I thought it might be a good time for me to write up a actual post about mass line. Both cuz it’s a bit of a nebulous concept and typically not defined in its entirety and that it can hopefully help explain to people what use this whole like “federating to onboard cool people” idea has.
Principles of the Mass Line
First off, the mass line is defined in a few different Mao writings including On Practice and Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership but the description given never typically identifies the concept for all of its components.
Contrary to some people’s belief, mass line did not mysteriously unexist until Mao coined it! Mass line has been a central technique to Marxist-Leninist organizing from the beginning with even CPUSA members notably having written practical pamphlets on it in the 1930s. Mao did however coin the term itself and wrote specifically about it, consolidating and adding to our understanding of it.
Principally the mass line is a method of categorization. The categorization follows that:
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The Advanced are people who identify that capitalism is the issue and are willing to organize to combat it.
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The Middle are people who may or may not be aware that capitalism is the issue, but are yet to actively participate in the organizing process. Single issue people are typically the middle.
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The Backwards are people who are reactive to the idea that capitalism is the issue. Democrat, Republican, Centrist, whoever what we care about is how aware they are that capitalism is the issue and needs to be overcome.
Within each category you can also categorize people as Advanced, Middle or Backwards within their category. There are Advanced (of the) Middle, Middle Backwards, and Backwards Advanced people. These categories serve multiple purposes. The most important thing to note is how the mass line relates to society at large: “through the Advanced we can reach the Middle” and “through the Middle we can move some of the Backwards”. The task of “a vanguard” is to organize cadre to organize the Advanced to move the Middle and some of the Backwards. This formula is designed to allow us to pinpoint the leverage points in society.
Using the Mass Line to elevate Class Consciousness
Relevant to our “task” here (not sure if its really important enough to call task cuz i just like this place as a chill environment to hang but ig its a task if you believe it is) is that the mass line can be used as a practical tool to elevate the consciousness of people (it may be more accurate to say that mass line is the process that we use to move people whether we are aware of it or not).
When we are “mass lining” a person, we are trying to investigate their level of class consciousness as well as their class interests and push them to elevate towards a higher level of class consciousness. In essence, investigation is about mapping where somebody is in relation to mass line, and using this information to nudge people towards the next highest level. Online you really can’t do any of this so more so its mostly guess work but the principal remains. You won’t push the backwards into the advanced and you’re wasting your time entirely when you could be doing much better things with your life. The best you can hope for typically is to move the advanced backwards and middle backwards towards the middle. Get them to believe in one of the actual issues of society. This could be incredible wealth disparities, this could be the liberal destruction of community and encirclement of the family, this could be the corruptness of the democracy of the US whatever. The backwards will never be able to accept capitalism in its entirety is the issue in almost all cases. If you can convince somebody to go from Backwards to Advanced in 1 conversation they were never really “Backwards”.
What is integration?
When thinking about the middle the most important concept to think about is integration. Integration is about forming unities with the people you are talking to. It is about listening to people and helping them with their issues while elevating their consciousness of them. Again, it is a lot harder to do this online where there are few things you can do to help people with their problems while elevating their consciousness about them, although there aren’t none, technically. Successful integration is translating the principles of Marxism naturally and having the person you are talking to easily understand them. Marxism makes sense and people can put it together for themselves if they really experience it and you aren’t failing to integrate. Some people’s material experiences also will just not have proven the accuracy of Marxism to them and that’s okay! That is the whole basis of class struggle.
Summation
In short tl;dr, who gives a fuck about federating with completely backwards websites and users. Complete waste of your time while achieving very little. If your goal is to use federation to “introduce Marxist politics to greater amounts of people” you have to tactically decide on instances where the vast majority of the users are The Middle or The Advanced. Also libs if you are not actually organizing you are the Middle. Advanced Middle, sure, but touch grass and move to the Advanced; it feels good!
This resolves an issue I saw earlier about referring to clueless libs as ‘NPCs’ and how that’s not a good description of them because it implies they aren’t fully human or fully conscious. I don’t like the term NPC, but didn’t have any language to describe the phenomenon of people who vehemently disagree with us, but clearly don’t understand what they’re disagreeing with or why they disagree.
yea there’s a secondary element of that which is the belief that we need to “water down our ideas” so that people are more willing to grasp them which is pure bourgeois chauvinism. People are capable of thinking for themselves and Marxism is (for all intents and purposes) correct, so people will be able to put it together if they have the material experiences to. All we can do is provide the theoretical framework, life has to prove it to them.
It’s hard to cast yourself backward in time and reflect on how far you’ve come. Most people were born into an ocean of anticommunist propaganda and there’s a distinct possibility they’ve literally never heard from the other side.
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haha yea that’s what i mean by saying that you probably spontaneously have a sense/understanding of mass line but i thought it would be a good idea to just write it out and try to get everybody on the same page.
hope this is like a good example of mass lining in and of itself lmao
Oh, yeah. This is great.
Any more recent reading on techniques and stuff (like questions to ask) you might recommend? Personally, I think this where a leftist LLM could be really useful, both for botting brigades, but also for categorizing and data mining accounts for language and personalized points of approach.
hopefully this doesnt sound harsh but this is really a tactic and technique you learn by doing, and especially by doing so in real life. you have to read enough theory to know you can stop reading and then you have to go outside so much you know you have to read more.
the best advice here is general advice, and then you have to adapt the general advice to the particularities of your environment, whether that’s your country, neighborhood, workplace, friend group, etc. By trying it out and practicing you can learn the areas of knowledge that are practically useful yourself that you also have a lack of knowledge in, and then perhaps ask around for book recommendations on that topic in particular.
a pamphlet with good practical advice is the Araling Aktivista (ARAK) by the ND movement in the Philippines, although i would like to add that the slant is very maoist and with it comes some maoist language that is not the best.
and yea i think the hexbear hivemind kind of operates as a high level LLM (or even tbh a higher level than LLM as LLMs are just symbolic) which is nice tbh
a pamphlet with good practical advice is the Araling Aktivista (ARAK) by the ND movement in the Philippines, although i would like to add that the slant is very maoist and with it comes some maoist language that is not the best.
This is great, thanks! Looks like it’ll pair nicely having read Fanon.
hope this doesnt die lmao
Interesting dive into how to reproduce class consciousness, I was thinking about the usage of memetic warfare to shift a class conscious cultural pole.
But myself personally I was exposed to Marxist ideology due to them explaining ailments competently that affected me (dating) though I have been raised in a country that was not rabidly anti communist, by parents that did not unload massive baggage into me.
mhm i assume most people here didnt get mass lined irl so clearly there’s some value, although it’s unclear the extent of that value
Maybe we can utilize the growing number of unhappy men/boys as they grow chronically online and discontent with the whole dating scene and instead of getting them angry with women, get them riled up with how capitalism screw em,
Edit a Marxist dating guide with quotes humanizing people and thoughtful stuff from bell hooks or something
you’ve got to be careful here with how your approach is though. you don’t want to ultimately approach the backwards elements of that group that have fallen into deep seated anti-communist tendencies but rather men in the Middle who are suffering from capitalism and who can benefit from the political knowledge of anti-capitalist and leftist philosophy.
this is why online tactics are much more ambiguous, where irl you can learn about people’s jobs, lives, and class interests and more scientifically apply pressure.
yes, please i fucking beg tell masc presenting people interested in fem presenting people literally anything to do instead of only things not to do, and do better than the shallow ableist things like “hit the gym” or “dress like a liberal”. there’s a huge vacuum there and it’s only filled by the literal rapists and human traffickers.
the problem is that kind of advice doesn’t and can’t exist because of how society is (misogynist, alienating, etc) and because people aren’t a monolith on that level of interpersonal interaction.
I just came in here for the adorable little kitty!!
