying this nominal unity, there are actually foundational disagreements on questions of principle (e.g. division of mental and manual labor, relations between leaders and the led, etc.) these will inevitably show up in one way or another in the Party’s practical work. In this particular case, disagreements about the nature of knowledge often led the intelligentsia to implicitly assume that the masses knew very little, given their lack of formal education or academic training. From this world view, a whole series of administrative and political style flowed. Mao understood that it was not sufficient to simply tell cadre “don’t act in x or y bad manner.” Rather, what was needed was ideological struggle to address the underlying political, theoretical, and ideological disagreements with proletarian politics, which were often implicit and hidden beneath nominal political unity.

In addition to key documents by Mao—and some less than helpful documents by Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi—comrades in the CCP were required to read some important documents from the CPSU(B) during the Rectification Campaign, especially the writing of Lenin, Stalin, and Dimitrov on Bolshevization, self-criticism, and Party discipline. Despite some shortcomings in Stalin and Dimitrov’s articulations, these helped to clarify the general theoretical lessons of the Soviet experience and to explain how it was possible to forge the proletarian discipline in the Bolshevik Party sufficient to the task of leading the October Revolution.

In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder—excerpts from which were required reading the CCP’s 1942 Rectification Campaign—Lenin provides an extremely clear analysis of how a Party develops proletarian discipline:

The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and—if you wish—merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people—primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.

The fact that, in 1917–20, Bolshevism was able, under unprecedentedly difficult conditions, to build up and successfully maintain the strictest centralisation and iron discipline was due simply to a number of historical peculiarities of Russia.

On the one hand, Bolshevism arose in 1903 on a very firm foundation of Marxist theory. The correctness of this revolutionary theory, and of it alone, has been proved, not only by world experience throughout the nineteenth century, but especially by the experience of the seekings and vacillations, the errors and disappointments of revolutionary thought in Russia. For about half a century—approximately from the forties to the nineties of the last century—progressive thought in Russia, oppressed by a most brutal and reactionary tsarism, sought eagerly for a correct revolutionary theory, and followed with the utmost diligence and thoroughness each and every “last word” in this sphere in Europe and America. Russia achieved Marxism—the only correct revolutionary theory—through the agony she experienced in the course of half a century of unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment. verification, and comparison with European experience. Thanks to the political emigration caused by tsarism, revolutionary Russia, in the second half of the nineteenth century, acquired a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement, such as no other country possessed.

On the other hand, Bolshevism, which had arisen on this granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903–17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society, a struggle which, owing to the backwardness of the country and the severity of the tsarist yoke, matured with exceptional rapidity, and assimilated most eagerly and successfully the appropriate “last word” of American and European political experience.¹⁹

Drawing on these lessons, Mao and the leadership of the CCP were able to guide a rectification movement which both Bolshevized the Party and addressed, in a systematic fashion, the non-proletarian class tendencies which, at the time, prevailed in the CCP’s ranks. While other Parties in the Comintern (outside of the CPSU, of course) basically all failed to develop into Bolshevized Parties, the CCP, through their creative application of the lessons of the Russian Revolution were able to not only Bolshevize their ranks but also were able to further develop Marxism through systematizing the practice of Party rectification. This method would be repeated in 1947-1948 to improve the Party’s method of work in rural areas and in the army, again in 1950 (after the victory of the revolution) to “correct authoritarian methods of work, strengthen relations between the Party and the masses of people in the town and countryside, and consolidate the people’s democratic united front, so as to facilitate the carrying out of the agrarian reform work in the newly liberated rural areas and the work of readjusting industry and commerce in the cities.”²⁰ The same method of rectification was also used in the Hundred Flowers Campaign. All of these campaigns contain invaluable lessons about how to carry on ideological struggle within the Party and address deviations like opportunism, dogmatism, and empiricism. Today, these lessons are being applied by leading Maoist parties like the Communist Party of the Philippines to address the pressing issues they face in their revolutionary movements.

The Experiences of MCU in Rectification

While, MCU is a small and young organization, and although the revolutionary movement in the U.S. is in a nascent stage, we have found the lessons from the CCP’s rectification campaigns to be invaluable to addressing wrong tendencies in our ranks, deepening our ideological unity, raising our theoretical level, and improving our practice of democratic centralism. In order to explain the basics of our own campaign—and so as to be able to accurately convey its successes and failures—it is important to explain some of the history of development of our organization to clarify why it became necessary to launch a rectification movement. This will also help to clarify how we applied the general lessons from the 1942 Rectification Campaign, which was carried out in Party of 800,000, to our present context as a small pre-party organization.

Factors Contributing to Our Growth and Development

As noted above, there is not presently a mass revolutionary movement in the United States, nor has MCU ever been in a position to lead such a movement—though we have provided leadership to various mass struggles. That said, we did grow significantly in 2023 and 2024. This growth was the results of a few different factors. 

First, we had adopted a more correct line during our first National Conference in 2022. While we still had many confusions, the relatively clarity we developed in the debate leading up to and during the Conference constituted a significant qualitative advance. This new line involved our first systematic effort to go among the industrial proletariat,²¹ as well as a move away from our prior focus on organizing in housing. We also unified around some better practices in our public facing studies, then still confined largely to students.

Equally important to these shifts was the expulsion of one misleader in MCU, D, for his sexual impropriety and overall terrible bourgeois commandist leadership (which was related to, but not reducible to his patriarchal attitude). After D’s expulsion (on the second day of the Conference), we had a series of internal discussions on the overall problems in our organization that allowed him to operate in a position of leadership as well as the issues which resulted from his misleadership. D’s expulsion, and the subsequent changes in our organization help to facilitate the development of a number of junior comrades, especially some women comrades who would go on to lead our work in the unions. 

What’s more, in the wake of this Conference, another leading comrade, A, jumped out and functionally promoted a line of commandism, seniority insulating leaders from criticism, opposition to doing any organizational work on social media (which is now the main form in which the masses consume agitation, despite all the issues with social media), and a narrow sectarianism which was functionally opposed to winning over semi-Marxists to MLM and our line.²² A’s opposition to things like comrades criticizing leadership was the result of the ongoing ideological transformation in MCU, in which many junior comrades had developed theoretically, practically, and ideologically. They were thus in a better position, in the wake of the Conference, to provide criticism of leading comrades. What’s more, our improved political line began to upend long standing backwards organizational practices and helped us correct some of our shortcomings. 

The sharpening of these political differences was also accelerated by the expulsion of D at the Conference. A also promoted working with D, who had just been expelled, and tried repeatedly to have us reintegrate D into our work. A eventually rage quit after these lines were defeated and junior comrades began criticizing him for his lack of follow-through on basic tasks, his bourgeois commandist attitude, and his overall sloppiness on basic tasks.²³

The victory of a correct line at the Conference, combined with overcoming of the leadership of two backwards cadre, opened the door to rapid advances in MCU.²⁴ What’s more the struggle against these two misleaders was carried out in such a way that not a single other comrade in the organization was won over to their line or left with them. This was possible because of the all-around participation of junior comrades in the line struggle and criticism of these leading comrades. In the very process of struggling against this misleadership, junior comrades developed rapidly, as they confronted their own ideological obstacles to criticizing bourgeois methods of leadership and thus became more able to address wrong tendencies in our organization. All of this led to a tremendous creative outpouring from junior comrades and significantly increased our organizational abilities. It also helped to check future wrong tendencies and shortcomings of leading comrades, as junior comrades became much more willing to wage ideological struggle and criticize leadership. 

The advances from these struggles and the adoption of a more correct line were most evident in our ability to play the leading role in the national Vote No campaign against the UPS contract, when just a year before, we had not even begun work among the industrial proletariat. It should be noted this campaign required not only the development of a correct overall strategy for work in the unions, but also careful united front work with other groups, the production of various forms of agitation and propaganda, and more. To concentrate the correct ideas of the masses and, on this basis, lead them,  required a level of organizational dynamism that had not previously existed in MCU. It was forged in the struggle for a correct line against these misleaders. 

Second, after beginning our work among the industrial proletariat in the Fall of 2022, we systematically developed our theoretical understanding of the role of communists in the working class movement. This began with a study of the CPUSA’s work among the industrial proletariat.²⁵ These studies led to the rapid development of our organization as a whole, and junior comrades working on the union front in particular. Notably, a number of women comrades—who had previously worked under D’s misleadership—took huge steps forward at all levels. They led studies on the CPUSA’s work, helped to sum up the lessons of this work, struggled for a correct line,²⁶ identified key groups to work with and join, developed into proletarian leaders, and ultimately helped to unite an advanced section of workers around voting no on the UPS contract. The latter was carried on via the communist method of leadership, combining economic and political agitation, such that, in a few short months of organizing with these workers, they united around a program of fighting for a worker-led country, a sharp shift from their previous basis of unity: Getting a greater share of UPS’s profits. All of this was a tremendous advance from our previous work in housing projects, were we were generally unable to sustain even a stable core of tenants willing to fight against evictions, privatization, and egregious living conditions, let alone begin to win these tenants over to proletarian ideology. 

Our new line was summed up in a series of documents published in late 2023 and early 2024. These documents explained our views on communist work in the unions, the nature of the political and economic struggle of the proletariat, among other topics. We also included some self-critical reflections on our “go everywhere and do everything” line which had been in command of our work for some years. The theoretical clarity expressed in these documents was the result of both our improved study of MLM (especially the writings of Marx and Lenin on communist work in the unions, but also the experiences of CPUSA and the Comintern) and our summation of practical experiences in the UPS contract struggle. It was also the result of us breaking from certain vestiges of the RCP’s post-1978 line on economism.²⁷

Third, we successfully intervened, as a result of this correct line, in the existing semi-Marxist milieu to win people over to MCU’s line. Initially our efforts were focused on smaller groups of people who were interested in MLM. These were relatively more advanced contacts compared to the broader U.S. left, and they were generally drawn to us because of the strength of our theoretical work.²⁸

We quickly won some of these people over to our line and had them join our ranks. Most had tried for years to bring together study circles and build these into an organized force, but without much success. Despite some of their strengths, some also had weaknesses which we did not fully understand. While we quickly identified some their theoretical shortcomings and confusions on the fundamentals of MLM, we did not appreciate the severity of some of their ideological issues. For example, many had tried and failed for years to build a group of Maoists, and thus had a pessimistic outlook. Some had internalized bourgeois methods of developing contacts. Others were used to being leaders in their past tiny organizations and had individualist work styles. Over time we came to realize the depth of some of their ideological hangups. Despite these issues, the influx of new members greatly increased our organizational capacity and led to notable advances on a number of fronts. 

As our work in the UPS contract struggle took on a national dimension—and as we were able to, through this work and our writing about it, clarify the correctness of our line—we began to engage a broader audience of semi-Marxists and win people over to supporting our line and joining MCU.

Fourth, the objective conditions were relatively favorable for our growth as an organization. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, many on the U.S. left were left looking for a way forward beyond the mass mobilizations and endless marching. There was also growing discontent with the Democrats in general and the Biden administration in particular. Biden’s decision to crush the railroad workers strike was a particularly important exposure of his hostility to the working class. All of this is tied to the general decline of the status of U.S. imperialism in its global competition with an ascendent Chinese imperialism, and the inherent instability in the social formation in the U.S. (especially ideologically), as the U.S. ruling class tries to adapt to this reality and preserve their global dominance. While we took advantage of some of these openings, we also failed to intervene well in the Palestine protests which began after October 7th, thus squandering further opportunities to grow and develop.

All of these factors contributed to our growth and development as an organization in 2023 and 2024, and put us in the strongest position we had ever been in. Despite some secondary issues and shortcomings noted above, it was correct grow as we did, and as a result of this growth, we were able to operate on a qualitatively higher level as a pre-Party organization. To solidify this growth, deepen our ideological unity, refine our line, and improve the overall quality of our work, we began to prepare for a Second National Conference.

MCU’s 2nd Conference and Problems Arising from Our Growth

In the process of growth and development that we underwent in 2023, various new internal issues emerged in our ranks. The most empirically obvious of these was the lack of experience systematically developing new cadre and ideologically consolidating them. In late 2023, we began to address this problem and other growth-related issues in our ranks. We developed a rough onboarding process, which we refined over the course of the next year, we started a national internal study to raise the overall theoretical level of the whole organization (previous studies had been exclusively run by the local branches, which tended to exacerbate some theoretical weaknesses in our ranks), and we began to prepare for our 2nd National Conference. 

In preparation for this Conference, we developed an all-organization research plan. Groups of comrades were assigned a number of key topics on which we needed to develop greater organizational clarity. These included things like the Black Nation thesis, the labor party question, the nature of the U.S. Steel industry, and much more. While these were key topics to investigate further, our plan was too ambitious, both in the scope of topics covered and in terms of our estimation of our cadre’s theoretical abilities. Therefore, most of the research that was done, while helpful, was not sufficiently thorough or well grounded in MLM. In retrospect, a less ambitious research plan would have been more appropriate so that comrades had more time to study the foundational texts of MLM, summarize the lessons from our work, and debate key questions of line, strategy, and tactics. This mistake, which became more fully apparent shortly before our Conference, was an important indication that leading comrades had overestimated the level of theoretical development in our ranks as well as our ideological unity.

Despite some shortcomings in the preparation for the Conference, and insufficient debate over some key matters of line, our 2nd National Conference was a significant success. We emerged from it with strong unity around a new basic line, which was summarized by our Central Committee in Growing and Developing as a Pre-Party Organization. Based on this line we came up with various policies for developing contacts, building our united front work, running our studies, onboarding new members, and more. We also put a series of plans into place, and came up with a division of labor to carry all this out after reorganizing our internal committee structure. All of this was a major step forward for us and resulted from the energetic participation of many comrades at our Conference. 

However, after the Conference, issues began to emerge in the implementation of the plans we had laid down. As we began to debate the nature of these issues and tried to rectify our mistakes, it became clear that there were deeper ideological issues at play. While our line was basically correct, we were struggling to put it into practice. Ultimately, it became clear that there were two main reasons for this. 

The first was that a small section of people who joined MCU in 2023 were not, in fact, ideologically unified around MLM and the need to build a Bolshevized organization. The exact nature of this disagreement varied, but as some cadre failed to carry out their basic responsibilities and came under criticism for this, they came to justify their own lack of follow through on basic tasks, and even democratic centralism itself.²⁹ Ultimately a small group of four cadre unified around an openly Menshevik line, which rejected democratic centralism, argued against basic organizational discipline, and said that anyone who nominally supports our line and work should be made cadre of MCU, even if they do not carry out basic work or abide by organizational discipline. Beyond recycling the exact arguments that the Mensheviks made at 2nd Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, they had little in the way of a political program to offer.³⁰ This group split off rather than engage in discussion and debate with the rest of the organization over their line. 

The second reason for our difficulties in carrying out organizational plans was that many junior comrades, despite agreeing with our line and being very dedicated to the work, had significant unresolved ideological issues which impeded their ability to consistently align thinking and doing and thereby put communist politics into practice. On a certain level, these issues reflected some disagreements with MLM, but overall these comrades were consolidated to MLM and committed to the revolution, they just had some significant shortcomings which needed to be rectified. These shortcomings, which ultimately result from the internalization of one or another aspect of the prevailing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology in the larger society, had often been exacerbated by our own organizational shortcomings. These shortcomings included the weaknesses of leading comrades, various ad-hoc styles of work prevailing in our ranks, our previous lack of systematic onboarding, and more. 

Given that our assessment was that our line was basically correct and that these comrades were committed communists with some shortcomings, it thus became clear that, in the wake of the struggle with the small clique that split off, it was necessary to wage an all-organization struggle to rectify our style of work. We thus began investigating the 1942 Rectification Campaign, and launched our own campaign to address the non-proletarian ideological trends then prevailing in our ranks. 

The Main Aims and Goals of Our Rectification Campaign

As noted above, the existence of non-proletarian ideology in a small pre-Party organization in a powerful imperialist country is to be expected. The period of relatively rapid growth in 2023, while it greatly developed our organization both qualitatively and quantitatively, also gave rise to alien-class tendencies in our ranks. In the wake of our 2nd Conference, we were set to make some significant advances on numerous fronts. However, this raised, for our organization, a series of new challenges which we were not ideologically equipped to consistently meet and resolve.

As noted in the document, Struggle Against Petty-Bourgeois Deviations, Deepen Proletarian Discipline, our Central Committee identified three main deviations in our ranks at the time; a lack of a developed understanding of dialectical materialism, an idealist notion of ideological transformation, and an insular organizational culture:

We face a few main shortcomings at present, all of which are the result of a petty-bourgeois one-sided mode of thinking. The first is the lack of a deep understanding of dialectical materialism, which manifests in things like comrades’ unscientific use of terms like “internal contradiction.” This is tied to difficulties comrades have had in grasping the relationship between internal and external contradictions, and the tendency to see internal contradictions metaphysically.

The second—which stems from the first, but is by no means reducible to it—is an idealist notion of transformation. Many comrades have a tendency to reduce transformation to the first half of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge and ignore the second half of this circuit. This has contributed to widespread confusions over the nature of criticism/self-criticism, fantasies of achieving a sort of “moral purity” by purging oneself of all non-proletarian ideas, and the rise of a lifestyle-esque tendency in our ranks that focuses on imitating communist conduct. The later is an inevitable result of trying to hold comrades to a high level of proletarian discipline while the above idealist and metaphysical confusions exist. 

The third shortcoming is an insular culture in our ranks. This issue predates the prior two shortcomings, and over the past few years we have made some significant progress in addressing it. This can be seen in how we have been able to develop a much wider orbit of semi-Marxists around MCU and how we have built our links to the organized working class over the past few years. However, the excessive focus first side of the dialectical materialist circuit of knowledge in conducting CSC and rectifying wrong tendencies in our ranks shows the deep issues we still have in this regard. The pervasiveness of sloganeering in our ranks also speaks to the insularity of our organizational culture at present.

These shortcomings are corrosive, they eat away at our discipline, undermine our unity, and weaken our ability to advance the proletarian cause. Their class nature must be firmly understood by all comrades so that we can address these issues head on and struggle against them unflinchingly. At the same time, we must understand that the ultimate source of these issues is the class society in which we exist, and that our particular circumstances—as small communist organization lacking deep links with the working class and existing in the most powerful imperialist country in the world—means that we are unable to completely eliminate all vestiges of these issues from our ranks. Rather, we must understand how to overcome the biggest shortcomings, improve our discipline and morale, and remain vigilant for future issues of a similar nature, so that they can be nipped in the bud before they grow and metastasize into full-blown deviations.

With this understanding of our three main shortcomings, we were able to carry out an extensive campaign to address them. This began with discussion and debate in all committees over the issues they faced and past mistakes. In order to develop a unified policy for addressing our issues, it was necessary to first come to a unified understanding. Only once a unified understanding was reached could policy be made, plans be laid out, divisions of labor set, and unified action be taken. 

This discussion and debate was fruitful, as cadre across the organization applied the general understanding of the issues laid out in Struggle Against Petty-Bourgeois Deviations, Deepen Proletarian Discipline to understand the particular issues that arose in their own front of work. While the document itself was a product of an investigation by our Central Committee into various issues in different committees, the initiative of rank-and-file comrades help to make develop our collective understanding of the problems we faced. As a result, we developed a much more concrete picture of the problems to be addressed in our ranks. We saw, in this period, a large creative outpouring from junior comrades as they showed tremendous initiative in rectifying wrong tendencies in our ranks. This took the form of criticisms of various leading comrades for promoting some petty-bourgeois tendencies, but also of poetry and songs about the rectification.

All of this also helped to spur on a hunger for theoretical development in our ranks which had previously been somewhat lacking. While comrades had studied MLM, and while our national study was helpful, it could not proceed at a sufficient pace, by itself, to provide comrades with an all-around understanding of MLM. While the first rectification document correctly noted the lack of a developed understanding of dialectical materialism in our ranks,³¹ this was far from the only issue on this front. In order to address the lack of all around theoretical development in our ranks, it was necessary to institute a more methodical approach to study. 

After dealing with the most pressing and immediate problems in our ranks and summing up the lessons of the first phase of the rectification campaign, we began a second phase, aimed at deepening the rectification and addressing various issues which had come into focus during the first phase. Among these issues was comrades’ approach to study. A document, On Study, written by a Central Committee member, summed up some of these issues and provided guidance on how to address them:

After launching the rectification campaign we’ve started to get at some deeper issues in our organization overall and with individual comrades. We now have more insight, in particular, into the dearth of deep understanding of MLM within our organization, and there is an urgent need for a big push across the organization and from each individual member to deepen and improve our understanding. Reforming our methods of study will be key for doing this. Each individual comrade has a responsibility to ensure that they get the most they can out of group studies by preparing notes, reading carefully, discussing the reading with comrades before the meeting, consulting outside resources, etc. Additionally, each individual comrade has a responsibility to carry on a lively and engaged independent study to address their own individual weaknesses and blind spots. Adopting a proletarian approach to these two tasks, group and individual study, will require us all to engage in a long-term struggle to transform our habits and our approach, to challenge deeply held ideas about our own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and to develop study skills that we currently lack. Here we present a breakdown of how this series of struggles should be approached as well as a curated reading list of material for comrades’ independent study.

This document outline various deviations in our ranks, including a lack of seriousness about individual study, pragmatic approaches to study, manic orientations in work, and the “study for individual gratification” approach. The document was pivotal in helping comrades to better understand the issues in their study habits. As part of the organization-wide effort to address these issues, we adopted a requirement that all comrade read a book a week and share weekly reflections with their committee on their reading. This helped to develop a better theoretical culture in MCU and addressed some of the issues that we faced in winning over semi-Marxists to our line and MLM.

For example, to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the Chinese Revolution, it is necessary to read a few dozen books on the topic. If comrades only read a few books a year, it will take years to develop well-rounded knowledge on this single topic. In order to have a sufficiently developed understanding of MLM to navigate a diverse series of situations and creatively apply Marxism in the U.S., it is necessary to have profound knowledge of not only the Chinese Revolution, but all the MLM classics, as well as a series of other important topics (e.g. the history of the CPUSA, developments in this country since the 1970s, how the unions have changed since the Second World War, etc.). While enthusiastic participation in revolutionary activity can partially make up for lack of theoretical development and ideological consolidation to MLM, any organization which is serious about leading a revolution needs a huge number of theoretically developed cadre with an extremely solid understanding of Marxism. The experiences of the Bolshevik Party clearly demonstrate this. 

By significantly increasing the pace at which comrades studied (which necessarily involved a struggle against the ideological hangups comrades had around study), we were also able to improve our ability to win over semi-Marxists of various stripes. In order to provide sharp and coherent rebuttals, from an MLM perspective, to various revisionist, radical liberal, and social democratic theories it has been necessary to, first of all, ensure comrades have a sufficiently developed grasp of MLM, and second, have comrades study the key theorists popular among the semi-Marxists so as to be better able to criticize them. 

Given the victories in first phase of the rectification, it was necessary to provide guidance not only on study habits, but on how to continue the rectification across the board. This was summed up in the document Continue the Rectification, Fight Demoralization, Apply Marxism Consistently:

In order to carry forward the rectification campaign to completion, comrades must enthusiastically take up all three of these struggles each and every day. The first is the struggle against opportunism, petty-bourgeois laziness, empiricism, and dogmatism. The second is the struggle to deepen our understanding of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The third is the struggle to apply MLM to all aspects of our lives. Only in waging a consistent and tireless struggle each and every day can we rectify our wrong styles of work, replace our liberalism with Marxism, and Bolshevize our ranks. All of this is essential to combating liberalism and opposing the non-proletarian tendencies which will inevitably arise within our ranks. As Mao noted:

“As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades’ minds and our Party’s work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing. The proverb “Running water is never stale and a door-hinge is never worm-eaten” means that constant motion prevents the inroads of germs and other organisms.”

Though the struggle is arduous, the path forward is clear. What’s more, we have already won a number of victories over own conservatism, indiscipline, and petty-bourgeois laziness. […] Overall we are finally in a strong position to carry out primary task of growing as a pre-Party organization.

After the initial phase of rectification, we had addressed the most glaring problems in our ranks, adjusted our leadership structure, and ignited the initiative of junior comrades to not only address various ideological shortcomings in our ranks, but also to raise our work overall to a new level. All of this was promising, and put us in a better position to carry out the line we had unified around at our 2nd Conference. However, this did not mean that the rectification was complete. In reality, it had just begun, and various new struggles had to be taken up so as to carry it forward and further develop proletarian discipline our ranks. This is to say, in the first phase of the rectification, we mainly dealt with the ideological issues that were preventing us from carrying out the basic work in our committees. Once these issues were resolved, we were able to carry out the work, but then had to resolve the issues that inevitably arose in the work itself.

While the conditions for a truly proletarian discipline cannot emerge all at once, it was essential, at this stage of the rectification, that we address head on various secondary shortcomings, especially those which most significantly impeded our ability to improve our collective discipline and practice of democratic centralism. This was the necessary precondition to Bolshevizing our ranks. Continue the Rectification, Fight Demoralization, Apply Marxism Consistently concludes by setting this as our key task in the second phase of rectification:

[Bolshevizing our ranks is] an exceeding difficult and complex task which we are carrying out under a period of extreme reaction and popular demoralization. In order to rise to the occasion, in order to be worthy of the heritage bequeathed to us by our revolutionary predecessors, we must develop within our ranks what Lenin referred to as a “granite foundation” in Marxist theory. 

In order to do this we must work eagerly and tirelessly to understand and assimilate every last bit of revolutionary history and theory we can and to understand how to apply it in our current historical circumstances. This is a task which requires the active participation of all comrades. If comrades are unclear on the most basic aspects of MLM, how can they begin to work to apply this theory to our present conditions? And comrades would do well to remember that they are not blank slates, the holes in comrades’ knowledge of MLM are not empty, but filled with liberalism and bourgeois ideology. Without addressing this glaring issue which is nearly ubiquitous, it will be impossible to Bolshevize our ranks, and we will instead end up clowning. 

But if we take up this rectification campaign with the courage necessary for the proletarian cause, then we will succeed in overcoming our present shortcomings, Bolshevizing our ranks, building a solid pre-Party organization, deepening our ties with the fighting proletariat, and laying the groundwork for a Vanguard Party. This is conclusion is neither a pipe dream nor an article of faith, but a basic materialist understanding which follows from a concrete (MLM) analysis of our concrete situation. But the courage necessary for this task demands much of us. We must unflinchingly look at our own shortcomings, those of our comrades (including leading comrades), and those of our organization. We must fight each and every day to align our thinking and doing with communist principles. We must fight narrow-minded and short-sighted selfishness and instead encourage the kind of historical thinking necessary to serve the people. Only thus can we carry forward the rectification to its successful conclusion.

In the months since this document was written we have carried out this struggle to a significant degree and addressed many of our most glaring shortcomings. First and foremost we have deepened our level of ideological unity and improved our proletarian discipline. This has meant that comrades are much more capable of operating independently and are more apt at creatively applying Marxism in a wide array of situations, in line with general guidance from leadership. Second, we have seen a massive improvement in the theoretical culture in our ranks, as comrades have been rapidly reading a wide array of Marxist texts and have learned a good deal revolutionary history, political economy, and dialectical materialism in a relatively short time. Third, as a result of our improved organizational study habits, the level of theoretical discussion and debate in MCU is much higher, allowing us to more dynamically refine our line. Fourth, we have vastly improved our public studies, which serve as a key means by which to win people over to MLM. Fifth, we have grown our influence in the working class movement, and now operate in militant workers’ organizations in a number of different unions. Sixth, we have finally begun to regularly produce a large amount of high quality agitation and propaganda in a regular fashion.

All of this constitutes a major advance for our organization, and has laid a proper foundation for us to properly carry out our line and prepare for the coming turmoil in this country, as the impacts of the looming U.S. defeat in its war on Iran destabilize both the global economy and the domestic situation. We hope that our modest reflections on our rectification campaign can be of use to other MLM organizations around the world as they work to Bolshevize their ranks and prepare for the coming years of global instability.

Footnotes

1. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch08.htm Stalin correctly notes that it is necessary to expel some key opportunists from the Party, but then incorrectly generalizes this point to advocate purges as the method to deal with opportunism in general. It is notable that in the quote from Lenin which Stalin uses to justify this approach, Lenin is far more judicious. Lenin notes that at key moments “the slightest wavering in the ranks of the Party may wreck everything” that “desertion of wavering leaders at such a time does not weaken but strengthens the Party, the working-class movement and the revolution.” Lenin’s approach of isolating the backwards leadership, while working to win over the rank and file who, at a given moment, may incorrectly follow them, can be seen throughout his lifetime of work as a leader of the Bolshevik Party. Mao learned from this method; this is why he emphasized that the dogmatists in the CCP (those returned students from Moscow like Wang Ming) spread their poison via means of the broad section of empiricists in the Party, the latter of which could be more easily won over to a correct line after some ideological struggle. ↩︎
2. It is essential to note that the method of unity-struggle-unity should not be mistaken for the rectification campaign proper. While unity-struggle-unity is the general method for struggle among comrades in a party, the rectification campaign is a political campaign within a party (or pre-party cadre organization) which aims to address various alien-class tendencies and forms of non-proletarian ideology so as to Bolshevize the organization’s ranks, to the degree possible given the objective development of the organization in question. ↩︎
3. For more on this, see The Maoist Party by Ajith. https://www.marxists.org/subject/india/cpiml-naxalbari/2009/maoist-party.htm ↩︎
4. This is why Lenin struggled to resolutely against the Komitetchiki (committeemen, those leading professional revolutionaries in the Bolshevik Party) in 1905, when they initially opposed mass influxes into the Party. The Komitetchiki were the pillars of the Party’s work, but in 1905 many of them struggled to grasp how the changed situation required of the Bolsheviks new methods and styles of work. The previous methods, suitable to the repressive conditions in Tsarist Russia during a period of reaction, had become a major impediment to the Party’s ability to grow and lead the revolution. 
   There exists a widespread confusion among Marxists who have not thoroughly studied Lenin’s work and the history of the Russian Revolution, that all Bolshevik party members, or nearly all, were professional revolutionaries. While Lenin proposed this in What is to Be Done?, it proved impracticable, given the various organizational limitations the Party faced, especially a chronic shortage of funds. This did not mean that the party was unprofessional in its methods—extreme care and skill was needed to evade the secret police—but rather that the majority of party member could not be full-timers. Nevertheless, the Komitetchiki made up the core of the Bolshevik Party. Krupskaya describes them well, and how, despite their many strengths, they initially struggled to grasp the new situation which emerged with the 1905 Revolution:
   “The “Komitetchik” [committeeman] was usually a fairly self-assured person, who realised what great influence the work of the committees had over the masses; he generally did not recognise any inner-party democracy whatever. ‘This democratism only leads to us falling into the hands of the authorities; we are already quite well enough connected with the movement,’ the Komitetchiks would say. And inwardly, these committee members always rather despised ‘the people abroad,’ who, they considered, just grew fat and organised intrigues. ‘They ought to be sent to work under Russian conditions’ was their verdict. The Komitetchiks did not like to feel the pressure from abroad. At the same time they did not like innovations. They were neither desirous nor capable of adapting themselves to the changing conditions.
   “In the period 1904-1905 these members of the committees bore tremendous responsibilities on their shoulders, but many of them experienced the utmost difficulty in adapting themselves to the conditions of increasing opportunities for legal work, and to the methods of open struggle. At the third Congress there were no workers present – or at any rate, not a single prominent worker. On the other hand there were many committee members.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/krupskaya/works/rol/rol08.htm ↩︎
5. “By combining ‘correct theory and practice,’ [one] can transform himself, as one can see in the common Chinese word fanshen, which may be freely rendered as ‘transformation of identity.’ The Chinese communists thus believe that the arena of class struggle cannot take place abstractly within the class a whole, but must be fought for within each individual human being,” Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China, (Berkeley, UC Press, 1966), p. 32. ↩︎
6. It is essential for communists today to take stock of the lessons from Lenin’s struggle against both right (Trotsky and Bukharin) and “left” (Kollontai and Shlyapnikov) deviations at the end of the Civil War. ↩︎
7. Hence why Lenin noted in December of 1922 that the Soviet state was an apparatus that the Bolsheviks “took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil.” With these remarks he hoped to clarify how far the Party still had to go in transforming the state apparatus and to warn against the dangers inherent in various illusions which prevailed at the highest level of the Bolshevik Party about the nature of the Soviet state machinery. This danger, already evident in Trotsky’s formulations at the end of the Civil War—which implied that as long as the Bolshevik Party was the ruling Party, the state would inherently be proletarian in character—was made all the more apparent by the Georgian Incident and Stalin’s role therein. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm ↩︎
8. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm This speech is replete with lessons for how a Party should relate to the masses of people, as is Lenin’s subsequent speech in the same struggle with Trotsky and Bukharin, “Once Again on the Trade Unions.” ↩︎
9. This shift in the approach to inner-Party struggle occurred in the period known as the “Great Change” in 1929, during which major shifts took place within the Bolshevik Party and the social formation of the USSR overall. After this period, no real public debate on the Party’s line took place except in caricatured form of polemics against various wrong tendencies. This was justified, in part, by the dangers posed by the right-opportunist lines that were at that time arising with the Party. While these lines were dangerous and did represent the consolidation of a section of Party leadership to the capitalist road, the silencing of debate in the larger society weakened the ability of the Party to struggle against the capitalist roaders as the mobilization of the masses is an integral and not auxiliary part of this struggle under socialism. As Mao noted “The struggle against the capitalist roaders in the Party is the principal task, but not the object. The object is to solve the problem of world outlook and eradicate revisionism…If world outlook is not reformed, although two thousand capitalist roaders are removed in the current great cultural revolution, four thousand may appear next time.”
   The changes in the Bolshevik’s approach to inner-party struggle were far from the only changes that took place in this period. For example, it was after 1929 that the system of one-man management was adopted as a permanent policy and declared to be the Soviet and socialist method of management (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/aug/27.htm). This was in direct contradiction to Lenin’s initial conception, adopted by the Bolshevik Party in the spring of 1918, of one-man management as a temporary measure necessary to combat the prevailing disorganization in production which prevailed at the start of the Civil War (c.f. his remarks in “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”). This adoption of the system of one-man management was eventually adopted as a general policy and labeled “socialist.” It was thus no longer considered an exceptional measure necessary only given the extremely difficult challenges the country faced in the Civil War. In this way the prevailing capitalist relations of production in management, which had only just begun to be transformed in the during the first few years of the New Economic Policy, instead of being struggled against by the revolutionary mobilization of the masses, were supported by the Party and declared to be socialist. Such a change can only occur with the growth in the strength of capitalist roaders in the party and the nascent state bourgeoisie which was then emerging in the USSR. These changes, along with others—such as the widening gap in compensation between the managers and workers and measures adopted against the discussion of politics on the shop floor—reinforced and deepened the division of mental and manual labor and thus paved the way for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. No amount of purges in the 1930s could reverse these developments. Contrast this approach of one-man management with the “three participations” approach promoted by Mao during the GPCR. ↩︎
10. To get more of a sense of the changes that took place in inner-Party debate after 1929 (and how debate over policy increasingly ceased to be conducted in the open and with the participation of the masses), it can be helpful to quote from E.H. Carr’s Foundations of a Planned Economy: Volume 1, “The spring of 1929 is a terminal landmark for the historian of the Soviet Union in another relevant sense. Down to that time, debates were conducted in the leading party organs on major issues of policy; and, though the free expression of opinions hostile to the party was increasingly restricted, the historian has no great difficulty in unraveling the issues at stake, in appreciating the arguments advanced on either side, or in knowing, by and large, who advanced them. Thus—almost suddenly—ceases to be true after the spring of 1929. Though we understand well enough the pressures which led to the decision at the end of that year to embark on the forced collectivization of agriculture, we know little of the discussions in the inner counsels of the party which must have preceded the decision, or of the view taken by any leading Soviet politician other than Stalin. Later, the fog becomes thicker still, and, in spite of a few piecemeal revelations, envelops all Society policy in the nineteen-thirties.” ↩︎
11. Later, it became necessary to launch a different kind of struggle under socialism, namely the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, to address the ideological issues in the Party and the broader society, given the fact that a section of leading Party members had consolidated to taking the capitalist road and were actively organizing for counter revolution. ↩︎
12. There were also influxes of feudal officials and even some patriotic landlords into the united front government. ↩︎
13. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way, p. 188-189. ↩︎
14. As noted in footnotes to Rectify the Party’s Style of Work: “Stereotyped writing, or the ‘eight-legged essay’, was the special form of essay prescribed in the imperial examinations under China’s feudal dynasties from the 15th to the 19th centuries; it consisted in juggling with words, concentrated only on form and was devoid of content. Structurally the main body of the essay had eight parts—presentation, amplification, preliminary exposition, initial argument, inceptive paragraphs, middle paragraphs, rear paragraphs and concluding paragraphs, and the fifth to eighth parts each had to have two ‘legs’, i.e., two antithetical paragraphs, hence the name ‘eight-legged essay’. The ‘eight-legged essay’ became a byword in China denoting stereotyped formalism and triteness. Thus ‘stereotyped Party writing’, characterizes the writings of certain people in the revolutionary ranks who piled up revolutionary phrases and terms higgledy-piggledy instead of analysing the facts. Like the ‘eight-legged essay’, their writings were nothing but verbiage.”
    This shows the degree to which the culture of the feudal intelligentsia still persisted in Chinese society and even in the Party itself. In On Practice, and in many of his other writings from this period, Mao notes the pernicious impact that this culture had on the Party’s work. An effective struggle against this trend in the broader society necessitated a unified understanding, within the Party itself, on the problems with feudal intellectual culture. This was a necessary precondition for a successful rectification. ↩︎
15. Ho Kan-Chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution, p. 377. ↩︎
16. In contrast, within the Red Army, idealist tendencies, especially with criticism, abounded in this period. This was tied to some ultra-democratic inclinations among the peasantry who made up the vast majority of the Red Army members. Mao noted, “Idealism is unusually strong among the Party members in the Red Army. It creates an extraordinary barrier to political analysis, the guidance of work, and Party organization, for idealistic political analysis and idealistic guidance of work—the results which necessarily follow—are not opportunism, but blindness. An idealistic spirit of criticism with the Party, wild talk unsupported by evidence, mutual fears and doubts, and their results, frequently bring about unprincipled and meaningless disorder and destroy the organization of the Party.” Mao, “In Opposition to Several Incorrect Tendencies Within the Party,” in Mao’s China: Party Reform Documents, 1942-1944, p. 244. 
    This book is a collection of the main documents used during the 1942 Rectification Campaign, and is essential to read to begun to understand the general lessons from this campaign. These include not only the strengths of the campaign (which were dominant) but also some of its weaknesses, including, for example, the promotion of Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yun’s writing on topics like training Party members, how to carry out struggle within the Party, and more. These document promoted a bourgeois line on these matters and tended to conflate democratic centralism with subservience to authority. ↩︎
17. This question is really as old as philosophy itself. For example, the early Greek philosopher Parmenides argued that “the same are both thinking and being.” However, this statement is ambiguous, while opposing a dualistic conception of reality, it leaves open the door to an idealistic understanding that fails to grasp the distinct nature of thought, which, while part of being, is also reflection of it. While post-moderns tend to deny any relationship between thinking and being (based on an often implicit Kantianism and a related rejection of adequation), other reactionary philosophers like Martin Heidegger have interpreted the axiom of identity of thought and being in an idealist fashion.
    Hence, the Marxist theory of knowledge is one of asymptotic reflection, as Engels explains in his March 12, 1895 letter to Conrad Schmidt (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_12.htm). Based on this fundamental stance of Marxist philosophy, Mao upheld the identity of thought and being, and opposed Yang Hsien-chen’s claim, in the latter’s 1958 article A Brief Discussion of Two Categories of “Identity” that it was “subjective idealism” to support the identity of thinking and being. Yang’s attack was not only on a key materialist thesis, but also on the political program of the Great Leap Forward itself. ↩︎
18. Mao, “Rectify Our Study Style, Party Style, and Writing Style,” published in Mao’s Road to Power: Volume VIII From Rectification to Coalition Government (1942-1945), p. 21-22. This document would later be updated, lightly revised, and publishes in Mao’s Collected Works as Rectify the Party’s Style of Work.
    That Mao was not quite satisfied with what he wrote in 1942 is indicated by his slightly different articulation in the 1963 document, Draft Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on Certain Problems in Our Present Rural Work (a paragraph of which was published separately as Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?) in which he states that correct ideas “come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.”
    It is extremely important to note that Mao distinguishes here between knowledge arising from the class struggle and that which is produced by means of scientific experiment. This should give pause to those who speak of “the science of revolution.” However, full elaboration of the questions raised by Mao’s formulation is outside of the scope of this article. ↩︎
19. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch02.htm ↩︎
20. “Remolding the Party’s Style of Work and Improving Its State of Organization,” in Mao’s China: Party Reform Document, 1942-1944, p. 273. This document was originally published as an editorial in People’s Daily, July 1, 1950. ↩︎
21. In particular, as a result of this Conference, we came to the decision for a number of comrades to work at UPS, in light of favorable conditions there, the importance of the Teamsters union, and the looming contract struggle in the summer of 2023. This line won out against a proposal that we focus our organizing efforts among non-unionized truckers; the latter line was largely a continuation of past unsystematic and sloppy approach we had previously taken in both proletarian workplaces and in the broader society. We wrote about the mistakes of this “go everywhere and do everything” line in MCU and the Working Class Movement. ↩︎
22. In addition to these bourgeois lines and commandist forms of leadership, his opposition to MLM manifested on the philosophical front. For example, functionally adopting a nominalist view, he opposed the idea that it was possible to abstract from a particular empirical thing and grasp the essence of it. Closely related to this was his rejection of the concept of fundamental contradiction; his explicit articulation was that there is no such thing as a fundamental contradiction but only principal contradictions. This led him into all sorts of philosophical confusions, and prevented him from grasping the correct handling of dialectical relationship between fundamental and principal contradiction, which Mao outlines so clearly in all of his political writings, and which separates Marxism from empiricism. This example shows the truth of what Lenin noted in his November 11, 1908 letter to Gorky, namely that if philosophical differences on fundamental matters are not resolved, they inevitably manifest in serious and even antagonistic political differences. The dominance of crypto-Kantian nominalism in academic and post-modern philosophy has exerted a tremendous negative influence on the U.S. intelligentsia, and much like the empirio-criticists, many would-be Marxists today absorb some of these anti-dialectical views. ↩︎
23. A notable instance of A’s grandiosity can be seen in his final message to MCU, in which he announced his resignation after being removed, by a unanimous decision of the rest of national leadership, from his position of leadership. He compared this to the 1976 coup in China (!) and called others in the organization to join him in leaving MCU. Despite this appeal, not a single cadre left MCU with him, given how he had discredited himself in the line struggles since the Conference. It is quite notable that a founding member and long-standing leader of our organization rage quit without anyone following him in his exodus. Unwilling to accept the political and ideological development of junior comrades in MCU (especially women comrades) he would later, in a typically patriarchal fashion, accuse them of simply being lackeys of one leading male comrade. ↩︎
24. It should be noted that the misleader, D, who engaged in sexual impropriety basically never internalized proletarian ideology to any significant extent. His position as a leader was a relic of our early development, where we had few people, lacked clarity on how to develop cadre into leaders, had a confused overall line, and had yet to break with some basic liberalisms internalized from bourgeois society. The other leader, A, who rage quit, played a dominantly positive role in the early development of Mass Proletariat and MCU, despite various shortcomings. However, as other cadre developed and internalized enough MLM to be able to debate him on matters of line, theory, and strategy, A degenerated. It became clear that if he could not personally dictate our organization’s political line, strategy, and tactics, he would not be involved. In the last year or so of his political involvement A barely did any political work, became increasingly angry and volatile, and tended more and more to use his status as a leader and founding member to deflect from any and all criticism. Unfortunately, the degeneration of communist leadership is not an uncommon phenomenon in the history of the International Communist Movement. In this particular case, this former comrade was ideologically opposed to our development from a looser circle into a more serious organization, especially as comrades began to criticize his own disorganization, unsystematic workstyle, commandism, and general laziness. A stood still while our organization advanced. ↩︎
25. A previous effort, in the summer of 2021, to carry on an organizational study of the CPUSA’s history in the 1920s and 30s was blocked by the two above mentioned misleaders, A and D. Instead of carrying out this study, they argued that it was more important for MCU to carry out a vague and ill-defined “anti-imperialist” work, largely among liberal “anti-war” organizations, but occasionally also involving sporadic and unsystematic efforts to “go among the masses” which generally amounted to one-off conversations or abortive flyering efforts in poor neighborhoods. This was an integral part of the “go everywhere and do everything” line that they promoted. Functionally, this served to stunt and even prevent the political and theoretical development of junior comrades who were all expected to do the leg work of multiple different fronts of work each week. ↩︎
26. For example, one leading comrade initially put forward that our work in the unions would have to begin locally in the shop floor and grow from this to national-level work. This incorrect line was based on mechanically applying the lessons from our previous efforts in organizing public housing, where we tried to build mass organizations from scratch, as no substantial mass organizations existed among tenants in most public housing developments, and did not account for the concrete difference between organizing in public housing and organizing in the working class movement. In the latter, the unions are broad and basic organizations of the class. What’s more, the advanced section of the working class has experience struggling, often for years, against both the capitalist class and the reactionary union leadership. Given the relatively small number of advanced workers and the fact that they are scattered across the country, it was of principal importance that we united these elements around a correct line for the UPS contract struggle so as to be able to then win over the broader mass of intermediate workers, including in our comrades’ workplaces. As we summed up our early experiences in the UPS struggle, we realized that this line of growing from local to national work was incorrect, and adjusted our approach accordingly. ↩︎
27. In the split with the Jarvis-Bergman section (which would become Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and later FRSO), the RCP was correct to argue that there had been a coup and counter-revolution in China in 1976. However, in their criticism of some of the economism of the Jarvis-Bergman section, the RCP abandoned fundamental principles of Marxism and revised the lessons Lenin wrote about in What is to Be Done? In particular, they functionally argued that the participation of communists in any economic struggle of the class amounted to economism (rather than understanding economism, as Lenin does, as a particular pernicious and dangerous deviation that can crop up within revolutionary work in the trade unions and which has its philosophical roots in economic determinism and bowing to spontaneity). This backwards view, along with a series of related arguments, was used to justify their full-scale withdrawal from organizing in the unions (c.f. “Some Notes on the Study of What is to Be Done? and its implications for the Struggle Today” in the May, 1979 issue of the RCP’s theoretical journal The Communist). Given the role that some ex-RCPers (who either left or were expelled from the RCP in the late 1970s and early 1980s) had in our earlier development as Mass Proletariat and MCU (a role that was overall positive and extremely helpful) we internalized some aspects of the RCP’s incorrect line on economism and their related rejection of communist work in the unions. Gaining clarity on the secondary confusions we had inherited from these ex-RCPers was essential to our advances as an organization. While these older comrades taught us a tremendous amount, including about the RCP’s mistakes and degeneration, it was inevitable that they would also pass along some of their own confusions. ↩︎
28. At the time we had no social media presence and no public facing work that could demonstrate the correctness of our line in practice. This was due to an incorrect secrecy policy and a sectarian approach to the broader U.S. left, and approach which left us isolated and without significant influence. We began to rectify these mistakes in 2023, but it took some time to more fully resolve them. ↩︎
29. One cadre, then in a position of national leadership, justified his refusal to carry out collective decisions or even meet with comrades to talk about his disagreements by saying “we all break democratic centralism sometimes, what’s the big deal?” This comment belied not only his disagreements with democratic centralism, but also his conflation of democratic centralism with organizational discipline. ↩︎
30. It is essential that all communist familiarize themselves with the struggle that led to the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back provides incredible insights not only into the key disagreements in principle between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, he also explains many fundamental principles for proletarian parties. ↩︎
31. As was noted in the document, “Reading On Practice and On Contradiction as well as some of Anti-Dühring is a good start for comrades, but if this is all that comrades have read, it is far from sufficient. In contrast, consider the volume of material that would be covered in a Philosophy 101 course in college; this shows how far many comrades are from having even a survey-course-level understanding of Marxist philosophy.” ↩︎