The poet Shelley inspired the oppressed with the reminder "We are many, they are few." The "Occupy" movement told us that the 1% rule and plunder the 99%. And the Socialist movement reminded workers that all we have going for us is our numbers. At various times the revolutionary movements have been able to rally the courage, energy, dedication, and sacrifice of the masses of working people to challenge and sometimes overthrow the ruling classes and to begin the laborious tasks of constructing the new out of the materials of the old, including ourselves. But we have not yet succeeded in mobilizing the collective intelligence of our species, the 7 billion (minus a few rulers) of thinking beings who can turn their suffering into understanding and outsmart as well as overwhelm the corporations and their states and their regimes that staff capitalism.

Marx noted that what distinguished communists from all other socialists is internationalism and looking out for the movement as a whole. Looking out for the whole means, in our day, struggling against all kinds of injustice, for social ownership of the means of production, land to the tillers, equality of women and men, a world without racism, and protection of our shared environment.

That is not easy. We have to combine our effort, commitment, and courage with the full intelligence of our species to solve the enormous problems we confront. And we have to begin with the most committed.

Lenin, in outlining his ideas for a revolutionary party, listed three prerequisites for membership: support for the party's program, supporting the organization financially, and belonging to one of its local base organizations. I would like to propose a fourth prerequisite: to analyze, doubt, and criticize our own organizations and actions.

Only by thinking together can we correct our worst errors and move past them. We will always be making errors: we are attempting to do something that has never be done before, to replace 8000 years of class society, of exploitation and hierarchy and plunder of the planet's resources by advancing toward a world of justice, equality, and sustainability. And the "we" who are doing this are ourselves products of the world we want to replace. This sets all of us up for own specific kinds of errors.

People go through life with models of the world, the ideas that this is how things are. In normal times the model of the world becomes the model for the world, the way things have to be, what is only common sense or human nature or divine commandments. This is not simply that the rulers delude us by control of the media and of education. Daily experience supports the prevailing beliefs. Capitalists exploit workers, but the direct experience is that the employer gives us jobs and pays our wages. Political parties help them exploit us, but give us show debates that masquerade as freedom.

But radio call-in sports programs show that people are Smart, can amasss huge amounts of information and analyze subtly the choices made by team managers. In this domain they have confidence in their own intelligence. When that intelligence is aimed at the conditions of their oppression, the bosses will tremble. It is only in special times that the model of ceases to be the model for, when ordinary day to day misery that we have learned to cope with one way or another is intensified and recognized as unacceptable, when what is is seen as unjust, wrong, deceitful, dishonest, and unbearable. That is the prelude to revolutionary times and the air fills with rich clouds of illusion, offering us a hundred colorful ways to continue our oppression.

The errors people make come out of their experience and thinking about that experience in the light of previous ideas. Most wrong ideas and destructive behaviors come not from stupidity but for reasons which come from their own experience and common sense. But their own experience is usually a mixed role of oppressed and oppressor, and carry the ideas of both. White working men may feel superior in exploiting women and blaming African-Americans and Latinos for their deprivation and insecurity. So even within the revolutionary movements comrades carry ideas from the ruling class. While workers in the Cuban revolution waged class struggle, members of the petty bourgeoisie rebelled against the brutal corruption of the Batista government or the subordination of their country to the United States. Some of them moved on to a deeper meaning of liberation but others felt that once Batista left for Miami and the new foreign ministry asserted Cuba's Independence, the job was done and they could go home or conspire against the communists. Every revolution carries within itself a mixture of beliefs and feelings from different sources that may come into conflict.

Therefore we face the problem, how to minimize the errors coming from our histories? The first step is to acknowledge that questioning is legitimate. If a worker or peasant expresses a criticism that we see as itself wrong, our first response must be not to demolish it with superior knowledge but to seek out the rational core of that preoccupation and see how the problem that inspired the question can be solved together. Criticism cannot be rejected as hostile infiltration of enemy ideology. But many comrades will be timid about expressing doubts for fear of causing disunity or being seen as ignorant. Our task is to nurture doubt.

It may even be useful to, create the formal role of devil's advocate as done in the Catholic Church when cosidering a candidate for sainthood, someone assigned to criticize a particular policy or program. This role should be rotated in collectives where people know and respect each other, are aware of each others' strengths and vulnerabilities so that nobody will be regarded as a profesional nay-sayer and everybody should learn how to be able to ask, "But what if we're wrong?"

All of this is part of the process on the way to reaching consensus and achieving unity in action. To the extent that people who were regarded as too ignorant to make political decisions become full participants, we will have millions of brains working to shatter the great detour in human history through class societies and their illusions.

Therefore the fourth requirement for joining the revolution should be to be willing to criticize.

The author is professor of population sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Photo: Statue of Lenin in Seattle 2012. Originally commissioned in Czechoslovakia 1988, it was purchased by Lewis Carpenter, an American who was teaching English there, and brought to Seattle where it has been displayed since the mid 1990s. The PA editor found it on flickr on the photo stream of InSapphoWeTrust. Creative Commons 2.0