ACHILLE STARACE'S "GOING TO THE PEOPLE"-WITH A MAOIST ANALYSIS
"Go to the people, to educate them, to raise them, to improve them physically and morally; to encourage them to love their land, their village, their family, their home..."
These are the words what the Fascist leader Achille Starace said before creating the National Leisure System in Italy during the Mussolini era. These words also mirrors the simple words Mao Zedong said:
"Our objective is to fulfill our tasks to the people. Every word, deed, and plan are aligned with the good of the people, and if there are mistakes, they are liable for rectification-that is the meaning of having objectives for the people."
In reading Starace, these words made by a Fascist seemed trying to make similar to the socialists like those of Mao. But then their ideas are rather too contradicting as we may say, as Fascists tend to enforce without people's will, the Socialists are into genuine solidarity and cooperation, as Fascists tend to glorify the past too much, the socialists turned themselves into the future; Fascists tend to preserve the rotten social order, Socialists tend to build a new order. Starace's words are literally good-only to be practised much by the left as part of the struggle, since Mao tends to stress the mass line very much-"From the masses to the masses" as he may say, and Going to the people and doing for the people means analyzing the condition to understand it fully, and not of a mere action as what Starace and other rightists think of, its just like "you go and do"-without analysis, creating without understanding.
In general,
Going to the people and serving them whole-heartedly is a door to the struggle along with them. Going to the people is meant to be submitting one's self to the people, being the creators of the society, and the ones who have the power to create-in order to destroy the opposing classes and to build a new society "in each according to duty in each according to work," all from joining in their organizational work, in educating them, living with their simplicity, working amongst them as well as defending them same as they defend themselves from oppression. And not those who simply create for the sake of defending the rotten system with a smattering of populism and of some sort, including Starace's plan, although his concept shows similarities, for it bears a true objective the fascists think of-to give the masses a rope to be hanged, as they (the fascists and the reactionaries in general) tried to fascistize the laboring people and negating class struggle with their so called "class cooperation", or rather "submission", or perhaps even "death".
Going to the people is part of revolution, for you accept them as creators of history, and not as a mere them, of a mere oppressed being.
