How Do We Find the Masses?

In previous revolutions, building a Mass-based movement was in some ways a much more difficult task. While the tools our Bourgeoisie opponents have at their hand are enormously more complex, and present a more technically demanding challenge to overcome, in other ways Capitalism has simplified our task enormously.

Contrary to how the Leftists see matters, the masses are not defined by their social relationships. While the Masses are opressed, they are not opressed because they are Christian, or transgendered, patriotic, or indigenous; they are opressed economically. They are the Masses because they are the economically exploited not the exploiters, and in our society today that means they are Proletarians. The Masses are defined by this, even while different Class elements within the masses are differentiated and defined by the specific mechanisms and relationships through which they are exploited. This is what leads the Settler Proletariat to be part of the Masses, even though some aspects of class division remain within the Colonial relationship.

Previous Revolutions had to contend with significant populations of non-Proletarians existing as part of the Masses. The Peasantry were the majority of society in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions; sharecroppers, whom are closely related to the Feudal Serf, formed sizable contingents in the Cuban Revolution. In the United States, it was also the case that until the late 2000’s, there was a sizable portion of Labor Aristocrats who benefited more from Imperialism and Colonialism than Capitalism exploited from their labor. Whether or not we had found the masses was an important question; it was an easy enough mistake to find workers and assume their interests were necessarily the interests of the Masses.

However Capitalism has shown itself to be the decisive power and forced aside all other forms of exploitation, and even within the Imperial Core it has done away with the Peasant, the Settler, and the Slave and turned all of them into the Proletariat. This doesn't mean that Colonialism, the history of Slavery, and the individual small producers don't still exist, and that we don't need to account for them. What this means is simply that to find the Masses, we have to find the Proletariat.

However we can also exist within the Masses and still fail to see them. Its quite easy to literally lose the forest behind all the trees. In my life, I’ve found the Masses twice. First when I was still a Liberal, and working in kitchens, I fundamentally misunderstood them. While all service-industry workers are undeniably Proletarians, I didn’t understand Class at the time and saw it through a Liberal social-economic, and individualistic perspective; while Class Relations exist within every work place, they exist only on the scale of small groups, and not entire societies. Despite the fact that cooks and servers have different relationships to the production they are engaged in, this is inconsequential in the overall picture. How specifically their wages are calculated and paid is irrelevant in the face of the relationship between the Capitalist and the Worker that both cooks and servers exist under.

My mistake at the time was thinking that the individual experience of these relationships mattered more than the objective analysis of those relationships. I believed that personal, subjective relationships mattered more than economic ones in the workplace. I believed that the individual experience of ethnographic culture mattered more than the economic relationships that imposed themselves on every people and nation, and loomed over every other factor in our lives. I had found the Masses, but I couldn’t see them because all I saw were a collection of individual people, and not the common aspects uniting them together. I couldn’t see how they collectively formed the Masses.

The second time I found the Masses, I found them in a dying Labor Aristocracy as rank and file members struggle with their own unions that had come to exploit them. This shows me that the Masses are almost everywhere in our society. There is almost no place that doesn’t shelter them and nurture their instinctive opposition to Imperialism. The question of if we have found the Masses is in some ways much less relevant today. Much more important is whether we actually center our practices in the Masses, or if we try to bring a niche-based political line to the Masses, and try to cajole them into supporting us for our own purposes, as the Tailists have done.

Even the elements of the Marxist sphere that are actively working to support Imperialism have to reach out to the same people we do, and they will never build a mass-movment, for the same reason ours will succeed. Gaining the support of the Masses means centering our practices on them; we have to support them as they exist in their entirety. The Masses don't exist online, within Leftists or Rightist circles, or within any Party. The Masses have no one ideology unto itself, no one political tendency, or character. They are almost exclusively Proletarian, and they exist everywhere, and we must fight for them everywhere. As Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done? “The Communists must send detachments of their army in all directions”.

But what does this mean in practical terms? It means that wherever we find Proletarians, people exploited under a Wage Labor relationship, we need to make practical steps to solving the problems that are holding them back. Where they are disengaged and alienated, we need to connect with them as individuals, work to brighten their lives, and help them to find meaning in our society again. Where they are angry at the wrong people, we need to validate the anger they feel at the collapse of their society and standards of living, and calmly illustrate how the Imperialists are responsible. Where they are afraid to take risks because of what they might lose, we have to take risks ourselves, and show them that the only way they will prosper is by joining together and figting for their collective interests.

We will have to make sacrifices. The relationships that are necessary for us to build as Communists may take us away from our family and friends. We will find it necessary to support our own operations at times, and will have to learn to do with less, so that we can give the Masses more. The people are not stupid, nor easily fooled, and when put out in the open, its obvious to them who is fighting in their own personal interests, and who is fighting for the interests of others. We are approaching a stage in our struggle where we will find it necessary to live under what are effectively wartime conditions, and actually live as Communists rather than Liberals; this is what will bring the Masses to us in a way that guarantees us victory.

The Right-Opportunists who have taken over the PCUSA have exposed this mistake within our ranks, and not only given us the opportunity, but made it necessary to correct our mistakes in that regard. We cannot afford to merely talk to the whole Masses, we have to join with them and fight alongside them; all of them. The Bolshevik party was forged and strengthened in its struggles against the Opportunists on both sides prior to the first Revolution, and our Parties and Organizations will only be strengthed by these Imperialist attacks against us just as steel is forged beneath the hammer. Overcoming these challenges will shape us into exactly what is demanded by the Class Struggle, but we have to press ahead and discipline ourselves to act whenever there is opportunity. Our movement is growing stronger but is still young, and it will have to fight hard to build itself up to where it's truly stong.

By joining with the Masses, we will cross a threshold where we are infinitely harder to defeat, and no singular setback can interupt our progress. But we can only do this by applying our Dialectical method to the conditions we find within the Masses themselves; we can only do this by learning what their role in our Struggle will be, but we cannot dictate it for them.