Lynne Meow

April 1^st, 2025 GATT special online-only issue

In an Instagram post dated March 15^th, 2024, the Revolutionary People’s Maoist Alliance of California (RPMAC) announced bold plans for sending its cadre to do mass work in proletarian neighborhoods and workplaces across the state, declaring that within a year it will have built solid links with the masses, developed mass organizations with hundreds of members, and led class struggles in housing and labor. A year later, we could not find any evidence of mass work on RPMAC’s Instagram account, just lots of goofy photos of themselves with their faces blocked out, holding banners with edgy-sounding slogans at small protests. When we DM’d them about what happened to their plans for mass work, RPMAC responded that “we felt we needed to study more Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory before we could go talk to the masses, and unfortunately a shipment of books from the European Foreign Languages Press got delayed in the mail, so we’re behind schedule.”

Defectors from RPMAC who reached out to Going Against the Tide journal expressed frustration with the constant delays in implementing plans for mass work. One described how “after we read and discussed Kenny Lake’s article ‘Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies’ and said we agreed with it, we lost our main justification for not talking to the masses, namely that we couldn’t talk to the masses unless we first gave them free stuff. So we spent the last year trying to invent a new justification, and settled on ‘we need to study the mass line more before we can apply it.’ RPMAC’s central committee assured us that Mao liked to stare at a pear all day long before he took a bite.” Another defector described their boredom with the organization’s hours-long weekly political education sessions, but nonetheless stuck with the RPMAC for months expecting they might someday act on one of the militant slogans on their banners. Asked what finally made them quit the Revolutionary People’s Maoist Alliance of California, they explained, “At a certain point, I realized that all this talk of people’s war was going nowhere without actually talking to the people.”