First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 42, October 30, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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“Ex-Member Exposes CPML” reads the headline in the latest (October) issue of Revolution, organ of the opportunist gang that calls itself the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
The interview contained under this sensational banner head is with an infamous scoundrel known around the Detroit area as Yahru, who remains unnamed in Revolution. Long regarded by the workers as a fool and an opportunist at best, Yahru has become a new-found spokesman for the RCP in their anti-China, anti-CPML campaign. This, as we shall see, says more about the recruitment policies of the RCP than anything else.
We shall take on each one of Yahru’s points in order to examine more closely the thrust of RCP’s tactics. At the same time, we hope this article serves as an instructive lesson about the logic of the anti-China opportunists for the benefit of those comrades who are still taken in by the RCP.
The interview begins as it ends–with lies. The interviewee was never a “member of the CPML,” as is claimed. Rather, he was expelled from the October League in 1976 before our Party was even founded. While Yahru tries to make it seem that he quit over his opposition to the Party’s “opportunistic domestic and international line,” his record is hardly that “glorious.”
After repeated warnings, Yahru was unceremoniously put out of the OL for his refusal to obey the organization’s rules, including its strict ban on drug-using, woman-chasing and wife-beating. Who can blame RCP’s newly-found representative for trying to cover this up and hide behind anonymity? After all, can it be admitted that the RCP has now resorted to recruiting the dregs and rejects of the movement?
Let’s examine Yahru’s line and see how correct the verdict of the OL was on his expulsion.
Yahru’s first revelation about the CPML concerns our Party’s firm and principled support for the Communist Party of China in its struggle to defeat the “gang of four.” After keeping silent on this question for over a year and a half, the RCP finally declared itself in support of the counter-revolutionary “gang of four” and has mounted a frenzied attack against the present Chinese leaders as well as Chairman Mao’s teachings.
The RCP leaders suffered a major split when this debate, which was covered up for so long, finally broke out. Hundreds of members left.
But to hear Yahru tell it, it was the CPML which avoided talking about the struggle in China. In the Revolution interview he charges: “The CPML went to great lengths to avoid the questions about what was going on in China–particularly the leadership of the CPML. This went to the point of not even mentioning the revisions in the Constitution of China at the 11th Congress, or about the revolutionary committees being abolished....”
Yahru then goes on to claim that the CPML doesn’t study the line of the RCP and that, generally, CPML members are like “honest” sheep, being led to support China and Marxism-Leninism through intimidation from the ruthless leadership.
So, naturally, those inside and outside of our Party who are familiar with its style of work must ask Yahru and the RCP for some facts. No facts are provided, however, and the most important ones are deliberately left out. For example, the fact that our Party members discussed the issues involving the situation in China, internally and in our newspaper, for over a year leading up to our founding congress in June 1977.
Support for Chairman Mao’s “three worlds theory” was a major part of the Political Report and even written into the Party’s Program that was unanimously adopted by delegates to that Congress. The Political Report, which was studied and discussed widely at the time and still is, takes a principled stand in defense of China and in opposition to those like the RCP, who it says “are working to disunite our movement and to do their dirty work of revisionism within our ranks.”
In the time since the struggle against the “gang of four” opened up, no less than 150 articles have appeared in The Call, dealing with every manifestation of the line of the “gang of four” and refuting them one by one. In our theoretical journal Class Struggle, we have gone into depth on questions relating to China’s policies, ranging from the class struggle under socialism to the international situation. In various internal papers, there has been debate and discussion among our comrades, raising different points of view, but always seeking unity rather than splits, on this complex question.
The struggle in China against the “gang of four” is a struggle with profound implications for the whole international movement. Our Party took its stand in defense of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and against revisionism because it was our internationalist duty. We did this, not in the spirit of transferring China’s experience mechanically to the U.S., but rather to lend our support to the world revolution.
Can this be described as “avoiding the question” or “running away from ideological struggle”? What about the many other important struggles between two lines that have gone on in the ranks of our Party and our movement before this one?
Didn’t our comrades study and debate broadly and openly the struggle against the line of Martin Nicolaus, who called for unity with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union? Didn’t our comrades study and openly debate against the centrist line of the Guardian and other revisionists who called for unity with the Soviet social-imperialists? And finally, didn’t we study and broadly debate through no less than 40 polemics, the line of the RCP, even while RCP members were refused permission by leaders to read The Call? This fact is now openly admitted by many former RCP members.
No, facts are stubborn fellows. No line has ever been or ever will be shoved down the throats of CPML members. But now let’s look at the RCP and their line of support for the counter-revolutionary “gang.” Did the RCP carry out an open-and-aboveboard policy on this question? Of course not. Everyone is now familiar with RCP ringleader Avakian and his own documents which carefully plotted a course of misleading RCPers and friends into thinking that the question was being studied when in fact the leadership already supported the “gang.” When this became known to the rank and file, nearly half of them revolted and only the most slavish Avakianites remained.
Let Avakian tell us just who it is that has avoided debate and avoided the China question after reviewing his own words: “Comrades should keep in mind that what they say to workers and others whom we cannot count on as being completely reliable have to be put in the category of statements to the ’general public,’ since they may very well have contact with both us and the OL-CPML, and may not understand why he should not discuss with them what we tell him about our position on China.” (Document adopted by the RCP Central Committee in 1977)
Let’s look at another example–the stand of RCP and our Party on the “theory of three worlds” as elaborated by Mao Tsetung in 1974. In the Revolution interview, the RCP’s new spokesman, Yahru, calls this theory “garbage.” Elsewhere in the issue, RCP claims that Chairman Mao’s theory “is nothing but a ’theoretical’ justification for Hua’s and Teng’s vicious pragmatic policy of capitulating to imperialism, U.S. imperialism in particular.”
But let’s go back just one year to the July 1977 issue of Revolution to an article titled: “On the Three Worlds and the International Situation.” Let’s see the way the RCP was training its comrades to study hard and refute Chairman Mao’s “garbage,” as it is now called. Says Revolution: “The three worlds analysis gives, in our view, a correct appraisal of the general role that countries, or groupings of countries, are playing today on a world scale. As such it is one important part of the more general worldwide united front line.”
The RCP leadership then went on to call the theory a contribution “to the revolutionary struggle of the world’s peoples against every imperialist and reactionary ruling class...” and finally “a blow at...self-serving superpower world views” which the international proletariat cannot “fail to take into account.”
For Avakian, Yahru and their bunch, however, today’s “correct appraisal” is tomorrow’s “garbage.” This flip-flop is not based on any real study or internal debate. It is simply a case of political opportunism– with Avakian concealing his views on the theory of three worlds earlier in order to bolster his pretense to be a supporter of Mao Tsctung’s line.
By contrast, the practice of the CPML has been consistent work–through articles and studies both inside and outside the Party, through cadre schools, summer camps and public forums–to educate ourselves and the masses to analyze today’s world based on the correct strategic and tactical concept of the theory of the three worlds.
Spokesman Yahru continues his charges, each one getting more ludicrous than the one before. He turns to the national question, charging the CPML with everything from “supporting busing” for school desegregation to defending Martin Luther King, whom he describes as a “dead preacher” who “was more reaction to the militancy of the people than anything else.”
Here Yahru tries to counterpose Malcolm X to King as a hero that RCP can uphold. But this is just part and parcel of RCP’s all-around chauvinist demagoguery, which is now well-known throughout the country. First of all, if Malcolm X were alive today, RCP would surely be attacking him as a “Bundist.”
After all, wasn’t it Malcolm who called revolutionary Black nationalism “our gospel”? Wasn’t it Malcolm who warned: “If you’re afraid of Black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love revolution, you love Black nationalism”? (See “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm X Speaks, Grove Press, p. 10)
But wasn’t it the RCP who charged that “all nationalism is nationalism” and therefore “reactionary,” failing to make any distinction between reactionary and revolutionary nationalism? (Red Papers #8) Wasn’t it RCP which charged that such nationalism was the “main danger” within the working class movement?
This is the white chauvinist line which Yahru is parroting in his interview when he launches his accusations against our Party for “uniting with some of the most reactionary forces in the Black community” in the Crown Heights struggle in New York. The fact is that RCP has attacked the broad Black United Front which has been the vehicle for the mass movement for democratic rights and self-determination in Brooklyn’s Black community. RCP’s position of lumping all capitalists, Black or white, big or small, into one reactionary mass was used to try and split the united front and caused the people of Crown Heights to react by physically expelling from the Black community an RCP-led demonstration of 30 people.
Yet Yahru claims that this is the policy the communist movement should follow. This is what he calls “developing the revolutionary sentiment of the people inside Crown Heights.”
Yahru even tries to defend RCP’s stand in support of the racist anti-busing movement which led that organization to adopt the symbol of the STOP sign along with the KKK and ROAR in Boston. In the interview, he tries to make it appear as if the weaknesses in some particular busing plans were to blame for RCP’s stand, and even tries to put the source of the whole problem on China’s Teng Hsiao-ping.
From the Black liberation movement to the third world, says Yahru, Teng Hsiao-ping is “unable to distinguish the difference between Marxism and imperialism,” “negating the class character” of the struggle by “supporting” nationalists.
According to Yahru and the RCP, we should only support national liberation movements when the proletariat already leads them. He says: “Like the RCP pointed out, you can never forget the class character of national liberation movements, that is, whether or not proletarian elements exist inside that movement.”
With that kind of policy, the working class will never be in a position to lead any liberation movements. After all, it is only through a consistent stand of support for genuine movements for liberation that the communists can win the respect and following of the masses of oppressed people.
In many liberation movements, including those inside the U.S., the working class and its party have not yet won leadership. The class struggle within those movements must be carried out in the course of struggle and not through rhetorical declarations and attacks on people like Martin Luther King who, at the time of his death, was seen by the Afro-American masses as their leading spokeman. While King at times played a bad role, especially at the height of the mass upsurge in the mid-60s, at other times he played a positive role, especially on the eve of his death. An all-sided analysis is needed, one which RCP is unable to make.
The interview with Yahru goes on to refute Marxism on a number of other questions. Yahru claims that war is not inevitable under imperialism, rendering Khrushchev even more profound. He chides the CPML for taking the growing fascist menace seriously, saying that our “minds get clouded with all the threat of fascism, and there’s no showing of the bright future of proletarian revolution.”
The RCP wants to see brightness by covering up the fascist menace. But isn’t it Avakian who is always bemoaning the fact that the working class is “too backwards” to organize and must be “shocked” into action by self-proclaimed leaders like the RCP?
Yahru’s diatribe against the CPML shows to all why he was not acceptable to become a member of our Party. He has now taken up the attack against Marxism, socialism, China and against the Black liberation movement in order to buy some prestige in the higher circles of the RCP, where he hopes to finally begin a career. But all he has really done is affirm the correctness of the OL’s decision to expel him and expose the RCP for propping up this new “hero” in the cause of counterrevolution.