Because it is precisely set up to serve business, be that slaveowners or cotton processing plants, it does not make room in itself for "the people." These large and powerful will never, under any condition, just hand over their power to the masses by constitutional amendment. Term limits don't stop people like GW from being real tyrants. Adolf, like GW, was elected. A multi-party system has in neither case prevented this. In fact, each party represents certain class forces that are contending for power and control of society. Democrats represent one section of the ruling class and the republicans represent another section. When their class interest as a whole comes under attack, these two parties tend to work together quite visibly as we have seen since 9.11...

Having multiple parties shows that there are multiple classes, so under socialism will there be multiple parties and is it desirable? I don't see it as desirable to hand to the defeated oppressors a means to legally contend to take back control of society before the rev is even consolidated. It's like handing your enemy a loaded gun, ya know?

Agree with emphasis on winning allies, with seeing education as persuasion, renounce violence except against diehards. The programme should make clearer that violence should only be used within the boundaries of socialist law, e.g. by using fair, consistent and uniform standards and not indiscriminately....

Page 38 paragraph on Democratic Centralism

The dictatorship of the proletariat should ensure that the "smallest" person can challenge and remove leadership. The leaders including the chairman should be humbled to the rank and file. Feel strongly that there should be an explicit guarantee that every person, masses and party members, can have direct access to the leadership up to the highest level, a right for cadre to go to the highest level of leadership and if issue not resolved, should guarantee right to have face-to-face meeting.

When the dictatorship of the proletariat has come to exist, the people will certainly have the right to freedom of speech assembly etc.... the oppressors from the old society, white supremacists and other reactionary criminals will not have these rights. The proletariat will exercise democracy amongst themselves and dictatorship over the reactionary classes to prevent their re-asserting their power.

as for the idea that we can "skip" socialism, this is a pipe dream. the walls that have been built by the capitalists inside our own hearts and minds will not die without a massive struggle, we have to be practical here. the solution to the worker's problems is not the expansion of our bourgeois-democratic individual "rights" but building a new society on the new proletarian way.

as for the reactionaries who want to spit poison.. fuck em! the right to try to fool and hoodwink the masses isn't a right, it's a privilege the reactionaries will want and the masses should never give.

Why was socialism in Russia and China defeated if the masses are makers of history? I totally agree with RedRev that this "is absolutely crucial in dealing with the whole new generation of rebels." And while I don't think it's accurate to say the coup in China was a "palace coup with the masses as mere spectators", it is the case that these coups were carried out by top leaders within the Communist Parties.

What's the fundamental problem? The fact is that the underlying factors/conditions that mean the Party can turn into a ruling elite over the masses are the very SAME factors/conditions that make the Party necessary to begin with. The appendix on "The Party under Socialism, and the Transition to Communism" deals with this contradiction...

We can't do without a vanguard if we are serious about making revolution. And the role of the Party/organized leadership becomes even more important under socialism if we confront that the proletariat "will face the immense challenge of defending the socialist state, building a new and radically different economic, social, and political system, continuing the struggle to transform society, supporting and assisting revolutionary struggles throughout the world--AND correctly handling the very real and often acute contradictions involved in all this."

The whole period of socialism is a transition to communism--the end of classes and class distinctions and all the oppressive social divisions and along with all that, "the end of any need for specialized, institutionalized leadership."

The huge challenge that confronts the proletariat in power--to both defeat attacks by remaining imperialist and reactionary states, and to overcome the remaining differences and inequalities, such as between mental and manual labor--can't be done all at once or instantly.

The solution to this fundamental problem isn't to eliminate the Party (and the state) under socialism, which would mean eliminating the revolution and the goal of communism. The solution is to continue the revolution under socialism--to continually fight to thoroughly revolutionize every aspect/sphere of society and the Party itself.... Mao said one cultural revolution won't be enough to prevent capitalist restoration once and for all. Well he was right.

The fact they were defeated should not lead us into the all-American way of thinking that "you can't argue with success," like if they lost, it means they were wrong. Would we apply this to the numerous slave revolts that went on for hundreds of years before slavery ended?

The bitter defeats suffered by our class in Russia and China proves only one thing--that the most radical revolution in human history, proletarian revolution "is bound to proceed through twists and turns and even to encounter--and confront--the necessity to rebound from--major setbacks along the way, both within particular countries and on a world scale."

In rereading Marx's pamphlet on "Wage labor and Capital", he states: "Thus capital presupposes wage labour, wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other, they reciprocally bring forth each other."

If this is still a correct analysis of the condition of wage labor in capitalist economics, how can you end the material foundation of capitalism without first putting an end to wage labor?.. When labor power is turned into an exchange value, it becomes an alien force that the worker has no control over. The human being is turned into another component of the production process and has as much interest in the process as a block of wood. The worker becomes just another part of the cost of production...

When is labor power not a commodity? When the labor power of the worker is used to produce something that he himself will use. When the worker has use of the fruits of his labor, he is not a wage- worker. When workers know that what they are making is something they will have use of, their labor power is no longer an alien force.

So how can individual workers who produce use values collectively possibly share in the products of their labor? A rationing system is a logical way. It is something that the workers themselves can monitor and control... It makes it possible for people to exercise their political power and see that what is important is dealt with. Whatever products are produced all workers will have an opportunity to have use of that production. When we have had a share then the surplus can be dealt with...

The proletariat's creativity is unleashed when we have responsibility over our lives and the fruits of our labor. If we control our labor power then we can rebuild the rain forests. If we control our labor power then we can rebuild the ozone layer. If we control our labor power then we can clean the rivers, clean the air, and build new forms of power plants. We can rebuild our homes, hospitals, schools; we can build a New World. If we control our labor power, there is nothing that we can not do; there is nothing we can not achieve. As long as there is wage labor there will be capital. As long as there is labor based upon exchange value, mankind will never be free.

Jared wrote: How do Maoists view Leon Trotsky and his theories? Considering that Trotskyists tried to infiltrate the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when it was a Socialist party, how would a party deal with this? Would this differ from how Trotskyists would be dealt with outside the party?

Maoists have a rather different view of Trotskyism than the one you describe here. At the time that the important line struggle erupted with Trotskyism (in the 1920s and 1930s), the communist movement did not have much experience with the intense inner-party struggles under socialism. Lines like trotsky's were viewed as either a middle class infiltration of the party or else (later) as essentially a foreign espionage operation with backing from domestic reactionaries from the former ruling classes.

Maoists (based on a summation of the experience in the Soviet Union and the later decades of class struggle in Socialist China) have a different view.

The Draft Programme of the RCP writes:
"History shows that, in the conditions of socialist society, with its inequalities left over from capitalism and in the context of encirclement by imperialist powers, Party leaders can be transformed into new bourgeois elements and representatives of a new bourgeoisie. Such new bourgeoisies, headquartered in the Party leadership, will work to seize back power from the proletariat and change the society back into a capitalist one, even if it remains "socialist" in name-as happened in both the Soviet Union and China.

"The only way that this can be prevented is through mass revolutionary struggle within socialist society. Through this struggle, together with the study of the science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the masses will learn to distinguish the socialist road from the capitalist road and revolutionaries from counter-revolutionaries, and to better exercise their role as masters of society.

"The struggle to stay on the socialist road will go on throughout the entire period of socialism, and the genuine communists will support and lead the masses who rebel against new overlords. Many of those in positions of authority and leadership who take the wrong road can be revolutionized (or further revolutionized) through this struggle, and brought back to the revolutionary path. But there will be those who cannot, and they will have to be overthrown.

"The genuine communists will lead the masses in this decisive battle to revolutionize the Party, and in that way strengthen the Party's vanguard role-as part of the process of revolutionizing all of society and advancing toward the goal of a communist world without classes or class distinctions and thus without the need for the Party itself."

In other words, reactionary headquarters that emerge within the party (like those created by Trotsky or Bukharin in the USSR) can now be seen as struggles with those emerging within the party itself (not mainly "infiltrating") who want to restore capitalism. Trotsky himself was a classic example of "bourgeois democrat turned capitalist roader" (as they were called during the cultural revolution) -- people who supported revolution during its early stages, but said "this is my stop, this is where i get off" as the revolution deepened and key questions of advancing had to be confronted.

Clearly there are foreign agents in the world, and there are remnants of overthrown classes that want to reverse the revolution -- but the Maoist summation of the Soviet experience shows that this is not the main source of restoration. And the way to fight restoration is to lead mass revolutionary struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat to expose capitalist roaders and especially politically defeat their line, policies, proposals etc.

As for Trotskyists outside the party (which is obviously where trots are these days) -- they are not a unified trend, and are very different (one grouping from another). In the main they seem to be (as Stalin once said) "semi-Menshevik" -- i.e. economist and left social democratic groupings, that promote various kinds of rightism (social-pacifism, electoralism in some cases, lots of fixation about merging socialist property forms with bourgeois democratic political forms etc.)