On the weapon of exposure, the role of all-around agitation, and prioritizing recruitment
By OCR Leadership
December 2023
In the section “Strategy for Revolution in the US” of the Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries, we outline a multifaceted approach for building the subjective forces for revolution. Building mass organizations under our leadership is presented as a “crucial starting point” in that process, and our Manifesto lays out a communist approach to building such mass organizations. The emphasis our Manifesto gives to mass organizations was an important correction to the line and practice of recent revolutionary organizations in the US. The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had no clear strategic doctrine on building mass organizations, though it certainly did important work mobilizing the masses in struggle and building organizations to serve that struggle.1 The most well-known revolutionary organizations of the Sixties, such as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, were generally characterized by a combination of revolutionary agitation and bold and badass revolutionary heroism, on the one hand, and social programs aimed at meeting the immediate needs of the masses, on the other, lacking a clear concept and practice of building mass organizations waging class struggle under their leadership. It is not since the 1930s, when the Communist Party (CP) had several impressive and large mass organizations of proletarians under its leadership, that revolutionaries in the US have had a clear plan and practice for building mass organizations.
With that problem in mind, the OCR has attached great importance to figuring out how to build communist-led mass organizations in the US and gained some initial experience doing so, as reflected in our manual Refining Our Mass Organizing Methods. Since publishing our Manifesto in Spring 2020, based on our own practice and on writing our summation of the CP, the Sixties, and the RCP (published as kites #8), we have deepened our understanding of the various organizational forms, including but not limited to mass organizations, involved in building the subjective force for revolution. A more multifaceted and clearly defined approach to organizational forms than what is articulated in our Manifesto is now available in our manual on organization, All Roads Lead to Revolution. This theoretical work and summation of practice has led us to recognize that the way mass organizations are emphasized in our Manifesto is a bit of an over-correction that risks downplaying the role of all-around agitation, the weapon of exposure, and the centrality of recruitment into the OCR in building the subjective forces for revolution.2
While we quickly followed our Manifesto with the publication of our manual Drawing Blood: A Guide to Communist Agitation, the weapon of exposure is downplayed in our Manifesto, and this weakness has led to our new recruits not fully appreciating the power of this weapon and not taking enough initiative to wield it. Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902) articulates the central role of exposure in developing proletarian class consciousness by enabling the masses to understand how the capitalist-imperialist system is the source of their exploitation and oppression and leading them to revolutionary conclusions. OCR comrades should be sure to wield the weapon of exposure both among the masses we are seeking to mobilize in class struggle and bring under our leadership, and more broadly in society, and not underestimate its effects even when it does not result in immediate mobilization of the masses in class struggle.
Agitation—spoken, written, and visual—is a key form through which we communists do exposure, and also call the masses to action and argue for the need for revolution. The word “agitation” appears only once in our Manifesto, and is presented as something communists do “[w]ithin and around mass organizations and struggles.” Our comrades have been carrying out plenty of agitation, we wrote a manual on how to do it, and the journal kites has been strong at arguing for the importance of agitation in the revolutionary process. But our Manifesto makes the mistake of, in effect, subordinating agitation to mass organizations and mass struggles. We certainly should conduct agitation “[w]ithin and around mass organizations and struggles.” But the role of communist agitation extends beyond that realm, into society more broadly, as a way to reach the masses whether or not they are connected to mass organizations and active in struggle, and as a means to find advanced masses throughout society, not just where we are engaged in a mass organizing effort.
Our organization needs to conduct all-around agitation for revolution. This is taking shape, and will need to continue at a higher level, in different forms, sometimes focused on particular political questions and other times more generally projecting our full revolutionary politics, i.e., agitating directly for revolution. For the most part, our new recruits have considerable experience with the former but not enough with the latter. Both to give our cadre and the advanced under our leadership that experience, and as a means to find and recruit advanced masses outside the focuses of our organizing efforts, we need to give greater emphasis to revolutionary agitation in our work, assigning comrades and people under our leadership to the task and designating places to carry out this agitation among the proletariat.
For younger comrades, there is a dearth of recent positive examples of revolutionary agitation and wielding the weapon of exposure in the US. We should certainly look back to the RCP’s Revolutionary Worker newspaper, the Black Panther newspaper, and the Young Lords’ Palante, but the style, lingo, and forms of agitation cannot be yesterday’s blues (to make an analogy to Amiri Baraka’s critique of certain white jazz musicians). One mistake we should not repeat is that of aimless agitation that characterized much of the RCP’s practice, where, too often, agitation and newspaper distribution was not part of a strategic plan geared towards making concrete advances in building organization among the masses and recruiting the most advanced among them as communist cadre. Our all-around agitation among the broad masses should be tied to clear strategic plans aimed not just at broad influence, but at planting a red flag at specific sites of concentration of our class, and finding masses who are attracted to revolutionary politics and turning them into organized ties or, better yet, recruiting them into the OCR. To that end, comrades carrying out all-around agitation for revolution will need to be pit bull about following up with the advanced masses they meet and strategically astute in figuring out how to involve those masses in our work (in contrast to our mass organizing efforts, where there are ready-made ways to involve the masses). Our goal should be nothing short of developing OCR units among the proletariat through our work of all-around agitation for revolution.
This last point brings us to our final modification to the “Strategy for Revolution in the US” section of our Manifesto: while training the advanced as communists and recruiting them into the OCR is a thread throughout this section, and it correctly emphasizes that “the proletariat first and foremost needs a communist vanguard party,” the task of recruitment does not receive enough attention as a task in its own right. As it stands in our Manifesto, it could be perceived as an afterthought, something we tack onto our other tasks, rather than the central component to building the subjective forces for revolution. Indeed, at this stage in our development, recruiting people into the OCR is the key link in advancing all our other tasks, so it must be our central priority. Given the great difficulty of recruiting communist cadre in the US right now—initial recruits into communist organizations tend to come from people in their twenties involved in political struggle, and at present such people in the US are inundated and indoctrinated with Leftist and postmodernist politics—we will have to work overtime to recruit.
Perhaps we will develop a manual on recruitment in the future, but for now a few words on this question are in order. (1) We should avoid the tendency to see “going to the masses” as solving all ideological problems in potential recruits. We must recognize what Zhang Chunqiao called the “dynamic role of theory” within ideology: how studying and struggling over articulations of communist politics, most especially at this point and in this country OCR documents and the journal kites, can transform the advanced into communists, in combination with political work among the masses. (2) OCR units and members should make definite plans for how to recruit anyone with the potential to become a communist, and not let the pull of immediate events and other tasks that are more pressing in the short-term get in the way of those plans. (3) We will have to master the art of ideological struggle, of recognizing the ways that bourgeois ideology, habit, and lifestyle hold people back from making the leap to becoming a communist and finding the ways to enable them to cast off their (petty-)bourgeois baggage—to voluntarily subordinate themselves to revolution and the masses. (4) In line with Lenin’s point that “communism springs from all pores of society,” we should avoid narrowing the scope of potential recruits to those people directly engaged in political work under our leadership. We should actively pursue individuals who are not now under our leadership but who have shown some revolutionary potential. We will need to step to such people with a serious challenge, and approach them with our full revolutionary politics more or less from the jump. This is obviously a difficult proposition given that the heap of garbage that is the Left muddies such individuals and obscures them from view, and poses security issues to approaching them, so we will have be diligent in various ways to translate Lenin’s dictum that “communism springs from all pores of society” to recruitment. The bottom line is that if we expect recruitment to unfold through a linear process wherein the small number of cadre we have focus on building mass organizations of proletarians and then gradually recruit a few people from them, we are never going to make the necessary quantitative leap towards forming a vanguard party.
The above corrections and modifications to our Manifesto articulate what we have learned over the last several years from our practice, from studying the history of our communist tradition, and from our comrades in Canada. These and other developments in our strategic thinking are coming out in a series of manuals aimed at training up a new generation of communists in the art and science of making revolution. At the risk of shoehorning in the one manual we have not yet mentioned, this exercise in “correcting an over-correction” was also an expression of carrying out what is articulated in Looking Back to Face Forward, our manual on summation. If we are to rise to the challenge of figuring out how to make revolution in the most powerful empire in human history, we will need nothing short of a ruthlessly critical attitude towards our practice and our political line—a fearless approach to confronting our mistakes and a confidence in moving forward from them.
1There have been various critiques of the RCP over the years claiming that it did not practice the mass line or carry out mass work. These critiques have all advocated tailing the masses in opposition to Mao’s concept of the mass line, and the people making them have all fallen miserably short of what the RCP accomplished in mobilizing the masses in struggle.
2The role of propaganda in the revolutionary process is underdeveloped in our Manifesto, somewhat purposely because our practice at being propagandists is underdeveloped and remedying that weakness was not then a pressing practical concern. Developing doctrine on producing propaganda and being propagandists is certainly a necessary task we must take up, perhaps with a training manual devoted to the question, but more as part of the overall process of fleshing out and developing the strategy put forward in our Manifesto than as a correction to a political error within it.
kites-journal.org 