Manifesto of the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organisation – Proletarian Way (OCML-VP)

This is an updated version of the previous text entitled ‘Who we are’ dated 2014 and which no longer fully meets the needs of a document of this kind today.

It is divided into two parts : first, a more political section entitled ‘Socialism or Barbarism’, where we set out the different aspects of our political orientation, followed by the more theoretical ‘What to Do, With Whom, and How ?’, which lays out the basic programmatic and ideological positions that define our organisation.

This Manifesto is intended for activists who have come across us by chance and want to find out more about us as well as activists who want to better understand where we come from and what distinguishes us from the rest of what is known as the revolutionary far-left.

A full PDF version of the Manifesto is available for download as a brochure here.

The world is barbaric. The capitalists/imperialists are harbingers of an impending apocalypse based on the wars already underway and others yet to come, the destruction of nature and climate change and the increasingly aggressive exploitation of the proletariat and the peoples of the world.

We want a peaceful world based on solidarity, mutual aid and co-operation. We have had enough of war, the subjugation of peoples through genocide, such as that perpetrated by the Zionists today in Gaza or as we already saw in Rwanda, enough of massacres and pillaging and people driven from their homes. The Palestinian, Kurdish, Ukrainian and many other peoples have the inalienable right to self-determination and to free their lands. Enough of global, economic, political and military hostilities that are only paving the way for a future global conflict !

We are not ingenuous. We do not want war – nobody wants war ! – but nor do we want the great imperialist powers that crush peoples and lay waste to the planet and whose leaders are the real warmongers. That is why we staunchly support the resistance of peoples fighting for their liberation arms in hand ! But that does not mean that we support their reactionary, fundamentalist leaders who are allied with one or other of those tyrants. We are not amongst those ‘campists’ who end up supporting the Russian or Chinese imperialists or reactionary regimes such as the Iran of the mullahs or the Algeria of the generals in the name of the fight against US and Western imperialism. The bourgeoisie of all countries – be they imperialist or emerging – are our enemies and seek only to exploit us more and more. We are anti-imperialists because we are anti-capitalists.

Today, we may yet be weak, but the future is ours ! We, the workers, undocumented or not ; we, the rebellious youth ; we, the peoples fighting for our liberation across the globe : we are the future ! As Mao Zedong said 70 years ago : “Imperialism is a paper tiger” : It may look strong, but its only derives its strength from our own weakness and divisions ! And one day we will rout it !

We want a logical, useful, economic world that preserves the planet’s riches and protects our future... That is our hope and our struggle.
It is the struggle waged by radical environmentalists in our fight against the destruction of the planet, toxins and poisons of all kinds, climate change, widespread waste, mountains of rubbish, all produced by capitalist madness. We must stop this hellish race driven solely by profit, unbridled productivism at any cost and globalised competition.
We remain optimistic enough to believe this, refusing to submit to the barbaric and apocalyptic world that the large multinational monopolies hold in store for us. Yes, it is possible to combat waste, protect nature and feed populations without destroying the planet, as thousands of local initiatives everywhere have shown. What we need to do now is to move beyond the local level, organising to change the rules of the economic game, both nationally and internationally, and to put an end to the capitalist exploitation of nature and humanity. But we do not believe in environmentalism without class struggle, in ‘radical gardening’, even though we respect all of those committed activists. ‘We are Green because we are Red’ is our watchword : it is socialism that can put the planet back on track for the future !

We want a world of welfare, useful labour, the fair distribution of the wealth produced, stability and the ability to look to the future with a little more hope. We do not want work that destroys the mind and body, austerity and precarious working conditions, the violent and cruel world of competition and unemployment and redundancies. We want co-operation and a social republic. We no longer want exploiters who suck our life-blood and sweat, nor politicians (the French Communist Party, France Unbowed, the Greens and others) who tell us that capitalism with a human face is the only viable option... We refuse to be reasonable ! We will not share wealth ; we want all the wealth, we want to revolutionise work itself ! We won’t fall for the smoke and mirrors and the sleight of hand of snake oil salesman ; we’ve had enough of experts who claim to know what’s good for us better than we ourselves do !

We the Maoists of the Proletarian Way maintain that only the working class can carry out such a genuinely communist project, to completely overturn imperialism, capitalism and the exploitation of the proletariat and nature, because its condition as a class concentrates all the alienation and oppression suffered by exploited men and women, regardless of their nationality ; totally subjected to exploitation, they have no reason to spare the system or maintain any particular privilege. We must also disregard a corrupt aristocratic sector who defend the existing order from which they derive the privileges that separate them from the masses of proletariat and who we oppose unremittingly. And while many others also stand to gain from the revolution alongside the mass of workers, it is the proletariat who must lead the way to avoid become sidetracked along the way, hand in hand with all those who are fighting to change this society. This is what we mean by the central role of the working class. We work in companies in order to aim the political work of our activists directly at the working class, encouraging them to meld with the masses by working side by side with them. The organisation we are building is an organisation of proletarians, led by them, not overrun by what is known as the salaried petty bourgeoisie which abounds in an imperialist country such as ours (e.g. teachers, social workers, employees, workers in the media and culture, technicians and managers, etc.). Some of these will of course be our allies, but they may also stand to lose certain privileges with the advent of a radical revolution, as history has taught us repeatedly around the world.

We want a real revolution, with power in the hands of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the revolutionaries of the Commune, the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Maoists of the Cultural Revolution sought to do. We do not want false friends who try to beguile us with the illusion of capitalism with a human face with elections as a would-be easy fix to change our lives but which ultimately only leads to yet more exploitation. They are not so-called ‘misguided friends’ and ‘part of the working-class movement’ as the Trotskyists would have us believe. They are covert enemies, the “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”, as Lenin said, i.e. the representatives of capitalist management within the working-class movement.
Reformism involves sharing the wealth with the exploiters, sovereigntist national chauvinism, parliamentarianism and the electoral path, trade union parity in social institutions, local environmentalist solutions and so many other elements bent on thwarting a real revolution, believing that it is possible to force the exploiters to be more humane without wresting their power from them. This is what is upheld by what remains of the French Communist Party (PCF), with France Unbowed (La France Insoumise, LFI) peddling a more modern version with their total parliamentary cretinism and with the Greens proffering a revamped version of social democracy.

Reformism is everywhere, from politics, to trade unionist and grassroots associations. Organisations such as trade unions are largely bureaucratised. And once again, contrary to what the Trotskyists preach, it is not merely a question of an opposition between a rotten leadership and a healthy rank and file, of gaining a little more democracy, because bureaucracy and corruption run through all levels of the apparatus. This is what sets us apart as Maoists of Proletarian Way ; our unwavering fight against the reformist and even reactionary ideas that dominate trade unions and other associations, seeking instead to build a radical, revolutionary class orientation.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from our positions is that capitalism cannot be reformed. We must go against the political experts, the skulking enemies who claim to speak on our behalf and take matters into our own hands ! We must be ambitious ; we must change the world !
What we want is a real revolution where the masses take matters into their own hands, with workers’ committees everywhere : a revolution that can only ultimately come about through people’s armed struggle against the capitalist state in order to wrest power by force from the bourgeoisie who will never relinquish it otherwise, contrary to what reformists of all hues would have us believe, terrified at the mere prospect of armed proletarians...

We want a world of friendship, solidarity and co-operation, fighting the neo-fascist international, LGBTphobia and racism, defending radical feminism, anti-colonial internationalism and friendship between peoples. This is the struggle that we are waging within the working class, without fear of going against the tide of widespread reactionary prejudices.
Capitalist exploitation is what shapes society today. But while that is the main contradiction, we should not fail to recognise all of the forms of oppression that divide society, particularly the proletariat. A failure to address secondary contradictions such as racism or sexism within the working class means that the main contradiction against exploitation cannot be properly addressed ! We Maoists of Proletarian Way seek to build a truly intersectional class unity, as the only way to push for a radical transformation of society, ripping out capitalism by its very roots, such as patriarchy and racism.

To conclude this section, it is clear that we are fighting for a ‘wholescale’ revolution because any vague temporary improvement will only herald future setbacks, as we have already been experiencing for decades. We Maoists of Proletarian Way are not afraid to say that bringing different struggles together is far from being a silver bullet, and while we remain, of course, in favour of it, nor too is a would-be successful general strike (the ultimate dream of all libertarians). What we need to do is to work on a programme and build a political organisation. Protests and mobilisations around single issues are obviously essential, but the frenzied activism around successive demonstrations builds nothing. We must centralise the struggle, moving away from such activism and localism, especially given that we have to contend with one of the world’s major imperialist metropoles, which renders the fight against powerful, long-standing reformism all the more difficult.
If we are to eventually bring down our enemies, themselves very well organised within the capitalist state, then we must organise, prepare to seize power and pave the way for the revolution to come !

Socialism or barbarism,that is our slogan ! Bourgeoisie, exploiters, politicians of all stripes should tremble !
The current time may well be marked by resignation and apathy, but sooner or later the day will come when we forge the bonds of our solidarity and rise up to challenge their power, hand in hand with the peoples of the world !
Equality, mutual aid, friendship, cooperation, justice, independence. These bywords continue to ring out in our hearts and minds. The old phoenixes are rising from the ashes of individualism, of everyone for themselves, where we thought that they had been locked away forever. The new world is here ; communism is the youth of the world !
This is what the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organisation – Proletarian Way (OCML-VP) is working towards.

We must not lose sight of the fact that bringing about the revolution in an imperialist country is far from easy. Even though it continues to galvanise the class struggle during key mobilisations, the working class has seen its numerical and political sway dwindle. The salaried petty bourgeoisie has gained the upper-hand and taken over the leadership of trade unions, associations and political parties, with its natural tendency towards reformism in order to preserve the few privileges it has gained within the capitalist system, particularly regarding the division of labour between manual and intellectual work : it is more rewarding to be a social worker in a housing estate, however harsh it may be, than a worker on an assembly line or a cleaner in a hotel. Reformism is strong and long-standing, deeply rooted in capitalism and its management.

But we must also recognise that today capitalist-imperialist domination is globalised, be it in terms of exploitation, wars or the environment, and that our struggle, that of the proletariat and the peoples, is therefore also globalised. The working class itself has become globalised, ‘outsourced’ by the imperialist countries, and has grown considerably worldwide.

Our struggle as Maoists in France is an integral part of the global struggle against capitalism-imperialism, in connection with the peoples of the world. We are not alone, an isolated minority ; we are supported by the struggles of the Palestinian, Kurdish, Ukrainian, Iranian and all other peoples, by the revolutionary Afghan women of RAWA and by the Maoist forces that exist around the globe. And we in turn support the Maoist people’s war everywhere, from India, to Turkey and the Philippines and the Maoist organisations and parties who stand out in the people’s struggle against global imperialism.

We have already made clear that we are Maoists. However, this should by no means to taken to imply a dogmatic reference rendering us incapable of thinking for ourselves. Since the OCML Proletarian Way was first created in 1979, we have endeavoured to understand past mistakes and study, political debate, criticism and self-criticism continue play a crucial role in guiding our political orientation to this day. There are those who argue that the proletariat lost power very early on in the USSR and China, thus supposedly demonstrating that it is pointless to continue to uphold communism. But we refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to make a clean sweep of the past. Not only do we accept the communist past, but we also recognise it for what it truly is, with both its failures and successes. The theory of revolution and socialism has only existed for a century and a half. It is up to us to bring it to life, not to bury it.
One of the reasons why we follow Mao and the Chinese communists is because we see the Chinese Revolution, and in particular the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) as the most far-reaching experience yet in the construction of socialism, bringing to the fore the vital questions that arise during the transition to communism and to which those communists sought to provide answers.
In the former USSR, the working class lost power as early as the 1930s and society was transformed into state capitalism. This is what the Chinese communists tried to understand and prevent in China with the Cultural Revolution. There they developed Lenin’s principle, later abandoned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), that class struggle continues during the transition to communism as the driving force behind the construction of socialism. As an unstable transitional phase between capitalism and communism, socialism will only partially alter a country’s capitalist economic base and it is on this material basis that a new bourgeoisie is formed in the transitional society, including within the party and the state.

As happened in Russia and the newly independent countries, the capitalist roaders in China drew their strength from the fact that their countries needed to develop by undergoing an industrial economic revolution. The need to develop the productive forces served as a pretext for refraining from revolutionising the relations of production. In the political campaigns they launched, Mao and what is known as the Maoist Left in the Communist Party of China relied on the masses, who were both the intended target and the driving force behind these mobilisations and the socialist transformation of society, marking the starting point of the Cultural Revolution by mobilising the masses to head off the new bourgeoisie.
This is one of the main reasons why we call ourselves Maoists, namely the failure of the Russian Revolution and the restoration of capitalism and the attempt to overcome these difficulties through a new ‘revolution within the revolution’. But when we say that we are Maoists, we do not do so exclusively based on this historical experience. Maoism is first and foremost a set of philosophical, political and theoretical advances that prove essential for the International Communist Movement, marking out fundamental redlines that separate reformism from revisionism and providing a concrete set political guidelines for engaging in politics here and now.

Above and beyond the reference to Maoist China, Maoism also provides us with a set of political tools :
• Maoism is above all else the art of dialectics, one of the philosophical foundations of Marxism, a way of ‘thinking about the world’ in terms of contradictions, distinguishing between primary and secondary contradictions in a specific and ever-changing situation. For example, being able to distinguish between contradictions within the people, which are not antagonistic (i.e. whose interests are not irreconcilable) and contradictions between us and our enemies, which are irreconcilable.
• There is always a constant need to put ‘politics in the driving seat’ and to be guided by the contradictions, mapping out a direction based on both theory and the reality of the class struggle. Mao also stressed the idea that practice, and in particular political practice, is both the sole source and the ultimate criterion of truth : practice enables theory to be verified and then enriches it.
• It involves practising a mass line, i.e. relying on the correct ideas within the proletariat to raise them to a higher level of awareness through Marxist theory, combating false ideas (such as chauvinism, sexism, reformist illusions, etc.) and entails learning from the exploited, from struggles and being ready to listen.
• Finally, investigation is an integral part of being a communist. Investigation means listening to what the proletariat have to say, gathering their ideas, pooling them and feeding the results back to them. It means better understanding their level of awareness, their correct and incorrect ideas, etc. Investigation requires being permanently in touch with the masses ! As Mao Zedong said : “No investigation, no right to speak”. This is one of our core tenets.
• No organisation or leader is all-knowing and infallible ! That is why it is important to take stock of the policies we pursue and to engage in self-criticism in order to correct mistakes and move forwards, as practiced systematically in Proletarian Path. Similarly, it is essential to educate ourselves and engage in debate, which enables us to define our own direction within the class struggle and set to work immediately to reduce inequalities between the leaders and the rank and file, especially within the party that we seek to build.

As Maoists, where do we come from ?
Our organisation was founded in 1979, at the ‘beginning of the end’ of the Maoist movement in France. The impact of the workers’ mobilisations and the profound ideological upheaval of May 1968 combined with the international repercussions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution gave rise to a powerful Maoist movement opposed to the line adopted by the French Communist Party (PCF). Our organisation therefore grew up out of a critical assessment of the historical failures of socialism on the one hand, and the workers’ struggles of 1968 in France on the other. The organisation was founded on a critique of both Maoist dogmatism and a line overly-geared to mobilisations, incapable of a broader political perspective and continually swayed by the course of events. Some of the founders of Proletarian Way came from a rather dogmatic Marxist-Leninist current centred around L’Éveil (‘Awake’) and Le Prolétaire Ligne Rouge (‘Proletarian Red Line’). Another part of the early activists came directly from the Maoist movement, including the Workers’ and Peasants’ Left (Gauche ouvrière et paysanne, GOP), the Proletarian Left (Gauche prolétarienne, GP), the Marxist–Leninist Communist Party of France (Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France, PCMLF), etc. It was the convergence of these two currents that gave rise to the OCML Proletarian Way, with some of the activists bringing their theoretical knowledge and others their experience of class struggle, all seeking to fuse theory and practice, reflection and action, in pursuit of what we aspire to be true communism.
Our organisation was forged on the basis of a radical critique of labour and exploitation, and the political struggle against chauvinist positions, corporatism and ‘Produce French’ attitudes, combatting French imperialism in particular, fighting for equal rights between French citizens and migrants and between men and women, standing up against racism and in defence of the most oppressed. We have a very strong theoretical foundation available on our website and we continue to work towards to forging the communist programme that we need.
Since we were first formed, the Marxist–Leninist Communist Organisation – Proletarian Way (OCML-VP) has survived several serious internal crises, all but inevitable in an imperialist country dominated by petty-bourgeois ideology. We are determined to learn from our mistakes and our experiences in order to move beyond the stage of being a small group and to build the Party we need.

Building a Party of a new type
The aim of the OCML- Proletarian Way is to help work towards building a Communist Party that will act as the headquarters of the exploited. The workers must organise because, as Marx said : “numbers weigh in the balance only if united by combination and led by knowledge”. This knowledge derives from the accumulated experience of the labour and communist movements, the lessons learned from past failures and successes and an understanding of the world in which we live.
When it was first founded, the French Communist Party (PCF) embodied the workers’ hopes for a different society. But in 1936 it supported the reformist government, before going on to completely abandon the revolutionary struggle following the Liberation, calling upon the workers to rebuild French capitalism.
Since then, it has been nothing more than a more or less combative revisionist party, but nationalist and reformist nonetheless.
Without the Communist Party, workers are the pawns in struggles which only serve to benefit the bourgeois reformists. The Arab uprisings in the spring of 2011 showed how the masses could bring down imperialism and reactionary regimes. But the Arab Spring gave way to a reactionary winter... Because without the Communist Party, without a headquarters, they were unable to completely overturn society culminating in their social emancipation and ultimately the various bourgeois forces quickly regained control. Such a party capable of ensuring the independence of the exploited in their struggles does not exist in France, a party capable of challenging the bourgeoisie and wresting power from them tomorrow.

Our party will not be made up of obedient foot soldiers, all just blindly obeying orders. On the contrary, we need operational practices that allow for and encourage political debate, whilst at the same time ensuring the correct functioning of the party. This involves democratic centralism, i.e. :
– The broadest and most democratic debate possible.
– Decisions taken after debate by majority vote, which then become the organisation’s positions to be applied by everyone.
– The minority submits to the decisions of the majority, but is protected and respected.
– All internal bodies are subject to control together the possibility of removal from office, the systematic practice of investigation, evaluation, criticism and self-criticism.

Lenin wrote : “Everything is illusory except power” : unlike anarchists and other libertarians, we maintain that there will never be a people’s society without the seizure of state power, leading on to the difficult path of the transition to Communism. In order to put an end to exploitation, we need more than revolt, more even than insurrection, a general strike or the upscaling of zones to defend (ZAD), more than a spontaneous revolution that would succeed in seizing power. To put an end to exploitation, we must uproot it, overturning the relations of production in order to advance towards communism.

This will not come about spontaneously, even in the heat of a struggle, however advanced it may be. Class struggle is the key-pin, the material basis for the march towards communism, but it is awareness, politics and communism as the final horizon alone that can guide us on this path. And the Party is the leading element in this qualitative leap.