The Midwest Is Red: May Day message of the Kansas City Revolutionary Collective

Each year I try to post and repost May Day messages from parties and organizations around the world. This message was posted by the Kansas City Revolutionary Collective. I have not met these folks yet, but this group is in Kansas City which is a 3 ½ hour drive from my home town. This is the closest Maoist organization to me and I hope to make a trip up to Kansas City to meet these folks sometime soon. Here is their May 1^st message:

-សតិវ ​អតុ

*This post was originally published on May 1st, 2016.

Today we are excited to announce the formation of a new Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective in the Kansas City metropolitan area: The Kansas City Revolutionary Collective (KCRC). This is no small announcement as Kansas City has been without a Communist movement for some time now, other than Anarchist collectives the KC Left void is filled by the Alphabet soup of NGOs, Non-profits and otherwise “non-partisan” groups. How perfect of a day to announce the formation of our collective than on International Workers Day, the only holiday the proletariat can call it’s own. It is on this day where we walk in a tradition of those came before us; from the day the Red flag flew over Paris to the Red flag over Peking to the day the Red flag will fly over Manila. We are here to serve our role in advancing the world proletarian revolution. KCRC was in formation during the crisis that would come to later dissolve the Liaison Committee for a New Communist Party and has weathered the storm to push forward and cast aside the corpse that is the NCP(LC) to form a collective, small at first, but with the mission to revolutionize, educate and most importantly mobilize the oppressed communities in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area. We seek to form a rival dual power to challenge and overthrow the capitalist and imperialist system that is in place. KCRC seeks to integrate ourselves into and promote mass struggles, while simultaneously providing communist leadership, as well as when necessary create mass organizations to take on the task of building the tools and infrastructure which shall be the vehicle of carrying out the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat. Through the creation of these mass organizations, united under the ideological and political leadership of KCRC, the basis of the unity of the revolutionary masses, on which the construction of dual power depends, can be solidified. As such Kansas City Revolutionary Collective (KCRC) shall be founded on the following basis:

1)       We are Marxist-Leninist-Maoist

The principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM) shall be the guiding force which shall inform the political practice and ideology of the Kansas City Revolutionary Collective. As an independent Maoist collective we recognize Kansas City, albeit more important than others give it credit to (it is a central hub for commerce) cannot exist in isolation, as can no other revolutionary collective in this country. With this in mind we are for the creation of a Maoist Communist Party in the United States and shall organize to create such a Party to lead a proletarian revolution composed of all oppressed peoples in this country as part of the global proletarian revolution. This party shall lead the proletariat in a Socialist Revolution in which the bourgeoisie shall be completely overthrown and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat established with the goal of elimination of all class distinctions and the eventual victory of Communism around the globe. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism represents the summary practice and synthesis of over 150 years of revolutionary class struggle with four focal points: The Paris Commune, The Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Each progressive period marked a continuity and rupture with the pre-existing modes of thinking of the day, in each one, lessons and summations were drawn only after the fact. In classifying the revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism we also are drawn to three main components in the realm of philosophy, political economy and scientific socialism.

i) In the realm of philosophy Maoism has developed and stressed the fundamental law of contradiction, the unity and struggle of opposites as the principal law in nature and society. It has stressed and recognized that all unity is temporal while struggle between opposites is absolute and endless which gives rises to radical ruptures, revolutionary leaps and continuity-breaks in social struggles which was popularized in the phrase “one divides into two”. In this realm as well Maoism has stressed that the best gauge for the correctness of social theory was only through social practice and that this was the well from which all knowledge streamed, and it is only gauged if it is taken up by the masses in the millions. It is then through this in which the understanding of the “masses make history” comes together, and in providing leadership to the masses by applying the mass line by first gathering the unsystematic and scattered ideas of the masses, concentrating them and through study turning them into systematic and concrete ideas and returning them to the masses until they embrace them as their own. Through actions and the testing of ideas through social practice.

ii) In the realm of political economy Maoism recognizes the reciprocal relationship between the structure and the superstructure of a given society and stresses that under socialism special attention must be paid to ensuring that the construction occurs in content and form in which politics is primary. In essence Maoism stresses that it is politics in command, that is revolutionary politics of the proletariat in command, which is the marker which determines whether the dictatorship of the proletariat exists. Maoism thus states that revisionism in command thus is the beginning of the return of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through seizure of the commanding heights: The Communist Party itself. As well as due to the contradictory nature of the transitional socialist economy, the Party-State, the retention of a wage-labour system, the existence of, albeit a suppressed, law of value etc. The lessons drawn here is the important role of the subjective forces and superstructure can transform the base through political power as opposed to the economic deterministic theory of the productive forces. Because of the transitional nature of socialism and the existence of the state as a marker of irreconcilable differences between classes Maoism also recognized the existence of class struggle under socialism which could be of a low-level of intensity or of a higher one (cultural revolution) but which would exist until the dissolution of classes and the state with it.

iii) In the realm of scientific socialism Maoism is marked by the theory of class struggle and its existence during the dictatorship of the proletariat as well as it’s centrality in the construction of socialism. It is also characterized by the strategy and tactics of the revolution through People’s War led by the revolutionary Communist party of the proletariat, proletarian feminism, the national question, the mass line as well as the classline.

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