Connection to the Popular Struggle

It has been long stressed by previous vanguard revolutionaries that literature can only have a place in revolution if it is established and connected to the masses. Without this connection to the popular struggle, literature is rendered useless, instead becoming another tool of the upper class, alienated and disconnected from the real needs on the ground. Thus, the Young Lords Party took specific measures to ensure that they were publishing and circulating the real needs of the people that they were representing. This established a clear break between the revolutionary educational literature of the YLP and the topics that were being covered by the mainstream media landscape of the time. The YLP chose to focus on issues directly affecting working-class people in New York City, specifically within the Puerto Rican diaspora, in order to establish both widespread outrage, but also widespread calls to action. The privileging of these often ignored stories allowed the YLP to develop a base through providing visibility and circulation to often-marginalized groups and issues.

theoretical Importance of connecting to the masses:

Lenin:

What is needed is that the whole of our Party, and the entire politically-conscious Social-Democratic proletariat throughout Russia, should become aware of this new problem, specify it clearly and everywhere set about solving it. Emerging   from the captivity of the feudal censorship, we have no desire to become, and shall not become, prisoners of bourgeois-shopkeeper literary relations. We want to establish, and we shall establish, a free press, free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois-anarchist individualism. - Lenin, Party Organization and Party Literature, 1905

Many comrades like to talk about "a mass style". But what does it really mean? It means that the thoughts and feelings of our writers and artists should be fused with those of the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers. To achieve this fusion, they should conscientiously learn the language of the masses.

Writers and artists should study society, that is to say, should study the various classes in society, their mutual relations and respective conditions, their physiognomy and their psychology. Only when we grasp all this clearly can we have a literature and art that is rich in content and correct in orientation.

Only by starting from the workers, peasants and soldiers can we have a correct understanding of popularization and of the raising of standards and find the proper relationship between the two.

China's revolutionary writers and artists, writers and artists of promise, must go among the masses; they must for a long period of time unreservedly and whole-heartedly go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, go into the heat of the struggle, go to the only source, the broadest and richest source, in order to observe, experience, study and analyse all the different kinds of people, all the classes, all the masses, all the vivid patterns of life and struggle, all the raw materials of literature and art. Only then can they proceed to creative work.

Selections:

YLP 13 Point Program:

6. We want community control of our institutions and land. 

We want control of our communities by our people and programs to guarantee that all institutions serve the needs of our people. People's control of police, health services, churches, schools, housing, transportation and welfare are needed. We want an end to attacks on our land by urban removal, highway destruction, universities and corporations. Land Belongs To All The People!

8. We oppose capitalists and alliances with traitors. 

Puerto Rican rulers, or puppets of the oppressor, do not help our people. They are paid by the system to lead our people down blind alleys, just like the thousands of poverty pimps who keep our communities peaceful for business, or the street workers who keep gangs divided and blowing each other away. We want a society where the people socialistically control their labor. Venceremos!

13. We want a socialist society. 

We want liberation, clothing, free food, education, health care, transportation, utilities, and employment for all. We want a society where the needs of our people come first, and where we give solidarity and aid to the peoples of the world, not oppression and racism. Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Palante, Volume 2, Number 7, July 17 1970