The Masses Are Not Wrong, You Are: Against Petit-Bourgeois Childishness, Commandism, and Reasons Why the White Left Fails. BRG Follow Nov 12, 2017 · 5 min read

The makers of history

The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant, and without this understanding, it is impossible to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge. — Mao Zedong, “Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys” In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly. — “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”

I can’t stress the importance of casting away one’s own subjective views and integrating deeply into the masses enough. “I have lost my faith in humanity”. “I hate people.” “Fuck the people.” Everything, including the words that come from our mouth, have a definite class origin and nature. These views and the funk that go along with them are petit-bourgeois in origin and nature. Because the masses reject incorrect strategies, tactics, and lines, the petit-bourgeois activists gets disoriented, angry and upset. They oftentimes turn to drug and alcohol abuse, nihilism, and other things which are detrimental to the development of the mass movement and unbecoming of revolutionaries. Reality is reality regardless of whether you want it to be so or not. If your strategies, tactics, and views run counter to reality, they will be rejected. Why do the masses not pick up weapons immediately and begin killing the police? What reason have they? Waging armed struggle is not something that is done lightly, you win or you die. Landless peasants, lumpenproletarians with nothing to lose, and those who can’t turn an inch without seeing a pig ready to kill them for being black, poor and queer, those are who are most apt to wage an armed struggle. That’s your focus. People who make $15–$20 an hour, have SUVs and riding lawnmowers don’t pick up rifles and start killing pigs. If that’s who you’re relying on for your Communists and your people’s war, you’ll wait until you’re dead. As long as the average white American can go to the store and fill their refrigerator and they think that they can vote some fellow settler into office, there will be no armed struggle in this country that will involve masses of people, at least white people. That’s cool, most white people ain’t shit anyways and never have been. They’ll either become red because they realize their day is done and consciously decide to stand on the right side, like John Brown did, or be swept into the dustbin of history because they pick up weapons to destroy us. The universe will go on. Who needs them? What benefit does allowing tens of millions of white people to continue to eat up the world’s resources and make counterrevolution serve? To keep them around is no gain, to lose them is no loss. Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Donald Trump, and the weed whacker are not that important to me. The first thing is to stop worrying so much about white people and what they think or want. Black people don’t give a fuck about them. Do they give a fuck about us? When have they once picked up rifles, en masse, in our defense? What are they doing to stop the pigs from killing us? Never and nothing. The South Africans didn’t worry about Boers, the Palestinians aren’t worrying about Israelis, the Zimbabweans didn’t worry about the white Rhodesians, and anybody in a settler colonial country that actually spends most of their time arguing for, defending, or trying to rehabilitate the white masses should and will be hanged alongside them as counterrevolutionary elements andabettors of settler-colonialism, genocide, and imperialism. The only role for a white person is to consciously betray and accept the leadership of the oppressed. If you do not do this, you are a counterrevolutionary.

The masses I’m talking about are the black and brown masses, particularly the lumpenproletariat and the semi-lumpenproletariat. The unemployed, the semi-employed, migrant workers, those who are homeless or semi-homeless. Former prisoners. Current prisoners. These are who, if you are revolutionary, your focus should be on. These people aren’t voting, or engaging in whatever little legalism or reformist struggle you’ve cooked up. They also don’t care about your dogmatism, your books, your “this and that is reactionary because so and so said such and such”. They’re trying to figure out how to eat and if you come to them with some bullshit they’ll rightfully punch you in the throat, as they should. The lumpenproletariat and semi-lumpenproletariat are to modern day America what the peasantry were to the Chinese. The moving force, but not the leading. That role still belongs to the advanced detachment of the proletariat and their Communist Party. The lumpen must be disciplined and proletarianized, and the proletariat must (and in oppressed communities for the most part are, through familial and other ties) be united with the lumpen and lead them.

Back to faith in humanity. When you carry erroneous lines to the masses who are more advanced than you, you will lose. When you lose, you study, reorient yourself, and do better. When we use the mass line, if our line is rejected, you think about it, consult the masses again, and fix your shit. If you carry some white apologetic shit to black temp workers, you’ll be laughed at. If you carry some voting shit to people who don’t vote, you’ll get 21% turnout. If you carry some Zionist shit to Palestinians, you’ll be hurt. If you say “we love the cops in the ghetto”, you’ll be run out. The masses are not stupid, they are the makers of history. You are childish and ignorant for carrying erroneous lines to them, not consulting them beforehand to see what they wanted, and then pouting and crying and drinking when you lose and they do not mobilize. If they don’t trust you, they gon’ shoot you.