Published: The Workers’ Advocate, Vol. 2, No. 5, May 1970.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Workers’ Advocate proudly announces the formation, in Cleveland, Ohio, of the Revolutionary Student Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team, composed of fearless communist students, who are already going forth boldly to spread Mao Tsetung Thought on the Midwest campuses in order to bring the progressive sections, of the petty bourgeoisie into the struggle against rising fascism, on a conscious basis, under the leadership of the communist workers.
This propaganda team has been formed in Ohio, the very storm center of U.S. student struggles, at an extremely important moment in the development of the struggle of the American working class and people against monopoly capital. The imperialists are taking unprecedented steps, first, to repress the revolutionary initiative of the masses by armed force and, second, to use constant propaganda to convince the masses to accept fascist practices as normal, everyday activity. Only the petty bourgeoisie, divorced from material production and the class struggle, can be fooled by this two-faced deception. It is the class with a choice and can ally with either the working class or the monopoly capitalists. Therefore, revolutionary students must serve the working class by winning the petty bourgeoisie to the side of the working class in activity opposing the big bourgeoisie and fascism.
It is the program of the proletariat and its friends the revolutionary students to answer the big bourgeoisie, first, by developing the “revolutionary initiative of the masses against monopoly capital and, second, by doing constant propaganda that fascism must be overthrown by armed proletarian revolution. The Revolutionary Student Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team will put this into practice using four guidelines:
1) Do widespread propaganda for Mao Tsetung Thought and armed proletarian revolution.
2) Develop mass democratic, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist struggles under the slogan: No investigation, no right to speak! No sophistry! No rhetoric!
3) Actively combat trotskyism, revisionism and all other forms of opportunism.
4) Hold meetings to sum up experience in the course of actual struggle and develop guidelines to move the struggle forward.
The formation of the Revolutionary Student Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team follows by several months the formation of the Workers’ Mao Tsetung. Thought Propaganda Team which already has many revolutionary achievements to its credit in the Cleveland area. Practicing the mass democratic method of putting all political and ideological questions before the working and oppressed people, this propaganda, team has been arousing the masses of workers more and more boldly against fascist propaganda and repression and are preparing the ground for a new revolutionary communist party and for armed struggle against the fascists.
In Cleveland, for example, the Workers’ Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team sold more than 2700 copies of the March-April issue of The Workers’ Advocate to workers alone, not to mention sales to members of other social classes. Along with the newspaper, considerable quantities of the Quotations from Chairman Mao and other writings of Chairman Mao were sold.
This widespread distribution of bright red literature has the effect of tilling the soil for revolution, of placing the ideological weapons in the hands of the people themselves, instead of restricting them to the hands of a few petty bourgeois intellectuals. Constantly, reports come in that workers have cut out certain articles and framed them and hung them on their walls, or that newspapers were seen in many nooks and crannies of major factories, or that workers took quantities to sell to their friends. The evidence is crystal clear that the working class is thirsty for political knowledge, for systematic summing up of their experience in struggle. Chairman Mao points out, “In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily ’from the masses, to the masses.’ This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action.”
This method was also applied by the Workers’ Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team and student supporters in numerous agitations carried out in Cleveland around specific instances of oppression and resistance. Such agitations, mentioned elsewhere in this paper, as the struggle against the fascist movie “Sympathy for the Devil”, support for the truck drivers’ strike, and the anti-fascist propaganda march through working-class housing projects, all served to alert and arouse the masses of people against rising fascism, sum up their experience in actual struggle and place revolutionary ideology in their hands.
It is the weighty task of the Revolutionary Student Mao Tsetung Thought Propaganda Team to follow working-class leadership, go forth boldly and brave the storm of class struggle, and display the spirit of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionaries of China:
DARE TO SPEAK, DARE TO FIGHT!
MAKE REBELLION, NEVER STOP!
FIGHT ON, SMASH UP THE OLD WORLD!
MAKE OUR COUNTRY EVER RED!
It is the duty of progressive students, intellectuals and workers to support and cherish these young Red Guards and true servants of the working class.