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What do the present material conditions call for communists to do?

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If we take these measures to make our efforts more focused, displined, and pragmatic, we'll be in a better position to confront the capitalist state in more direct ways.

What will ultimately become our most needed task: getting those in our movement equipped for resisting state violence

Here, the warning of the communist leader Thomas Sankara becomes pertinent: "a soldier without any political or ideological training is a potential criminal." Before we help give someone weapons or combat training-and before we jump into these things ourselves-we'll need to make sure that the given person will apply these tools appropriately. Will they unnecessarily assault somebody, like the foolish Austin Red Guards have done? Will they escalate a protest towards physical conflict? Will they do something to get themselves or their comrades unnecessarily in trouble? Without the political and ideological training necessary to acclimate oneself to the cause of communism, one might act according to the individualist attitudes that foster these kinds of dangerous behaviors.

This is where democratic centralism again comes in. The movement can best avoid slip-ups when people act accordingly to what their party says they should do. If someone acts recklessly or out of bounds, the cause is jeopardized. We need to function as members of an army, not as lone wolves or rogues.

The communist movement needs to take on this dynamic of army-like discipline because when it's fighting a capitalist state, it will at some point need to take on the responsibilities of an actual army. When the capitalist class has its power threatened, it will enact violence against the people within the revolution. So the people within the revolution will need to prepare to physically protect themselves and the oppressed groups they're trying to liberate.

This means taking on more serious types of training and preparation than is the case for nonviolent civil disobedience. At the mildest level, this training will have to consist of fitness routines and hand-to-hand combat exercises (boxing is the martial art that I personally most recommend learning). We'll also need to prepare to defend our groups and our communities from armed violence by the state and by right-wing paramilitaries; numerous leftist groups around the country have already been arming themselves with this in mind.

What we need to do as communists, in addition to gaining the various types of self-defense tools that I've mentioned, is attach the power of physical combat to a concrete goal for overthrowing the capitalist state. Getting your comrades to the gun range or holding group sparring sessions are easier than our larger task, which is to use these tools to overcome the violence of the ruling class.

To do this, we'll need to not just equip ourselves physically, but mentally as well. There are so many ideological pitfalls that our pro-capitalist, colonial chauvinist culture can make us fall into, and we need to avoid them to effectively carry out a revolution. I recommend reading Lenin's "The State and Revolution" to help bypass the counter-revolutionary ideas that are often marketed as "revolutionary," and I recommend reading Mao's "Combat Liberalism" to help bypass anti-Marxist organizational habits. Through works like these, we can bring the country's current communist movement to the state that Ho Chi Minh described for the communist movement in Vietnam:


In the beginning, under the influence of bourgeois ideology, the stand of some Party members may lack firmness, their outlook may be confused and their thinking not quite correct. But owing to the fact that they have been tempered in the revolution and the war of resistance, our Party members are by and large good militants, faithful to the Party and the revolution. Those Comrades know that those Party members who commit errors will lead the masses into error; therefore, they stand ready to correct any mistake they may make, and this in a timely way, and do not allow small errors accumulate into big ones. They sincerely practice criticism and self-criticism, which makes it possible for them to progress together.

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Rainer Shea is writing articles that counter the propaganda of the capitalist/imperialist power establishment, and that help move us towards a socialist revolution. Donate to me on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=11988744

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