First Published: Class War, No. 1, Winter 1973
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Note: The first part of this series appeared in Communist issue #6, and the series will continue in Class War #2.
One of the primary problems facing the emerging Marxist-Leninist movement in this country is the problem of understanding history. Many of the new groups today neither study closely the history of the Struggle Between Two Lines in the Communist Movement as a whole, nor do they even take seriously the collective experience of their own particular group or tendency.
The proletarian left has not only ignored the history of their own Movement, but is also leaving it up to the pseudo-radical pimp journalists and “media-groovers” to write the history of the great revolutionary mass upsurge of the Sixties. This upsurge on a worldwide scale, including the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Tet Offensive and victory of People’s War in South Viet Nan, the Long Hot Summer of Black insurrections (“riots”) in hundreds of “US” cities, the May 1968 General Strike in France, the heroic uprising of the Czechoslovak people, also in 1968, the re-emergence of the Huks in the Philippines, the IRA in Ireland, etc. etc. is the most important world-wide development since the great international upheavals that accompanied the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917. All the acre reason why all the lackey scholar-despots and ideological hirelings of the imperialist bourgeoisie must make all efforts to distort this tremendous earth-shaking period by breaking down the upsurge as a whole into a whole series of separated, unrelated, “purely spontaneous”, or “adventurist” episodes, which, once properly categorized according to bourgeois psychology and other such “sciences”, can be put on a dusty shelf and forgotten by all concerned. This is precisely the main content of the thousands of books, magazine articles, films, etc. which take advantage of a growing interest in revolution to peddle the worse kind of rubbish by the most discredited and backward of the opportunist elements associated with the upsurge of the Sixties in one way or another, although mainly consumed by dilettante petty-bourgeoisie, this “new leftism” nevertheless has its negative influence on the revolutionary Movement since it imposes an entirely non-proletarian and anti-Marxist concept of history itself which is already, since it plays into the hands of the revisionists and trotskyites, a grave danger to the movement in this country.
Despite the fact that most of the new groups in the Marxist-Leninist movement owe their very existence to the upsurge of the sixties, there has not yet been any serious attempt to either analyse this specific period or to place it in the context of the overall development of the world proletarian revolution. Of course, we are not calling upon the movement for either prophets or prophecy, what we are calling for is world-historical analysis and outlook and a resolute struggle against “ad hoc” pragmatism and narrowness.
Of course, all left-wing groups, even the ones with the lowest political level, try to give the appearance that at least their leadership has some grasp of the basic lessons of history. But the carrying out of a struggle in the revolutionary ranks to study history and to master dialectics, which the Communist Party of China has always given the closest attention to, is still being ignored. Most of the leadership of the new Marxist-Leninist groups, capable as they may be in the practical, day-to-day organizational functions, and dedicated and heroic as many have been in the face of extreme difficulties and threats, have yet to produce the comprehensive world-historical analysis of their tasks in this country in the overall context of the international struggle. Of course, this is something that cannot be written up overnight by a select committee but must be hammered out in struggle. But without this body of theoretical knowledge, the summary and content of our collective experience, we will end up awaiting each new series of events, with no over-view, no idea of the strengths and weaknesses of our own forces or the enemy’s.
It is modem revisionism, in this country expressed in its ultimate degeneration in the form of the CPUSA, which liquidated not only the organizational form of the party of the proletariat in this country, but also, its ideological content, its role as standard-bearer of the scientific method of dialectical materialism. In place of the immensely valuable, irreplaceable historic legacy passed to us by the Communist International, through the decisions expressed through all seven of its world congresses, as well as the International Communist Movement as it has developed since the time of the Comintern, the revisionists of the CPUSA, have come forward with their miserable petty-bourgeois hacks, loaded with anti-Marxist, non-proletarian baggage, under the cozy arrangements afforded by the USA-USSR Axis, the revisionists in this country are grinding out tons of their books, pamphlets, and other materials. The failure of the emerging Marxist-Leninist movement to produce a highly professional revolutionary press will ensure that the revisionists and trotskyites will continue to spread their reactionary lines in the workingclass without being challenged. The tendency of some Marxist-Leninists themselves to rely upon such revisionist “experts” as Aptheker, CPUSA “historian”, or those armchair political economists of the Monthly Review variety, will feed to the most serious errors in every field of activity, unless also challenged and subjected to rigorous criticism.
Some groups have recently produced statements and documents related to their own specific development. But, almost always, these experiences are described and analyzed in isolation from the general world-historical conditions in which they take place. Thus, although the various documents produced out of the Struggle Between Two Lines as it has developed in the Black Panther Party, SDS, the Young Lords Party (now the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization), the Revolutionary Union, etc. are useful in relation to each specific group, it still remains incomplete, since the collective experience of the movement as a whole is more, much than simply a sum of its parts.
The pragmatism and empiricism that characterizes the emerging Marxist-Leninist movement is, in one sense, an inevitable aspect of the early development of any genuinely revolutionary movement in this historical period. But, just as inevitable is the fact that after a certain degree of mistakes stemming from this “spontenaism” a genuinely revolutionary movement will then rigorously set itself to the mastery of dialectics, to the class-against-class struggle to hammer out new methods of thinking, to close-quarter, inner-party philosophical struggle. If the first stage does not develop into the second stage, the revolutionary movement will simply turn into another recruiting area for the trotskyites. However, in this historical period, in this major oppressor nation, the natural problems of low theoretical level, or even anti-theoretical tendencies, is compounded by the large-scale treachery of the rotten revisionist CPUSA, whose specific brand of modern revisionism, known since the time of Stalin’s criticism of the CPOSA in 1928 as “American Exceptionalism”, has been doing everything possible to prevent the revolutionary education of the proletariat in the theory and practice of the Proletarian Revolution. Thus, we must pay special attention to training the revolutionary cadres to master dialectics, especially at this time. Such special effort must take the form of a wholesale rectification campaign to root out all vestiges of bourgeois ideology, including its petty-bourgeois “radical” trends. American exceptionalism today lives not only in the form of the CPUSA, but expresses itself in a centrist and opportunist deviation within the Marxist-Leninist movement itself.
The most dangerous false notion prevalent in the emerging Marxist-Leninist movement concerning the CPUSA and revisionism in this country is the notion that Earl Browder was the only important revisionist leader, and that William ”Zig-Zag” Foster was the great anti-revisionist leader, who “reconstituted” the CPUSA In 1945, barely one year after it had been liquidated into the “Communist Political Association” by Browder & Co. in 1944. The fact is that both Foster and Browder were rotten revisionists, who, as far back as the 1920’s (See Part One of Struggle Between Two Lines in The Communist Movement, Communist #6 for specific details.) had been guilty of American Exceptionalism in their general political lines. Basically, Browder represented, the petty-bourgeois wing of the CPUSA leading clique, Foster the labor-aristocracy and Trade Union bureaucrats, the majority of both of which groups deserted the party in the thousands during the fascist witch-hunt, often becoming stool-pigeons, red-baiters, and professional anti-communists.
This simple notion of Foster as the good guy, saving the Party and its Marxist-Leninist line from Browder, the bad guy, is a poor substitute for a real investigation into the roots of modern revisionism in this country. It in no way explains why the supposedly “Marxist-Leninist” Foster endorsed every single one of the counter-revolutionary revisionist theses of the notorious 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, including the trotskyite-titoite anti-Stalin slanders of Khrushchev. Of course, it has made it easier, not only for Foster, but also his counter-parts in Thorez and Togliatti and other revisionists who joined in the anti-Stalin chorus, to cover up mistakes and treason with the blame heaped upon Stalin by the capitalist-restorationists of the Kremlin. Although this alone would be enough to condemn Foster, the dozen or so major works of his, including his histories of the CPUSA, the World Trade Union movement, the “Americas”, etc., (all of which have been reprinted and are being used extensively by the CPUSA today) are the full proof of Foster’s partnership with Browder in liquidating the CPUSA as the theoretical and practical embodiment of Marxism-Leninism in this country. However, the main question that must concern us at present is not Foster personally, but Fosterism as a political line, as a specific variety of American exceptionalism, as a centrist, or vacillating detachment of modern revisionism. This is because the failure to overcome Fosterism in particular has been the curse of many, attempted “reconstitutions” of the CPUSA, not merely the farce presided over by Foster in person in 1945, but also, a whole series of left splits from the CPUSA, in the period after the genuine and final left split (actually an expulsion) from the CPUSA in 1958. The 1958 split by a group in the CPUSA that was first known as the Consistent Left Caucus, to distinguish it from the inconsistent “left” faction of Foster-led centrists, was in fact the sign of the complete victory of counter-revolutionary modern revisionism in the CPUSA and the clear expression of the utter bankruptcy of that group. After 1958 no genuine Marxist-Leninist had any reason to remain inside the CPUSA, except perhaps to either wreck that group or else to “factionalize” with the deliberate purpose of drawing people out and into a genuine Communist organization.
The Consistent Left Caucus became, upon its expulsion from the CPUSA, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in the U.S.A., better known simply as the POC. Publishing the Marxist-Leninist Vanguard regularly for a decade, the POC made important contributions to the anti-revisionist and anti-imperialist movement in this country. The POC particularly upheld the Marxist-Leninist position on the National-Colonial Question, specifically the Comintern line on the Black Belt nation and Puerto Rico, and distinguished itself from almost every other left organization at that time by its intensive concentration on, and predominant leadership and membership of, Black and Latin American national-minority workers.
The POC is not important in and of itself, what is important is that the POC represented the continuity of the anti-revisionist struggle, of the Struggle Between Two Lines in the Communist Movement in this country, of the proletarian, Bolshevik wing of the workingclass movement against its many-faced enemy, the opportunist, Menshevik, essentially bourgeoisified and imperialist-bribed wing. Out of the POC have come many of the leading cadres of the emerging Marxist-Leninist movement, who, giving the POC up for lost after its 1966 metamorphosis into the “American Workers Communist Party” where under the leadership of A. Roman, a small fraction of the original POC declared the whole world, including China, to be imperialist, swept by a “cycle of counter-revolution”, etc.) have brought to the new movement much valuable experience and first-hand knowledge especially about the CPUSA. Despite the degeneration of the POC in 1968 into a neo-trotskyite family sect, in the period up to then, it had generally been the only centre of anti-revisionist struggle in this country. In the sixties, a number of other splits off the CPUSA occurred, each one making more and more grandiose pretentions about its role, and each in fact miserable by comparison with the early POC. These included Hammer and Steel, a Boston mass, group led by Homer Chase, Progressive Labor (then, becoming PLM, PLP) led by Milt Rosen and Mort Sheer, the Negro-Labor Vanguard group in New Jersey, led by Clarence Coggins, the Antithesis group on the west coast, and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, based in Chicago, this last group having a policy of keeping some of its forces inside the CPUSA, some outside. All of these groups, except PL, have remained small or else have gone out of existence entirely. All of them, including PL, eventually took up a counter-revolutionary line, except for the Ad Hoc Committee, which has a Fosterite-centrist position on some questions, but otherwise has remained anti-revisionist. Like Roman’s sect, the Homer Chase group ended up attacking China and Mao Tsetung as “imperialist” and “left revisionist”. In fact, PL’s most recent counter-revolutionary position, as expressed in their “Road to Revolution III”, is merely a poor imitation of Roman’s and Chase’s neo-trotskyite anti-China ravings, the main difference being that PL has been better funded than either Roman or Chase, thus, becoming better known (and more hated!) in the workingclass movement.
Thus, we have this outwardly-appearing pessimistic picture of a number of successive groups breaking out of the CPUSA, and most of them either evaporating or turning into some weird brand of trotskyites, doomsday prophets, and vicious slanderers and liars. However, untangling this complicated process, and, more importantly, piecing it in the context of the Struggle Between Two Lines in the International Communist Movement, the “Great Debate” starting in the second half of the fifties, we can clearly see that 1958 is a line of demarcation between the genuine anti-revisionists and the Fosterite, centrist, vacillating, and unreliable opponents of revisionism, who, in 1958, had largely supported the expulsion of what became the POC, only to find themselves expelled a few years later!! Furthermore, we can see that, in terms of the fundamental political and ideological questions involved, the POC was the last real left wing of the CPUSA, and produced the best cadres based on the anti-revisionist struggle in the CPUSA. Most of what came after 1958, typified in its most extreme degeneration in the form of the hated Progressive Labor group, was an expression, not of the struggle against revisionism, but of the crisis in the revisionist camp itself, of the disintegration of a single bloc of modern revisionists into a “polycentrist” swarm of squabbling rival revisionisms. The clearest proof of this is not simply what position this or that group took on the international questions. After all, PL was playing a counter-revolutionary role even during the period when they claimed to support Mao Tsetung Thought, the Chinese and Albanians.
What unmasked all these post-1958 splits as Fosterite, even though some of them professed some criticism of Foster, is that they all took up the Fosterite line on the fundamental questions related to the tasks of the Proletarian Revolution in this country. PL was not the first, nor has it been the last would-be Marxist-Leninist group in this country which, abandoning the correct position on the Black Belt Question like Foster and Browder, fell into one error after another on the National-Colonial Question, sometimes embracing Pan-African and Black nationalism uncritically, at other times, utterly denying the existence of any national question or national struggle inside the “USA”. What unmasked the post-1958 splits, especially PL, as essentially centrists, conciliators of revisionism, vacillators destined to be drawn into the camp of revisionism completely at some crucial point, was their typically centrist formulations which combined some aspects of the Communist world-outlook with barely-disguised revisionist lines, a mixture which was bound to separate, like oil and water. Thus, the Fosterites will combine taking a “correct” position on some general question with taking a revisionist line on some specific aspect of that question, or vice versa, but always, trying to appear as a vague middle point between the two opposites. Thus PL, in one of its early statements, said, “we do not want a fratricidal war with the CPUSA” while at the same time claiming to be the strongest supporters of the Communist Party of China, who were struggling fiercely against modern revisionism internationally. Today, there are Fosterites who claim to support China, but still consider the Soviet union to be socialist, thus opposing one of the most important positions the Chinese have developed, that of the fact that capitalism has been restored in the Soviet Union, that it is social-imperialist and social-fascist, etc.
Lately, William Z. Foster has been honored in the Guardian, which, self-described as an “independent radical news weekly”, is itself a classical centrist publication, long known for its tightrope-walking act “between” the two protagonists in what it still likes to call the “Sino-Soviet split”, lately, more “left” centrist in character, supporting China, but not quite calling the Soviet Union capitalist and imperialist, professing commitment to the anti-revisionist struggle, yet still carrying paid advertisements for revisionists and trotskyite activities and publications, etc. etc.
The December 13th issue of the Guardian quotes Foster in its “Voices of Revolution” column (which has also carried quotes from the notorious counter-revolutionary Trotsky!!) which relate to the struggle against fascism, for democracy, etc. The Guardian or anybody else for that matter, could easily piece together something from Foster’s writings, or even Browder’s writings, for that matter, which might look half-way decent as a quote. But a look at another quote from Foster, this time about the fascist movements themselves, as they appeared in this country, gives us a real idea of just how much in error, how confused Foster, and the whole CPUSA leadership at that time, were about fascism, democracy, the class content of political phenomenon in general!
”Striking manifestations of the broad democratic upsurge of the masses during the early New Deal period were the many “panacea” mass agitations.. .Usually their programs were fantastically utopian, and the demagogic leaders were frequently fascist-minded, but the masses were full of democratic fighting spirit...” (Here, Foster cites Technocracy, Father Coughlin, the KKK’s Huey Long, and other reactionary movements) “...The Communist Party paid close attention to the “panacea” movements. Although often led by dangerous demagogues these movements were not wholly in vain. They dramatized the plight of the workers, the unemployed, the aged, the farmers, and the impoverished petty-bourgeoisie. That the “panacea” movements did not become perverted into a real base for American fascism was also due in no small measure to the activities of the Communist Party in exposing their economic fallacies, in combatting their reactionary leaders, and in directing their masses into more practical channels of political struggle.
This incredible piece of rubbish completely fills the needs of present-day American fascism, which, contrary to Foster’s “history”, was already definitely a fascist movement at that time, combining the ”left” social-fascism of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” with the right wing and openly pro-Hitler and pro-Mussolini Coughlin’s, Longs, etc. Furthermore, in no way did the various so-called “panacea” movements “dramatize the plight”, or in any way organize or aid either striking workers or struggling unemployed. To claim this is to give credit to the fascists of the 1930’s and to slander the working-class, which, even if not completely revolutionary at that time, was definitely anti-fascist, anti-Hitler. In reality, all of these movements, some more hysterically than others, were openly anti-working class at that time, aligned with Ford and other capitalists as strike-breakers, labor spies, and goon squads to attack meetings, terrorize the families of “known agitators”, etc.. Foster paints the openly fascist movements of the 1930’s in this country in “democratic” and even workingclass colors, speaking of “their masses”, he makes the absurd claim that the CPUSA prevented these fascists from becoming fascists! This conciliatory attitude towards home-grown American fascism contradicts Foster’s militant stand against foreign, that is German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and other European fascisms. But this is the nature of centrism–to combine a correct general line with a betrayal in the realm of the specific, the particular.
Foster began his career expressing the interests of the developing labor-aristocracy in the American workingclass, not the old decayed crafts and guild-type labor-aristocrats, but the new labor-aristocracy of the era of imperialism and State-Monopoly-Capitalism. Based on the union bureaucracies, this new labor-aristocracy arose in the 1930’s, and, riding the crest of the wave of strikes, sitdowns, factory occupations, and CIO union-building, made itself hegemonic over the “Labor Movement” with the aid of the CPUSA. Then, after turning on the revisionist hand that had fed them, the running dogs of the labor aristocracy embraced the imperialist chieftains and consolidated their parasitical status on the backs of both the colonially-oppressed workers and peasantry and the proletariat in “their” countries, most of which, of course, they still refuse to organize into their “unions”. This new-style labor-aristocracy in America, and throughout the “western hemisphere” (even in Latin America–the Peronista Trade Union bureaucrats are a good example) draws its members from a variety of political areas, “left” as well as right, integrating these into a viable, workable, and also, necessarily flexible instrument of State-Monopoly-Capital. Hitler called it the “Labor Front”–here, they team it up, alongside Big Business, as “Big labor”, but every rank-and-file worker, union member or not, knows that this concept is the direct opposite of the class concept of “Labor”, the concept of Labor vs. Capital, the labor movement as the workingclass movement.
Because of his position as a leading member of the emerging new-type labor-aristocracy in this country, because of the multitude of ideological threads binding him to the interests of that privileged, bribed, and corrupted strata, which, although a small minority within the workingclass as a whole, exercises a dominant influence on the class, until decisively defeated by the revolutionary, Communist-led majority, because of the objective and subjective factors present, Foster was no more capable of understanding the nature of counter-revolution than he was of understanding the tasks of revolution. Thus, Foster ends his “History of the CPUSA”, after a long dissertation on the essentially reactionary, warlike, fascist, aggressive, etc. nature of U.S. imperialism, with the following gem:
The Communist Party’s orientation for a possible peaceful transition to socialism in the united States is based upon four elementary considerations: first, the fight of the working class for its immediate demands is the very substance of democracy, it strengthens basically the democratic forces in our country, and by the eventual establishment of socialism it raises democracy qualitatively to a new high level; second, the working class, led by the Communist Party, harmonizes its methods with its ends by fighting for both its immediate and ultimate objectives with the most peaceful and democratic means possible; third, the workers and their allies, constituting the vast majority of the people and possessing immense organizations, now have the potential power to curb, restrain, and make ineffective whatever violence the capitalists may undertake in their attempt to balk the will of the people and to prevent the establishment of socialism; and fourth, in recent years, on the international scale, there has been an enormous growth of power in the camp of democracy and socialism. The fundamental difference between the Communist Party and right-wing Social Democracy (and its Browderite variant) is not that the Social-Democrats want to establish socialism by peaceful means and the Communists want to achieve it by violence.
The chapter in which this quote appears, Chapter 37, is followed by an even worse one entitled: “The Party of the Working Class and the Nation.” The positions that Foster puts forward in this book, more than any other he wrote, completely throw Marxism-Leninism out the window, as any critical study of the work will show. This book Is literally the fountainhead of modern revisionism in the CPUSA, the crystallization of all the liquidationist trends in the CPUSA, which the present-day Fosterites and neo-Fosterites, although nominally in opposition to the revisionists, are carrying amongst their political baggage, and which must be cast off and thrown out of the workingclass movement, before it causes any more harm.
Amongst most of the new Marxist-Leninist groups, there can be seen two main groups in terms of origins. There are those groups that emerged at the beginning, at the breaking out of the world-wide revolutionary upsurge of the 1960’s, and there are those groups which emerged at the peak of, or even after the main period of upsurge. Between these two general groups there can be seen important differences as well as similarities, but it is our premise that the best of both must be combined in the Marxist-Leninist movement as it continues, through the protracted class war in this oppressor nation, towards the building of the Marxist-Leninist Party. The best of those who became Communists at the beginning of the sixties are those who, maintaining revolutionary endurance and tenacity, were able to come forward and join with the younger comrades at the end of the sixties, overcoming differences between them, through mutual respect for each other’s collective experiences. The younger comrades have been through the mass struggles of the past few years, and have developed a strong practical grasp of the problems of the Proletarian Revolution in this country. The older comrades, some with experience in the earlier anti-revisionist struggle, bring equally valuable and essential theoretical and historical grasp of the same problems. Without continuity with the earlier anti-revisionist struggle, with the Struggle Between Two Lines in the Communist Movement, the younger comrades would not be well prepared to deal with the many varieties of opportunism and ideological deviation that will arise in the course of the class war in this country. Likewise, without the more recent and younger comrades, especially the thousands of Black, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chicano, Chinese, and other national-minority workingclass youth who have built up most of the new Marxist-Leninist forces throughout the country, the various ex-CPUSA elements would exist as either sects or as “left” loyal oppositions to the CPUSA. However, whereas the best of both general groups of the anti-revisionist movement as a whole must be unified, so also, the useless, in fact harmful, elements must be thrown out of each. Such elements are precisely all those vestiges of American Exceptionalism, both the Browderite and Fosterite varieties, which appear in both younger and older cadres. The theoretical roots, objective class origins, and multi-faceted character of this American Exceptionalism must be completely understood, as it expresses itself in relation to the National-Colonial Question, the question of State And Revolution, the Women’s Question, the Trade Union Question, and every other question related to the overall task of Proletarian Revolution in this country. Our tendency pledges itself to this struggle, firm in its belief that Anti-imperialism will not be victorious unless it is combined with Anti-revisionism.
We have arrived therefore at the following general conclusions, based, initially, on our specific experience (See our November 14, 1972 Statement “Origins of the Class War Tendency”) as a political tendency in the Communist Movement over the last half-decade. This article, second in the series, in no way completes, but only begins, the polemics against what we see as the main enemy within the new revolutionary workingclass movement. The modem revisionists of the CPUSA, the trotskyites, bukharinites, titoites, and all the rest of the crisis-ridden, splintering revisionist movement is too exposed as social-imperialist and social-fascist when it appears in its familiar old clothes. Thus, it dons a new, disguised costume, even a bright red one if necessary! Thus, the modern revisionists try to appear as “anti-revisionists” themselves, and taking advantage of lack of study of history and mastery of dialectics, smuggle in their revisionist lines. This series of articles will continue to expose the modern revisionists in whatever form they try to disguise themselves, and our tendency puts forward the following seven guidelines as only the barest outlines of the tasks connected with the anti-revisionist struggles:
1.) The primary task of the Marxist-Leninist movement in this country is the building of a Marxist-Leninist Party. However, this party does not yet exist, and the claims of one or more tendencies within the movement to be the centre of the movement stand in the way of the building of the real centre, the Party.
2.) The Party does not yet exist, but the future cadres of the Party do exist, not merely in one or two, but throughout all of the various new Marxist-Leninist groups. Likewise the danger of revisionism comes, not merely from one or two groups, but will inevitably express itself, in different forms, throughout the movement. This has already been irrefutably proven by the Struggle Between Two Lines as it has already developed in the various groups.
3.) The present generation of revolutionary cadre have developed out of the great world-wide revolutionary upsurge of the 1960’s, an upheaval involving socialist countries, oppressed nations and peoples, and the proletariat in the imperialist oppressor nations, sweeping the full breadth of the existing social systems in the world, progressive and reactionary alike.
4.) All of the various struggles throughout this earth-shaking period are inter-connected, and out of all of them has come a new, qualitatively higher level of consciousness and struggle in all the component parts of the world proletarian revolution. Mao Tse-Tung Thought, which has developed both through the process of the class struggle under socialism (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) and the national struggle against imperialism (People’s War) as well as the struggle between two limes (Polemic on the General Line in the International Communist Movement) is the most important single expression of this overall process.
5.) In the development of the revolutionary movement in this country, there are potential new forces and as-of-yet unaccounted factors present, such as the widespread underground communist movement in the prisons, and a similar, although less widespread movement inside the imperialist armed forces, which have not yet made their full ideological and practical contributions to the movement. Thus, any attempts to sum up the movement without some sense of these areas must be considered incomplete. There are comrades and cadres in the cell-blocks and barracks, as well as the factories, ghettos, and schools.
6.) Any attempts to bureaucratically manipulate various combinations in order to produce a ready-made “party”, will lead, at this stage, to inevitable splits, confusion, and demoralization. Likewise, we oppose the other extreme, attempts to keep the various Marxist-Leninists in isolation from each other, in arrogant postures that prevent discussion and joint action. We must carry out pro-Party tasks under the banner of opposing both “All Unity, No Struggle” and “All Struggle, No Unity”. Such steps as the formation of the November 4th Committee, based on the anti-imperialist mass march of 5,000 in New York City this year, and the publication of the magazine Proletarian Cause, as a forum for the Marxist-Leninist movement, are good steps forward along the principled road that will lead us to the Party we all want to build.
7.) All of the various tendencies must intensify the Struggle Between Two Lines, must carry through the struggle against modern revisionism to the end, must tear up American Exceptionalism by its Fosterite, as well as Browderite, roots, and must unite ever more firmly with the International Communist Movement, with the proletariat of all countries, with the oppressed nations and peoples, and with all of the fighting detachments in the great united front of the World Proletarian Revolution!
December 29, 1972
New York City