RW #589, January 20, 1991

Making Revolution--and Keeping on Making Revolution

by Bob Avakian

In the last article I wrote in this series I spoke to a big problem--that for thousands of years the oppressed have risen up but, even when they have overthrown the old rulers, they have just gotten new oppressors ruling over them. And sometimes these new oppressors have been leaders of the people themselves who have "sold out" or have misused the people's struggle to get themselves into positions of power over the people. But I also pointed out that, in this time in history, there is something radically different --something that makes all the difference--there is a class of people, the proletariat, that can lead the struggle all the way to complete liberation. And there is an ideology that represents this proletarian class and that can guide it in carrying out this historic struggle, worldwide. That ideology is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. (See "Fighting for Complete Liberation--Not To Get New Oppressors," January 6, 1991)

Still, there is another big problem that is bound to come to mind for anyone who thinks seriously about the question of revolution. The problem is this: even where there have been proletarian revolutions, even where the oppressed people have been led by a proletarian vanguard--such as in China (and in Russia before that), even there the revolutions have been "sold out" after a while and the people have once more been brought under the domination of new exploiters and oppressors. Only now these new exploiters and oppressors speak in the name of "communism"! Historical experience has shown that this is a big problem, a profound problem, indeed.

But historical experience also shows something even greater and more profound. It shows that the ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the guide in understanding and dealing with this very problem itself. This ideology makes it possible to tell the difference between real communism and phony communism. It gives us the means and methods for making revolution to seize power and then to continue the revolution--to go forward on the road of communism and to combat those counterfeit "communists" who are really trying to drag things back onto the road of capitalism.

This is something we (our Party and the Maoist movement internationally) are dealing with straight-up. It is a crucial point spoken to, in a concentrated way, in the document adopted by our Party's Central Committee in 1988, on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and in the New Programme and New Constitution of our Party (and it is also spoken to in the Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, RIM). It is something I have repeatedly come back to and grappled with from many different angles (for example, in the talks published in the latest Revolution magazine as well as in the book Mao Tsetung's Immortal Contributions and in other writings and talks). But more than that, all this is something that everyone who is really down for radically changing the world must get deeply off into.

And that gets down to the most important point of all: The liberation of the proletariat, the liberation of the oppressed masses, must be and will be won by the masses themselves. Yes, we need leadership, yes we need organization, and above all we need ideology that can lead us in winning all-the-way liberation. And we have that--we have the RCP,USA, we have the RIM, and we have the ideology of MLM, representing the revolutionary proletariat, worldwide. But in order for the leadership itself to stay fresh and remain revolutionary, and in order for our ideology to be expressed as a powerful force capable of overthrowing the power of the old system and then moving on to uproot all exploitation and oppression, the oppressed themselves, in ever greater numbers, must join the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat and its vanguard. They must take up its all-conquering ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

When our Party's Central Committee adopted its document on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it called attention to these words from Karl Marx, the founder of the international communist movement:

Communism, said Marx, "is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally, to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social relations."

In other words, if we want to rid ourselves, and the world, of all exploitation and oppression, we have to make revolution and seize power and then keep on making revolution until we have revolutionized away all systems, all relations, all institutions, and all ideas that would hold back that revolution, or stop it half-way.

Now that is something really worth getting deep off into and really being down for--in theory and in practice.