First Published: The New Voice, Vol. IV, No. 4, February 24, 1975.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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On January 31, in concert with the October League (OL), Guardian staffer Carl Davidson spoke on “The Imperialist Crisis and the Movement’s Tasks.” Davidson has been on a speaking tour for the past two months and stopped in Oakland, California to address the “pressing tasks” of the day for communists, which included party-building, united fronts, the “national” question of racial minorities, anti-war activities, fascism, trade union struggles, and civil rights struggles. Not once did Davidson mention revisionism as a primary issue facing communists.
Davidson spent over an hour discussing various phases of the communist movement. However, one aspect of his speech stood out above all else–the Guardian’s inability to lead the revolutionary working class.
An example of the Guardian’s anti-working class line is revealed in its approach to the busing struggle. Members of The New Voice (TNV) who attended the Guardian-OL sponsored event handed out a leaflet exposing the Guardian’s tailist and liberal line on the Boston busing struggle. The leaflet pointed out that busing is a program of the liberal bourgeoisie, and the Guardian’s support of that program is just helping the ruling class build racism and split the working class. The Guardian ignores the real issue–more funds for schools for both black and white working-class children. By pushing the capitalists’ line, others, like the Guardian, destroy the material basis for working-class unity on the issue of busing.
Characteristically, the OL monitors refused to allow TNV to distribute the leaflet inside the hall. These champions of “unity-struggle-unity” lose all pretense of scientific struggle when their anti-working class views are exposed.
The Guardian, by not recognizing modern revisionism as a tool of the bourgeoisie, is building a long record of supporting revisionists, those who mislead the workers’ movement by distorting the laws of revolutionary socialism. Essentially, revisionism falsely teaches that there are non-revolutionary roads to socialism. Revisionism has its roots in bourgeois ideology, and if it is not defeated within the communist movement, it will hold back the formation of a real communist party.
It was the Guardian that insisted that the U.S. left “study and defend” the reformist program of “Marxist” Salvador Allende of Chile. Today, after the slaughter of thousands brought on by politics which the editors of the Guardian defended, they point sagely to Chile as an argument against peaceful transition to socialism. The Guardian throws bouquets of praise on the new ruling junta of Portugal, echoing capitalist lies that the clique of officers are Marxists, and that their coup d’etat was a revolution. To this day, the Guardian insists that Cuba, long a neo-colony of Soviet social-imperialism, is a socialist country.
The Guardian’s latest concession to revisionism took place at the Puerto Rican Independence Day Rally, October 27, in New York City. At that rally, so-called anti-revisionists like the Guardian shared the podium with the arch-revisionist CPUSA. The Guardian refused to expose the revisionists as enemies of Puerto Rican independence; they even attacked those who did. Although the Guardian says it is communist, in reality it is like the slick opportunist renegade Kautsky. Kautsky also refused to struggle against revisionism and eventually degenerated to outright revisionist himself. [See TNV, January 13, 1975]
Revisionism is the main roadblock to a communist party. Those who do not vigorously expose and defeat revisionism are not seriously looking toward a new Marxist-Leninist party. Revisionists and supporters of revisionism can only build a non-communist party. It was the position of the Bolsheviks that the struggle against imperialism is a sham unless inseparably bound with the struggle against revisionism. That holds true today when the ideas of “peaceful transition to socialism” and the “obsolescence of class struggle” have seized state power in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. It is especially true in the United States, where so-called “anti-imperialist” groups make great appeals to mass struggle, but refuse to fight revisionism. Groups like the Guardian that mislead the mass struggle and stand in the way of working-class revolution serve only the capitalist ruling class.