Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

Against the Reactionary Idealism and Metaphysics of the "Communist" League

CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U S MARXIST LENINISTS

NOVEMBER, 1974

Part Two of: Dialectics of the Development of Nelson Peery's Head -- A Refutation of the Counter-Revolutionary Line of the So-called "Communist" League

Part Two of: Dialectics of the Development of Nelson Peery's Head -- A Refutation of the Counter-Revolutionary Line of the So-called "Communist" League

Part Two

Against the Reactionary Idealism and Metaphysics of the "Communist" League

by

Tim Hall

TO CRITICIZE AND REPUDIATE THE "LEFT" OPPORTUNIST, COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL LINE OF THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE, NOW CALLING ITSELF THE "COMMUNIST LABOR PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA", THE CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS IS PRODUCING A SERIES OF PAMPHLETS OPPOSING THE "C"L LINE ON A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FACING THE U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS TODAY. THEY ARE: PHILOSOPHY AND WORLD OUTLOOK, THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION, THE HISTORY OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS AND COMMUNIST MOVEMENT, PARTY-BUILDING AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION IN THE U.S. IT IS HOPED THAT THESE POLEMICS WILL CONTRIBUTE TO DISTINGUISHING SHAM FROM GENUINE MARXISM-LENINISM AND TO UNITING THE GENUINE MARXIST-LENINISTS INTO A SINGLE MARXIST- LENINIST COMMUNIST PARTY.

AGAINST THE REACTIONARY IDEALISM AND METAPHYSICS OF THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE

CONTENTS

MATTER IS PRIMARY OVER SPIRIT: THE FUNDAMENTAL PREMISE OF MATERIALISM AND THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE'S OPPOSITION TO IT

The "Communist" League writes:

"Our approach to the understanding of the theory of knowledge is to be found in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism " ("Call for Unity of Action against Fascist Offensive: Reply to October League (M-L), "People's Tribune", Vol 5, No 9)

I agree But the "Communist" League's theory of knowledge is not the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge of Engels and Lenin, which is one theory of knowledge that can be found in Lenin's book Instead, it is the idealist theory of knowledge of Mach and Avenarius, of their predecessors, Berkeley, Hume, etc, and of their followers, the Russian "would-be Marxists" who took up the viewpoint of Mach, and others, all of whose works Lenin quotes at length to illustrate their reactionary idealist theory of knowledge, which can also "be found" in Lenin's book. It is not the theory of knowledge of dialectical materialism, but this idealist theory of knowledge, which Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League adopt.

The theory of knowledge adopted by an organization is part of its ideological line, along with its attitude towards the laws of motion of matter The theory of knowledge of a Marxist-Leninist organization recognizes dialectics as the laws of motion of matter. Together these form dialectical materialism, the ideological line of the Marxist-Leninist Party, of the proletariat in its revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie. The ideological line of an organization is the foundation of its political line, the viewpoint and method with which it analyzes conditions and arrives at its political line, tactics and policies. Therefore, the ideological line of an organization is of paramount importance. The theory of knowledge is a fundamental part of its ideological line. If an organization opposes dialectical materialism and embraces idealism as its theory of knowledge, it cannot be called a Marxist-Leninist organization, but instead a reactionary tool of the bourgeoisie for diverting the working class movement from its revolutionary tasks.

Because Nelson Peery and the "C"L say that their "approach to the understanding of the theory of knowledge is to be found in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism," my investigation of "C"L's theory of knowledge required turning to Lenin's book. I discovered that any reader of Lenin's work who is familiar with the situation in the Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States today will quickly recognize the profound similarity between the Machians criticized by Lenin and the "Communist" League. As the U.S Marxist-Leninists struggle to develop their ideological and political line and unite to rebuild the Marxist-Leninist Party of the proletariat, we have been greatly disrupted by the vicious attacks of the "CL against the leaders of our movement in the past, against the genuine Communists who have led the working class and oppressed peoples in the U.S. forward towards the proletarian revolution, against the history of the Communist Party itself before it had become a revisionist party, and against its Marxist-Leninist political line. These open attacks have gone hand-in-hand with veiled attacks on the leadership of the international Communist movement, the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao Tsetung. These attacks have been accompanied by the assertion of all sorts of "new" political lines which the "C"L leaders claim represent the application of Marxism-Leninism to U.S and international conditions. At the same time, the attacks have been carried out under the banner of the greatest faithfulness to the classics of Marxism-Leninism, the staunchest championing of dialectical materialism. What is this veritable campaign against the history of our Party, against its political line and the political line of the international Communist movement all about? Comrade Lenin faced a similar situation in 1908 when he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: a period following a peak of the mass movement, when all sorts of bourgeois elements in the working class movement in Russia were attempting to peddle every kind of distortion as Marxism. In Russia in 1908 these poisonous weeds found their fullest flower on the philosophical front through the followers of Mach, while in the U.S. today the philosophical front is only one of the main fronts on which the opportunists of the "C"L and others are attacking Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and attempting to divert the Marxist-Leninists from their tasks. In his preface to the First Edition of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, as throughout the book, Lenin pointed out how the Russian Machians, the would-be Marxists, made every kind of attack on dialectical materialism, but never dared to come right out and say that they opposed the founders of dialectical materialism, Marx and Engels. Instead, they would attack the materialism of Plekhanov, while claiming only to be attacking his errors, in order to make devious attacks on the materialism of Marx and Engels. In a similar way, today Nelson Peery and company make every kind of attack on dialectical materialism, and they too do not dare to come out and openly declare their opposition to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao. Instead, using different tricks, often with a "philosophical" guise, they make every kind of attack on this or that less prominent Communist, most notably, on Comrade William Z Foster, leader of the Communist Party of the U.S. for many of its years as a revolutionary Party. While claiming to be exposing their "errors", the "C"L attacks Foster and others for their dialectical materialism, never daring to admit that by doing so they are attacking dialectical materialism itself and not Foster alone. As Lenin pointed out in his Preface, this is "mutiny on one's knees," opposing Marxism while kissing the earth before the great teachers of the proletariat.

So it is a welcome task to expose the idealism and metaphysics of Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League, their opposition to dialectical materialism and their fundamental kinship with the idealists criticized by Lenin and with other revolutionary thinkers. Such criticism and repudiation is necessary to clear the ground for the Marxist-Leninist movement to adopt a correct ideological line and to lay the foundation for adopting a correct political line.

In writing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin took as his task the refutation of the empirio-critical trend in philosophy, which emerged in the late 19th century headed by Ernst Mach and which had adherents in the working-class movement in Russia. Empirio-criticism, or Machism as it was also called, amounted to a rejection of materialism and a return to reactionary idealism under the guise of the development of "recent positivism." Through the would-be Marxists Machism gained influence in the proletarian Party in Russia and threatened to divert the working-class movement from its revolutionary tasks. Its idealist premises left the door wide open for the spread of religion among the workers to oppose the revolutionary working-class movement. Hence this philosophical question acquired great importance. For this reason, Lenin paid great attention to refuting the reactionary fallacies of Machism.

In refuting Machism, Lenin first analyzed its viewpoint on the fundamental question of all philosophy, the question of which is recognized as primary, matter or spirit, the answer to which determines where one stands in the division between the two fundamental lines in philosophy, materialism and idealism. Exposing the fundamentally idealist stand of the Machians, Lenin then proceeded to assess their stand on the particular applications of their general philosophical line: the relationship between matter and spirit and between social consciousness and social being. Lenin showed how Mach and Avenarius had given rise to followers, how the Machians utilized the crisis in the natural sciences of that time to attempt to deny the existence of the material world and what absurdities the Machians uttered when they applied their idealist conceptions to social life. For our purposes in criticizing Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League, who are not involved in the natural sciences and who have not yet given rise to successors (aside from members of their organization), I will attempt to analyze the stand of the "C"L on the same basic questions of philosophy on which Lenin assessed the stand of the Machians, to show the fundamental identity between "C'L's ideological line and that of the Machian idealists. Following this, which will comprise the first part of this work, I will analyze the "dialectics" which the "C"L leaders boast so much about and will attempt to show that it represents nothing but rank reactionary metaphysics. In dealing with these questions I will be forced to present "C"L's philosophy mainly as it is applied to various political and historical questions facing the Marxist-Leninist movement.

To begin, let us look at the fundamental premises of the two theories of knowledge which are "to be found" in the pages of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

The fundamental premise of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge and the fundamental dividing line between the two great camps of philosophy, materialism and idealism, is whether or not one recognizes the objective existence of the material world, independent of man's will, which can only reflect the material world. That is, whether one recognizes that matter is primary over spirit or not. All materialists recognize the existence of the material world and hold that matter is primary over spirit and that consciousness can only reflect being, while all idealists reject the existence of the material world, hold that spirit is primary over matter and that consciousness determines being. It is this question which has divided all philosophers from the beginnings of recorded history down to the present day. From Democritus the materialist versus Plato the idealist, to Lenin the materialist versus Mach the idealist, to the Marxist-Leninists in the U.S. today upholding materialism against the idealism of Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League, the struggle of materialism against idealism has not in the least become "antiquated." Holding that the real world does not exist, the idealists, in the final analysis, declare that the world is the creation of the subjective will of a God or of an individual and that the masses in general are incapable of changing it. On the other hand, the materialists, who hold the view that the material world does indeed exist, declare that man is capable of comprehending it, of reflecting its laws in his consciousness, and that the masses are therefore capable of changing it. Idealism has always been used by the exploiting classes to attempt to dupe the exploited classes into believing that the social world cannot be known and changed by them, but that instead they should entrust their fate to a god and, while on earth, to the slaveowners, landlords and the bourgeoisie and their agents the priests, clergy, etc. Materialism on the other hand, has always been a weapon in the hands of the exploited classes for analyzing their actual conditions and arriving at plans and policies for revolting against the exploiting classes, making revolution and changing the world. Idealism, therefore, is conservative and reactionary, a tool of the exploiting classes, while materialism is progressive and revolutionary, a tool of the exploited classes. Whether one recognizes the existence of matter, of objective reality and objective truth standing outside one's consciousness is the cornerstone of materialism and of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin repudiates Mach, Avenarius and others who rejected the fundamental premise of materialism and adopted that of idealism. Let us look at how Mach and his brethren present their fundamental stand of idealism.

In 1872, Mach wrote:

"The task of science can only be: 1 To determine the laws of connection of ideas (Psychology). 2 To discover the laws of connection of sensations (Physics) 3 To explain the laws of connection between sensations and ideas (Psycho-Physics) " (Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1972, p 31

And in 1876, Avenarius wrote:

"Only sensation can be thought of as the existing." "We have recognised that the existing (das Seiende) is substance endowed with sensation; the substance falls away, sensation remains; we must then regard the existing as sensation, at the basis of which there is nothing which does not posses sensation nichts Empfindungsloses." Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 42)

Thus both Mach and Avenarius hold that a material world does not exist independently of the mind but that what exists in its place is sensation, that the world outside of one is merely an illusion and all that exists is one' s ideas. Hence, for Mach and Avenarius, leaders of the philosophical trend which Lenin was fighting against in the pages of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (where Nelson Peery's "approach" is to be found), spirit is primary over matter and in fact matter does not exist. Only illusions of matter exist, created by the spirit and called sensations.

While the Machians presented this theory as something "new", Lenin pointed out that it was nothing but a refurbishing of age-old idealist philosophy and represented nothing new whatsoever. Lenin illustrated this by citing the views of the 18th century idealist Bishop Berkeley, who put forth all the arguments of the Machians a hundred and fifty years before their time. Berkeley, too, held the position that spirit was primary over matter and that a material world independent of man's will did not exist. In 1710, Berkeley wrote:

"It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding." "For, what are the afore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?" Berkeley adds that the opinion he is refuting recognizes "the absolute existence of sensible objects in themselves, or without the mind." (Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp 12-14)

Hence it can be seen that the Machians of the 19th century and Berkeley in the 18th century rejected the existence of the material world.

Against these idealist fallacies, materialism holds that the material world exists external to and independent of man's will, and that sensations are only the channel through which the mind becomes aware of the external world, which is then only reflected by the mind. Lenin quotes Engels in refuting the Machians:

"But whence does thought obtain these principles (i.e., the fundamental principles of all knowledge)? From itself? No these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world... the principles are not the starting point of the investigation (as Duhring who would be a materialist but cannot consistently adhere to materialism, holds), but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialistic conception of the matter and Herr Duhring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas." (Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 33, from Anti-Duhring)

Thus Engels holds that thought creates nothing out of itself but can only reflect the external world and derive principles from the investigation of it which are correct only in so far as they correspond with it Lenin points out:

"But the question here is not of this or that formulation of materialism, but of the opposition of materialism to idealism, of the difference between the two fundamental lines in philosophy. Are we to proceed from things to sensation and thought? Or are we to proceed from thought and sensation to things? The first line, i.e., the materialist line, is adopted by Engels. The second line, i e., the idealist line, is adopted by Mach. No evasions, no sophisms (a multitude of which we shall yet encounter) can remove the clear and indisputable fact that Ernst Mach's doctrine that things are complexes of sensations is subjective idealism and a simple rehash of Berkeleianism." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 33-4.)

There is absolutely no room in Engels' or Lenin's theory for rejecting the existence of the objective external world or for considering that all that exists are sensations or ideas. Such are the two lines in philosophy, as they manifest themselves on the fundamental question of all philosophy and as represented by the Idealists Mach, Avenarius and Berkeley on the one hand, and the materialists Engels and Lenin, on the other.

Where do Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League stand on the fundamental question of philosophy? What stand do these self-proclaimed "dialectical materialists" take? Since they have not written any works dealing outright with the problems of philosophy (although they pretend to say a great deal about it at every turn), it is only possible to study their outlook on this question by seeing how they apply it to important political matters. For example, today in the US a two-line struggle is raging in the Marxist-Leninist movement over whether or not to build a genuinely Marxist-Leninist Communist Party to lead the working class in revolution. Having proclaimed themselves leaders of this process, the "Communist" League would seem to have recognized the importance of the material phenomenon of this Communist movement and the necessity of studying it, grasping the laws of the inter-action of theory and practice within it and of its inter-action with the material and ideological world of the class struggle of the proletariat, in order to learn from its experience, guide it in building the Party on a truly Leninist basis and lead the proletariat in its class struggle. But in fact, the "Communist" League does not consider the Communist movement itself to be a material phenomenon having such inter-relations and laws, but instead they consider the Communist movement as a complex of concepts and theories, which is equally idealistic as Mach's belief that reality is a complex of sensations. The "C"L writes:

"When Engels was asked what is the Communist movement, he did not hesitate to answer that the Communist movement is the movement of the theories of the emancipation of the proletariat. We have from the beginning accepted this as our guideline and cornerstone." ("May Day 1974 International Report", "People's Tribune", May 1974)

The "C"L leaders elaborate this conception of the U.S. Communist movement in their "analysis" of its history in the document "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", which they advertise as a contribution to the summation of its history In this document, in speaking of the "struggle" between anarcho-syndicalism and revisionism in the 1880's, the "C"L leaders describe the Communist movement as a complex of concepts:

"To the peaceful mass legal activity of the SLP was counterpoised the IWPA with their anarchist concepts against all class governments and the concept that a small and desperate group could overthrow the government, and added to it, was the syndicalist concept that the trade unions were an embryonic form of the future society. So, out of the revisionist concepts of mass democracy and legal activity grew its opposite which was united with it; the concept of illegal activity in opposition to the masses. This development in the mid-1880's was concrete proof of Marx's dialectical method."

Later in the same document, when speaking of the rise of Gompersism in the working-class movement and of the sectarianism of Daniel DeLeon of the SLP, the "C"L attributes the conceptions of these two men with the power of souring the trade unions on the possibility of a labor party for over half a century:

"By 1900, it was clear that a very important qualitative change had taken place in the labor movement in the United States of North America. The labor lieutenant theories of Gompers on the right, linked with the anti-Marxist, revisionist, sectarian policies of DeLeon on the left and the result was that to this very day the trade unions reject the concept of a party of the working class."

Throughout this document, the Communist movement and the two-line struggle within it is treated solely as a matter of ideas, and the consequences of the actual tactics and policies, the participation of the Marxists in the class struggles of the proletariat, their successes and failures, are completely ignored. It is even held by the "C"L today that there has not yet been a "real movement" of the American working class and only the "Communist" League, by providing concepts and theories, can bring it about:

"The objective conditions--the environment is highly favorable to us. The question is now whether we will be able to supply history with the subjective factors that will allow for the outburst of a real movement in this country."

To consider, as the "C"L does, that the Communist movement has nothing to do with changing the objective conditions of the country that is, leading the proletarian struggle to higher and higher levels deepening the predicament of the bourgeoisie when it is already in crisis and thus contributing towards bringing about a revolutionary situation, is to consider that the Communist movement is simply a matter of the propagation of some eternal principles, that it is a complex of concepts and theories which only must be whispered to the proletariat to make revolution. This is why the "C"L considers "education" to be the main political task of the Marxist-Leninists:

"This victory was also due in part to and clearly proved the correctness of the Communist League's line on Party Building. This line states that 'education is the main political task in this period of Party Building.'" ("Communist League Celebrates 5th Anniversary", "People's Tribune", July 1973)

And:

"In summary, clarity on the Marxist-Leninist line in the three areas of education, the press and the struggle against revisionism is indispensable to the building of a communist party of a new type. Only through education of the working class to the science of Marxism-Leninism and the usage of a national newspaper for political exposure can we combat the revisionists " ("Resolution on Party-Building" in "Marxist-Leninists, Unite"', 1973)

As further evidence that the "C"L considers the Communist movement as an ideal and not a material phenomenon, there is the use they make of three different passages from Engels and Marx in the first paragraphs of "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League" -- passages in which Marx and Engels are describing the idealist dialectics of the German philosopher Hegel, but which Nelson Peery and company attempt to palm off as descriptions of materialist dialectics for the reader to use as a guide in studying the history of the Communist movement. In the first of these passages, "C"L quotes Engels, claiming to provide the "point of view" of "Marxists' analysis of all phenomena " Here are "C'L's words and the quote from Engels:

"Marxists' analysis of all phenomena, as Engels said, is from the point of view of its: constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.'"

This quotation is a mutilated version of Engels' words in Anti-Duhring, from a section where Engels is characterizing the idealist dialectics of Hegel Here is the entire quotation (the part used by "C"L is underlined):

"This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system In this system--and herein lay its great merit--for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i e, as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development." (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, p. 34.)

A little further down on the same page in Anti-Duhring where this passage appears, Engels adds:

"Hegel was an idealist. To him the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realised pictures of the 'Idea', existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world " (Anti-Duhring, p 34)

The question from what point of view one analyzes "all phenomena" is not a question of whether or not one views them in motion, but whether or not one adopts the point of view of materialism and views them as existing objectively. Nelson Peery is here distorting the words of Engels to cover over his idealism in general and in particular his view of the U.S. Communist movement as a complex of concepts and theories. In "quoting" Engels' description of Hegelian dialectics, Nelson Peery had to delete the words "and the attempt is made to trace out", which refer to tracing out the internal connection of phenomena, because it would not escape notice if "C"L were to assert that Marxism had only made "the attempt" to do this but had not yet done it. In fact, the very reason Hegel failed to accomplish this task was that he was an idealist and did not make concrete analysis of concrete conditions. But to the subjective idealist Nelson Peery, such discrepancies can be wiped away at whim just by changing a few words.

"C"L s conception of the U.S. Communist movement as a complex of concepts and theories is even more graphically illustrated in the two passages from Marx which they distort in a similar manner to what they did with Engels' words. "C"L writes:

"First of all we are going to have to grasp the essentials of the dialectical method of Marx and Engels. In his famous statement on dialectics in the 'Poverty of Philosophy', Marx wrote: 'Wherein does the movement of pure reason consist? In posing itself, opposing itself, composing itself, in formulating itself as thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or, yet again, in affirming itself, negating itself and negating its negation.'"

A few paragraphs later, "C"L continues:

"This development of the mid 1880 s referring to the development of revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism) was concrete proof of Marx's dialectical method Marx wrote: But once it has managed to pose itself as a thesis, this thesis, this thought, opposed to itself, splits up into two contradictory thoughts the positive and the negative, the yes and the no. The struggle between these two antagonistic elements comprised in the anthesis constitutes the dialectical movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming both yes and no, the no becoming both no and yes, the contraries balance, neutralize, paralyze each other. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought, which is the synthesis of them."

In these passage, just as in the passage from Engels "quoted" above, idealist dialectics describing thought fighting thought without connection to, without reflecting, the real world are presented as materialist dialectics. Marx writes shortly after the passages quoted above:

"Up to now we have expounded only the dialectics of Hegel. We shall see later how M Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the meanest proportions. (Just as we shall see in the case of Nelson Peery--T H) Thus, for Hegel, all that has happened and is still happening is only just what is happening in his own mind. Thus the philosophy of history is nothing but the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer a history according to the order in time there is only the sequence of ideas in the understanding." The Poverty of Philosophy, International Publishers, New York, 1963, pp 108-9)

Not the materialist dialectics of Marx arrived at after long struggles against idealism, but the idealist dialectics of Hegel which do not recognize the existence of the material world. This is what the "C"L leaders urge on the Marxist-Leninist movement as the guide for studying the history of the Communist movement in the U.S. For Hegel history was only "the sequence of ideas in the understanding." For Mach, "the task of science can only be: 1 To determine the laws of connection of ideas," etc. For Avenarius, "only sensation can be thought of as the existing." For Berkeley, it was "indeed an opinion strangely prevailing" that men believed that the material world actually existed. And for Nelson Peery and the "C"L, the U S Communist movement, which they claim to be leading, is a complex of concepts and theories which they characterize, misusing Marx, as "the movement of pure reason" consisting of "two contradictory thoughts." But the ideological contradiction in the Communist movement can only reflect, not substitute for, the real world and for revolutionary practice in the struggles of the masses. Revolutionary theory is a reflection of the laws of development of the objective world, and in turn it guides the action of the masses in changing the world. "C"L's kind of "Communist" movement can only have "theoretical" tasks detached from revolutionary practice; it can only be a reactionary propaganda sect.

In this way, with regard to the Communist movement in the U.S., the "C"L leaders declare their rejection of the materialist premise that matter is primary over spirit and firmly place spirit in the primary position, reject the existence of the material world and adopt the fundamental premise of idealism. They perform this stunt in the field of their specialty, the history of the Communist movement for the whole world to see It hardly matters what they say about anything else; it is as if a well-known biologist were to declare that mankind arose when God pulled a rib out of Adam's chest and created Eve, or if a "prominent" surgeon were to declare himself in favor of bloodletting to exorcise the body of demons.

However, it is still "an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men," reflecting a material fact, that the U.S. Communist movement has existed for 122 years, since 1852, when Joseph Weydemeyer issued Die Revolution, the first Communist journal in the U.S., printing Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for the first time in the world, and organized the Proletarian League in New York. Ever since that year, no matter how much the bourgeoisie inside and outside the working-class movement tries to deny it, there has been a Communist movement in the U.S., performing the theoretical, political and economic tasks of Communism, always striving to lead the proletariat and train it for its assaults on capitalism. It doesn't matter if today Nelson Peery wants to place himself in the idealist camp and attempt to declare the Communist movement out of existence; the bourgeoisie has tried everything in its power to eliminate it in the past, and Nelson Peery will certainly not succeed where Earl Browder and Gus Hall, Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, have failed so miserably.

The "Communist" League leadership reveals its rejection of the fundamental premise of materialism in other ways as well. In a recent article defending their position that the Soviet Union is not a capitalist country, they declared that the superstructure of socialist society has both "conscious" and "subconscious" elements. They wrote:

"The objective part of the superstructure is consciously developed by the victorious class after a battle; that fundamentally is the State. The State is represented by a constitution and the necessary laws to define that constitution and the military and police apparatus, the prisons, etc, which enforce those laws. This conscious element is constructed to safeguard and develop the productive relations which are the basis of the specific society. Alongside of the conscious aspects of the superstructure, there arises a reflection of the subconscious class struggle --art, literature, political forms, etc. What we want to emphasize is that the subconscious element arises on the basis of the established productive relations, and over a period of time tends to reflect and coincide with those relations of production " "Class Struggle in the USSR", "People's Tribune", June 1974)

Hence the state, which is not itself a living being, becomes animate, "conscious", while certain other aspects of the superstructure, themselves also material products of man's labor, are declared to be "subconscious", that is, presumably existing within the minds of men who aren't quite aware of the fact. Hence the entire superstructure under socialism, according to "C"L, possesses consciousness of some sort. This is nothing but a ghost story for children.

It was Bogdanov, the would-be Marxist who fell in with the Machians, who asserted the same sort of garbage Lenin quotes him:

"'As has been established by recent positivist philosophy,' wrote-Bogdanov in Book I of Empirio-Monism 2nd ed, p 90), 'the elements of psychical experience are identical with the elements of experience in general, as they are identical with the elements of physical experience '" (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 55)

The state, whether under capitalism or socialism, is a political form, an instrument of repression in the hands of the ruling class, and it is not a conscious being. So to assign it consciousness is to commit the same absurdity as the Machian Bogdanov. This is to claim that matter and spirit are the same thing, thus asserting that matter does not exist independently of the spirit and going over to the age-old idealist fallacy. Bogdanov applied this principle to social life and declared that the historical materialism of Marx "no longer satisfies us " He said:

"Social being and social consciousness are, in the exact meaning of these terms, identical." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 390, Bogdanov's italics)

According to the materialist theory of knowledge, consciousness only reflects being, and social consciousness only reflects social being. To assert the opposite, as Nelson Peery and Bogdanov do, is to negate materialism and embrace idealism.

To continue, "C"L's negation of the existence of the material world independent of man's consciousness can be further illustrated by examining the attitude of the "C"L towards social investigation and the study of material conditions by the Marxist-Leninists. Only by starting from the standpoint of the recognition of the existence of the material world and making thorough-going social and economic investigation into concrete conditions, guided by revolutionary theory, can the Marxist-Leninists correctly formulate a political line, tactics and policies with which to lead the working-class movement forward. But proceeding from its idealist premise, the "C"L believes that this laborious process can be replaced by the declaration of a few phrases, a few quotations from Marxist classics (along with a crucial distortion here and there), and as a result the world will change. This is evident if one examines the resolutions adopted at the sham conference held by the "Communist" League in May 1973 and printed in "Marxist-Leninists, Unite'"

Take, for example, the resolution on the national question in the Southwest. One of the serious problems facing the Marxist-Leninist movement in the U.S. today is to arrive at a correct assessment of the national question within the confines of the U.S. One aspect of this is the question of the Southwest, annexed from Mexico by the U.S. Government in 1846. In this resolution, entitled "Regional Autonomy for the Southwest", the "C"L draws conclusions without the presentation of evidence (and presumably without any investigation, with the possible exception of a paper by the Communist Collective of the Chicano Nation, a separate organization, which is not presented). In fact, the resolution even declares that investigation of the material conditions is reactionary. Following is an outline of the main points of the resolution:

1 Introduction and Orientation

a History demands that we build a Marxist- Leninist Party

b History shows that without a consistent Marxist-Leninist theory and practice on the national question there can be no such Party

c Therefore we must first restate the basic general principles of Marxism-Leninism on the national question, in order to examine the complex Southwest question

d "It is the duty of all communists to resolutely oppose all imperialist territorial annexations. We must wage a struggle against the petty-bourgeois deviation that seeks to question whether or not peoples have the right to demand political secession from an oppressor state. We must be clear that this is outright chauvinism, a line in defense of imperialist aggression. The right to secession is not up for debate. It can never be said or implied by the Communists that peoples or nations do not have the right to secede. That is precisely the position we would take if we were to weigh out how advanced the capitalist development of a people is and reach the conclusion that certain peoples constitute nations while others do not, and therefore the latter do not deserve the right to secede. We must not allow discussion of the characteristics of nationhood to prevent us from basing ourselves in the unqualified proposition Stalin laid out, i.e, the duty of the 'recognition of the right of peoples to secession' (J V Stalin, 'Report on the National Question') The above mentioned deviation and others spring from a tendency to proceed from the national question as an abstraction. We must see the right of secession or separation as an urgent demand of the Anglo-American working class, as key to uniting the class and to fight for the democratic rights and equalities for the national minorities."

Here I will interrupt the "C"L leaders to point out that they have just asserted that investigation of material conditions is not necessary, and they have doctored a quotation to "prove" their point. The actual quotation from Stalin reads:

"Recognition of the right of nations to secession " (Point four of four basic points on the national question presented by Stalin in "Report on the National Question at the Seventh Conference of the R S D L P (Bolsheviks) " Collected Works of Stalin, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953, Vol 3, p 58)

By changing the quotation to read "peoples" instead of "nations", the "C"L thinks that it can change the material world and divert the Marxist-Leninists from investigating the actual conditions of the peoples of the Southwest. This is the purpose of the idealist stand of the passage. A nation is one form of existence a people can take. It has certain characteristics which provide the material basis for it to exist, if its people desire, as a separate state, and Marxist-Leninists must recognize its right to secession and uphold this right in order to unite the entire working class in its struggle against capital. A national minority, which is another form of existence a people may take, has different characteristics which make it impossible for it to secede and form a separate state. In the case of a national minority, rather than uphold the right to secession for it, which would not correspond to the material conditions and would be a reactionary demand, the Marxist-Leninists stand for unequivocal laws guaranteeing equal rights to national minorities, and will institute them when the proletariat comes to power. If it were not important to distinguish between a nation and a national minority, then there would have been no reason for Stalin to have written Marxism and the National Question setting forth the characteristics of nationhood to guide the Marxists, nor for the Bolsheviks to have separate points for nations and national minorities on the self-same program of four points from which "C"L has "quoted" Stalin. Such a practical question cannot be handled in an idealist fashion, which would have most harmful effects on the Marxist-Leninist and working-class movements, but must be thoroughly investigated and studied. Such are the results of abandoning materialism for idealism.

Continuing with the resolution:

e Quotations from Stalin to "clarify these general points on regional autonomy." (No points have yet been made on regional autonomy--T H)

f "Restate" the "Leninist position" on the national colonial question: necessity of the Party and of the overthrow of capital

g "In light of these basic principles," discuss positions: 1) regional autonomy for the Southwest, (2) independence for a Chicano nation within the Southwest." "Although lacking full knowledge of all the particularities, we recognize that the issues brought forth are clearly in the realm of national questions. We also recognize that in both positions the approaches are in line with Marxist-Leninist principles on the national question."

Here "C"L admits that it has drawn certain conclusions about the subject at hand without concrete analysis of concrete conditions.

2. "Facts" about the Southwest

a "USNA" annexed the Southwest in 1846 and since 1880 the economy of the region has served the needs of "USNA" imperialism

b Imperialism enslaves whole nations, and also creates nations

c The imperialists "justify" and "reinforce" national oppression by spreading white chauvinism

d Therefore, to unite the working class we must give full support to the right "of the peoples of the Southwest" to secession.

Again, on the basis of facts which by themselves are insufficient to confirm or deny the existence of an oppressed nation in the Southwest, "C"L declares its support for its right to secession

3 The two positions

a For regional autonomy is based on a clear recognition of the historical unevenness of development in the region and on "national peculiarities," which need further investigation

b "In this light" the position of the Communist Collective of the Chicano Nation is "the first real Marxist-Leninist attempt to further our understanding on this subject."

4 More on the situation in the Southwest

a "USNA" imperialism oppresses and dominates the region robbing its resources and exploiting the Mexican "national minority" workers

b Imperialism has brought into existence the class that will destroy it, the proletariat of the Southwest, whose struggle "is reaching a new stage of development."

c Proletarian leadership and the Party are the real steps to unite the masses

d Imperialism is increasingly attacking the Mexican "national minority" masses on many fronts: fascist deportations, harassment by the border patrol, denial of equality to the Spanish language and the central question, land (unity between the proletariat and the peasantry is essential for the victory of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat

So it seems that the categories "nation" and "national minority" do mean something after all, when "C"L wants to arbitrarily assign a term.

5 Conclusions

a "the demands for the right to secession is the only solution to the problems of democracy for the oppressed peoples of the Southwest."

b For this reason, building the Party is "the step" towards this solution

c This demand must come from the Anglo-American working class

d Keeping in mind the goal of proletarian revolution, six demands are to be fought for, opposing the attacks by the imperialists mentioned above

e "To sum up", Stalin is quoted as giving the four basic points of Bolshevik policy on the national question from the Report misquoted by "C"L above.

In summary, to the idealist leaders of "C"L the concepts of Nelson Peery and a few colleagues have power over the material world and are capable of transforming nations and national minorities into a single entity, and of wiping away the necessity of making concrete analysis of concrete conditions. This is the same idealist stand which was denounced by Engels, who said, in the passage quoted above from Anti-Duhring, that "the principles are not the starting point of the investigation but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them; it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history." "C"L believes that the Communist movement is a movement of the theories and concepts of the proletariat, and all Nelson Peery needs to do is to wave a theory at some problem and it will be solved.

The remaining resolutions of the sham conference with the exception of those submitted by organizations other than "C"L, are just as devoid of concrete analysis as this one (this one does, however unlike most of the others, give an analysis of the practical struggle and a call to action). The resolution on Party building gives no serious analysis of the history of the Party and the concrete lessons to be derived from it, what its main internal struggles were and what consequences they had for the revolutionary movement of the working class. The resolution on youth concludes that a Young Communist League must now be built. Why? Because Lenin and Stalin organized one in Russia and because it is the general form of the organization of the youth wing of a Communist Party. No analysis is made of the history of the youth and student movement of the 60's and early 70's except to say that they fought heroically in several mass movements) and its relationship to the working-class movement. No particular conditions are analyzed which made it time to take up the building of a YCL now. In the resolution on "Industrial Work" there is no explanation of the character, role and significance of the trade unions and the economic struggle on which to base the attitude of the Marxist-Leninists to them. (And this at a time when the economic crisis is rapidly deepening and the economic struggles of the workers are acquiring immense importance for the Marxist-Leninists and for the working-class movement as a whole.)

Hence, in the resolutions of "C"L's sham conference, whose declared purpose is to provide the Marxist-Leninist movement with a political line, the leaders of the "C"L faithfully pursue their idealism, refuse to make concrete analysis of concrete conditions and even go so far as to declare the analysis of material conditions, in certain important cases, is reactionary! This is another example of the fundamentally idealist premise of "C"L's thinking.

In a similar way, Ernst Mach regarded investigation of the characteristics of the material world as needless. He wrote:

"We see a body with a point S. If we touch S, that is, bring it into contact with our body, we receive a prick. We can see S without feeling the prick. But as soon as we feel the prick we find S on the skin. Thus, the visible point is a permanent nucleus, to which, according to circumstances, the prick is attached as something accidental. By frequent repetitions of analogous occurrences we finally habituate ourselves to regard all properties as 'effects' which proceed from permanent nuclei and are conveyed to the self through the medium of the body; which effects we call sensations. It is then correct that the world consists only of our sensations. In which case we have knowledge only of sensations, and the assumption of those nuclei, and their interaction, from which alone sensations proceed, turns out to be quite idle and superfluous. Such a view can only appeal to half-hearted realism or half-hearted criticism." (Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, pp 34-5)

Just as Mach regards the assumption of any connection between his body and the point of the needle itself, and the needle's existence altogether, as "idle and superfluous", so Nelson Peery, with equal disdain for the material world, declares that any desire to investigate the national question in the Southwest is the result of "a tendency to proceed from the national question as an abstraction" and is "outright chauvinism." The other resolutions show that this is the attitude "C"L takes toward other important political questions facing the working-class movement. In place of serious investigation, a few well-placed "concepts" and "theories" will do the trick. This is unadulterated subjective idealism.

The example of the resolutions of the conference show that Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League leadership use concepts and theories, not as a guide to action, as a materialist would do, but as a barrier to "fence off" the Marxist-Leninists from investigation of the real material world. Nelson Peery's tricks in this respect are no different from those of the Machians. Lenin pointed out:

"For every scientist who has not been led astray by professorial philosophy, as well as for every materialist, sensation is indeed the direct connection between consciousness and the external world; it is the transformation of the energy of external excitation into a state of consciousness. This transformation has been, and is, observed by each of us a million times on every hand. The sophism of idealist philosophy consists in the fact that it regards sensation as being not the connection between consciousness and the external world, but a fence, a wall, separating consciousness from the external world--not an image of the external phenomenon corresponding to the sensation, but as the 'sole entity.' Avenarius gave but a slightly changed form of this old sophism, which had been already worn thread-bare by Bishop Berkeley. Since we do not yet know all the conditions of the connection we are constantly observing between sensation and matter organised in a definite way, let us therefore acknowledge the existence of sensation alone--that is what the sophism of Avenarius reduces itself to." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 45-6)

Nelson Peery is talking about concepts and not immediate sense-perceptions, but the effect of asserting that these concepts are the form of existence of the Communist movement and of using them to overrule concrete investigation of concrete conditions is the same as the effect of the Machians' attempt to limit science to the recognition of sensations as the only thing existing. It is to fence off the materialists from the material world, to deny, for practical purposes, its existence.

Nelson Peery believes, like all subjective idealists, that with a few words he can change the world. He believes this because he considers the world as existing inside his own mind. This is the basic view of the "C"L leadership, but they are half-hearted in its application. This is why they do not come right out and say that they are opposed to materialism and to dialectical materialist theory of knowledge and that the theory of knowledge they were referring to when they sent us to the pages of Lenin's book was actually that of Mach. Here again they are just like Machians, especially the Russian would-be Marxists who were always attacking the materialist Plekhanov for his materialism while cowering before the materialists Marx and Engels. In this way they hoped to discredit materialism by subterfuge. In a similar way, by distorting views and doctoring quotations, the "C"L believes that it can discredit certain Marxist-Leninist and attack Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought without ever coming right out and saying that they oppose Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao. Two good examples of "C"L s subjective idealism in this respect are: their distortion of the views of Stalin and the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in hopes of discrediting Comrade Foster and the Communist Party of America, and their doctoring of the words of Comrade Amado Guerrero, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines in order to surreptitiously attack Mao Tsetung Thought and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Let us take the case of Comrade Foster and the Communist Party first. In their document "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League" and in a recently issued pamphlet "A Veteran Communist Speaks on the Struggle Against Revisionism" by a "C"L leader, Admiral Kilpatrick, the leaders of the "Communist" League discuss the deliberations of the Comintern on the situation in the Communist Party of America in 1929. In the course of this discussion the "C"L greatly distorts the views of Stalin and the other leaders of the Comintern to make it appear as if they did not regard the American Party as a revolutionary Party and as if they put Comrade Foster on a par with the revisionist Lovestone. The criticism made by Stalin and the Presidium are used by "C"L as evidence that the Party was dominated by syndicalism and opportunism and that Comrade Foster was a thorough-going syndicalist and opportunist.

The "C"L claims in "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League":

"Internally (after the founding of the CPUSA), the struggle continued between the factions; and, it should be emphasized that the struggle was not one of Marxism and Revisionism, but between the various syndicalist and opportunist elements. However, by the end of 1924, the groupings had formalized behind Ruthenberg and Pepper on the one hand and Foster and Bittelman on the other. As rotten as Pepper was, that group was more realistic than the syndicalist Foster."

And:

"Every grouping that came together to form the Communist Party kept their identity in the form of factions. This situation was so bad that the Communist International called the principal leaders of the factions to Moscow in an unsuccessful attempt to unite the Party.

"At this meeting of the Communist International, Stalin laid bare the syndicalism and liberalism of each of the factions. Whereas the Foster-Bittelman group attempted to curry support from Stalin by calling themselves Stalinites, the Lovestone-Pepper group tried to curry favor by declaring themselves as super-supporters of the CI. However, Stalin ripped both groups apart with criticism that is as valid today as in 1929."

After quoting several passages from Stalin, "C"L continues:

"After the 6th Congress of the CI, the Lovestone-Gitlow-Pepper clique split off from the Party and left the syndicalists under Foster and Bittelman, the I.W.W. 's under Wagenknecht and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and some remnants of the Socialist Party. Thus 'unity' was achieved in the Party on the eve of the great Depression."

And according to Kilpatrick:

"The two speeches by Comrade Stalin delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on May 6, 1929, and again on May 14, 1929, point out that the American Communist Party had at no time gotten rid of the old Social-Democratic bourgeois philosophy that had flowed over from the Second International."

"It must be made clear that the struggle, in the final analysis, was not between Marxism and Revisionism, but between the various factionalist and opportunist elements in the Party."

"It is obvious from the factional struggles of the 20's that the American Communist Party never rooted itself in a correct understanding of Marxism-Leninism. To this extent it never could be called a real revolutionary Bolshevik Party."

It is quite true that Stalin and the leaders of the Comintern subjected both factions in the CPUSA to strong criticism. In his May 6 speech (quoted in both "C"L documents), Stalin pointed out:

"Both groups are guilty of the fundamental error of exaggerating the specific features of American capitalism. You know that this exaggeration lies at the root of every opportunist error committed both by the majority and the minority group..."

In the same speech Stalin condemned equally the errors of both factions (quoted by Kilpatrick). Both "C"L pamphlets quote Stalin as pointing out that factionalism was "the fundamental evil of the American Communist Party." In fact, the leaders of the Comintern considered the elimination of factionalism in the Communist Party of the U.S. the prerequisite to fighting against Right deviations in political line and the prerequisite to strengthening the positive work of the Party among the masses. But does all this support the "C"L claims against the Party and Foster? No, it does not. The speeches of Stalin and other leaders of the Comintern in the deliberations indicate that they did not draw the conclusion that the American Party had never defeated old-style revisionism, nor that Foster was a syndicalist and an opportunist and on a par with Lovestore; in fact, the speeches prove that the "C"L charges are themselves factional slanders based on subjective doctoring of the facts. The additional quotations from Stalin and Kuusinen, not appearing in "C"L's documents, are quoted from the translation published as part of the September 1939 House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings.)

For example, with regard to the attitude of Stalin and the Comintern to the general character of the American Party, Stalin not only criticized its errors but said on May 6 that the proposals of the Presidium that the "American Party must be improved and cleansed" of "all factionalism and all deviations" "are intended for curing the Communist Party of America, for the annihilation of factionalism, for the establishment of unity and bolshevization of the Party." In his first speech on May 14, opposing the Lovestone group Stalin declared: "The Communist Party of America is not as weak as some comrades think." In his second speech the same day, again answering the Lovestoneites, who refused to submit to the decisions of the Presidium and were prophesying doom for the Party if it did not follow them, Stalin said:

"The American Party lives and will live in spite of the prophesies of the comrades of the American delegation. Moreover, the American Party will grow and prosper if only it will drive unprincipled factionalism out of its midst. The significance of the decision of the Presidium lies precisely in the fact that it facilitates the liquidation of unprincipled factionalism in the American Party, that it will bring about unity within the Party and that the Party will at last be in a position to enter upon the highway of mass political action. No, comrades, the American Party will not be ruined. It will live and prosper to the horror of the enemies of the working class."

In all their speeches, Stalin and the other leaders of the Comintern called upon the leaders and members of both sections of the American Party to decide whether to take the course of Leninism or of factionalism. Stalin said to them on May 6: "One must choose, comrades." Clearly the leaders of the Communist International considered the Communist Party of the United States as deserving membership in the Comintern, a "real revolutionary" Party (in Kilpatrick's words), its leaders as "Comrades" and that the elimination of factionalism in the Party as part of the process of its bolshevization.

As for the attitude of the Comintern leaders toward Comrade Foster, it is also clear from the speeches that they considered him a Marxist-Leninist making the serious error of unprincipled factionalism. While directing sharp criticism towards Foster ("C"L prints only the criticism of Foster and not the criticism of Lovestone; they were equally the target of Stalin's May 6 speech, while on May 14, by the time the Lovestone faction had rebelled against the Comintern decisions, the Lovestone group was the main target of Stalin's criticism), they clearly call upon him to change. Kuusinen, a member of the Presidium, replied to a slander campaign mounted by the Lovestoneites against Foster, in which they dredged up his articles written while he was still a syndicalist to accuse him of still being a syndicalist (just as "C"L treats Foster today) Kuusinen said:

"In the discussion here, as well as during the Party Congress in America, there was a campaign against Comrade Foster on account of his past mistakes, of his articles of 1913-16. Comrades, you know what Foster is now politically. Such campaigns can only compromise the whole Party in the eyes of the working class. We have see during many years that he has been developing all the time ever closer to the policies of the Comintern. But he is factionally inclined, that is his weakness."

It should be added that after Stalin's May 6 speech, in which he condemned both factions equally, the Lovestoneite majority faction, which controlled the American delegation, issued two factional declarations. In the first one they declared that they opposed the Presidium proposals and would not adhere to them if they were adopted Stalin forcefully denounced these factional declarations, made right in the midst of the sincere deliberations of Marxist-Leninists to solve the paramount problems of the American proletarian revolution. After the first declaration, Stalin pointed out that "the extreme factionalism of the Majority leaders has driven them to the path of non-submission, that is, to the path of struggle against the Comintern." (May 14, first speech) Stalin further said that the Lovestone Majority were "incorrigible violators of the spirit and letter of the decisions of the Comintern." And when the Lovestoneites refused to submit to the Presidium decisions, Stalin said:

"Comrades Gitlow and Lovestone have declared here with self-confidence that their conscience, their convictions, do not permit them to submit to the decisions of the Presidium, and to carry them into effect. But only anarchists, individualists, and not Bolsheviks, not Leninists, who must regard the collective will above their individual will, can speak thus." (May 14, second speech)

It should be further noted that only a month after the meetings of the Comintern Presidium on the American Party, Lovestone was expelled from the Communist Party for his rejection of the decisions of the Comintern and his attempts to split the Party. Thus Lovestone, revealing his true nature as an opportunist, refused to submit to the decisions of the Comintern leadership and was expelled from the Party, while Foster, on the other hand, agreed with the decisions, accepted the criticism and remained in the Party and worked to rectify it.

Thus the "Conclusions" about the supposed reactionary character of the Communist Party of the United States and one of its leaders, William Z Foster, supposedly drawn by Nelson Peery and the "C"L from the statements of Stalin and the decisions of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, turn out to be subjective concoctions and distortions. This is how the subjective idealists of the "Communist" League believe they can change the world and rule the CP of 1929 and one of its leaders as opportunist by distorting the views of such a great Marxist-Leninist as Stalin. But the world does not change with a few words from Nelson Peery.

A last example will further expose "C"L's belief that its whims (called "concepts") can change the world, and to what reactionary ends, in service of the bourgeoisie, they turn them.

In "People's Tribune", Vol 5, No 9, there appeared an article entitled: "Communist Party of the Philippines: Vanguard of the Philippine Revolution." Most of it consisted of paraphrases, along with some quotations, from the book Philippine Society and Revolution by Comrade Amado Guerrero, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines. This book outlines the history and nature of Philippine society and sets forth the character and tasks of the Philippine Revolution under the leadership of its Marxist-Leninist Party, the Communist Party of the Philippines. The CPP has overthrown modern revisionism and adopted Marxism- Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought as its ideology, has reorganized the people's army (as the New People's Army), is leading revolutionary people's war throughout the archipelago and is building a broad united front against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism. But Nelson Peery and the "C"L leadership are opposed to Mao Tsetung Thought and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, although they are afraid to say so, so they attempt to expunge the two from the banner of the Communist Party of the Philippines, where they are proudly inscribed, by crossing them out with the stroke of a pen from Chicago. Reproduced below are some of the paraphrases of Amado Guerrero made by Nelson Peery and the"C"L in their article. Following each quotation from "People's Tribune" there appears the passage from Philippine Society and Revolution on which it is obviously based. The first two pairs of passages illustrate how closely "C"L copied the words of Amado Guerrero when it agreed with them. The next three pairs of quotations illustrate how "C"L deleted what it doesn't like. In the passages from Philippine Society and Revolution the words deleted by Nelson Peery in his version are underlined. The straight paraphrases:

Nelson Peery:

"The present stage of the Philippine revolution is a continuation of the Philippine revolution of 1896 and the Filipino-American War. These past wars and national democratic struggles ended in failure under the liberal bourgeois leadership of the Aguinaldo government and the local bourgeoisie."

Amado Guerrero:

"Because the principal objective of the present stage of the Philippine revolution is to liberate the Filipino people from foreign and feudal oppression and exploitation, it can be said that it is a continuation and resumption of the Philippine revolution of 1896 and the Filipino-American War, both of which ended in failure under the leadership of the local bourgeoisie, particularly under the liberal bourgeois leadership of the Aguinaldo government." (Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong, 1971, p 230)

Nelson Peery:

"The basic difference between the present national democratic revolution and the one that suffered defeat under the orientation of the world bourgeois revolution, is the fact that since the October Revolution and the emergence of the first socialist state, the national democratic struggle against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in colonies, has inevitably become part of the world proletarian revolution."

Amado Guerrero:

"There is however a basic difference between the present national democratic revolution and the one that suffered defeat at the hands of U.S. imperialism. The present national democratic revolution is of a new type. It is so by virtue of the fact that since the October Revolution and the emergence of the first socialist state, from the ruins of an inter-imperialist war (World War I), the national democratic struggles against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in colonies and semi-colonies have inevitably become part of the world proletarian revolution." (pp 230-31)

Now the censored passages:

Nelson Peery:

"The effective class leadership in the Philippine Revolution is now in the hands of the Proletariat and no longer in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary demands and aspirations of the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie can be correctly brought forward and can be realized only under the class leadership of the proletariat and its Party."

Amado Guerrero:

"The effective class leadership in the Philippine revolution is now in the hands of the proletariat and no longer in the hands of the bourgeoisie or any of its strata as was previously the case in the old type of national democratic revolution. U.S. imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism cannot be overthrown unless the broad masses of the people are led by the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the Communist Party of the Philippines, under the supreme guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. The revolutionary demands and aspirations of the working class, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie can be correctly brought forward and can be realized only under the class leadership of the proletariat and its Party." (pp 231-32)

Nelson Peery:

"Realizing that the counter-revolutionaries had to be defeated, the CPP was re-established under the supreme guidance of Marxism-Leninism. The Party was re-established on December 26, 1968, after several years of criticism and self-criticism. Under the leadership of the CPP, the people's guerillas were transformed into the New People's Army on March 29, 1969."

Amado Guerrero:

"The most significant development so far in the Philippine revolution is the re-establishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines under the supreme guidance of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. The Party was re-established on December 26, 1968 after several years of criticism and self-criticism conducted by both old and young proletarian revolutionaries.

"Resuming the people's democratic revolution of a new and higher level, the Communist Party of the Philippines was re-established on the theoretical basis of Mao Tsetung Thought, the acme of Marxism-Leninism in the present era when imperialism is heading to total collapse and socialism is marching toward worldwide victory.

(There follows a paragraph which consists mostly of information appearing elsewhere in the "C"L article on the repudiation of the revisionist line--T H)

"Under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the people's guerillas were transformed into the New People's Army on March 29, 1969 " (pp 110-111)

Nelson Peery:

"We are now in the world era in which USNA (United States of North America) Imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing to worldwide victory.

"Yet, although it is a historical inevitability that the proletariat will achieve socialism, the immediate practical task of real Marxist-Leninists is to fight against modern revisionism. Modern revisionism is the main danger today in the international communist movement and likewise in the Philippine revolutionary movement. The Communist Party of the Philippines is now rebuilt and has repudiated and criticized the line of the counterrevolutionary Lavas and Tarucs, which has persisted for more than three decades within the old merger party of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. It strives to be a well-disciplined Party, using the method of criticism and self-criticism and closely linked with the masses of the people. It is the most advanced detachment of the Filipino working class, leading the Philippine revolution forward. To end imperialism and feudalism, it wields the two weapons of armed struggle and the national united front. There is only one road which the working class under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines must take. It is the road of armed revolution to smash the armed counter-revolution that preserves foreign and feudal oppression in the Philippines."

Amado Guerrero:

(In this case, "C"L's deletions are not so precise and will not be underlined; but their effect is the same--T H)

"We are now in the era when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing to worldwide victory. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has lofted high Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, and has transformed the People's Republic of China into an iron bastion of the world proletarian revolution. The oppressed people of the world now have an invincible ideological weapon to defeat imperialism, revisionism and all reaction and can look forward to a socialist future that has become a reality in a significant part of the world. The universal truth of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought is the invincible weapon directly wielded by the proletarian revolutionary parties leading the oppressed people of the world.

"There is now the Communist Party of the Philippines which is arduously striving to apply the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought to the concrete conditions of the Philippines. There is now the New People's Army under the command of the Party to deal deadly blows against armed counterrevolution and build the iron bastions of the revolution in the countryside before the seizure of power in the cities. There is now a united front for waging people's war and isolating the enemy diehards. It is based on the alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry, comprising more than 90 per cent of the people, and furthermore it embraces the petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie and other patriots. The local allies of U S imperialism--the big bourgeoisie, the landlord class, and the bureaucrat-capitalists--are coming fast to their doom." (pp. 232-33)

This is the hiding-place from which the half-hearted subjective idealists of the "Communist" League make their attack on Chairman Mao, Mao Tsetung Thought and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which they dare not speak against openly. Together with their description, quoted above, of class struggle in the sphere of art and literature under socialism, the sphere from which the revisionists in China launched their assault on the dictatorship of the proletariat, this example of "expunging" Mao Tsetung Thought from the Communist Party of the Philippines shows how the idealism of the "Communist" League goes hand in hand with revisionism The "C"L leaders are cocky and believe that evil deeds will not come to light. That, too, is an idealist fallacy.

Proud of the traditional "honesty" of their organization, they write:

"We have our style of fighting--to print what our adversary prints for the whole world to see and then polemicize against it. The OL (M-L) has chosen a style of fighting that includes slander, lies, and taking quotes out of context. We will, in the coming issues, document every one of these lies " ("C"L Reply to OL (M-L), Part I", "People's Tribune", February 1973.)

Shame on the opponents of "C" L for stooping so low! All honor to the "Communist" League for opposing "slander, lies, and taking quotes out of context"!

Clearly Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League will go to considerable lengths in distorting the material facts to serve their reactionary ends. These distortions are not the activities of materialists who recognize the existence of a material world independent of man's will, nor are they innocent mistakes. They are the activities of reactionary idealists who believe that the world is their concept and responds to their whim. And whom do such activities serve, when it is the bourgeoisie that is laboring day and night to discredit materialism, dialectical materialism, and its exponents, the Communists? and when the bourgeoisie has nothing but calumnies for Chairman Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, for the great Stalin, and, here in America where there are not supposed to be any Communists, for the real Communist Party and such leaders as William Z Foster? The question only needs to be asked to be answered.

The antics of the "C"L in the realm of distortions resemble nothing so much as a similar trick pulled in 1970 by Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet revisionist bourgeoisie and exposed to the world by the Communist Party of China. April 22, 1970, was the centenary of the birth of Lenin, the great revolutionary teacher of the proletariat. To put up a big show of "commemorating" Comrade Lenin, on December 23, 1969, Brezhnev and the Soviet revisionists, who have cravenly betrayed Lenin's teachings, concocted a document entitled "Theses on the Centenary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin." In it, the Soviet revisionists attempted to pass off revisionism as Marxism-Leninism (just as Nelson Peery tries to pass off Hegelian idealism as dialectical materialism and to expunge Mao Tsetung Thought from the Communist Party of the Philippines) by attributing to Lenin the revisionist concepts called the five "social factors of force," which were dreamed up by Otto Bauer, a leader of the old-revisionist Second International and expounded in his anti-Communist book Bolshevism or Social-Democracy? Published in 1920, this book attacked the Soviet state as "despotic socialism" and slandered the dictatorship of the proletariat as "violence against the social factors of force." It also opposed violent revolution and preached peaceful transition to socialism, claiming that "the distribution of state power is determined by social factors of force." Lenin strongly denounced Bauer's book at the Second Congress of the Communist International, but in 1969 Brezhnev and company had the nerve to include Bauer's description of the five "social factors of force" in their "Theses", reprinted word-for-word and attributed directly to Lenin! (See Appendix I for a fuller account ) Thus the despicable practice of doctoring quotations and distorting views is a common activity to Leonid Brezhnev and Nelson Peery. They share the same philosophical, and class, stand.

Since Nelson Peery and the "C"L regard the U.S. Communist movement as a complex of concepts, and since they assign their own words and ideas, such tremendous powers of changing the world, they inevitably fall into the pit of solipsism--believing that nothing exists but their own ideas, in fact the ideas of Nelson Peery. For to regard the Communist movement as a movement of concepts and theories is to believe that nothing exists but one's consciousness of these concepts and theories. The other living, material beings the Marxist-Leninists, the proletariat, the masses--do not exist; all that exists is the consciousness of these concepts and theories. It follows that the whole movement is nothing but one's own idea. And if this is the character of the movement, then all it takes to change the world is to change one's thoughts, the proletarian revolution becomes a matter of spreading the word about a few eternal principles and the dictatorship of the proletariat will fall from the sky. This is how Nelson Peery and the leaders of the "Communist" League think.

It is also how the Machians, and all subjective idealists, think. Lenin wrote:

"If bodies are 'complexes of sensations,' as Mach says, or 'combinations of sensations' as Berkeley said, it inevitably follows that the whole world is but my idea. Starting from such a premise it is impossible to arrive at the existence of other people besides oneself; it is the purest solipsism. Much as Mach, Avenarius, Petzoldt and the others may abjure solipisism, they cannot in fact escape solipsism without falling into howling logical absurdities." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 34)

Proof that Nelson Peery and the "C"L leaders have not escaped solipsism can be seen in the fact that they do not think that any correct concepts and theories arrived on the scene of the U.S. Communist movement prior to Nelson Peery's arrival with the formation of the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party in 1958. According to "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", the POC was the first group in the history of the Communist movement to have a "relatively firm grasp on Marxism." From 1972, when that document was published, to May 1973, the power of Nelson Peery's will went through a further development and the "C"L declared in its "Industrial Work" resolution in "Marxist-Leninists Unite," that their cadres will "emerge" from the working-class movement "the leaders of that movement nationally and internationally." By the time of their "May Day 1974, International Report" ("People's Tribune", May 1974), Nelson Peery's consciousness had expanded still further and now the "C"L leaders regarded themselves as "class-conscious leaders of world revolution " The half-hearted solipsist and idealist Nelson Peery becomes bolder by the day!

A final example will further illustrate the solipsism of the "C"L leaders and the idealism that leads them to believe that the world will march to their whims. From November 1972 until April 1973 the founding organizations of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists worked together with the "Communist" League on the Preparatory Committee for the Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists in order to organize this conference, which would have given a tremendous impetus to the process of building the Marxist-Leninist Party in the U.S. But the leaders of the "Communist" League sabotaged the conference preparations at every step of the way. One of their main methods of sabotage was to refuse to agree (or even if they agreed, to refuse to execute the agreement) to go widely among the masses throughout the U.S. doing propaganda for the proletarian revolution and the necessity of a revolutionary Party, in order to find the revolutionary activists who had come up to lead the mass struggles during the sixties, had come into contact with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, were studying it, and were striving to adopt the world outlook of the proletariat and serve its revolutionary cause. It was the experience of the founding organizations of the COUSML that this was precisely how we ourselves had come into existence, and it was an objective law independent of man's will that there were thousands of other activists like us across the length and breadth of the country. To find these Marxist-Leninist groups and individuals and to mobilize them for the task of building the Party was essential, and it required the vigorous standing up for the interests of the working class among the masses. But the "C"L leaders slandered this view of the other organizations on the Preparatory Committee, claiming that we wanted to open the North American Conference to "every striker" and "every student." The real reason for "C"L's reactionary stand lay in their idealist, solipsist world outlook. They regarded themselves and a few of their friends as the only Marxist-Leninists, and since they had come by their "Marxism-Leninism" in a purely intellectual manner, they expected others to do the same. They thought that all they had to do was lift a finger, utter a quotation, and the cadres would come running. They were opposed to participating in revolutionary social practice, to leading the struggles of the masses and to recruiting cadres who did. Once they picked up a few ideas about how to organize from other organizations on the Preparatory Committee, mainly from the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) they swelled up with self-importance, violated all the decisions of the Preparatory Committee, usurped the name of the Preparatory Committee and the North American Conference, whose reputation had been mainly created by others, and held their sham "North American" conference in May 1973. This gathering was attended only by organizations which the "C"L had recruited behind the backs of the other organizations of the Preparatory Committee and therefore had no way of knowing what had taken place. But the real world has not proved to be at "C"L's beck and call. Since that time, the history of their "Continuations Committee" has been the history of themselves issuing commands and the genuine Marxist-Leninists struggling against them, on many ideological and political questions. Their reactionary tricks are coming to a bad end because they are not based on the real world and on the needs of the proletariat and broad masses, which can only be served by going deep into their midst, participating in their struggles, making social investigations, analyzing conditions in the light of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and formulating a correct political line in the course of leading the masses in their struggles against the class enemy. The fundamental idealist premise of the "Communist" League's thinking places it in opposition to the masses and causes its leaders to think that they are destined to be overlords over the working class and to act accordingly. A Marxist-Leninist Party cannot be built with such an outlook.

Rejecting the fundamental premise of materialism and considering spirit to be primary over matter and the external world to be nonexistent, Nelson Peery and the other leaders of the "Communist" League take the stand of idealism on the fundamental question dividing all philosophy. Their "approach to the understanding of the theory of knowledge" is indeed "to be found" in the pages of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, but it is not the dialectical materialism of Engels and Lenin; it is the reactionary idealism of Berkeley, Mach, Avenarius and the Russian Machians. And this reactionary philosophical stand has very reactionary political consequences.

II

THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE'S OPPOSITION TO THE DIALECTICAL MATERIALIST THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE CENTRAL ROLE OF PRACTICE AS THE CRITERION OF TRUTH

The dialectical materialist theory of knowledge holds that man can know the nature of the material world by the active process of participation in social practice, the formation of theory based on practice and the use of theory to guide practice, the testing of theory in practice. Underlying the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge is the central role played in it by practice, which is the sole criterion of truth. Using the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, the Marxist-Leninists can investigate actual conditions, base their theories, political line and policies on them, use theory to guide practice and advance the struggles of the masses, and test and verify the correctness or incorrectness of theory, political line and policies by means of their results in practice. According to the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, all knowledge originates in practice.

According to the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, all knowledge originates in three kinds of social practice: class struggle, the struggle for production and scientific experimentation. The Marxist-Leninists, therefore, must make social and economic investigations into the conditions of life of the masses and participate vigorously in their struggles Chairman Mao writes:

"Without investigating the actual situation, there is bound to be an idealist appraisal of class forces and an idealist guidance in work resulting either in opportunism or in putschism." ("Oppose Book Worship", Selected Readings, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1971, p 43)

Knowledge then performs a leap from perceptual knowledge to conceptual knowledge and theories are formed, reflecting the essence of reality Here, study, the guidance of the study of perceptual knowledge by theory in order to solve new problems and more deeply grasp the essence of things, plays an important role. Finally, theory returns to practice, actively guides it and its correctness or incorrectness is tested by practice. Just as making an appraisal without investigation will result in idealism, so judging a theory without testing it in practice will also necessarily result in an idealist judgment. Hence, practice plays the central role in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. Where does the "Communist" League stand on this crucial question? What is the "C"L's theory of knowledge? Chairman Mao teaches us: "No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement." ("The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War", Selected Works, Vol. II, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1967, p 208)

Let us see how the "Communist" League goes about acquiring this knowledge.

To begin with, take the question of getting "a profound grasp of the practical movement." This involves making social and economic investigations and participating in the actual struggles of the masses. The "Communist" League states its general attitude on this question in its "Reply to October League (M L) On the Young Communist Movement":

"Their conception that the CPUSA is and always has been a bourgeois party naturally suggested that they, the 'new Left', would have to rely on their own practice. This line denied the Marxist concept that socialism is a science and as such it must be studied. The rejection of the theoretical struggle compelled them to unite with the then popular phrase: 'the duty of the Communist is to hurl the masses into combat.' The Communist League, long ago rejected the idea of relying on the quicksand that the 'new Left' calls practice. We rely on the historical experience of the world revolution and especially the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The lessons of this history can only be found by diligently studying the works of the great teachers: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tsetung." ("People's Tribune", August 1973)

In this passage, and in the article itself, no other kind of practice besides that referred to by the "New Left" is mentioned, so we can justly take this as a statement of "C"L's attitude towards practice in general. Thus, when it comes to acquiring "a profound grasp of the practical movement," practice is "quicksand." Very clear. And when it comes to participating in the struggles of the masses, "C"L denounces "hurling the masses into combat." Also very clear. It is declared quite openly that knowledge can be acquired only from theory. This, too, is clear: it means to cut off theory from practice, to attempt to turn Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought from a guide to action into a sterile dogma.

The resolutions in "Marxist-Leninists, Unite!", which purport to give a practical program leading up to "C"L's present "congress," provide a good illustration of this attitude toward social and economic investigation and participation in the struggles of the masses.

The attitude towards social and economic investigations is portrayed in the resolution on the Southwest where, side by side with verbal calls for investigation, their purpose is negated by declaring a nation and a national minority the same thing and denouncing all who want to discuss "the characteristics of nationhood" as pursuing a line of "outright chauvinism." Thus, we are permitted to investigate, but not to form concepts based on investigation.

The attitude towards participation in the actual struggles of the masses is more devious, but equally reactionary. Introducing the publication, the "Call for a Congress", "C"L s leaders utter some impressive words:

"We must go all out in our efforts to link Marxism-Leninism with the working class struggle. And, we must at all costs exert our energy towards making the upcoming Party Congress a success, a basis from which the proletariat can wage a ferocious attack against imperialism and reaction in this country."

But if this "ferocious attack" proves to be anything like what the resolutions in "Marxist-Leninists, Unite!" call for then the capitalists have nothing to worry about.

Take the resolution on Party-building, entitled "Party of a New Type." This "Party" is of such a "New Type" that it doesn't recognize the existence of the trade unions!:

"The reason why the class cannot successfully wage struggle is because it has no philosophy and no organization."

Counter-posed to leading the masses in struggle, the "Party" has another "main task": "In this crucial period of party building, education is our main task."

That is, in place of the Party, even in its beginning stages, as a fighting vanguard leading the working class against the bourgeoisie, we have an educational association, not unlike the Communist Political Association organized by Browder when he liquidated the Communist Party in 1944, or like the self-cultivation society which Liu Shao-chi attempted to make out of the Communist Party of China. Turning to the resolution entitled "Industrial Work" we find the same thing. Devoid of analysis of the problems facing the workers as the economic crisis deepens and the capitalists shift the burden of it onto the workers' backs, this resolution gives no call to lead the workers' struggles for their immediate interests. The organized workers today, through their trade unions, are fighting for higher wages, better working conditions and job security, while the unorganized workers are trying to organize themselves into trade unions and thus into the working class to fight the capitalists. But the resolution ignores the actual struggles of the workers, and even goes to the extent of declaring the "C"L's intention to "concentrate on the unorganized workers" without calling for organizing them into trade unions, the basic class organizations of the proletariat, without which the proletariat cannot be trained for revolution, no matter how many doctrinaire "parties" it has. In fact, the resolution actually counter-poses leading the economic struggles of the workers to beading their political struggles:

"While we must engage in the economic struggle in our plants and unions, we have to ensure at the same time that the proletariat is raised to the level of class consciousness in understanding its role in relation to the state and all other classes."

What a sad duty the "C"L has to "engage in the economic struggle." Let us hope that as the economic crisis deepens, and the workers get more and more nasty with the capitalists, that all this doesn't soil the banner of "C"L's eternal principles. Thus the trade- union struggles of the workers, one of the main forms of struggle of the class and one which acquires special importance in a period of deepening economic crisis, are ruled out as a field for the Communists to mobilize the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

The resolution on Youth is speechless on the actual struggles of youth but only calls on the Communist youth to go into unnamed "existing class organizations made up of working class youth" and "build a core of the most advanced" which will become a "Young Communist League." The resolution on Native Indians fails to mention the heroic struggles they have recently been waging for their hereditary rights and declares that, rather than by resolute revolutionary struggle:

"the Indian peoples' rights can be guaranteed only by: 1 living up to and recognizing the rights of the Indian peoples under existing treaties, 2 Regional Autonomy for the Indian Peoples over large amounts of lands that will guarantee their cultural and economic development and well being."

Perhaps this is to be brought about by "education"; who knows?

And so forth. Aside from resolutions sponsored by other organizations besides the "Communist" League, only two resolutions call upon the Marxist-Leninists to take part in any actual struggles. There is a brief mention of the mass struggles of women, calling for bringing "Marxist-Leninist consciousness and leadership" to them. And the Southwest resolution, while opposing investigation, presents a six-point program for the Marxist-Leninists to fight for in order to lead the struggles of the Mexican nationality working people. (One can only conclude from this exception that there were some Communists from this area who attended "C"L's conference and fought for the interests of the working class.)

Thus does the "Communist" League prepare for its "ferocious attack" on imperialism by acquiring "a profound grasp of the practical movement." This is its attitude towards basing theory on practice.

Next there is the question of how to come to possess "revolutionary theory." In the quotation above we saw its general attitude:

"We rely on the historical experience of the world revolution and especially the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The lessons of this history can only be found by diligently studying the works of the great teachers: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung "

In the entire course of our polemic, we will be showing how the "Communist" League tries to bastardize the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. I would like now to point out that the above formulation of the process of acquiring this theory as consisting "only" of the study of the works of the great teachers of Marxism is also a formulation of self-cultivation. Marxist-Leninists must study with a purpose, to shoot the arrow of Marxism-Leninism at the target of the U.S. proletarian revolution, and not for the sake of studying itself. "C"L's subjectivist attitude towards theory is in fact an attempt to detach it from the real world, to make it into a dogma instead of a guide to action.

This can be illustrated by investigating the "C"L's attitude toward the history of the two-line struggle in the U.S. Communist movement. We have already seen that Nelson Peery considers the U.S. Communist movement as an ideal phenomenon, a "movement of pure reason." As a consequence of this idealist view, he arrogates to himself the right to denounce the entire history of the American Communists waging two-line struggles against opportunism of every shade, and to excuse or cover up the main targets of this two-line struggle, in other words, to take the side of the bourgeoisie and its representatives against the proletariat and its representatives.

Let us look at the general outlines of this history and at the stand taken by the "Communist" League toward it:

In every period of U.S. history the working class movement faced certain central tasks in order to advance its revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie In the Communist movement, the Marxists waged two-line struggles against the line of the bourgeoisie which opposed leading the working class to execute these tasks. The role of organizations and individuals in the two-line struggle can only be evaluated on the basis of whether or not the tasks of the working class movement are executed and the proletariat advances towards its revolutionary goals, that is, on the basis of practice

1852-1876

This is the period of the second phase of the bourgeois-democratic revolution with the sweeping away of chattel slavery- as the dominant social system in the South in the Civil War, the emergence of full-scale industrial production on a national scale and the emergence of the modern proletariat. In this period the tasks of the working-class movement were to establish its independence of the bourgeoisie, carry the bourgeois-democratic revolution through to the end, and begin to organize itself on a national scale. In this period, from the introduction of Marxism into the U.S. by Comrade Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852, with the formation of the Proletarian League and the publication of Die Revolution, the first Communist publication in the U.S., to the dissolution of the International Workingman's Association in 1876, the American Marxists, led by Weydemeyer and F A Sorge, close friends and disciples of Marx and Engels, waged many two-line struggles against utopian socialism, sectarian socialism and reformism. In the 1850's they criticized and repudiated the utopian land reform scheme of Kriege, the utopian labor exchange bank of Weitling and the sectarian conspiracies of Willich and Kinkel who worked only for the revolution in Germany. The early Marxists' dissemination of the basic principles of Marxism was so widespread that many trade unions adopted the principles of the Communist Manifesto in their preambles. Winning victories in the two-line struggle the Marxists were able to clarify theoretical problems facing the American working class, such as demonstrating the applicability of the basic laws of Marxism to conditions of the United States, with its availability of free land, its bourgeois-democratic illusions among the masses and the existence of chattel slavery in the South. In this way the Marxists opposed American exceptionalism. They were also able to organize the workers into trade unions. They united immigrant workers with native workers. They opposed the sectarian notions that the workers should not be concerned with immediate demands and that the German-American workers should not be concerned with American problems but should await the revolution in Germany. In 1857, as a consequence of correctly waging the two-line struggle the Marxists led the great unemployed struggles. During the whole period prior to the Civil War, Weydemeyer and others struggled against the sectarians who opposed the mobilization of the workers against slavery and who advocated that the abolition of slavery should wait until after socialism had arrived. Victory in this struggle by the Marxists resulted in the large-scale mobilization of the German-American workers, a key section of the working class, for the War Against Slavery, and also contributed to the mobilization of the workers of all nationalities for the war. Most important, Weydemeyer, Sorge and others established the first communist organizations in the U.S., the Proletarian League and later the New York Communist Club, thus beginning the entire tradition of Communism in the U.S. which has not been broken to this day.

Following the Civil War, the principal contradition in the U.S. became the contradiction between the working class and the capitalist class and the task of the working class was to organize itself to struggle against the capitalists on a national scale and to carry the bourgeois-democratic revolution through to completion. The International Workingmen's Association was formed in 1864 and the first American section in 1869. It soon spread widely in the U.S. The Marxists in the I.W.A. waged a struggle against the line of the Lassalleans--sectarian and reformist socialists who advocated a utopian scheme of state cooperatives to be achieved through the bourgeois elections and who denigrated the importance of the trade union struggles. At the same time, the Marxists opposed sectarianism in their own ranks. Victory in these struggles resulted in wider-scale leadership by the Marxists in the working-class movement. Many trade unions were built under their leadership; they organized the workers to take up political activity independent of the bourgeois parties; and they fought against racial discrimination against the Black workers. Even Gompers had to remark that the Marxists dominated the labor movement in New York, then the cradle of the working-class movement. The two-line struggle against the Lassalleans, whose erroneous ideas led to the destruction of the National Labor Union, the first national labor center, became particularly acute in the early 1870's. The stand taken by the Marxists led by Sorge (Weydemeyer had died) prepared the Marxists to play a role in the great class struggles that were to come in the late 1870's. But, at the same time, the Marxists did not grasp the importance of fully completing the bourgeois-democratic revolution and eliminating the survivals of slavery in the South, and so did not struggle to carry through the tasks of Reconstruction, which the main sections of the bourgeoisie were turning against.

Thus we see that in this period the early Marxists vigorously waged two-line struggles against the bourgeois line, and that victories in these struggles had the indisputable practical effects of the initiation of the U.S. Communist movement, the solution of various theoretical problems facing the Communist movement and the beginnings of linking communism with the working-class movement. Especially, the Communists played an important role in the second bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Civil War, which swept away chattel slavery. To execute these tasks was to be a Communist, and the fact that they were done was a great victory for the proletariat and greatly contributed to moving history forward.

What do Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League have to say about these two-line struggles and their results?

In "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", they write:

"The opposition to the oppression of the pre-imperialist and early imperialist capitalists was the formation of a powerful trade union movement led by a variety of Communists, anarchists and syndicalists. But even more so, the principal political opposition to the Wall Street robber barons was the gigantic Populist movement."

So, apparently "Communists, anarchists and syndicalists" are equally capable of building a "powerful trade union movement" and the two- line struggle never existed. Not only that but what about the War Against Slavery? Wasn't that "opposition to the oppression of the pre-imperialist days" of capitalism? The reasons for its omission become clearer with the following quotation from "Negro National Colonial Question":

"Until the late 1920's the working class of the United States of North America was formed primarily from the importation of German, Irish, Italian and Slavic workers. It is only natural that the struggles of these imported workers should be couched in the framework of their native lands. There is no Negro question in Germany or Poland, so it is only natural that these immigrants--many of them revolutionaries, would disregard the burning Negro question. And it is only natural that the capitalist class would recognize this abnormal situation and take advantage of it."

Thus the Civil War was "omitted" to "omit" Marxism. Apparently, the two-line struggle led by Weydemeyer, guided by Marx and Engels, against denigrating the struggle against slavery, and its resulting glorious mobilization of the workers to lay down their lives in the War Against Slavery, never existed! It was "omitted" because to admit it would be to admit that the Marxists did not "disregard the burning Negro question" but instead fought resolutely for the emancipation of the Black people from chattel slavery. But facts slap Nelson Peery in the face. The test of practice, the elimination of chattel slavery and the clearing of the ground for the advance of the working-class movement on, as Marx said, "seven-leagued boots," after the War proved the correctness of the line of the Marxists fully and objectively.

1876-1890

The period from the dissolution of the International Workingmen's Association in 1876 to the 1890's saw the flowering of industry and competitive capitalism and its development towards monopoly capitalism and imperialism. In this period the first fully national working-class movement emerged with the first national strike, the first large-scale independent political action by the workers, the first large-scale national labor organizations and the first national Marxist Party, the Socialist Labor Party. The tasks of the Marxists in this period were to establish the Marxist Party and to influence the mass workers' movement to wage open struggle against the bourgeoisie by organizing the workers into trade unions and a mass labor party. During this time, Engels instructed the American Marxists principally to break their isolation and influence the workers to organize as a class and break with the bourgeois political parties, but the Marxists were unable to fully break the hold of sectarianism.

Between 1876 and 1881, the two-line struggle between Marxism and Lassallean reformism and sectarianism continued and deepened. Immediately after the dissolution of the International, in the U.S. the Workingmen's Party was organized, with Sorge as one of the leaders. The Marxists led by Sorge fought for the Workingmen's Party (and later the Socialist Labor Party) to support and organize the trade unions and for independent political action by the working class supported by the trade unions. As a result of this struggle, the Workingmen's Party played a strong role in the first national strike the first great outbreak of the class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the Railroad Strike of 1877. The Party Executive called for all-out support for the strike, the Party-led workers' committees played especially vigorous roles in Chicago and St. Louis, in the latter city virtually controlling the city for a number of days. In 1877 the Workingmen's Party changed its name to the Socialist Labor Party. Between 1877 and 1881, Lassalleanism gained the upper hand in the Party and the Marxists were not able to defeat it. As a result they were still not able to overcome sectarianism among the German-American workers, which continued to separate the SLP to a large extent from the struggles of the American workers and which was to plague the SLP from then on.

Between 1881 and 1890, anarcho-syndicalism also developed to oppose Marxism. Disgusted by the reformism of the SLP leadership many revolutionary workers were diverted by the anarchists into anarcho-syndicalism. The SLP split in 1881, with one section forming the anarcho-syndicalist International Working People's Association in 1883. Influenced by the anarchist Johann Most, the IWPA opposed political action and advocated anarchistic acts of violence. The IWPA temporarily grew stronger than the reformist-led SLP but dissolved in 1887, after the Haymarket massacre. During this period, despite the defeats suffered by the Marxists at the hands of the reformists and anarcho-syndicalists they participated in many strikes in 1884-5 and in the development of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. In 1886 they participated in the great eight-hour day movement and in the Henry George election campaign, which Engels hailed as major steps in organizing the workers into a class and a political party. Still, the SLP was unable to really break with sectarianism and get off the sidelines. Engels sharply criticized the American Marxists and advised them to assist the working class in organizing a mass political party, a labor party independent of the bourgeois parties. But the Marxists in the SLP were unable to accomplish this, although they did throw the Lassalleans out of the Party in 1889.

While Marxism suffered certain defeats at the hands of reformism and anarcho-syndicalism, with the result that the SLP was forced largely onto the sidelines in the midst of the greatest upsurge of the working-class movement the U.S. had ever seen, nevertheless a continuous Marxist Party organization and tradition was maintained. Such were the two-line struggles in the period from 1876 to 1890 and such were their results.

But according to Nelson Peery, the "principal political opposition" of this period was not even this workers' movement, but the Populist movement. Not only that, but "C"L writes:

"As the Populist movement declined, the scattered intellectuals who knew or studied Marx and Marxism along with the mainly European revolutionaries from the defunct First International, came together to form the Socialist Labor Party."

But the decline of the Populist movement did not take place until 1896 when it fused with the Democratic Party, so we have the formation of the SLP "misplaced" by 19 years. This is not "history according to the order in time" but history according to the "sequence of ideas" in Nelson Peery's head. As for the class origin of the Communist movement, "C"L writes:

"However, this Party really was a composition of the petit bourgeois militant democrats of the Populist and Free Silver struggles uniting with the dogmatist groupings from the First International as well as the Lassallean groups of revisionists. So we see that in history, the Communist movement could not and did not arise out of the struggles of the proletariat, but rather arose out of the morality of the middle classes, and their struggle against the insatiable monopolies."

Here we have the entire early history of the U.S. Communist movement denied and its origin entirely distorted. Instead of the introduction of Marxism in 1852 and the continuous two-line struggles against all who opposed the interests of the proletariat, we have its origin "misplaced" by about 44 years (1852 to 1896) and we have it reflecting not the development of the proletariat but the crushing of the petty bourgeoisie by the monopolies. One could hardly think of a greater slander of the early American Marxists, who are also accused of being "mainly European" and "dogmatist groupings." Such an argument has absolutely nothing to do with any practical work of the Marxists in the real world of class struggle, but is the worst sort of subjective concoction.

But "C"L is not done with this period. According to them, the two opportunist trends within and later inside and outside, the Socialist Labor Party--anarcho-syndicalism and reformism (which "C"L incorrectly calls revisionism, which did not develop until later)-- occupied the entire stage in the Communist movement and there was no room for Marxism at all. They write in "Dialectics of Development of the Communist League" (all succeeding quotations from "C"L in this section will be from that document):

"The struggle between the Socialist Labor Party and the International Working Peoples Association became the framework for the internal struggle of the revolutionaries in the United States of North America, which has maintained itself down to this very day. That framework is: revisionist policies call forth anarcho-syndicalism."

Earlier "C"L characterized the two lines as "revisionist concepts of mass democracy and legal activity" against "the concept of illegal activity in opposition to the masses: It doesn't matter to Nelson Peery and company that standing opposite to both reformism and anarcho-syndicalism was Marxism, which utilized legal channels to organize the workers for their immediate interests and to propagate Marxism, and which led sections of the workers in the divil war that was the great Railroad Strike. It doesn't concern Nelson Peery and colleagues that Engels waged a vigorous struggle against sectarianism, pointing out that the main fault of the American Marxists was that they were isolated from the mass working-class movement and they considered Marxism as a credo and not as a guide to action. The only thing that concerns Nelson Peery and the "C"L is their subjective desire to liquidate Marxism from the two-line struggle and let a bogus "struggle" between two opportunist tendencies occupy the whole stage. In fact, the lessons of this period are of the utmost importance for the present, because the American Communist movement still has not been able to break the hold of the bourgeois political parties on the working class, and Engels' advice, repeated by Lenin in 1907, to create a mass working-class party independent of all bourgeois parties, still has not been carried out. Here again, Nelson Peery is not interested in the actual two-line struggle and its actual results and lessons, but substitutes for it his subjective concoctions. And they have the purpose of covering up "C"L's opposition to Engels' advice in order to have Marxism as a dogma rather than as a guide to action.

1890-1919

In the period from 1890 to 1919, imperialism emerged full-scale and the rivalry between the Great Powers led to the First Imperialist World War. Bribery of the labor aristocracy, the tiny upper crust of the working class, with the superprofits plundered from the colonies gave rise to the extremely rotten opportunism of Gompers of the AFL and of the old-revisionist leadership of the Socialist Party. At the same time, the driving out of small capital by monopoly and the extreme violence used by the capitalists in the class struggle gave rise to mature anarcho-syndicalism, led first by Daniel DeLeon of the SLP and later by the Industrial Workers of the World. The tasks of the Marxists in this period were to oppose revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism and to work to build a Marxist-Leninist Party capable of leading the working class to victory over the bourgeoisie in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. Such a Party is necessary to lead the working class in struggle against the intensified exploitation imposed by the monopoly capitalists, against imperialist war and the oppression of the colonies, and to the overthrow of the monopoly capitalist class.

Between 1890 and 1900, imperialism became consolidated and outside the SLP the Gompers machine clamped down its hold on the organized workers in the AFL, while inside the SLP the anarcho-syndicalism of Daniel DeLeon came to the fore and gained control of the Party. DeLeon's line was "revisionism from the left", as Lenin called anarcho-syndicalism--opposition to all partial demands and to the existing unions under the abstract call for "proletarian revolution" and "revolutionary unions." In this period Marxism waged struggles mainly against DeLeon's sectarianism which intensified the isolation of the Party from the struggles of the workers. During this period, many great strikes took place and the first industrial unions were formed. The Socialists had a good deal of strength in the AFL in the early 1890's, but DeLeon's policy of dual unionism all but destroyed this. The Marxists finally inflicted defeat on DeLeon in 1900 and the Socialist Party was founded which, despite all its weaknesses, provided a form for Marxism to become much more widely disseminated in the working class than ever before. It was in this period of the 1890's that the sectarianism criticized by Engels reached its peak. The sectarianism of DeLeon was a strong factor in allowing the Gompers machine to clamp down its control over the AFL. Nevertheless, the Socialists were a force within the AFL that the Gompers machine had to reckon with.

Of these developments, Nelson Peery has two things to say:

"It is obvious that the struggles of the revolutionary and working class movements from the 1850's to the early 1900 s were a series of quantitative changes that were leading in the direction of an independent working class movement. However, at the turn of the century, the most advanced concrete activity was the anti-monopoly coalitions as represented by the Populist and Peoples' movements or the left sectarian movements under the direction of the SLP."

And:

"By 1900, it was clear that a very important qualtative change had taken place in the labor movement in the United States of North America. The labor lieutenant theories of Gompers on the right, linked with the anti-Marxist revisionist, sectarian policies of DeLeon on the left and the result was that to this very day the trade unions reject the concept of a party of the working class."

Thus we have it both ways: "quantitative changes" "leading in the direction of an independent working class movement," on the one hand, and, on the other, a "very important qualitative change" whose "result was that to this very day the trade unions reject the concept of a party of the working class." "C"L would like to have its cake and eat it too, to denounce all and say things are developing. This cannot be said to be an objective assessment of the two-line struggle and its results.

From 1900 to 1919 the Marxists waged two-line struggles mainly against the old-style revisionism of the Second International, represented by the leadership of the Socialist Party after 1905, and against anarcho-syndicalism, represented by the Industrial Workers of the World, organized in 1905. The organization of the Socialist Party resulted in wide-scale dissemination of Marxism in the working class, and in resumed activity by the Marxist workers in the trade unions, but the SP was never a revolutionary party. The entry into the party of petty-bourgeois elements crushed by the trusts (whom "C"L called the originators of the Communist movement) and the lack of the revolutionary theory of Leninism resulted in the takeover of the party leadership in 1905 by thoroughly reformist elements. Reformism and revisionism then had the upper hand in the Party until 1919, when the left- wing broke away and formed the Communist Parties. During this period the genuine Marxists led by Ruthenberg strove to propagate Marxism and oppose the revisionism of the Party leadership, while outside the SP revolutionary workers under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism began to rebel against it, opposed the dual unionism of the IWW and began to work within the existing unions (Foster led this process). During this period, the left wing of the SP, made up of thousands of revolutionary workers, led many struggles of the workers, organized the immigrant workers on a large scale and built up a strong labor press. The SP participated widely in elections. In 1912, fearing the development of the left wing, the right wing and centrists controlling the Party used the guise of opposing the tactic of sabotage to attack the revolutionary forces in the Party and outlaw all use of revolutionary violence. This further deepened the struggle between the left-wing Marxists and the right-wing revisionists and reformists. Once the First World War broke out (an event ignored by "C"L), the right-wing and centrist leadership fully exposed its colors, the right wing bolting the Party in support of the war and the center supporting an anti-war resolution which was basically pacifist with some fighting clauses inserted by the left wing. The centrists then refused to carry out the fighting clauses. Coupled with the refusal of the centrists to strongly support the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and to affiliate with the Communist International, these developments brought the two-line struggle in the SP to a head. At the same time, outside the SP, Foster's Trade Union Educational League initiated and led two major industrial union organizing campaigns, among the packinghouse workers and the steel workers, the latter leading to the great Steel Strike of 1919. The forces opposed to revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, led by Ruthenberg and Foster, were developing the strength necessary to defeat the bourgeois line and form the Communist Party. This became possible once the Bolshevik Revolution brought Marxism-Leninism to the American working class and the theoretical basis of the struggle against revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism was provided. Hence, the two-line struggles waged by the Marxists and other revolutionary workers against reformism, revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, and the introduction of Leninism, prepared the conditions for the formation of the Leninist Party of a new type, the Communist Party.

What does Nelson Peery and company have to say about the two-line struggle in this period? Take, first of all, their comments on the struggle against anarcho-syndicalism:

"This syndicalist group (the ITUEL, led by Foster--T H ) differed from the rest only in that it advocated working in the established unions."

This was a decisive difference, for it led the revolutionary workers to work to unite the workers into a fighting, organized class, where the lessons they learned enabled the advanced workers to embrace Marxism-Leninism later when Lenin repudiated anarcho-syndicalism in detail in Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, and the American Communist Party repudiated it in 1921.

"Foster and the syndicalist groups led by him organized the steel strike of 1919 and the meat packing strike of 1918. This strike was of special importance because it was one of the first industrial strikes in the big northern cities to involve a large number of Negroes who were doing a great amount of struggling, suffering, and dying in the class struggle, but were completely ignored by the chauvinist, so-called revolutionaries Foster, Wagenknecht, and co included."

According to Nelson Peery, to whom social practice is not the criterion of truth, to organize the first industrial unions involving large numbers of Black workers (20,000 joined the union), was to "ignore" the Black people! Not only did Foster not "ignore" the Black workers in the organizing drive itself, but once the union was organized, Foster's fellow organizers mobilized the white workers to oppose the attacks of the capitalists on the Black people, attacks that resulted in the Chicago "race riot" of 1919 but which, because of the efforts of the revolutionary workers, failed to break the union. This means nothing to Nelson Peery, to whom the Black people are an abstraction.

As for the struggle of the left-wing Marxists against the revisionists and reformists dominating the Socialist Party, "C"L writes:

"The Socialist Party could not help but split. Although the CPUSA tries to infer that the split was between the Left Marxists and the right opportunists, in fact the split was between revisionism and syndicalism."

"In 1912, an even more fundamental split took place with Bill Haywood being expelled from the Central Committee. Charles Ruthenberg, an Ohio carpenter, emerged as the principal leader of the Lefts in the Socialist Party."

"It is obvious that there was a growing coalescence of the forces of syndicalism along with some primitive Marxism, that was bound to be part of a qualitative leap in the USNA revolution. These forces, as we have seen, principally the Left-wing of the Socialist Party led by Ruthenberg, were a cabal of intellectuals and petite professionals, coupled with flamboyant, colorful syndicalists such as Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners. However, these elements did involve themselves in political life, ran candidates, and, in general, what Marxism that was to develop had to be developed out of this grouping."

And with the introduction of Leninism following the Bolshevik Revolution:

"The syndicalists, revisionists, and anarchists who were dazzled by the splendor of the Soviet revolution and by the acknowledged brilliance of Lenin rushed to declare themselves Communists--but even in this heady moment of revolution they could not unite."

Thus the struggle of Marxism against right opportunism again becomes revisionism versus syndicalism. But "even more fundamental" than this is the emergence of the "cabal" constituting the left wing of the SP, who are a little bit "Marxist" because they "did involve themselves in political life" and "ran candidates." These "syndicalists" and "revisionists" are joined, from somewhere, by "anarchists," all of whom only "rushed to declare themselves Communists" because of the external influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. None of these groups, supposedly, had anything to do with any actual struggles, for example, with the struggles against the imperialist war.

Such a conception of the two-line struggle is altogether on the moon.

1919-1921

Between 1919 and 1921 the Communist Party of America, the Leninist Party of the U.S. proletariat, was founded on the ideological basis of Marxism-Leninism. A decisive break was made with revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism.

In 1919, the Marxists in the left wing of the Socialist Party, adopting Marxism-Leninism, rebelled against the opportunist leadership and split from it, forming two Communist Parties. Both adopted Marxism-Leninism as their ideological basis and adopted correct general lines on the nature of imperialism, the imperialist war, the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and on the necessity of a Party of a new type, but both had remnants of anarcho-syndicalism in their program, such as dual unionism, opposition to partial demands and the united front, belief that a revolutionary crisis existed, and both neglected the Afro-American question. Between 1919 and 1921, the Marxist-Leninists struggled against these erroneous ideas in order to unite and fully adopt a Marxist-Leninist political line. Further grasping Lenin's teachings, through this struggle the Marxist-Leninists brought about a great victory for Marxism-Leninism and the working class--the formation in 1921 of the United Communist Party of America on a Marxist-Leninist ideological basis, and with a generally Marxist-Leninist political line. Marxism-Leninism had won victory in its struggle against both revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, a decisive break was made with opportunism in general and the Party of the proletariat in the era of imperialism was founded.

The Party plunged into the workers' struggles, aided by the influential group of trade union militants led by Foster, who approved of the repudiation of dual unionism and enthusiastically joined the Party. The Workers' Party was formed as a means of legal existence for the Party; the Trade Union Educational League was formed as a Party organization for the working class. From that date onward in the 1920's, the Party's influence in the working class developed at a great speed. By 1923 the TUEL, which raised the slogans for the amalgamation of the craft unions into industrial unions, for a labor party and for recognition of the Soviet Union, became a powerful factor in the working-class movement. This social practice was one of the early fruits of the great victory in the two-line struggle against revisionism, reformism and anarcho-syndicalism and the formation of the united Party.

But the "Communist" League is blind to this historical advance and can utter nothing but subjective slanders against the Marxist-Leninists. The decisive split with the SP leadership and the formation of the two Communist Parties is termed "syndicalists, revisionists, and anarchists" who "rushed to declare themselves Communists." According to Nelson Peery and company, the unification of the two Parties only came about "under the prodding of the Communist International" (external forces primary again). The glorious achievement of the formation of the united Party is summed up as follows:

"Formal unity was achieved and Ruthenberg was elected as the leader of this grand federation of radicals, syndicalists, anarchists, dual unionists, language and national federations that were hang-overs from DeLeon's sectarianism, Foster's syndicalism, John Reed's opportunism, Bittelman's skillful maneuvering of the big Jewish sections, the IWW and the Socialist Federations. Small wonder that Marxism-Leninism almost strangled in the morass."

The initial adoption of the basic Marxist-Leninist program of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the two separate Parties in 1919 is ridiculed:

"It should be noted that both parties ignored the Negro Question; and in the main only covered over their syndicalism by the demand now for a dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the extent of the program of Marxism in the USNA."

When Foster and the trade union militants joined:

"In the summer of 1921, Foster and the Trade Union Educational League joined the CP. The cabal was complete. Syndicalism without dual unionism, opportunism under the Marxist slogans, sectarianism under the banner of revolution. Federationism under the slogan of unity. Such was the Communist Party of the recession of 1921."

Thus the formation of the Party of the American working class, according to "C"L, had nothing to do with the two-line struggle against, and a decisive split with, revisionism. The basic principle of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be sneered at; and the struggle to eliminate anarcho-syndicalist and sectarian influences from the Party's program and unite with the advanced revolutionary workers is to nearly "strangle" Marxism-Leninism "in the morass" and to "complete the cabal." A delightful fairy tale for some people, perhaps, but not the summation of the struggle between the two lines in the Communist movement.

However, unable to deny the influence gained by the Party and its organizations in the working-class movement, Nelson Peery rationalizes it as follows:

"Despite its germs of destruction, the Communist Party began and for many years maintained a free-wheeling militancy and unity in struggle that is an important heritage of the revolution of our time. The Communist Party formed many front organizations--the Trade Union Unity League, the Workers Party and many others that played a real role in the struggle to build a union movement and in many class struggles.

"Internally, the struggle continued between the factions; and, it should be emphasized that the struggle was not one of Marxism and Revisionism, but between the various syndicalist and opportunist elements."

Here we have the separation of theory and practice formally declared by Nelson Peery: the Party could do all this correct work in the working-class movement, while "internally, the struggle continued between the factions", but "not one of Marxism and Revisionism, but between the various syndicalist and opportunist elements." This is Nelson Peery's idealist theory of knowledge all decked out. Not only does theory not arise from practice, but it does not guide practice and be tested there.

1921-1929

From the early 1920's to 1929, the working- class movement faced the task of opposing the labor aristocrats and organizing itself into industrial unions and an independent labor party. The Communists faced the task of building the Marxist-Leninist Party that could actually lead the proletariat in its struggles, of building the Party on the basis of a Marxist-Leninist political line and extending its influence over the struggles of the workers. They waged two-line struggles against trotskyism and the revisionism of Lovestone and opposed factionalism and "left" sectarian errors. The struggle against factionalism, which culminated in the decision of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1929 to eliminate factionalism in the Party, also led to the expulsion of the revisionist Lovestone from the Party in 1929. Lovestone had advocated the right opportunist line of American exceptionalism, opposing the analysis of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, held in 1928, which pointed out that world capitalism was entering a "third period" in its development since World War I, a period that would be marked by an intensification of its crisis and of the struggles of the working class. Lovestone instead predicted a healthy growth for U.S. capitalism and opposed militant class-struggle policies. The defeat of Lovestoneite revisionism and repudiation of American exceptionalism and the defeat of factionalism prepared the Party for its major role as a mass leader of the proletariat during the great Depression of the 1930's. Part of this struggle was the adoption by the Comintern of two resolutions on the Black national question in the U.S., defining it as a national question of an oppressed nation in the Black Belt and an oppressed national minority in the rest of the country, and advocating the right of the Black nation to secession. Also important was the exposure and expulsion of the trotskyites, who were scheming with the rightist Bukharin-Zinoviev-Trotsky clique internationally to oppose revolution. During this period the Party led many struggles of the workers, through the vehicles of the TUEL and, after 1929, the Trade Union Unity League, and worked to establish a labor party.

We have seen that Nelson Peery and company described the struggles of this period as solely between factions and "various syndicalist and opportunist elements." In its treatment of factionalism, we have seen how the "C"L blows up the faults of Comrade Foster in order to label him an opportunist and the faults of the Party to slander it, while covering up the anti-Comintern activities of Lovestone. It is also interesting that the activities of the trotskyites get hardly a mention from the "C"L. The struggles against the trotskyites and the Lovestoneites are converted into the expulsion of single individuals while the lines upheld by them are never analyzed. The entire developments in the Party are presented as taking place up in the air, having nothing to do with practice in the struggles of the masses.

1930's

During the 1930's the objective criterion of whether or not a Party was revolutionary was whether or not it led the workers ' mass struggles against the capitalists' shifting of the burden of the economic crisis onto their backs, worked to organize the unorganized workers into the class, and trained the workers through fighting against the class enemy for their final assault on capitalism. Having defeated Lovestoneite revisionism and its exceptionalist theories denying the economic crisis, the Party vigorously took up this task. It analyzed the crash and deepening depression as an inevitable product of the capitalist system and plunged into and led militant struggles of the unemployed. In 1933 it held an Extraordinary Conference and issued an Open Letter to Party members calling on them to build Party units and trade unions and wage militant struggles. In 1933, the TUUL led 200,000 workers in strikes, compared to the independent unions, which led 250,000, and the AFL which led 450,000. The Party's mass influence grew rapidly while at the same time the opportunists and social-democrats declined in influence.

But with Foster ill in the middle of the thirties, rightist ideas represented by Browder began to develop in the Party, beginning with his formulation in 1934 that "Communism is 20th-Century Americanism." In 1934 the TUUL was disbanded without receiving guarantees from the AFL of democratic rights for the TUUL members within it. Foster resisted some of the rightist ideas at the 1937 plenum of the Central Committee. But by 1938 principles of Jeffersonian bourgeois democracy were written into the Party Constitution and the call of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, in 1935, to break with the capitalist parties "without delay" and form a united front of the proletariat and an anti-fascist people's front of the laboring classes in the form of a Workers' and Farmers' Party had become converted by Browder into a "Democratic Front" under the leadership of the Roosevelt section of finance capital. As a result of the rightist ideas in the Party, the Party did not wage a vigorous struggle for leadership of the CIO organizing drive and began to give up leadership over the workers' movement to the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the Party in the 1930 s especially in the early 30's, was the leader of many of the major struggles of the workers an in the late 30's was the indispensable organizer of the CIO, the greatest single step forward yet taken by the American workers to organizing themselves into a fighting class.

Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League depict the great economic struggles of the 1930's led by the Party as follows:

"As the economic crisis developed and deepened the CPUSA launched a furious, if syndicalist struggle to organize and feed the starving millions."

According to the "C"L, the two-line struggle which had this result was between "mass" work and "revolutionary work":

"It was during this period that the contradictions within the CPUSA became very apparent. That contradiction posed itself as whether to do mass or revolutionary work--how to combine them, how to take democratic demands and make revolutionary demands out of them."

That is, economic struggles are necessarily syndicalist, and mass work is in contradiction to revolutionary work. Enlightening.

As for the development of rightist ideas in the Party, the "C"L says:

"The worldwide impact of the 7th World Congress was largely lost on the CPUSA. Their concepts of the United Front could be summed up as: in the labor movement, a left-center coalition with the center in the leadership. Politically, develop an international and national struggle against fascism under the leadership of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. When Roosevelt took Browder out of jail in 1941 and then invited him to the White House for dinner, the fate of the Communist Party was sealed. To this day the CPUSA has not broken the style of work that makes them the tail of the liberal bourgeoisie in the battle for an insurrectionary movement, in the battle to produce a steeled bolshevized Party, the CPUSA never even got started. The anti-Marxist concepts of American Exceptionalism that Stalin warned against in 1929 and which were the basis for the expulsion of the Lovestone-Pepper gang, were never thrown out of the Party. Browder and Foster carried on the struggle Browder developed his theories of exceptionalism in the guise of ultra-imperialism. Foster went even further and developed the absurd theory that the Negro question was the question of a 'nation within a nation.'"

How did the rightist ideas develop and become Browder's revisionist-capitulationist line? "C"L is silent: they just popped up. As for the "battle for an insurrectionary movement," an insurrectionary movement is only possible in a revolutionary situation, and that requires that the bourgeoisie must have landed in a complete predicament. This did not take place in the U.S. in the 30's; U.S. imperialism was still strong enough to pursue liberal tactics of deception through Roosevelt, so conditions were not yet ripe for an insurrectionary movement. Therefore, to make it the criteria of judgment of the CPUSA and by this yardstick to find the practice of the Party erroneous throughout the 30's, is reactionary idealist thinking. In fact, how else to prepare conditions for an insurrectionary movement but to purge the Party of opportunist elements (as was done in 1929), correct one's analysis of the political and economic situation (as was done in 1929, and American exceptionalism was precisely what was eliminated until Browder reintroduced it step by step), and plunge into and strive to lead the main struggles of the working class as was done too, until the rightist ideas developed in 1934)? But "C"L is bent on judging the Party apart from its practice and will not listen to reason.

1940's

In the early 1940 s, the task of the working class was to participate in the worldwide struggle against fascism and to maintain its independence from the bourgeoisie and prepare to struggle mainly against its own bourgeoisie after the war. The duty of the U.S. Communists was to lead this process. The American Communists participated gloriously in the Anti-Fascist War, as they had done in the Civil War in Spain. It was the trotskyites who failed to recognize the just character and the importance of the anti-fascist war and plunge into the struggle. At the same time, Browder s rightist ideas developed into a full-scale revisionist-capitulationist line which gained the upper hand in the Party and led to the Party's dissolution in 1944. Considering American imperialism a "young" and healthy capitalism, in which the working class could live in class peace with the capitalists, who in turn would live in peace with the rest of the world, Browder's line revived American Exceptionalism and denied the applicability of the laws of Marxism-Leninism to American conditions. Thus he betrayed the proletariat. Foster struggled against Browder's line from an early date. After the war, and upon receipt of the letter by Jacques Duclcs, Secretary of the Communist Party of France, denouncing Browder's line, Foster led the communists in reconstituting the party and in repudiating the main features of Browder's line. Under Foster's leadership, the Party membership participated in two months of discussion repudiating Browder's line. Following its reconstitution, the Party resumed its work in the trade unions and waged struggles against the threat of imperialist war against the Soviet Union. Frightened by these developments, the U.S. imperialists were forced to drop their liberal mask and try to smash the Party, first by using their labor lieutenants to expel the Communists from the trade unions, then in the open anti-Communist attacks of McCarthyism.

The "Communist" League "sums up" the liquidation of the Party and its reconstitution, the struggle against Browder's revisionist line (a struggle that was so important that the French Party made a detailed analysis of Browder's line and prepared the Duclos letter, and Chairman Mao sent a special telegram to Comrade Foster congratulating him and the Party on its victory) as follows:

"The major motion within the Party reached its climax in May 1944. The special convention of the Party dissolved the C.P.U.S.A. and set up a political association in its place. Foster was demoted, but remained in the leadership of the Party. In 1945, Duclos Secretary of the French Party wrote and published his famous letter. Dutifully, the Browderite majority removed Browder and replaced Foster. The fact is, that when the Party was reconstituted it was reconstituted with the same basic leadership that dissolved the CPUSA a year before. Actually, Browder was the scapegoat who went too far, too fast. The policies of class collaboration remained."

The "C"L never mentions that Foster opposed Browder's revisionism. (Kilpatrick, in his pamphlet, calls Foster's 1944 letter to the National Committee opposing Browder's line a "half-hearted letter" and praises some unnamed "honest comrades" for waging the real struggle against Browder.) Nor does "C"L mention the two-month process of repudiation of Browder's line carried out among the whole membership of the Party. This major two-line struggle, the first struggle against modern revisionism in the international Communist movement, is treated as a bureaucratic maneuver. If Browder was only a "scapegoat", if the "policies of class collaboration remained" and if Foster "went even further", then why did the imperialists have to go on the rampage attacking the Party in the late 40's and early 50's?

Again practice is the criterion of truth and the "Communist" League's estimate is based only on subjective imagination.

1950's

In the 1950's the monopoly capitalists intensified their attacks against the Party of the proletariat, trying to behead the working class in order to free their hands to increase exploitation to the maximum and to wage wars of aggression abroad. The capitalists at the same time attacked the Party from the inside through the development of Khruschevite revisionism, which took the place of Browderite revisionism and began to gain the upper hand in the Party. Many Marxist-Leninists opposed it and struggled against it. However, it wasn't until the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labor of Albania launched the great debates in the international Communist movement in the early 1960's that the character of Khruschevite revisionism became clear. As soon as this happened, the American Marxist-Leninists rebelled against it. Many left the Party to form the Progressive Labor Movement in 1962, which plunged into the struggles of the masses. Others continued to wage struggles inside the old party, then left to work to rebuild the Party on a Leninist basis. It was the split by the PLM from the CPUSA that carried on the continuity of the U.S. Communist movement. This was proven by the vigorous attitude it took towards leading the struggles of the masses, as well as towards defending the general principles of Marxism-Leninism, before it later degenerated into trotskyism.

But, according to the "Communist" League, what took place was that the Marxists were "overwhelmed by national and international revisionism." At the same time, "C"L says that the POC, its predecessor, arose in the 50's from a caucus in the CPUSA that was the first group of people in the entire history of the U.S. to have "a relatively firm grasp of Marxism." "It was apparent" to this superior group, already in 1958, before the leading Parties in the international Communist movement had taken up the struggle, "that the revisionism of the CPUSA was an adjunct to the Khruschev revisionism in the USSR." Therefore, "with the formation of the POC, the development of the revolutionary movement within the United States of North America had reached a new qualitative level."

One can only ask: if "C"L's predecessors stood so staunchly so early against Khruschevite revisionism, where are their documents?

When Foster opposed Browder, he wrote a detailed letter, a material manifestation of his opposition to revisionism. As against it, "C"L can only mutter about unnamed "honest comrades." When Fergus McKean, Secretary of the British Columbia Provincial Committee of the Labor Progressive Party of Canada rebelled against the revisionism of that party's leadership, he wrote a book Communism Versus Opportunism in 1946 (reprinted in People's Canada Daily News, August 17, 1974) making a detailed repudiation of the revisionist line. Where are your documents, where is the record of your practice in opposing revisionism, Mr Peery and friends?

Let us see what other social practice justifies the extravagant claims the "C"L makes about the POC:

"The POC started out with about 400 members, the majority of these being professionals who were out of the Party apparatus and wanted back in. Mickey Lima and the whole West Coast organization quickly deserted the POC. The sailors and the East Coast Waterfront section soon followed. Left-wing errors in dealing with the struggle against revisionism reduced the Cleveland organization from 45 to 2 in a period of several months. By the summer of 1959, the POC was reduced to a hard core grouping of Puerto Rican and Negro Communists and a handful of Anglo-American Communists."

And ten years later, in 1968:

"Registering some 42 members some ten years after disengagement from the Party, and clearly seeing that they were hopelessly isolated from the working class, the POC declared itself a Party and took the name, American Workers Communist Party."

Such was the social practice of the predecessor of the "Communist" League, the first people in the U.S. who, according to "C"L had "a relatively firm grasp on Marxism."

1960's

In the 1960's U.S. imperialism suffered defeat after defeat in its global aggression and declined rapidly. At home the sharpening contradictions gave rise to the great mass struggles of the Black people against racial discrimination and violent repression, of the broad masses against U.S. imperialist war of aggression against Viet Nam, and the youth and student movement against the massive imperialist counter-revolution on the cultural front. With the degeneration of the CPUSA into a thoroughly revisionist party, the two-line struggle of the Marxist-Leninists raged against modern revisionism, as well as trotskyism, "New Leftism" and neo-revisionism which dominated the mass movements. The leaders of the Progressive Labor Movement degenerated into trotskyism and opposed the national liberation struggles and the movement against the imperialist war in Viet Nam; when they did so, large numbers of Marxist-Leninists split from them too. At the same time, many revolutionary activists came forth in the mass struggles, opposed opportunism, took up the study and dissemination of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, and formed Marxist-Leninist groups and organizations. By the end of the 60's this trend had gained in strength and had itself split into two, with the genuine Marxist-Leninists opposing both right and "left" opportunism among those proclaiming themselves "anti-revisionists." On the right there emerged those who paid lip service to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought but opposed building the Party under the hoax that "the Party will emerge from the mass movement."

On the "left" there emerged the "Communist" League, which spouted phrases about building the Party, but in fact opposed building a Party as the fighting vanguard of the working class and advocated the building of a propaganda sect. Both these trends falsely counter-posed building the Party to leading the mass movement. The genuine Marxist-Leninists upheld the line that the Party must be built consciously and at all times, opposing neo-revisionism which held that it was at best a momentary matter or a secondary adjunct to the mass movement. The genuine Marxist-Leninists held that the Party had to be built on the basis of a Marxist-Leninist political line, that is, it had to be built closely linked to the practice of leading the struggles of the working class against the class enemy.

According to the "Communist" League's "history" the two lines in this period were different. In "conflict" with the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, they report, they settled "the basic question": "building the mass movement or building a core of communist cadre." So: to "C"L the "basic question" boils down to counter-posing building the Marxist-Leninist organization to building the mass movement. And "C'L's choice of these two supposed alternatives is to build the so-called "core" in order to liquidate both. Thus, by their own words, they have summed up their "history" and provided us with a concentrated expression of their reactionary idealist theory of knowledge, with its separation of theory from practice, its denial that theory arises from practice and in turn serves practice, and its resulting counterrevolutionary political line. It is only in the course of building the mass movement for proletarian revolution that Communist cadre get trained, and it is only by the Communists building such a Party that the mass working-class movement can advance toward its revolutionary goals. And it is only in the course of revolutionary practice that the ideas, theories, line and policies of an organization are tested and proven correct or incorrect.

Thus the "C"L opposes, in an all-round way, Chairman Mao's teaching that:

"No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement."

At the same time, they reveal their profoundly reactionary idealist theory of knowledge.

Today the decline of U.S. imperialism is accelerating, its contention with Soviet social-imperialism is intensifying, and it is in a deepening economic crisis. The monopoly capitalists are shifting the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class at home and the oppressed nations abroad, developing fascism and preparing for imperialist war against the oppressed nations or the other superpower. The task facing the working-class movement is to fight resolutely against the shifting of the burden of the economic crisis onto its back, against fascism and war, and get prepared for proletarian revolution. Today the two-line struggle in the Marxist-Leninist movement is over whether or not to build a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and lead the working class in executing this task. Arrayed against the Marxist-Leninists are the modern revisionists of the "C"PUSA, the "left" opportunists of the "Communist" League, and other shades of revisionism, neo-revisionism and opportunism. The reactionary idealist theory of knowledge followed by the "Communist" League is completely opposed to the process of principled ideological clarification and demarcation of different trends, both present and historical, which must be carried out in order to unite the Marxist-Leninists into a single Party.

The spectacle of Nelson Peery and the "C"L denouncing everything good in the history of the U.S. Communist movement and covering up for everything bad should be a serious warning to the Marxist-Leninists of the consequences of adopting an idealist theory of knowledge. Such a theory of knowledge, which does not recognize any objective criterion of truth, is nothing but a rehash of Machian idealism, about which Lenin said:

"For Mach practice is one thing and the theory of knowledge another. They can be placed side by side without making the latter conditional on the former." (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 157)

III

THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE'S OPPOSITION TO HISTORICAL

MATERIALISM

Before proceeding to a discussion of the "Communist" League s "dialectical method" it remains to examine the application of its philosophical viewpoint to the historical process in general.

Marx and Engels applied the philosophical viewpoint of materialism to social life and created historical materialism. Historical materialism holds that the ultimate cause of all development of society lies in the changing economic conditions of society, in the changes in man's mode of dealing with nature the productive forces) and the relations he enters into in the course of production (the relations of production). The contradiction between these two drives society forward. When the productive forces outgrow the relations of production, revolution takes place and the whole society is transformed, including the superstructure of the state, legal forms, culture and man's consciousness. The contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production is expressed in the class struggle with the advanced class representing the advanced forces of production and the reactionary classes representing the backward relations of production. The cause of the activities of different classes of men in the class struggle, and of their consciousness of their role, therefore, originates, not from their own heads, but from the economic conditions of society Marx said:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." (Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968, p. 182.)

Marxist-Leninists must apply this principle of historical materialism in seeking the causes of the activities of different classes in society and of their consciousness; they must look for their causes, not in the thinking of men themselves, but in the development of economic conditions.

The Machians, whom the "C"L leaders avidly follow, of course did not look outside of man's consciousness for the laws governing man's thinking Bogdanov, the Russian would- be Marxist, for example, claimed:

Social being and social consciousness are, in the exact meaning of these terms, identical." (Quoted in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p 390, Bogdanov's emphasis.)

Thereby, Bogdanov denied that economic conditions had a separate existence from man's consciousness and determined it.

Let us look at the relationship between man's social being and his social consciousness in relation to a serious problem facing the U.S. working-class movement today, the question of the economic roots of opportunism and revisionism in the working-class movement, a problem on which the "Communist" League sows a great deal of confusion.

Applying the fundamental tenet of historical materialism to analyzing the "international split of the whole working-class movement" into an opportunist trend and a revolutionary trend, a split which has sharpened greatly since Lenin analyzed it, Lenin pointed out that it had its origin in the "enormous superprofits" ("over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their 'own' country") obtained by the capitalists of the imperialists countries which "plunder the whole world." Out of these superprofits the imperialists bribe the labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor aristocracy, turning the labor aristocracy into "the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie, the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, and of the impending revolution." (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Foreign Language Press, Peking, 1969, pp 9-10) In the same place, his Preface to the French and German editions, Lenin instructed the international Communist movement:

"Unless the economic roots of this phenomenon are understood and its political and social significance is appreciated, not a step can be taken toward the solution of the practical problems of the Communist movement and the impending social revolution."

The United States is one of the two most powerful imperialist countries in the world today. For over 70 years the U.S. monopoly capitalists have maintained a split in the U S working-class movement by bribing the labor aristocracy. They have subjected the trade unions to the domination of men bought by the bourgeoisie. They have tied the working class to the bourgeois political parties. They have destroyed the Party of the American proletariat, the Communist Party of the United States, from within, turning it into the revisionist party of the bourgeoisie which it is today. How can this phenomenon be understood and combatted? It can only be understood by applying Lenin's analysis, and the fundamental tenets of historical materialism, to analyzing the specific American form of this phenomenon, in order to arrive at tactics for struggle against it which are based on the concrete situation.

Let us see how Nelson Peery and the "Communist" League, who claim to know everything about this question, carry this out.

First, they berate others for not doing so. In their polemic against Sanmugathasan "People's Tribune", Vol 4, No. 2, they write:

"He talks a lot about revisionism, but does not say a single word about the material basis for revisionism." This "is part of his attempt to turn the class struggle into a debating society, a struggle of ideas, not of social classes and strata." "This failure," they add, "incidentally, is one that Sanmugathasan shares with countless so-called 'lefts' and 'communists' in the United States. These people talk loud and long about revisionism, but never say exactly how it comes into the working class. This is because they belong to, and appeal to, one of the two strata Stalin says bring opportunism into the movement, that is, they belong to 'the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia'." The bourgeois influence of revisionism is "brought into the proletariat via certain strata of workers, principally, the impoverished petty bourgeoisie forced to become wage workers, and the bribed workers, the labor aristocracy."

Turning to "C"L's document, "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", we will see if they fulfill their own promises to treat this matter in a historically materialist manner.

The first thing we notice is that the origin of the Communist movement in the U.S. is placed after the Populist movement "declined" (it declined in 1896), that is, with the development of the imperialist stage of capitalism. They write:

"The Communist movement could not and did not arise out of the struggles of the proletariat, but rather arose out of the morality of the middle classes, and their struggle against the insatiable monopolies."

That is, the U.S. Communist movement arose out of the very strata which bring opportunism into the movement, and not in response to the development of modern industrial production and the modern proletariat but in response to the crushing of small capital by big. This is highly inaccurate, to say the least. Marxism arose as a reflection in the minds of Marx and Engels, members of the bourgeois intelligentsia, of the development of capitalism and the modern proletariat; it was disseminated in the U.S. by Joseph Weydemeyer and other disciples and followers of Marx before the Civil War. Marxism found ample material and ideological conditions for its rapid spread among the advanced workers, since it explained the actual laws of development of American society and provided a guide to action for the proletariat in changing the world. The economic conditions existed, including the revolutionary class; the theory existed and was disseminated; together, these had to and did give rise to a Communist movement. "The morality of the middle classes" crushed by "the insatiable monopolies" could not give rise to Communism, but only to reactionary dreams of the lost days of free competition. Not to recognize that Marxism took root in the U.S. with the development of capitalism itself, that a Communist movement developed representing the modern proletariat and disseminated its theory, is to refuse to recognize the role of economic conditions and their reflection in men's minds and instead to make Marxism into a rootless, subjective phenomena. It is to oppose historical materialism, and to consider the U.S. as an exception to the laws of Marxism, to embrace American exceptionalism.

To prove that this "misplacing" of the U.S. Communist movement is not just a slip of the pen, we will quote another "C"L leader, Admiral Kilpatrick, who recently wrote a pamphlet entitled "A Veteran Communist Speaks on the Struggle Against Revisionism":

"The USNA working class has put up some heroic economic struggles... It is on the basis of these workers' struggles and the influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution that the stage was set for the organization of the Communist Party."

That is, there was no Communist tradition in the U.S., only "economic struggles," before the Bolshevik Revolution. And the "C"L extends this analysis internationally eliminating Marx and Engels and the International Workingmen's Association. Kilpatrick writes: "Before Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, the proletariat was led by various reformist parties whose machinery was solely dedicated to parliamentary struggle. Today, however, is the dawn of a new period, a period in which the old parties of social reform cannot possibly lead the proletariat."

Such are the historical fantasies that must be cleared away before dealing with the question at hand.

In addition to "misplacing" the origin of the Communist movement by about 44 years, the "C"L also "misplaces" the emergence of the imperialist stage of capitalism by roughly the same length of time. In "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League," "C"L claims that imperialism "arose as a consequence of the gigantic accumulation of capital acquired during the long and expensive Civil War." And in "Negro National Colonial Question" "C"L says:

"The end result of the Civil War and the gigantic accumulation of financial and industrial means of production was the emergence of United States of North America imperialism, the scourge of finance capital."

This is also a travesty on historical materialism. Lenin pointed out that imperialism superseded competitive capitalism at the beginning of the twentieth century and that the differences between capitalist countries "only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies, or in the moment of their appearance." (Imperialism, p 18).

In the United States, while monopolies appeared soon after the Civil War in specific branches of industry, it wasn't until 1900 that monopoly capitalism had definitely superseded competition. It was in the 1880' s that trusts began to be formed on a large scale (Standard Oil Co., 1879; Cotton-Oil Trust,1884; Whiskey Trust, Sugar Trust and Lead Trust, 1887), but it was not until 1900 that the process of concentration in railroads (which Lenin called "a summation of the basic capitalist industries " in Imperialism, pp 4-5) was completed. In 1901 U.S. Steel Co, long the largest holding company in the U S, was organized by the finance capitalists Gary and Morgan, capitalized at $1.4 billion, representing the completion of the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism. It was at this time, with the Spanish-American War of 1898, that U.S. imperialism entered the scramble for colonies with the other imperialist powers, and obtained the markets for the export of capital from which to obtain superprofits. Hence, the monopoly stage of capitalism-imperialism--arose in the U.S. at the same time as it did in Europe.

One reason for "C"L's "misplacing" of the emergence of the Communist movement (aside from their need to negate its early history) and of imperialism in the U.S. becomes clear when we examine their historical treatment of the different tendencies in the working-class movement. Essentially, "C"L's motive in this case is to cover up the depth of the changes in the economic conditions, and, with them, in the working-class movement, which took place with the emergence of imperialism. They want to replace concrete analysis of the concrete conditions with an abstract subjective category applied without change to the U.S. working-class movement from its beginnings to the present, to replace historical materialism with idealism. This would enable them to denigrate the revolutionary workers and whitewash revisionism, anarcho-syndicalism and other opportunist tendencies.

The "C"L "analysis" begins with the Socialist Labor Party. Organized in 1876 (at first called the Workingmen's Party, it experienced a semi-anarchist split in 1881, which led to the creation of an anarcho-syndicalist organization, the International Working People's Association, in 1883. But in this development, taking place before imperialism had superseded competitive capitalism and before the large-scale bribery of the labor aristocracy had begun, "C"L finds: "..the framework for the internal struggle of the revolutionaries in the United States of North America, which has maintained itself down to this very day. That framework is: revisionist policies cell forth anarcho-syndicalism." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League") In fact, the rightist trend in the SLP at that time was not revisionism but Lassalleanism, a pre-Marxist reformist socialism which was overcome and defeated by Marxism in the U.S. the Lassalleans were thrown out of the SLP by the Marxists in 1889. As Lenin pointed out in "Marxism and Revisionism", it was only when Marxism had defeated pre-Marxian socialism that the tendencies expressed in it sought other channels and there emerged, in the 1890's, "a trend hostile to Marxism within Marxism," revisionism, represented first and foremost by Bernstein (Marxism and Revisionism, International Publishers, New York, 1946 p. 6). Unlike Revisionism, Lassalleanism openly opposed certain features of Marxism--for example, it asserted that trade union struggles were useless because an "iron law of wages" determined that wage raises would inevitably be followed by population increases which would again reduce wages through competition among the laborers. Marx criticized this view in Critique of the Gotha Program and Wages, Price and Profit. Revisionism, on the other hand, subtly revised all the fundamental tenets of Marxism while paying lip-service to it, and sought to submerge the long-range goals of the proletariat in the struggle for partial demands. Where the reformism of the Lassalleans lay was in their call for use of the bourgeois elections to gain control of the government and create state-financed cooperatives. To look for revisionism in Lassalleanism is to try to learn how to fight a more subtle doctrine by examining a more primitive one. Thus "C"L's historical "misplacement" of revisionism is a glossing-over of its profoundly reactionary character.

To consider that imperialism arose 40 years before it did is also to underestimate the seriousness of the problem of the bribing of the labor aristocracy, because this economic phenomena makes the work of the Communists in the trade unions infinitely more difficult than it was in the 19th century. (For example the labor lieutenants heading the craft unions in the mid-20's carried on a policy of expulsions and violence against the Communists and other revolutionary workers that was unprecedented in American history. Revisionism, which arose along with this bribery, was far stronger than the opportunist tendencies of the 19th century.)

Let us look at how "C"L directly portrays the effects of the bribery of the labor aristocracy.

In "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", they explain that in the 1890's the U.S imperialists amassed enough capital to bribe the labor aristocracy. (Why it was not amassed earlier, if imperialism arose earlier, is a mystery.) But this economic development does not call forth any qualitative change in "C"L's analysis of the tendencies of the working-class movement: they remain in the same "framework" of revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism. By 1900, "on the right" there was the AFL under Gompers, which was "fully committed to support the capitalist two-party system," while "on the left" there was Daniel DeLeon, who "systematized" the "syndicalist concepts" and carried out "anti-Marxist, revisionist, sectarian policies" as leader of the SLP. Together, they had "the result that to this very day the trade unions reject the concept of a party of the working class." Apart from the fact that DeLeon now seemed to represent both revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, this is just what was said by "C"L about the earlier SLP and the IWPA: revisionism and bourgeois politics on the right, sectarianism and syndicalism on the "left."

How this and not the policies of the earlier SLP and IWPA, had "the result" that the trade unions rejected and still reject "the concept of a party of the working class" is another mystery.

What actually took place was that Gompers represented the skilled labor aristocracy, the main channel of reformism and revisionism, while DeLeon represented the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, the main bearers of "left" sectarian and anarchist ideas. The full-scale emergence of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in 1890-1900 resulted in the large-scale bribery of the labor aristocracy, the devouring of small capital by big and the hurling of large numbers of petty bourgeois into the proletariat. The capitalists gave the crumbs only to a small stratum of craft union aristocrats, while for the masses of the proletariat they intensified their use of force, notably in the Homestead strike, the American Railway Union strike and the struggles of the western miners. Since the bourgeois method of rule of bribery feeds right opportunism and the method of force feeds "left" opportunism, both of these tendencies became greatly strengthened, and these factors combined to clamp the hold of the labor lieutenants down on the organized workers while isolating the Marxists from the unions. There was, in addition, the tendency of the German-American Marxists to stand aloof from the mass movement. Without strength in the unions, it is impossible for the Communists to organize a labor party that is independent of the bourgeoisie. This, and not "C"L's abstraction, is the origin of the separation of Marxism from the labor movement.

About the following period, the period of the Socialist Party, "C"L has this to say:

"The Socialist Party could not help but split. Although the CPUSA tries to infer that the split was between the Left Marxists and the right opportunists, in fact the split was between revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

Here we have the left-wing of the Socialist Party, which was made up of the genuine Marxists headed by Comrade C E Ruthenberg, insistingly characterized as "opportunists", "syndicalists", a "cabal", "revisionists" and "anarchists", with a smattering of "primitive Marxism", while the rightist and centrist leaders of the Socialist Party, part of the "real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement," are ignored. It was precisely these opportunist elements inside the SP, and the Gompers machine outside, which took open and covert stands in support of the First Inter-Imperialist War and justified the leading of the workers of the world to the battlefield to slaughter each other for the benefit of capital. It was the war that revealed the profound rottenness of the fruit of the bribing of the labor aristocracy: social chauvinism, "defense of the (imperialist) Fatherland", open and covert. The First World War was an event of such paramount economic significance that it gave birth to the Great October Socialist Revolution and Leninism was disseminated throughout the world. It was precisely because the war brought to a head the abscess of social-chauvinism and because the Marxists of the left wing of the Socialist Party waged many struggles against the rightists and against the centrist leadership of Hillquist, who attempted to hinder the struggle against the war, and because the left wing waged many struggles against the war itself, that conditions were ripe for the introduction of Leninism and the struggle to build the Communist Party. But "C"L's abstract, subjective categories of revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, and their abstract concept of the relationship between imperialism and opportunism, make them blind to the forces which arose against opportunism. This approach of "C"L s is maintained throughout their historical treatment of the CPUSA, to such an extent that Stalin's 1929 remark that factionalism was "the fundamental evil" in the American Party, which could only be the case in a revolutionary Party, is held by the "C"L to be true "to this very day" ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League"), when the one-time Communist Party has become a reactionary, bourgeois revisionist party, a bribed tool of U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism, whose "fundamental evil" could only be revisionism, not factionalism. Once again, "C"L s opposition to historical materialism and their adherence to idealism brings them to denigrate the genuine Marxists and whitewash opportunism.

Furthermore, by denying the concrete influence of economic conditions on the working-class movement, "C"L is unable to explain why at one period in the era of imperialism right opportunism plays the main role in diverting the workers from revolution, while at another period "left" opportunism plays the main role. This phenomenon is tied up with the economic situation of the bourgeoisie. When the economy is in a period of relative prosperity, more money is available to bribe the labor aristocracy and the bourgeoisie is more capable of relying on liberalism, the method of deception, in enforcing its rule. This strengthens right opportunism and revisionism in the working-class movement. When the economy is in a period of contraction or crisis, the bourgeoisie is less capable of bribing the labor aristocracy, big capital is devouring small, larger numbers of petty bourgeoisie are being hurled into the working class, and the bourgeoisie relies more heavily on force as a method of rule. This strengthens "left" opportunism in the working-class movement. "C'L's formulation that "revisionist policies call forth anarcho-syndicalism" is therefore an idealist and not a materialist formulation. It is true that some workers turn to anarcho-syndicalism because of disgust with revisionism (such as Foster himself), but this is not what "calls forth" anarcho-syndicalism and does not explain why at one time one form of opportunism is dominant while at another time another form predominates.

The development of opportunism in the working-class movement in the U.S. in the era of imperialism has followed this pattern. Right opportunism has had its peaks of strength in periods of relative prosperity and has proved, as Lenin pointed out, that it "has always been even more dangerous for the labor movement than 'left' opportunism." (Marxism and Revisionism, p 17) In the 1890's, when monopoly capital was emerging, it was expressed in the take-over of the trade union movement by the Gompersite labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. In the decade before the First World War, when U.S. imperialism rapidly exported capital into Latin America, it was expressed in the revisionist leadership of the SP and in the AFL leadership. In 1923-29, after the immediate war crisis had abated, when U.S. imperialism had become a creditor country and was rapidly expanding its export of capital, it was expressed in the tightening of the hold of the labor lieutenants of the AFL over the organized workers in order to prevent the organization of industrial unions by the Communists, and by the development of Lovestoneite revisionism in the Party (both trends advocating American exceptionalism and boasting about the "strength" of U.S. imperialism). In the late 30's and during World War II, when U.S. imperialism was first arming both sides and was later supplying the Allies, fighting itself without suffering any war damage at home, and when the imperialists were employing the method of deception through Roosevelt, it was expressed by the development of Browderite revisionism (whose ideological basis was also American exceptionalism) in the Party leading to its liquidation in 1944. In the late 40's and the 50's and early 60's, when U.S. imperialism had emerged as the number one imperialist power, taking over many new colonies, it was manifested in the anti-Communist attacks by the labor lieutenants heading the CIO and in the development of Khruschovite revisionism in the Party and its complete degeneration in the early 60's into a revisionist party. It was also expressed in the late 60's and early 70's by the development of "New Leftism" into neo-revisionism, that is, revisionism in the guise of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, giving the line "the mass movement is everything, the Party is nothing."

"Left" opportunism, on the other hand, has been strengthened in periods of contraction and crisis of the imperialist economy. During and after World War I, when the world capitalist system had entered into general crisis, it was expressed by the anarcho-syndicalist influence among the revolutionary workers, which the United Communist Party took action against when it was formed in 1921. In the early 30's in the depths of the Depression, it was expressed by certain "left" errors of the Party, for example, in giving main stress in its 1932 presidential election campaign, to "A Revolutionary Way Out of the Crisis" as a mass slogan rather than to the immediate demands of the workers. In the late 60's and early 70's, when U.S. imperialism experienced sharp defeats at the hands of the national liberation struggles and rivalry with Soviet social-imperialism abroad, and a deepening economic crisis at home, and turned increasingly to force as its method of rule, it is expressed in the development of the "left" opportunist "Communist" League to subvert the struggle of the Marxist-Leninists against the revisionism of the "C"PUSA and to subvert the workers struggles against the capitalists shifting of the burden of the crisis onto their backs. This the "C"L opposed by advancing the thesis that the entire working class is bribed in April 1974 "People's Tribune", in their polemic against The New Voice, they speak of "the position of national minority workers as well as women workers, as being the least bribed and least tied to imperialism." According to this, the struggles of workers against the shifting of the burden of the crisis onto their backs is reactionary and cannot be led by the Communists and the trade unions be turned into "school for Communism." These economic conditions do not operate directly and mechanically on the working-class movement, but represent tendencies in the capitalist economy which influence the tendencies in the movement. Marxist-Leninists often can overcome the effects of these influences by grasping the laws governing them and leading the proletariat on a correct political line. Such was the case in the 20's and early 30's when the Party pursued a generally correct line and policies, opposing both right and "left" opportunism, leading the struggles of the proletariat for its immediate interests while keeping in view the goal of proletarian revolution and socialism. In the present deepening economic crisis, if the Marxist-Leninists grasp historical materialism, analyze the economic development of society, oppose both the right opportunism of the "C"PUSA and neo-revisionism, and the "left" opportunism of the "Communist" League and others, resolutely lead the struggles of the workers for their immediate interests and train and prepare the proletariat for revolution, we too can perform our revolutionary duty and lead the working class through the great class battles to the proletarian revolution.

This is the importance of adopting historical materialism and opposing the historical idealism of the leaders of the "Communist" League, brothers of the Machians, for whom the cause of men s activities in the class struggle originates in their own minds.

IV

THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE OPPOSES THE BASIC LAW OF MATERIALIST DIALECTICS

We have seen how the leaders of the "Communist" League oppose materialism in general, oppose the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, and oppose historical materialism, siding with the Machians and other idealists against the materialists. It remains to examine the views of the "Communist" League leaders on the laws of motion of matter, to see if there is any truth to their claims to grasping the dialectical method and being able, as they say in "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League" to "concretize dialectics," or whether they are outright reactionary metaphysicians.

While the philosophical viewpoint of Marxism is materialism, its philosophical method is dialectics. Dialectical materialism recognizes that all that exists is matter in motion, and it recognizes the struggle between opposites as the basic law of motion. This comprises the Marxist world outlook, dialectical materialism, which, applied to social life, become dialectical and historical materialism. The philosophical method of metaphysics, on the other hand, opposes dialectics and holds that motion does not take place due to the internal contradictions in things, but instead it takes place because of external causes, and therefore the revolutionary transformation of a thing into its opposite cannot take place, but instead things are static, immutable and unchanging.

Let us see just what is the philosophical method of the leaders of the "Communist" League.

Here is the basic law of materialist dialectics, according to the "Communist" League:

"These ladies and gentlemen forget that motion is the law of development. Motion is backward or forward." ("May Day 1974, International Report" "People's Tribune", May 1974.)

This is a metaphysical view. One might as well say that "development is the law of development." What gives rise to motion, development and change? They do not give rise to themselves. The basic cause of development is the struggle between opposites within a thing, that is, contradiction and its resolution through struggle, which brings about a transformation. Lenin wrote:

"Development is the struggle of opposites." ("On Dialectics", Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, Vol 38, p 360.)

And Chairman Mao wrote:

"The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics." ("On Contradiction", Selected Works, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1967, Vol 1, p. 311)

Only because contradiction is present in things, because one thing divides into two and the two sides struggle against each other, is there motion, development and change. Lacking this internal basis, there can be no motion or development. Because "C"L's formulation does not take into account the internal contradictions, the struggle, in things, it does not give any basis for motion to take place, and it is metaphysical.

We will show that this is, in fact, "C"L's view of the basic law of development, despite their incessant claims to "pose" and "oppose" "opposites" at every turn.

Because of its metaphysical method, the "C"L is unable to correctly present the two opposites in a thing and therefore unable to analyze the reasons for its development and the direction its development takes. Hence the "C"L leaders are unable to guide the masses in revolution. Unlike Hegel, who was a great dialectician though an idealist, Nelson Peery and the "C"L leaders resemble the petty bourgeois anarchist Proudhon who, as Marx said, had "never been able to raise himself above the first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis." (The Poverty of Philosophy, p 108 ) Unlike Proudhon, however, Nelson Peery and the "C"L are unable to even mount these "first two rungs" but always fall over backward into metaphysics.

Let us take, for example, the history of the U.S. Communist movement, which "C"L analyzes with such fanfare in "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League."

According to the "C"L, as we have seen, the two opposite tendencies, the two lines, in the Communist and working-class movement in the U.S. in the 1880's were revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism and the "struggle between" them "became the framework for the internal struggle of the revolutionaries in the United States of North America, which has maintained itself down to this very day." This conception is applied throughout the history of the U.S. Communist movement. In the Socialist Party, whose split "was fundamental," "although the CPUSA tries to infer that the split was between Left Marxists and right opportunists, in fact the split was between revisionism and syndicalism." Once the United Communist Party was formed in 1921, "the cabal is complete" and we have: "Syndicalism without dual unionism, opportunism under the Marxist slogans, sectarianism under the banner of revolution. Federationism under the slogan of unity" and "the struggle continued between factions, and, it should be emphasized that the struggle was not one of Marxism and Revisionism, but between the various syndicalist and opportunist elements." This period included the struggle against Lovestoneite revisionism. In the late 30's and early 40's, Foster, the leader of the struggle against Browderite revisionism (who was earlier termed "a leader of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. A position he held, even to his death.") "went even further" than Browder, while Browder was only "the scapegoat who went too far, too fast." Hence the struggle against Browderite revisionism is also portrayed as one between revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism. Finally, the struggle led by Foster in the early 50's against the revisionism and liquidationism of Gates is portrayed as another struggle among opportunists. And so forth.

Thus the two "opposites," the two "lines," within the U.S. Communist movement are not Marxism and opportunism in general, revisionism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc., in particular), and it is not the struggle between Marxism and opportunism which moves the U.S. Communist movement forward, but instead two different brands of opportunism are presented as the two opposite lines. This is a flagrant distortion of materialist dialectics and of history itself. Revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism both arose from the bourgeoisie to oppose Marxism, after Marxism had defeated pre-Marxian socialism and bourgeois ideology in its open form. Revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism do not constitute the two opposite lines within the U.S. Communist movement, whose struggle moves it forward; they are opposites within the entity opportunism, that is, within the camp of the class enemy. Revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism are twin brothers; they both contend for supremacy in the working-class movement against Marxism; they both serve the capitalist class and work for the preservation of capitalism. They are deadly enemies of Marxism. The real opposites in the Communist and working-class movements are Marxism on the one hand, and all brands of opportunism, including both revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, on the other. It is the struggle between these two opposites which moves the Communist and working-class movements forward. These are the real "first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis" which Nelson Peery fails to mount. By "C"L's conception, that the history of the Communist and workers' movements is the history of battles between opportunist factions, there is no internal basis for change in the movement, and we end up with "motion" as the "law of development", that is, without any real motion, and therefore without any real Communist and workers' movement at all.

The"C"L leaders further systematize this view with a statement about their own history:

"We are Marxists and we arose on a basis quite independent of the revisionist 'right' or the Anarcho-Syndicalist 'left.' Marxism-Leninism in the USNA arose on the basis of an analysis of the history of the class struggle here and of the Bolshevik revolution and on a scientific analysis of the world revolutionary movement. In our document, "The Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", we proved that there is a unity between Anarcho-Syndicalism and Revisionism. This unity does not include Marxism-Leninism which arose quite apart from the subjectivity of the 'left and 'right'. " ("Reply to October League ML", People's Tribune", August 1973)

This is another denial of the unity of opposites. Just as Marxism arose in struggle with its opposite, bourgeois ideology and pre-Marxian socialism, so Marxism-Leninism also arose in struggle, in a unity of opposites with opportunism in general and revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism in particular. Marxism-Leninism did not arise "quite apart from" "Left" and right opportunism, but in struggle with them, by defeating them Marxism-Leninism could not have arisen except in a unity of opposites with opportunism, and it has no reason for existence except to carry on this struggle and thus to advance the proletarian movement. Chairman Mao teaches that "no contradictory aspect can exist in isolation. Without its opposite aspect, each loses the condition for its existence." ("On Contradiction" p 338) Denying the unity of opposites between Marxism and opportunism means to deny the struggle between them, to deny the necessity of struggling against opportunism and to think that Marxism-Leninism can win out "apart from" this struggle instead of through it. It means to have peace with opportunism. This is where the denial of contradiction, the belief that "motion is the law of development," leads to.

In its "analysis" of the Communist movement in "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League", "C"L poses another false pair of opposites. This is the supposed contradiction faced by the CPUSA in the 30's: "whether to do mass or revolutionary work." This is repeated later, when "C"L speaks of its "conflict" with the Bay Area Revolutionary Union as revolving around "the basic question of building the mass movement or building a core of communist cadre." This time, instead of posing two opportunist trends against each other, and claiming that they were the only alternatives available, "C"L counter-poses two policies which are aspects of the work of all Marxist-Leninist against each other as if they were the two lines. This is a subjective concoction designed to split the Marxist-Leninist movement into those who "want to" build the mass movement "versus" those who "want to" build a Communist core. Posing these as opposites is to attempt to split the Communist movement into a clique which blindly does mass work and a clique which spouts abstract theory, rather than correctly isolating those who are against both and uniting those who want to build the Party and lead the revolutionary movement. In fact, it is the "Communist" League which is against both, since you cannot have a real Communist "core" which does not lead the class struggle, and you cannot have a revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory brought by the Communist "core." To pose such a "conflict" is to try to excuse the formation of a reactionary propaganda sect like the "C"L.

The "Communist" League s denial of the struggle between the two lines in the Communist and working-class movements leads them to deny theoretically that the struggle between opposites gives rise to transformation, to qualitative revolutionary change. With regard to the history of the two-line struggle as a whole, they write:

"We have seen thus far (once the United Communist Party was formed in 1921--T H) that the fundamental motion of the revolution in the United States of North America has been that each grouping represents a unity of opposites. This uniting of opposites is inevitably followed by the new entity splitting, to form again on at least a quantitatively higher level." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League ")

Thus, for "C"L the process of one dividing into two (the struggle emerging between Marxism and opportunism, for example) can be resolved ("to form again") by the elimination of the contradiction between them and the creation of a "new" united thing without the resolution of the contradiction and the suppression and destruction of the overthrown aspect which was formerly predominant. This means that the splitting of the Communist and working-class movements into two opposites, Marxism and opportunism, and the struggle between the two lines, "is inevitably followed" by Marxism and opportunism uniting on a "quantitatively higher level." This is a call for the Marxist-Leninists to unite with Gus Hall and the revisionist "C'PUSA, with whom they have irrevocably split. Marxism and opportunism are irreconcilable, and the contradiction between them will not be resolved until classes are eliminated and the material basis for the existence of Marxism and opportunism are eliminated. The concept that two opposites can be combined into one denies the struggle between Marxism and opportunism and in fact denies revolution altogether.

This metaphysical view of the struggle between the two lines in the Communist and working-class movements leads the "Communist" League to openly describe the movement as static, immutable and unchanging, in the best metaphysical manner:

"In the history of the working class of the USA. there is nothing but syndicalism."

"Syndicalism has been the major trend within the American revolution for the past 100 years. The old Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the Syndicalist League, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party have all been basically syndicalist." ("Syndicalism Disarms the Proletariat", "People's Tribune", Vol 3, No 10)

In the same vein, "C"L comments that Stalin's statement that "factionalism is the fundamental evil" of the American Communist Party in 1929 is "a truth that stands to this very day." ("Dialectics of Development of the Communist League", 1972) What could be more static, conservative and metaphysical than to conceive of the history of the U.S. Communist movement in this way? This denial of contradiction makes the "C"L unable to explain the phenomenon of one quality (the Marxist-Leninist quality of the Party in the past) changing into another (the revisionist quality of the party today). To Nelson Peery and the "C"L, the qualitative diversity of things, such as the difference between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism, is a total mystery and they utterly fail to explain the laws of motion, development and change, or the two-line struggle in the U.S. Communist movement, and instead they make vicious attacks on the proletarian revolutionary line and its representatives. This is the practical meaning of metaphysics.

The leadership of the "Communist" League extends its denial of contradiction and its posing of false opposites to the field of political economy, with equally reactionary results. They write:

"Imperialism arose as the negation of free enterprise It arose as the antithesis or the opposition but above all as the negation of the previous economic state of affairs." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

The "economic state of affairs" "previous" to imperialism was not just "free enterprise" but capitalist free enterprise. To say that imperialism negated "the previous economic state of affairs" is to say that imperialism negated capitalism. Imperialism did not negate capitalism but only certain of its secondary features, such as competition; imperialism is capitalism, but at a higher stage of development than competitive capitalism, the stage of monopoly capitalism. It is monopoly, and not monopoly capitalism or imperialism, which is the opposite of free enterprise. "C"L's metaphysical conception that imperialism is the opposite of "the previous economic state of affairs" sets the imperialist stage of capitalism entirely apart from capitalism as a whole. It denies that capitalism still exists, and it further denies that the laws of capitalism as a whole, Marxism, apply to imperialism, thereby declaring that Leninism is not, as Stalin called it, "Marxism in the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution," but is something entirely separate from Marxism, while Marxism itself is no longer valid. Since this conception goes hand-in-hand with "misplacing" the dates of the origins of imperialism and the Communist movement in such a way as to eliminate the pre-imperialist Communist movement and to predate the emergence of imperialism by 40 or so years, it appears that the "C"L is going to some heroic efforts to negate the basic character of the capitalist historical epoch and replace it with, not real imperialism, but with the "opposite" of free enterprise, with monopoly. This boils down to a monstrous revision of Marxism, removing the basic character of capitalism, the exploitation of wage-labor by capital, the basic relation on which is founded the antagonism of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and with it the revolutionary character inherent to the working class, and replace this basic relation of capitalism with the negation of free enterprise by monopoly, the complaint of small capital crushed by big. Thus we see the connection between this revision of Marxism and the declaration that the Communist movement "arose out of the morality of the middle classes, and their struggle against the insatiable monopolies," and "C"L's assertion that the "anti-monopoly coalitions" of the Populist movement were the "principle" political opposition to the Wall Street robber barons" at the end of the 19th century. The "Communist" League wants the proletariat to adopt the standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie and go against its inherent revolutionary character. And to accomplish this, the "C"L is following in the footsteps of the revisionists criticized by Lenin in his famous article "Marxism and Revisionism" in 1908:

"It was proved that the revisionists were systematically presenting modern small-scale production in a favorable light." (Marxism and Revisionism, p 8)

What more favorable light in which to paint small production than to declare its contradiction with big capital to be the principal contradiction in society, to declare that it gave rise to the Communist movement and replaced the working class as the principal opposition to the capitalists at the emergence of imperialism? Hand-in-hand with "C"L's negation of the revolutionary character of the working class goes its negation of the trade union struggle as a training ground for the proletarian revolution, for if the antagonism between labor and capital does not lie at the heart of the present system, then naturally to organize on that basis will not have anything to do with preparing for revolution. Far better to proclaim one's eternal principles. Thus it is that "C"L's idealism and metaphysics leads them to negate the basic nature of the class struggle, the validity of Marxism, the revolutionary character of the working class and the existence of capitalism altogether. An impressive feat for Nelson Peery's head.

Applying its metaphysics to the political economy of the history of the U.S., the "C"L winds up completely denying the forward motion of history. It is "C"L's contention that Southern society before the Civil War was based, not on the slave mode of production, but on capitalism, and that therefore the two opposite forces which struggled against each other in the War were capitalism--and capitalism. In "Negro National Colonial Question", they write:

"In the Black Belt of the USNA and in certain areas of Brazil, there arose a latifundist (capitalist) slavery--a slavery that produced for the international market--a slavery that essentially was a commodity producing, brutal, savage form of capitalism."

"Capitalism is the commodity producing society where human labor itself appears on the market as a commodity. Simply because this labor is sold all at once, does not change the character of the exploitation of that labor."

"The form was slavery, the content was capitalism."

Let us look at these arguments:

First, the fact that the slave South produced commodities for the capitalist world market by no means meant that the slave system was capitalism. To say this is to say that external causes decide the internal nature of a thing. This is not true. Today, for example, the majority of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America still have a predominantly feudal and semi-feudal economic system (preserved by the imperialists) and they also produce for the world market. The presence of imperialism and the capitalist world market results in intensifying the feudal exploitation of the peasants, just as the presence of the capitalist world market in the 19th century intensified the exploitation of the slaves (the especially intense labor of the Southern U.S. slave plantations which was due to production for the world market is another "C"L argument why slavery was capitalism). But in neither case does the presence of this external condition determine the internal character of the economic system of these countries.

Nelson Peery's second argument--"simply because this labor is sold all at once, does not change the character of the exploitation of that labor"--is simply a theoretical atrocity. Every school child knows that under chattel slavery not just labor but the laborer himself is sold on the auction-block to the slavemaster, to be disposed of at his will. In one stroke of their pen, Nelson Peery and the "C"L leaders declare meaningless all the class struggles by the slaves, the peasants and the workers throughout the entire history of class society before the proletarian revolution--struggles without which all historical progress including the proletarian revolution itself would be unthinkable--struggles in which millions of laborers have laid down their lives aspiring to be rid of all exploitation but aware of the progressive value of substituting a higher form of exploitation for a lower one. The "C"L leaders negate the heroic struggles of the slaves, farmers and workers in the Civil War, when the slaves appreciated the historical advance they would make by moving from chattel slavery to wage-slavery, while the workers and farmers knew what a historical defeat and retrogression for the working masses of the world it would be if the system of chattel slavery were to triumph and be established throughout the U.S. The International Workingmen's Association, under the leadership of Marx and Engels, pointed this out in its 1865 message to Abraham Lincoln on his re-election as President of the United States. It stated:

"From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant, or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

"When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding 'the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution,' and maintained 'slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of labor to capital,' and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice'; then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their 'betters,' and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good cause." (Address of the International Workingmen's Association to Abraham Lincoln", The Civil War in the U.S., Marx and Engels, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p 279)

Such was the cause that the laboring masses fought for, and which Nelson Peery negates.

Further attempting to convert slavery into capitalism, "C"L distorts the relationship between form and content. They assert that in the pre-war South "the form was slavery, the content was capitalism." This is incorrect. Both slavery and capitalism are private forms of appropriation of the product of labor; the content, in each case, is social labor. In the case of slavery, this form corresponds to a much lower level of development of the forces of production than does capitalism; slavery is therefore more backward than capitalism. When, as in the U.S., the form of slave relations of production comes into conflict with the rapidly developing content of full-scale modern industry and agriculture, it is a case of old form conflicting with new content. In the Civil War, the new content threw off the old form and established the new form, capitalist relations of production, throughout the country except for survivals of slavery in the South. This was the result of the War, which prepared the way for the productive forces to advance still more rapidly and created conditions for the final conflict of the content with its capitalist form, the proletarian revolution, which will install a still higher form of appropriation, socialist relations of production, which will develop into communism. Hence, by asserting that slavery was form and capitalism was content, "C"L tries again to deny the contradiction between slavery and capitalism, between the forces of production and the relations of production and thus the forward motion of all history.

In fact, if the South had been capitalist, there would never have been a Civil War, since it was the internal contradictions within the slave mode of production, which are different from those in the capitalist mode of production, which forced the slaveowners to attack the North and attempt to conquer the entire country. Agriculture under slavery, especially cotton-growing, exhausted the soil because it was only remunerative when carried on by large gangs of slaves working with hand labor, whose degraded condition and resistance to slavery ruled out the use of advanced techniques. Therefore slavery required grabbing wider and wider tracts of land to the west and northwest and brought the slaveowners into conflict with the northern bourgeoisie and the small farmers and workers. So it was precisely the slave mode of production and its internal contradiction which caused the Civil War. For the "C"L the very thing that caused the Civil War did not exist. That's why, instead of a reactionary war of conquest by the slave power which was opposed by the northern bourgeoisie and working masses who fought to complete (partially complete) the bourgeois-democratic revolution, for the "C"L the Civil War was a meaningless bloodbath without any progressive character whatsoever. Thus the "C"L tries to negate the profoundly revolutionary character of this war, which created conditions for the advance of the working-class movement.

Not only does the "C"L deny the revolutionary character of the Civil War, but their metaphysical conception of history leads them to deny the existence of the survivals of slavery which were not swept away by the war due to the northern bourgeoisie's refusal to carry the bourgeois-democratic revolution through to the end.

In summing up the results of the war, "C"L writes:

"The end result of the Civil War and the gigantic accumulation of financial capital and industrial means of production was the emergence of United States of North America imperialism, the scourge of finance capital." ("Negro National Colonial Question")

But that was only one side of the "end result" of the Civil War. The other side was the creation of an independent working-class movement whose embodiment was the eight-hours agitation which, as Marx said, "ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California." (Capital, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961, Vol 1, p 301) Lenin, in his "Letter to American Workers" in 1918 spoke of the "immense, world-historical progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65." (Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol 28, p 69 ) Thus "C"L's metaphysical conception of the Civil War, its denial of the difference between the two social systems and the contradiction between them, flies in the face of the great teachers of Marxism. Yet "C"L does not dare to say so, preferring "mutiny on one's knees."

About the other consequence of denying the slave character of the Southern mode of production--denying the survivals of slavery after the war, the semi-slave, semi-feudal system of share-cropping--"C"L writes, attacking Foster:

"He fails to explain why it is that the CPUSA's program concerning the struggle for democracy in the South is based on the destruction of lingering FEUDAL RELATIONS, not feudal social, but feudal economic relations. The CPUSA fails to distinguish between the Negro people which was developed as a people prior to the Civil War, and the Negro national movement which developed after the defeat of Reconstruction. The leadership of the CPUSA knows full well that to admit that slavery in the United States of North America was a crude, brutal, primitive form of capitalist exploitation would bring the CPUSA's house of revisionist cards down around their heads. Therefore, they blandly state a fact and then completely disregard it." ("Negro National Colonial Question")

Once again, "C"L is waging mutiny from their knees, opposing Marxism in general and Lenin in particular without daring to say so. Lenin wrote:

"The United States of America, writes Mr Himmer, is a country which has never known feudalism and is free from its economic survivals (p 41 of his article). This is the very opposite of the truth for the economic survivals of slavery are not in any way distinguishable from those of feudalism, and in the former slave-owning South of the U.S.A. these survivals are still very powerful." (Collected Works, Vol 22, p 24)

But regardless of "C"L's wishes, this system was installed by the former slaveowners and was the barrier that prevented the Black people from becoming assimilated into the proletariat as a whole. It chained them in large numbers to the old plantations, as a result of which they were formed into an oppressed nation, with a large stable stratum of share-croppers attached to the land. If chattel slavery had been capitalism, then there would have been no Black nation created in the Black Belt. Nelson Peery sticks his foot in his own mouth when he writes:

"The Negro question as a specific of social motion and class struggle in the United States of North America, is rooted in the type of slave system which developed in the Black Belt. Therefore, it is essential that we understand why Negro slavery in the Black Belt was what it was, in order to understand why the Negro Nation and the Negro liberation struggle exist in their present forms." ("Negro National Colonial Question")

Thus the metaphysics of the "C"L leaders leads them to deny the progressive character of the Civil War and the economic basis for the formation of the Black people in the former slaveowning area into an oppressed nation. Such a miserable fate for these champions of the "Negro National Colonial Question".

So, by denying one aspect of a contradiction, the "C"L leaders are led into denying the forward motion of history as well as the historical roots of the national question of today. This is a further example of the reactionary consequences of their denial of the basic law of materialist dialectics.

A further problem remains. The "Communist" League is well known for resorting to fancy phraseology about "dialectics" in order to attempt to deny the progressive character of the present-day struggles of the Third World against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and the hegemonism of the superpowers. This, again, is an example of "C"L's failure to correctly present the two aspects in a contradiction. In this case, the "C"L leaders declare that dialectics denies the "possibility" of "a third force in an entity" and consider that this refutes the existence of a Third World engaged in struggle against imperialism. They write:

"There is no possible 3d factor from the standpoint of theory and philosophy. Thesis: capitalist imperialism; antithesis: the proletariat and the toiling masses; synthesis: socialism. This is the motion of history." ("CL Response to Conciliators", "People's Tribune", Vol 4, No 8)

This, again, is "C"L's metaphysical trick of posing false opposites (beating the stuffing out of straw men) in hopes of muddling everything and liquidating the revolutionary struggle. The fundamental contradiction of the whole capitalist historical epoch is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This contradiction determines and influences all others in the present world, and will continue until mankind reaches the stage of classless society. When capitalism reached the stage of imperialism, certain major contradictions which are determined or influenced by this fundamental contradiction became intensified, in this case the contradiction between the imperialist powers and the oppressed nations and peoples. This gave rise to the immense upsurge of the national liberation movement of the people of the Third World. The fact that some of them have achieved formal political independence has not removed their contradiction with imperialism, which is continually trying to turn them into neo-colonies and to re-subjugate them under colonial control, the political form most favorable for imperialist exploitation. Since the October Reveolution, as Chairman Mao pointed out:

"No matter what classes, parties, or individuals in an oppressed nation join the revolution, and no matter whether they themselves are conscious of the point or understand it, so long as they oppose imperialism, their revolution becomes part of the proletarian-socialist revolution and they become its allies" (On New Democracy, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Peking, 1967, p 7.)

Thus the Third World is a part of the entity of the entire world, but it is not a separate force in relation to the fundamental contradiction within this entity; instead, it is part of the proletarian aspect of this contradictory entity, in struggle against the bourgeois aspect, independent of man's will. Hence, once again, the "Communist" League cannot correctly present the thesis and antithesis in a contradiction, but instead distorts them completely in order to achieve extremely reactionary political ends.

Thus the leaders of the "Communist" League unable to mount "the first two rungs of simple thesis and antithesis," deny the basic law of materialist dialectics, and with it deny revolution.

V

THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE HOLDS THAT EXTERNAL CAUSES ARE THE BASIS OF MOTION, DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE

Denying that the internal contradictions within things are the basis for their development, "C"L resorts to the metaphysical theory of external causation. This theory holds that everything has been the same ever since it first came into being and what motion there is, is merely a mechanical change of place and not a transformation of one quality into another. This mechanical change of place is brought about by an external force.

This view opposes revolution, since revolution depends on self-reliance, on accelerating the contradictions inherent in things in order to bring about their transformation. The theory of external causation is also the methodological basis for religion, since if the contradictions inherent in nature and society are not the basis for its development, then one must attribute development to a God standing outside nature and society. Thus the theory of external causation is extremely reactionary in its political consequences.

"C"L's history of the U.S. Communist movement is filled with examples of attributing the decisive cause of its development to causes outside the U.S. or outside the Communist organization. For example, the Bolshevik Revolution and not the internal two-line struggle in the U.S. between Marxism and revisionism is assigned the decisive role in the struggle to build the Communist Party: "The immediate political result of the Revolution was the split between the right and the left of the Socialist Party (this actually occurred years before--T H) and the splitting amongst the various anarcho-syndicalist groups."

"The syndicalists, revisionists, and anarchists who were dazzled by the splendor of the Soviet revolution and by the acknowledged brilliance of Lenin rushed to declare themselves Communists--but even in this heady moment of revolution they could not unite." (Both quotes from "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

In fact, it was only because Leninism is Marxism of the world era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution, therefore reflecting the internal conditions in the U.S., and because the Marxists had waged many struggles against the revisionist leadership of the Socialist Party and had led the struggles of the workers against the capitalists, that Leninism could take root in the United States and become operative through the internal basis of American society.

Further examples follow:

"Under the prodding of the Communist International (to which both the CP and the CLP were affiliated) a unity conference was held in May, 1921, at Woodstock, New York. Formal unity was achieved."

"Under the prodding of the Communist International, the CPUSA began to assume the form, but not the content, of a party of a new type." (Both quotes from "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

In fact, the Communist International did not prod but provided favorable external conditions for these developments to take place, providing guidance which would have been a failure if it had not conformed to the internal conditions in the American Party. And again "C"L distorts the relationship between form and content for reactionary ends. It is impossible for a Party to assume the form of a new type without already having this content. Form lags behind content, and the struggle between new content and old form is unending and revolutionary. The new form, the Communist Party, could not have come into existence in 1919-1921 if the new content, Marxism-Leninism represented by the left wing of the Socialist Party, had not fought against the revisionism of the SP leadership. The SP leadership used its dominant position to try to keep the reactionary form, the SP itself at that time, from being overthrown and replaced by a new form, the Communist Party. Thus new content preceded new form and had an internal basis. Today the same thing is taking place: the new content, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, is fighting against the old content, revisionism and "left" opportunism, and the old form defending it, the "C"PUSA and the splitting activities of the "C"L and others, and working to overthrow them so as to constitute a new form, a Marxist-Leninist Party, in which the new content will flourish. "C"L's denial of the dialectical relationship of form and content is just another way of denying the internal contradictions in things and adopting the metaphysical theory of external causation. To continue:

"In 1945, Duclos, Secretary of the French Party wrote and published his famous letter. Dutifully, the Browderite majority removed Browder and replaced Foster." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

So according to "C"L there was no two-line struggle in the Party, assisted and guided by the Duclos letter, but only a charade directed by a foreign master.

According to the "C"L, events, and not the Party's policies towards them, are able to "seal" the Party's "fate" twice:

"His (Ruthenberg's) death threw the struggle into the open and sealed the fate of the so-called CPUSA."

"When Roosevelt took Browder out of jail in 1941 and then invited him to the White House for dinner, the fate of the Communist Party was sealed " (Both quotes from "Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

And in the present, the "C"L itself admits to being a mere straw in the wind at the hands of external causes:

"It is clear that one of the laws of our development is that when we struggle with the 'New Left', we are drawn into their movement; but when we struggle with the CPUSA, we are drawn into the working class." ("May Day 1974, International Report","People's Tribune", May, 1974)

Finally, in the field of political economy:

"Although there is not a period of revolutionary upsurge within the USNA, the working class here does not want to go to war. This is shown concretely by the militant struggles against the war in Indochina. Thus, the imperialists are faced with having to impose fascism not to stem internal revolutionary upsurge, but to force the working class to participate in a war to stabilize the world for further imperialist aggression." ("United Front: Bridge to Revolution", "People's Tribune", March 1974 )

Thus we have the development of the U.S. Communist movement and of U.S. society itself determined by external forces.

A further variant of "C"L's theory of external causation is its view that one aspect of a contradiction can escape the laws of dialectics and become fixed for all time by becoming "external" to the other aspect. They write:

"What was historic about the Bolshevik revolution is that it ushered in the general crisis of world capitalism, a crisis from which it cannot recover. This crisis was concretized as the development of an external contradiction to imperialism. So we see that the process of the struggle against imperialism reached a nodal line and then crossed over, transforming itself into an external contradiction." ("Dialectics of the Development of the Communist League")

Out of this "external" contradiction arises the socialist camp. Then:

"These two camps (socialism and capitalism-- T H), because they are external to one another are bound to exist until the death of imperialism." ("May Day 1974, International Report", People's Tribune", May 1974)

Thus, once the contradiction within one or several countries is initially resolved in favor of the proletariat, then, just because these countries are now outside the domination of imperialism, they are exempt from contradiction, class struggle and the danger of capitalist restoration and the re-imposition of imperialist control, and have entered the Kingdom of God. With such a view, there is no need for struggle against revisionism in a socialist country, there is no need for frequent cultural revolutions like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. To negate the struggle against revisionism, especially when it is revisionism struggling for state power, is to negate the proletarian revolution, to refuse to defend it, to acquiesce in its overthrow, as has taken place in the Soviet Union. This is how "C"L's metaphysical theory of the external contradiction being eternal defends revisionism.

Still another variant of "C"L's metaphysical theory of external causation is its view that the Communist movement in the U.S. only arose with the imperialist stage of capitalism, reflecting not the basic characteristics of capitalism, but instead the crushing of free competition by "the insatiable monopolies." Dialectical materialism holds that all the basic characteristics of a process are present in its origin and will not disappear until the process itself disappears. Marxism reflects the basic characteristics of capitalism and arose when capitalism itself fully emerged. To claim that the Communist movement in the U.S. arose on another basis, on the basis of the imperialist stage of capitalism, is to claim that the U.S. Communist movement is not based on the essential features of capitalism but only on certain features which emerged or became intensified with the emergence of the monopoly stage of capitalism. A "Communist" movement which is not based on the essential features of capitalism is not directed towards the elimination of capitalism itself; it is a reformist movement, based on the complaint, as we have seen, of the petty bourgeoisie against the big bourgeoisie. A "Communist" movement on this basis can go away again before capitalism itself is eliminated, just as the petty bourgeoisie and all other classes except the bourgeoisie and the proletariat decline and disappear under the capitalist mode of production, while the proletariat is its special and essential product, its gravedigger, and will itself bring about the elimination of capitalism. And, in fact, in "C"L s history, this is just what you have: "Marxism" darting in and out the window at Nelson Peery's whim, only to emerge in full bloom with the arrival of the POC in 1958, the first people in the U.S. to have "a relatively firm grasp on Marxism."

But if the Communist movement only arose in the U.S. at the stage of imperialism then there could have been no two-line struggle in the working-class movement between the bourgeoisie and its representatives and the proletariat and its representatives before that. Instead, only "differences" and no contradictions could have existed and the development of the working-class movement could only have been determined by an external cause. Under this conception Marxism of that time becomes a foreign ideology, finding no roots in the U.S., and the activities of the actual Communist movement and its leaders are negated. For example:

"It is only natural that the struggles of these imported workers (the immigrants from German, Irish, Italian and Slavic origin) should be couched in the framework of the struggles within their native lands. There is no Negro question in Germany or Poland, so it is only natural that these immigrants many of them revolutionaries, would disregard the burning Negro question." ("Negro National Colonial Question")

Thus, by denying the existence of the Communist movement in the competitive stage of capitalism, "C"L denies that contradiction is present at the very beginning of a process. Only external causes remain to bring about development, and Marxism is looked at as a foreign ideology. This is the metaphysical view of the Deborin school of idealist philosophers in the Soviet Union whom Chairman Mao and the revolutionary Soviet philosophers criticized in the 1930's. It looks like Nelson Peery must have cribbed his ideas from there.

Denying the two aspects of a contradiction, "C"L arrives at the metaphysical theory of external causation and denies revolution altogether. There remains only the question of the relationship between "C"L's metaphysics and its idealism.

VI

HOW THE "COMMUNIST" LEAGUE'S METAPHYSICS LEADS IT STRAIGHT INTO IDEALISM

Following its metaphysical view of things as immutable and fixed, the "Communist" League's philosophical method contributes to its idealism. For example, "C"L writes:

"The line of a Marxist-Leninist Party is the application of these universal truths to the concrete conditions of a country. Hence, there is a difference between the universal truth and the concrete application of that truth. One thing is abstracted from history and the other reflects changing momentary relations. Thus a political line zig-zags, while the abstraction could be viewed as in a straight line." ("Call for Unity against Fascist Offensive, Reply to October League (ML), "People's Tribune", Vol 5, no 9)

Thus "C"L asserts that human conceptual knowledge, the "abstraction" from reality which reflects its inner laws and thereby forms universal truth, proceeds in a straight, fixed direction for all time. This is metaphysical and incorrect. The material world develops dialectically and so does its reflection in the mind. The material world develops through a struggle of opposites, one (for example, bourgeois society) dividing into two (bourgeoisie and proletariat), the struggle between them (class struggle), one aspect devouring the other (proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, whose aim is to eliminate the bourgeoisie), giving rise to a new unity at a higher level, Communist, classless society), with a new pair of opposites, etc. This is the spiralling development of the material world. Theory, too, develops in a spiral, reflecting reality. Perceptual knowledge is gained from practice; through study it is raised to the level of conceptual knowledge or theory, reflecting the essence of reality; then it guides practice and is tested and verified in practice; then new things are further studied with the guidance of this theory, theory is deepened and the essence of things is grasped more deeply, and so on Lenin described this process:

"Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness--voila the epistemological roots of idealism" ("On the Question of Dialectics", Collected Works, Vol 38, p 363)

But "C"L does not agree with this dialectical formulation of Lenin's. To it, abstraction, universal truth, forms "a straight line." What is the result of "C"L s differing view? It is that "C"L constantly seizes on some particular aspect of universal truth, some quotation or some concept, and refuses to pursue the dialectical spiral of the motion of the real world and use this theory to study new things in the motion of matter, but instead flies off with the universal truth into the wild blue yonder proclaiming that it has got the truth. Hence, "C"L denies the necessity to use theory to re-study concrete things to deepen theory and solve the specific problems of revolution in one's country, but flies off into idealism.

"C"L's metaphysical notion leads it to deny that Marxism develops. "C"L writes:

"Since Lenin's time, there have been no new classes. Hence, Leninism, as the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is a perfectly harmonious teaching, and is universally applicable." ("May Day, International Report", "People's Tribune" May 1974)

But there have been no new classes since Marx's time, either, and there will be none: Communist, classless society will be established and there will still be no new classes, because the proletariat is the grave-digger of class society. Yet Leninism developed on the basis of Marxism solving problems that had not fully emerged in the time of Marx and Engels. So "new classes" has nothing to do with it, and is only a smokescreen for asserting that now that there is Leninism, Marxism cannot develop further on the basis of Marxism-Leninism. But this, too, has been proven unfounded and metaphysical. By leading the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Chair- Mao has also developed Marxism; he has developed Mao Tsetung Thought on the basis of Marxism-Leninism by solving a problem of a universal character that was not solved in the lifetime of Lenin and Stalin. That is the problem of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, of preventing the repeated attempts of the revisionist bourgeoisie to restore capitalism acting through the Party and state apparatus of a socialist country. Such a development in Marxist theory is a great advance for the proletariat, setting a universal guide for avoiding the reversal suffered by the Soviet proletariat, and teaching the world proletariat profound lessons about the nature of the struggle against revisionism. Such a development in Marxist theory is not in contradiction with Marxism-Leninism but continues it and deepens it. But the metaphysical notions of the "C"L leaders, who consider universal truth "a straight line," negate the lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, negate Mao Tsetung Thought (this is why they tried to expunge it from the Communist Party of the Philippines) and thereby negate the struggle against revisionism (as they did in considering the socialist camp eternal).

In the passage quoted above from Lenin's "On the Question of Dialectics", Lenin pointed out the relationship of metaphysics to idealism. He showed how, by seizing a certain aspect, a "fragment" on the curve of universal truth and transforming it one-sidedly into something eternal, a straight line, the metaphysician leads himself right away from the spiralling development of the material world and into the sky. This is what Lenin meant when he said that "rectilinearity" sees truth as "a straight line") and "one-sidedness" are the "epistemological roots of idealism"; that is, by following the metaphysical method one necessarily follows a method of learning (epistemology) that leads away from, not deeper into, the material world.

This can be illustrated by an example from Kilpatrick's pamphlet "A Veteran Communist Speaks on the Struggle against Revisionism." Attacking Comrade William Z Foster for "revisionism," Kilpatrick says:

"In the same letter (Foster's letter to the National Committee of the CPUSA opposing Browder in 1944--T H ) Foster accused Browder of neglecting to give a complete statement of the Party's attitude towards socialism. This is what Foster had to say on the subject:

'The Question of Socialism "While it is correct to say as Comrade Browder does, that Socialism is not the issue in the war, nor will it be the issue in the immediate postwar period in the United States, and that, therefore, to raise the issue now could only result in narrowing down the national unity necessary to win the war and to carry out generally the decisions of Teheran, nevertheless, merely to take this negative attitude towards Socialism is not enough. We must also develop our positive position.

"We have to bear in mind that although Socialism will not be the political issue in the United States in the early postwar period, it will nevertheless be a question of great and growing mass interest and influence. This is true for a couple of major reasons, aside from the possibility that some countries in Europe may adopt Socialism at the close of the war; first, the Soviet Union in this war has given a world-shaking demonstration of the power of Socialism.' (pp 16-17)

"How could Foster have called himself a communist after making statements such as these? How could socialism 'not be the political issue in the United States in the early post-war period'? The fact is that socialism has been a worldwide issue since the writing of the 'Communist Manifesto' in 1848; it has been an 'issuse' since the working class ceased being a 'class in itself' and became a 'class for itself'. Has Comrade Foster forgotten the Paris Commune, when the proletariat made its first revolution? Has Comrade Foster forgotten the great October Revolution that shook the whole imperialist foundation and brought into being capitalism's general crisis? Has Comrade Foster forgotten Lenin's basic thesis which states that during the epoch of imperialism we live in the epoch of proletarian revolution? Either Comrade Foster had become senile or he was frightened as hell of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Did he think that all there was to being a communist was to 'talk about adopting socialism'? History has taught us that the revolutionary class struggle under the leadership of a communist party does not stop at merely interpreting the world--it changes the world. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat will be able to solve the problems of the workers and the revolutionary masses."

Here Kilpatrick raises the universal truth (socialism as the fundamental issue for the working class), separates it from the dialectical spiral of the real world, refuses to re-apply his theory to concrete conditions and attempts to use this universal truth as a club to brain Comrade Foster. This metaphysical detachment of a theoretically correct conclusion of Marxism from the actual development of the revolutionary process leads Kilpatrick to refuse to analyze concrete conditions, neither the concrete conditions of the time about which Foster is writing, nor the concrete meaning of Foster's words and how Foster is using the word "issue." Foster is writing about a time when the most broadly discussed and fought-over issues among the American workers were not yet socialism, not yet the proletarian revolution as an immediate task, but instead were various partial questions and immediate interests, and the rallying point for mobilizing the masses into concrete action was not yet the practical task of insurrection, of establishing socialism. But Foster pointed out that, nevertheless, the "interest and influence" of socialism would be "great and growing" among the masses. Thus Foster opposed Browder's rightism, which made socialism the backroom property of a few intellectuals, and called for mass propaganda for it, while at the same time recognizing that the time was not yet ripe for raising socialism as the practical rallying cry and slogan for immediate action and that instead the masses of workers should be mobilized to fight for their immediate interests. This was a Communist policy for the immediate post-war period. But to oppose this Communist policy and viciously attack Comrade Foster, Kilpatrick declares the universal truth that "socialism has been a world wide issue since the writing of the 'Communist Manifesto' in 1848." Using "issue" differently from Foster, refusing to look at Foster's words, refusing to analyze the concrete conditions of the time in question, Kilpatrick sails off into the sky on the wings of his universal truth and detaches it from its concrete roots in reality. This is how his metaphysical method leads him straight into idealism.

Hence the metaphysical method of the leaders of the "Communist" League leads them to treat universal truth as a straight line and as a result they refuse to recognize that theoretical knowledge develops, and they straightway depart from the dialectical motion of the real world and soar off into idealism. What consequences this has for the work of the Communists among the masses is illustrated by the example provided by Kilpatrick. In this example the "C"L again demonstrates how it is "left" only in words while rightist in practice. The Political Bureau of the "Communist" League declares in its foreword to Kilpatrick's pamphlet that he "sets the history of the struggle against revisionism on its feet as only a veteran of the struggle can do." But Kilpatrick's (and "C'L's) metaphysics have let them straight into idealism. This, certainly, is not setting the history of the U.S. Communist movement "on its feet"; it is standing it on its head, the feat of thorough-going metaphysicians and idealists.

CONCLUSION

Thus the idealism and the metaphysics of Nelson Peery and the leadership of the "Communist" League go hand in hand. This is the sum total of "C"L's philosophical viewpoint and method. It is a bourgeois reactionary world outlook which gives rise to a bourgeois reactionary political line. It has the practical result of placing the "Communist" League squarely in opposition to the Marxist-Leninists solving the most pressing problem facing the U.S. working class at the present time: the unification of the genuine Marxist-Leninists on a correct ideological and political line so as to form a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of the U.S. working class, a Party capable of leading the working class, the oppressed nationalities and other working people in the great task of proletarian revolution. The leadership of the "Communist" League is attempting to impose its reactionary ideological and political line on the Marxist-Leninist movement in order to suppress the building of such a Party, which alone can defeat revisionism and opportunism and lead the working class to victory. In place of such a Party, the "C"L is attempting to float a reactionary sect of revisionist overlords in the clothing of "left" phrases about "anti-revisionism." Hence the "Communist" League is nothing but a "left"-sloganeering front of modern revisionism, "left" in words while rightist in deeds. It complements the work of the revisionist "C"PUSA in opposing the proletarian revolution. The genuine Marxist-Leninists who want to grasp dialectical materialism, grasp the laws of development of society, work out a correct political line for the proletarian revolution in the U.S. and unite to build the Communist Party on a Leninist basis, should resolutely criticize and repudiate the idealist and metaphysical world outlook of Nelson Peery and the other leaders of the "Communist" League, criticize and repudiate their entire reactionary political line and resolutely unite with each other to build the Party.

APPENDIX I AN OUTSPOKEN REVELATION

(Hsinhua News Agency, April 16, 1970, dispatch):

April 22 of this year marks the centenary of the birth of Lenin, the great revolutionary teacher of the proletariat. With a big fanfare, Brezhnev and the rest of the handful of renegades who have betrayed Leninism put on a show of "commemorating" Lenin, and on December 23, 1969 came out with the so-called Theses on the Centenary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. They resort to their usual humbug in the "Theses", mix Krushchov revisionism up with Leninism, and pass social-imperialism off as Leninism. To everyone's indignation, they openly take the nonsense about the five "social factors of force" which Otto Bauer, a leader of the Second International and an enemy of Marxism-Leninism, wrote in his sinister book Bolshevism or Social-Democracy? and criminally attribute it to Lenin, committing a vicious forgery. Their shameless lies have gone beyond all bounds. This scandal has gone around the world. The following is a report by Hsinhua Correspondent on the incident and its background.

What kind of creature was this Otto Bauer? How and why does the Soviet revisionist renegade clique pass his words off as Lenin's?

It is quite well known that Otto Bauer was an Austrian scab. He was born in 1882 and died in 1938, the year in which the renegade Kautsky died. He was a notorious and typical representative of world opportunism, a chieftain of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party, of the Second International and the Two-and-a-Half International. He was a sworn enemy of Marxism-Leninism. One time member of parliament and foreign minister of Austria, he took an active part in suppressing a number of uprisings by the Austrian workers and supported Hitler's pan-Germanism. Like the renegade Kautsky, he ground out pamphlets advocating peaceful transition and the parliamentary road. He did his utmost to oppose violent revolution by the proletariat and the dictatorship of the proletariat, ferociously attacking the Great October Socialist Revolution and Soviet power led by Lenin. Lenin aptly characterized Otto Bauer: "This, the best of the social-traitors, is at most a learned and utterly hopeless fool." (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed, Vol 30, p.327)

Bauer's Bolshevism or Social-Democracy? was published in 1920. It absolutely opposed violent revolution and preached peaceful transition, saying that "the distribution of state power is determined by social factors of force". At the same time, it viciously attacked the Soviet state founded by Lenin as "despotic socialism" and slandered the dictatorship of the proletariat as "violence against the social factors of force." What are the "social factors of force" concocted by Bauer? They are: "First, the number of members of the class; second, the nature, strength and capability of its organization; third, its place in the process of production and distribution which determines its economic means; fourth, the degree of its political interest, flexibility, activity and capacity for sacrifice; fifth, its educational level, the extent to which its ideas influence members of its own class and other classes and the attraction exerted by its ideology." Otto Bauer, Bolshevism or Social-Democracy?, German ed, Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1920, p 109)

As soon as this pamphlet came out, Lenin strongly denounced it at the Second Congress of the Communist International. In particular, he emphatically refuted Bauer's maligning the use of violence by the proletariat as "violence against the social factors of force" and his fallacy of the "social factors of force." Lenin said: "It is an example of what Marxism has been reduced to, of the kind of banality and defence of the exploiters to which the most revolutionary theory can be reduced. A German variety of philistinism is required, and you get the 'theory' that the 'social factors of force' are: number; the degree of organization; the place held in the process of production and distribution; activity and education. If a rural agricultural labourer or an urban working man practises revolutionary violence against a landowner or a capitalist, that is no dictatorship of the proletariat, no violence against the exploiters and the oppressors of the people. Oh no! This is 'violence against the social factors of force'." Lenin went on: "Perhaps my example sounds something like jest. However, such is the nature of present-day opportunism that its struggle against Bolshevism becomes jest." (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed, Vol 31, p 201)

Interestingly enough, in the 14th point of the "Theses" published in Pravda, Brezhnev and company shamelessly quote in full the paragraph containing Bauer's counter-revolutionary fallacy about the five "social factors of force" which Lenin had sharply denounced, and arbitrarily and glaringly attribute it to Lenin. Just look:

"In the draft plan for his report on the international situation and the main tasks of the Comintern, Lenin noted five 'social factors of strength' of the working class: 1) numbers, 2) organization, 3) place in the process of production and distribution, 4) activity, and 5) education. Since Lenin wrote this the size of the working, class has sharply increased. It has become infinitely better organized and politically active, and is better educated and better trained."

For Brezhnev and company to crudely attribute Otto Bauer's words to Lenin is most reactionary and indeed a "jest." But, this is neither surprising nor accidental. It is determined by the "nature of present-day opportunism" Their opposition to violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, their advocacy of peaceful transition and their exercise of Hitlerite fascist dictatorship at home are in tune with and a continuation of Bauer's revisionist and social-imperialist ideas. Since they are out to oppose Leninism and take over the mantle of the old revisionists, and at the same time try to appropriate the radiant banner of Leninism, it is only natural for them to make monstrous fools of themselves.

In his criticism of Bauer's Bolshevism or Social-Democracy?, Lenin described it as a "new book against Bolshevism" and "a thorough-going Menshevik pamphlet" Lenin said:

"We thank in advance the bourgeois and opportunist publishers who will publish it and translate it into various languages. Bauer's book will be a useful if peculiar supplement to the textbooks on communism. Take any paragraph, any argument in Otto Bauer's book and indicate the Menshevism in it, where the roots lie of views that lead up to the actions of the traitors to socialism, of the friends of Kerensky, Scheidemann, etc --this is a question that could be very usefully and successfully set in 'examinations' designed to test whether communism has been properly assimilated. If you cannot answer this question, you are not yet a Communist, and should not join the Communist Party." (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed, Vol 31, pp 200-201)

Lenin put it very well, making an analysis of the roots of the philosophy of the scab and renegade Otto Bauer is "useful." Its usefulness lies in that "this is a question that could be very usefully and successfully set in 'examinations' designed to test whether communism has been properly assimilated." Brezhnev and company not only completely approve of the Menshevism in Bauer's book but have gone so far as to quote as Lenin's words the revisionist nonsense in Bauer s book which Lenin characterized as expressing "the essence of the views of world opportunism." This should serve as the most telling proof that the handful of members of the Soviet revisionist leading clique are not in the least qualified to join the ranks of the Communist Party, are not Communists at all but out-and-out counter-revolutionary democrats, out-and-out renegades to Leninism and out-and-out obedient and filial descendants of Bauer and company! Just as Lenin said in exposing the old scab Ramsay MacDonald, "This is a revelation" of "rare outspokenness." (Lenin, Collected Works, Chinese ed, Vol 31, p 200)

Now it is crystal clear to the people throughout the world that Brezhnev and company's so-called "observing the birth centenary of Lenin", "loyalty to Lenin's behests", "defending Marxism-Leninism" and so on, are nothing but lies. To put it bluntly, they are pushing "Bauerism" which is rotten to the core and the revisionism of the Second International. They are piously worshiping the "example" of their revisionist ancestors' perversion of Marxism as their holy bible. They are taking the trash of an active advocate of Hitler fascism as a "working class" source of "strength". All this seems too ugly and vile. But it is written in black and white and not even an axe can lop it off.

No dirty deal is too low for Brezhnev and company, that gang of scoundrels. In an attempt to cover up this scandal which had become known to the world, they stealthily camouflaged what Pravda had published by deleting Lenin's name but retaining Bauer's ideas when the "Theses" were later reprinted in the journal Kommunist. This only adds scandal to scandal. The more they try to hide it, the more they expose themselves as renegades to Leninism. Like Bauer, they are all enemies of the Soviet people; they are all anti-Soviet villains. By hook or by crook Brezhnev and company usurp Lenin's name to peddle revisionist, social-imperialist trash. Their passing off of Bauer's words as Lenin's is by no means an individual or isolated incident. Tampering with, distorting, emasculating and fabricating statements by Lenin has become a disgusting habit with them. There are many instances in their "Theses." Readers can readily see this by merely comparing what is quoted from Lenin's statements in the "Theses" with the original.

The dishing up of the "Theses" by the Soviet revisionist renegade clique shows how far Brezhnev and company have slid down the road of betrayal of Leninism and how despicable and shamelessly they have degenerated. The Soviet revisionists' "Theses" are, as Lenin said, a "peculiar supplement to the textbooks on communism", and indeed excellent teaching material by negative example since they lay bare the hypocrisy and reactionary nature of their so-called commemoration of Lenin. Yet Brezhnev and the rest of the handful of renegades have the impudence to laud these anti-Leninist "Theses", which stink of Khruschov revisionism, social-imperialism, as an "important political and theoretical document" which "profoundly expounds" the "organic integrity" of Marxism- Leninism. They raved that "communists and all working people of the world" "have taken the Theses." (Editorial of the Soviet revisionist Pravda, "Loyalty to the Great Teachings", January 21, 1970 ) These scoundrels have boastfully done all they can to prettify themselves and have lost all sense of shame.

History is inexorable. Khrushchov fell long ago. It is quite futile for Brezhnev to try to don the cloak of Leninism and press on with Khruschov revisionism, social-imperialism to deceive and mislead the masses. Our great leader Chairman Mao says: "'Lifting a rock only to drop it on one's own feet is a Chinese folk saying to describe the behaviour of certain fools. The reactionaries in all countries are fools of this kind." Brezhnev and company are precisely fools of this kind. The sinister "Theses" have turned out to be a clumsy sleight-of-hand and have exposed them. The Soviet revisionist renegade clique is now having a hard time. Following in Khrushchov's footsteps, Brezhnev and company are heading for the brink of their downfall. If you doubt this, just wait and see.

APPENDIX II

(To further expose the reactionary slanders perpetrated by the leaders of the "Communist" League against Comrade William Z Foster, reproduced below is a passage from Foster's writings which shows how in 1955, just as the Khruschevite revisionists were seizing political power away from the proletariat in the Soviet Union, Comrade Foster recognized the outstanding Marxist-Leninist qualities of Chairman Mao Tsetung, something which the "C"L leaders have not yet learned to see. The following passage is from Foster's History of the Three Internationals, International Publishers, New York, 1955, pp 511-513)

THE ROLE OF MAO TSE-TUNG

The great leader of the Chinese Revolution possesses many of the qualities of leadership that characterized Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. A man of resolution, initiative, and boundless energy, Mao is a brilliant theoretician, an exceptional organizer, and a very powerful leader of the masses in open struggle. These were the qualities that enabled this creative Marxist genius, in the face of prodigious difficulties, to lead the more than half a billion of the Chinese people to decisive victory.

Mao's theoretical work ranges over a vast scope. It sums up to an adaptation of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism to the specific conditions prevailing in China, a monumental task which he has done with profound skill and thoroughness. The basis of this work was a Marxist evaluation of the character, of the years, of the developing Chinese revolution-- his differentiation of the new-type bourgeois democratic revolution from the old type, and the establishment of its relationship to the socialist revolution, constitute major contributions to the general body of Marxist theory. Mao also paid close attention to the Marxist analysis of class forces in China and the relation to each other of the democratic forces in united-front movements, his work in this respect being one of the classics of Communist political writing. (24) Classical, too, are Mao's writings on military strategy and tactics, in the situation of a guerrilla army gradually growing into a mass military force and carrying on the struggle in the face of a vastly stronger enemy. (25) Splendid also is Mao's development theoretically of the leading role of the small Chinese proletariat especially in the midst of the vast sea of peasants. Another of Mao's many theoretical achievements was his skilled utilization of the three principles of Sun Yat Sen, which are widely popular among the masses, as part of the minimum program of the Communist Party, (26) thus taking over the democratic traditions of the famous Chinese bourgeois revolutionist. Brilliant also were his innumerable polemics with every sort of deviator and enemy. Mao's theoretical work extended not only into the fields of economics, politics, and military strategy, but also into literature, and philosophy. His work On Contradiction (27) is a comprehensive, profound and popular exposition of the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge.

Mao is also a splendid mass organizer and administrator. He is not one merely to throw out broad slogans; he also knows how to go to the masses and organize them to realize these slogans. His works are filled with consideration of the most detailed questions of organizational work, in the building of the Communist Party, the people's army, the trade unions, and all other organizations of the people. And all is written in the simplest of languages. A classical example of this is his work On the Rectification of Incorrect Ideas in the Party, (28) dealing with such errors as "the purely military viewpoint, extreme democratization, non-organizational viewpoint, absolute equalitarianism, subjectivism, adventurism, etc." Mao himself, born in 1893 of a poor peasant family in a village of Hunan, has had a hard life as a worker, soldier, student, and political leader. He is, indeed, a true son of the Chinese people, living their lives, knowing their thoughts and needs, and speaking their political language.

In the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, all of whom were fighters as well as great thinkers and organizers, Mao is also a superlatively good general, whether in the economic or political struggle or on the field of military battle. Along with Chu Teh and other leaders, Mao made the "Long March": he was a noted guerrilla fighter as well as tactician, and he took personal part in innumerable military campaigns. Mao's greatest political achievements have been in the sphere of the direct leadership of vast masses of the people in direct struggle against oppressors of every type.

When the Chinese people won the leadership of their country, there were very many elements in the capitalist world who said with assurance: "Well, maybe it is not so bad after all; China is a vast, impossible chaos, and the Communists will break their necks trying to organize and govern it." But this was only wishful thinking, typical capitalist underestimation of the revolutionary abilities of the Chinese Communists, and especially of their great leader, Mao Tse-tung. Now such remarks are rarely heard. Already, the Chinese Communists, with Mao at their head, have clearly demonstrated that they can organize and lead forward their huge people. This adds just one more to the many "impossibilities" that they have accomplished in their epic struggle for freedom.

APPENDIX III

(Chairman Mao, unlike "C"L, held Comrade Foster and the Communist Party of the United States in high esteem, as the following letter shows

LETTER FROM CHAIRMAN MAO TSE-TUNG TO COMRADE WILLIAM Z FOSTER

January 17, 1959

Dear Comrade Foster,

Thank you ever so much for your letter of December 19th, 1958. From your letter, full of warmth and enthusiasm, I could see the soul of the great Communist Party of the United States, and the soul of the great working class and people of the United States.

The Chinese people know that United States imperialism has done many bad things to China and to the whole world as well; they understand that only the United States ruling group is bad, while the people of the United States are very good. Among the Americans, although many of them have not yet awakened, only a tiny part are bad, the overwhelming majority are good. Friendly relations between the Chinese and American peoples will eventually break down the barriers put up by Dulles and his like and develop more extensively with each passing day.

Although the Communist Party of the United States is temporarily in a situation which is none too smooth, your struggle is highly significant and is bound to bear rich fruit. Dark night has its end. The reactionary forces of the United States are now running their heads into stone walls everywhere, which shows that they will not have too many days to live. Right now, over there in your country, the situation in which "the enemy is strong and we are weak" is entirely a temporary phenomenon. It will certainly develop in the opposite direction.

Allow me, on behalf of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people, to extend hearty greetings to you, glorious fighter and leader of the American working class, and to wish you an early recovery. I warmly welcome your coming to China for medical treatment and convalescence, if it is possible for you to do so.

With Communist Greetings,

Mao Tse-tung

Chairman, Central Committee, Communist Party of China

(Reprinted from Political Affairs, March, 1959)

Produced by CENTRAL ORGANIZATION OF U.S. MARXIST-LENINISTS

Distributed by N.F.C. Publications, Box 930, Boston 02103

[Back to Top]