Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.
Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.
People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well--they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.
Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.
Due to living in the heart of liberalism in the imperial core, i feel like we all with have that bias towards liberalism or may use it as a step towards Marxism. I know I still have some tendencies of it, but how does one be a 100% communist in the US?
Yeah reading the writings of people like Mao or Lenin who actually did a communist revolution really exposes me as a liberal.
The passage was written during a time when there was a massive number of armed communists ready to go to a civil war with China and a liberation war against Japan, so it may not apply to the United States. For me the passage spoke to how actual movements and organizations like the DSA and Black Lives Matter got completely destroyed by liberalism, though.
Anyways, the piece is called "Combat Liberalism" and Mao does a Jeff Foxworthy "you just might be a liberal" list in it. It's tricky because it basically boils down to being principled, disciplined, and open about Marxism but holy shit if I was open about being a ML my career would be over. I suppose you can still speak about Marxism and just not call it Marxism, since most people would agree with what he says. Keep in mind though that Mao isn't gospel and he says some very iffy things (e.g you probably shouldn't torch every friendship you have because you won't stop debunking their liberal arguments), I'm not a Maoist and he explicitly says that people are going to improve on his work.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm
I personally take his notions of debunking liberal arguments as being within the context of the party. There are plenty of organizers who demonstrate the types of liberalism Mao describes and it's 100% necessary to eliminate that kind of thinking from the socialist project
I haven’t gotten into Mao yet personally. I’m still trying to learn more into ML before I move on to anything else, so I at least have the basics covered. But everything you said and what I have seen about him so far seems obviously based af and makes sense.
I read this and think of all the societal woes that have manifest because if the atomization resulting from the marriage of technology and neoliberalism. A myriad of tools to show off your status symbol consumerism but a dearth for organization in pursuit of solidarity.
