2 | Worker-Community Organizations and the Duty of Cadres

 

In Tasks of the Revolutionary Socialist Movement, we have laid out the fundamental tactic of the worker-community organizations for our cadres in their local work. To summarize the points made there, the worker-community organization is our immediate front in the class struggle; it is there where the first decisive battles will take place. We work in the worker-community organizations for a two-fold purpose: to fight for the welfare of working class people and to inspire the masses to organized struggle against the interests of capital.

 

This two-fold purpose is intertwined. How could we rouse the masses to action without first understanding their situation? How can we affect without first engaging?

 

We must make it known that our tactical pedagogy cannot be limited to our students who have already come to fight on the side of the working classes. More importantly, we must address those who have not yet achieved this consciousness. Our cadres must teach the masses of their role in the class struggle during all interactions; this is one of the main objectives of the local cadre at all times.

 

Despite our knowledge of the objective processes of history, we cannot know all the nuances of the subjective experiences of the masses and how these experiences affect the class struggle as it occurs. The masses have learned much in their struggles, but their knowledge is confused and muddled by bourgeois ideology.

 

It is our duty to learn from the masses their own situation while simultaneously tearing away the façade built by and through bourgeois ideology. The knowledge of the masses in its crudest form is invaluable to us and our pedagogical practice and only becomes more so after an initial revolutionary transformation. Thus, our cadres must become teacher-learners in congruence with the masses in order for us to begin the journey towards achieving victory.

 

What Do the Masses Know?

 

In another essay, I said that intellectualism can be as dangerous as populism. Here, we should emphasize the opposite: populism can be just as dangerous as intellectualism. It is too easy for us when emphasizing the importance of the mass perspective to lose ourselves in the immediate situation of the class struggle. We lose sight of our overall objectives and fall back on certain demands when just yesterday we said that those demands were only a small part of our program. We sometimes become so enamored with the masses that we forget the historical role they must come to fulfill for their liberation.

 

The fact of the matter is that the masses know the situation as it appears, but they do not know the situation as it relates to all others, how the particular relates to the general. The masses lack the proper understanding of history; they lack the science of Marxism-Leninism. Here is where our organization finds its daunting task: How can we take the raw experience of the masses and rework it into the useful knowledge of a revolutionary class?

 

The first step in answering this question is understanding that the social processes of capitalism are hidden from the plain view of its actors. It is for this reason that we needed a Marx, an Engels, and a Lenin; it is for this reason that Althusser emphasized theoretical practice. We cannot fall back on the spontaneous practice of the masses and assume that the result will be genuinely revolutionary.

 

Remember: teacher-learners. We are not suggesting that we simply take the subjective experience of the masses and empirical data as is and call their synthesis theoretical knowledge. What we are saying is that before we can begin the theoretical practice to uncover theoretical knowledge, we must first look at the social practices of the masses at they are. Obvious forms of knowledge must be present before specific knowledge can be revealed. The biological sciences could not announce the existence of the cell before studying the muscle as it seemed. Likewise, Marx could not have laid out the laws of capitalism without first studying capitalism as it appeared. Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England naturally preceded Marx’s Capital.

We must first study the particular to understand the general so that we may return again to affect the particular. To ignore the situation of the masses as they understand it and simply shout slogans at and propagandize among them makes us nothing but preachers.

 

Teachers often give a pretest in the beginning of a course, and of course, the purpose of such is to measure the understandings of the students so as to avoid teaching concepts the students have already mastered or that the students are not yet ready to learn. In a manner, this is what we must do.

 

We must meet the masses halfway only so that we may build upon what they know now and pull them up to where they must be, so to speak. In effect, this means we must struggle alongside the masses for the realization of their immediate economic demands and  in the process show the masses that the reasons these demands must be made in the first place is the current mode and relations of production.

 

In short, it is necessary for us to have a clear picture of what the masses know and what the masses do with this knowledge to be able to genuinely teach them of their revolutionary role in history. By first knowing what the masses know, in all of its vulgarity, we can begin the process of getting to where we must be from where we are. Over time, the masses’ knowledge becomes all the more invaluable as we, the cadres and the masses together, in dialogue, interpret and transform it through Marxist-Leninist science. The effective teacher does not begin her lectures saying, “This is where you should be.” Rather, she says, “This is where we are, this is where we will be, and this is how we will get there. Do you have any questions?” We must do the same.

 

How Should We Teach the Masses?

 

Let’s return then to the original question of how we progress from the experience and knowledge of the masses to the theoretical knowledge necessary for the victory of the revolutionary class struggle.

 

We have said many times that we must struggle alongside the working class for their immediate economic demands, but why is it that we emphasize this point so often when our objective is education? Because, we answer, the ideological struggle is so intertwined with the economic struggle.

 

The very first lesson we must teach-learn concerns the mass perspective in the class struggle and history. The masses are concerned too much with the individual, no matter whether these individuals are leaders, capitalist “innovators”, celebrities, and on and on. The masses see the individual as the means by which history progresses; this bourgeois ideology must be combated.

For example, without first teasing out the answer, we would often hear of the critical importance of the American founding fathers in the War of Independence, but we must strain ourselves to hear anything of the soldiers themselves, the craftspeople, the farm workers, the women, the slaves, in short, the masses, who labored (or were forced to labor) to ensure the overthrow of colonial rule. To the victim of bourgeois ideology, history seems to be carried on the shoulders of great persons while the masses are merely along for the ride.

 

We know this is not the case. History rests on the backs of the masses, and the masses alone can bring us forward. This is not to say that leaders do not play an important role in history but that leaders are only worth the masses that prop them up.

 

So, how does this all relate to the worker-community organizations and our tactical pedagogy? Precisely, the revolutionary potential of such organizations lies in our method of building and operating. The fact of the matter is that only by being intimately and genuinely concerned with the welfare of the working classes can we open the opportunity to import Marxist-Leninist theory into the masses and displace bourgeois ideology. The worker-community organizations, by being mobilizations of the masses for the realization of their interests, are inherently bound up with the mass perspective, which is itself a necessary preceding step towards overcoming bourgeois ideology.

 

Through these seemingly minor battles against bourgeois ideology, we pave the way towards the eventual political organization of the working classes into the mass revolutionary party.

 

To clarify one last time, by first struggling alongside the working classes for the realization of their economic demands, we gain the opportunity to prove that Marxism-Leninism serves the people’s interests. Further, by achieving these economic demands, we call bourgeois ideologies themselves into question, which allows us the opportunity to engage the masses with dialogical, revolutionary education.

 

It is only through learning our own history as a movement along with the needs of the masses that can we begin to teach effectively. This is the significance of being a teacher-learner.