propaganda—has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more quickly, the more intensively propaganda is carried out, and the latter in turn is able to work the better, the stronger and the more vigorous the organization is that stands behind it. —In addition to exchanging information, the organization will focus on two areas: study and action. A steering committee prepares a reading list and several study plans for use as each area needs—focusing on the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao. —'Politics'—revolutionary socialist politics—becomes a question of using the right words, it is not enough that one be outraged and passionate and effective: one must also cite the correct texts.
Ideologies, whether bourgeois or proletarian, serve the interests of their respective classes, but that is as far as the similarity goes. Proletarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, is true social science; it is both partisan and, at the same time, an objective, true reflection of the real social process. It cannot become a new exploiting class, and it has, therefore, no interests which are ultimately directed against any section of society, its ideology must be 'objectively true' or it cannot liberate itself. —Hereby the following realization must never leave us: since the so-called program of the movement is certainly absolutely correct in its final aims, but as in its formulation it had to take psychological momenta into consideration, there can well arise, in the course of time, the conviction that in individual instances perhaps certain leading propositions should be framed differently, or should receive a better formulation. But every attempt in this direction has, in most cases, catastrophic effects. For thereby something that should stand unshakably firm is given free to discussion which, once a single point is deprived of Its faithful, dogmatic determination, does not result immediately in a new, better, and above all a uniform determination, but which will rather lead to never-ending debates and to general confusion. In such a case there remains always the reflection of what is better: a new, more fortunate formulation which causes a dispute within the movement, or a form which at the moment is perhaps not the best one, but presents an organism that in itself is complete, unshakable and entirely uniform. Every examination will show that the latter is preferable. —You cannot eliminate even one basic assumption, one substantial part of this philosophy of Marxism (it is as if it were a solid block of steel) without abandoning objective truth, without falling into the arms of the bourgeois-reactionary falsehood. —With a doctrine that in great
80
