Combat Tailism: A Maoist Reply to Lake’s Bean Pies
What does Mao Tse-Tung have to do with modern organizing?
Kenny Lake is right about one thing in “Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies.” Revolution is not a soup kitchen. His attack on charity as a substitute for class struggle is correct in principle. Maoists have always opposed economism, the idea that improving material conditions by themselves leads to revolutionary consciousness. Lake correctly targets the tendency to replace organization and struggle with service work that only manages misery.
But Lake draws the wrong political line from a correct critique. They treat material service as inherently non-revolutionary. That is not Maoism, nor does the article actually critique Maoist philosophy in fact, but a straw version. Maoism begins from the material life of the masses. The masses encounter capitalism as hunger, eviction, sickness, and police terror. To ignore these realities is to separate politics from the people and replace the mass line with empty agitation.
Lake is correct that Malcolm X did not run a charity project. He built political consciousness through struggle. But Maoists do not counterpose political struggle to material practice. We fuse them. In every successful revolutionary movement, communists distributed food and medical care while organizing collective survival and waging ideological struggle. This was not charity, but the building of proletarian authority and dual power.
Lake warns that charity turns the masses into passive recipients. This danger is real. But the Maoist solution is not to abandon service. It is to transform it. Aid must be organized, politicized, and collectivized. It must expose the system that produces deprivation and recruit the masses into a disciplined organization against it. The problem is feeding people without the inclusion of a revolutionary line.
By rejecting material service in practice, Lake risks promoting a politics of rhetoric without roots. Maoism rejects this split. We investigate the concrete needs of the people, meet those needs in collective forms, and turn those struggles into schools of revolution. Every act of service must deepen hatred for imperialism and strengthen organization for its overthrow.
Lake is right to demand struggle. Where he is wrong is in separating struggle from the daily survival of the oppressed. Maoism teaches that revolution grows out of these conditions, not above them. To serve the people is not charity. It is class war in social form. The task is not to stop meeting needs. The task is to turn need into organization and survival into rebellion.